AESTHETICA

”Beauty is truth, truth is beauty” –so said the romantic poet John Keats.
But what is beauty and truth? Our perceptions of these concepts are never something that can fully be understood because they are ever changing.

This is a comment on the everlasting discussion about aesthetics in art and design and a story about my early experiences in art school, which helped me gain some kind of understanding of the fluent meanings of aesthetics.

Throughout periods in time we have applied various meanings to the word reflecting the thoughts that were significant to that particular period in time.
In the early 1900s Dada stated their anti-aesthetics. “A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these ‘ready-mades’ was never dictated by aesthetic delectation.” Marcel Duchamp (1961)


Some critics thinks that Dadaism is the prelude to postmodernism, “Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of anti-art to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.”( Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation).

Within art and design today, aesthetics are also seen as something second rate and or rather banal.
In 2006 I went to art school in London. Here aesthetic art was certainly not well seen. There was a particular guy who was very aware of his image as a non-believer in aesthetic; he was off course also a great supporter of the Dada.
He kept stating how all art should not exist to please the eye and so on. What was very hard to avoid noticing was how extremely image conscious he was. Always dressed in grey or black and was actually the most well dressed person on the course.

Today design and the design process it is fashionable to be ethically if not globally aware, working with concepts and being “responsible”.
What is so obvious about trying to devalue aesthetics both in art and design, whether its Dadaism or Post-Modernism is that non-aesthetic is in itself a form of aesthetics.
The guy wearing black and grey chose a non-aesthetic style, but that in itself is an aesthetic style.
Being sustainable and environmentally aware designing from these concepts can also be seen as a form of aesthetic expression.
All art and design relates to aesthetic because it is man made. It is here and the question is how to use it, not neglect or reject it. After all how can we experience art or design without our senses?

Latour, B.(1991)"We Have Never Been Modern", La Découverte
Kul-Want, C.(2007)"Introducing Aesthetics", Icon Books
www.brooklynrail.org/2006/07/art/dada2