On the Misuse of the Word Aesthetic

Picture this: you’re stuck on your couch, again, and instead of doing something you would actually want to do, you let yourself become entombed to the cushion as you whip out a smartphone and pull up TikTok. Immediately you greet a video displaying the caption ‘Look at these aesthetic pictures I found’ and wince, which propels you from your stupor and out from the once-cold leather seat to your desk and monitor or outside for a mile-walk in frustration. That “you” is a “me” in case that was not obvious, and I can assure you that my argument is not going to descend into pointless and pedantic bitching.

Is there reason for such recoil over one locution, considering that slang terms and different dialects are natural developments of civilization? I say yes, even if I’m accounting the arts (fine art, cinema, etc.). This current trend of modifying the definition of ‘aesthetic’ properly defined in its original case as an entire realm of philosophy, has been subject to ‘newspeak’ bastardization in the day and age of social media spheres.

The Correct Definition

      To further define the proper meaning of ‘aesthetic’ we need to look no further than a dictionary such as Merriam-Webster, which states the word’s definition as, “…a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste and with the creation and appreciation of beauty”.

Far from a binary coded word, ‘aesthetic’ has been, according to Gabriel E. Lipkowitz’s Nassau Weekly article The Problem with Calling Something “Aesthetic”, “…as a noun…not so much a describer of an object or thing in itself [than] as a powerful prelude to a targeted discussion about the specific qualities of a particular object or space, using the thoughts and feelings [of] “aesthetics” [to indicate]…a starting point”. The same follows for its conjugations as an adverb, with, “…[the descriptor of] “aesthetically”, prefac[ing] a similar such discussion.

Alternatively, aesthetics can also be used as an adjective, but importantly not of an object itself” (Lipkowitz 5). With the collapse of these linguistic guidelines, “Gone is the complexity of the term as it relates to human experience and interpretation of the world, replaced by an instinctive and unthoughtful designation of something that looks “pretty” [and nothing substantially more than just that]”.

     Continuing with my supportive evidence against this cardinal sin of linguistic adoption, I discovered that within Dr. Ross Haenfler’s Subcultures And Sociology study portal for Grinell College, “…[in tangent with the studies of] Media scholar Henry Jenkins…fans [tend to] “poach” from popular media [amid other art forms], appropriating ideas from the text and rereading them in creative ways for their own uses”.

Pros of reshaping

Now, I also stress that there is absolutely no harm or malice I can find partaking in this type of, let’s say, ‘scrapping-activity’; what terms like ‘poaching’ and ‘plundering’ I am boiling down. On the contrary, it can serve as the basis for the sculpting of many other properties and trends in media, which can extend into art as well, through certain processes of coveting, remixing, and recontextualizing.

One of the most famous examples in recent history and, I would argue, the spurring of commodifying the realm of aesthetics, is the presence of ‘Vaporwave’ music. A genre that was founded on the patchworking of already established artists and sounds and submerged in reverberations and plundering’s. It reaches far back as taking heed from the turntable of Houston, Texas’s DJ Screw (Robert Earl Davis Jr.) to creating the arpeggios and clipped sound bites of 2011 breakout successes of Chuck Person/Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) and James Ferraro.

Cons of reshaping

     When I talk more so of ‘plundering’ there is still a great (infuriating) irony in discussing the Vaporwave genre in terms of its aesthetics. The popularity of the genre has, in part, led to the inward-collapse of the word’s definition and context on itself. It is reducing the word’s definition while still retaining the semblance and form prior to the altering.

Nowhere do I need to look further than the ‘Aesthetics Wiki,’ a subpage curated on the website Fandom, and a perfect encapsulation of how NOT to become a teacher of the arts. The Sub-Wiki’s front page greets you fair enough with the term’s origins as by the mouths of philosophy (Ancient Greece, to specify myself), but veers into confusion as it simultaneously states that, for one, “Millennials and Generation Z started using that term as an adjective that describes what they personally consider beautiful. For example: “After Denise finished watching The Virgin Suicides, she said, ‘Wow, That was so aesthetic’”. On the contrary, “This definition is not official and can be debated. There is currently no dictionary definition that captures the complexity of this phenomenon, which arose in the internet youth”.

Removal of meaning

     Bold and contradictory words indeed! I disagree with this website having quality control, moderating via volunteer fact-checkers. Much like the regular Wikipedia, it allows its curators and consumers to feed into an algorithmic-esque reinforcement of saturated terminology and contextually-devoid fragments of ideas.

It is in this premise of the poisonous aftereffects of neoliberal ideology that we see James Ferraro himself discuss in an interview hosted by Robert Grunenberg of Ssense, in which, “The perverted branding of nostalgia in music, art, and consumer products, is one of the concepts on Ferraro’s Mind…It’s cherrypicking from each decade [of the last century] and smashing them together to new weird nostalgic hybrids”.

The Fandom’s Site reinforces Ferraro’s criticisms, a tokenism of neon-kanji, Roman Busts, all taken unironically out from their respective movements and dates in history. It is a death of a visualization, an amnesia of all the important functions of geometry, color hues, and forms traded for poor crops of image macros on stock backgrounds with a ‘-core’ suffix glued on. An unacceptable stone’s throw away from bullshit like NFT’s.