Unorthodox Aesthetics

Aesthetics are very different today to what they were a few decades ago, and even more, to a few centuries ago. Each generation manages to outline a different ideal for beauty, the same goes for the majority of human cultures, depending of which one we are referring to, beauty can have drastically different forms of manifestation, this ranging from beauty standards which are easier or harder to reach.

This article is not making so much reference to human aesthetics, but rather the way in which we define something, other then an individual, as being aesthetically pleasing to the eyes or not. It is interesting to notice the facts that nowadays something is labeled as aesthetically through the perspective of its actual functionality or through roles and the individual and groups that it is associated with rather by actually analyzing its aesthetic value by the plasticity of its forms.

We can have the case of a photography, one that shows a working class neighborhood from an Eastern European industrial town; we will notice that people will generally label it as aesthetically desirable if it is associated with a group that is socially validated as successful.

 Very few will actually have an interest, or would even think, of evaluating the aesthetic value through the way in which an object’s patters, lines, colors, shades and texture relate to each other. This way beauty is deform and takes a one directional path.

To extend this discussion even more, can we state that we are still conscious of a thing that is called the aesthetics of ugliness? This idea tires to redefine the way in which was see beauty; it’s a glorification of aesthetic flaws, decay and of the lack of respect and of an interest towards the rules which govern artistic creations. Maybe ugliness can be seen as a constant of our earthly world; it’s the best example which proves that aesthetic flaws are ever present in our environment; and in some moments of human history in which they outnumbered the ‘functional’ and ‘aesthetically pleasing’ elements, people managed to turn them in to legit part of their culture, thus realizing the negative connotation that was attached to them.

Our ways of seeing aesthetics has changed over time as a result of the changes that made their way in our lifestyle; as food became cheaper, doo to the development of the food industry, we didn’t hold bodies that were curvy or as aesthetically pleasing anymore, we started glorifying skinniness. It is easy to come to the conclusion that our idea of beauty, regardless of what historic period we are talking about, was made from putting on a pedestal those images of beauty that were the less likely to be obtained by most of the people.

Beauty always comes with a struggle and is the product of a process; beauty is motivational and is meant to put us in a competition with ourselves. We are witnesses nowadays to the whole ‘accept yourself’ idea, which intrinsically is not bad, but it can backfire very easily.  I really disagree with it when it comes to actually stopping one’s evolution with the false idea that you can accept yourself the way you are at a particular stage in your life; we should not stagnate and use this idea as a type of an excuse for doing so.

Unorthodox aesthetics can challenge use to see our immediate environment in ways we never thought of before; and in the same time, it came give us a sense of comfort when ugliness seems to had invaded our world.