Look at the 21st century and what do you see? Certainly not the sterile, uniform world the futurists led us to expect. Far from wearing conformist jumpsuits, living in utilitarian high rises, and getting our food in pills, we citizens of the future are creating—and demanding—an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world. From the sight-and-sound extravaganzas of video games to Ikea-style modernism-for-the-masses, from sleek leather pants and stay-lined bustiers to the dress-down comfort of khakis and polo shirts, from the smooth surfaces of Starbucks' tables to the aroma of its coffees, the 21st century is a sensuous age.
Apple turns the personal computer from a utilitarian, putty-colored box into curvy, translucent eye candy—blueberry, strawberry, tangerine, grape. Running for president, Al Gore swaps Washington's blue-suit uniform for earth tones and stylish, three-button jackets.
Target stores introduce a line of housewares developed by architect-designer Michael Graves; most Target customers have never heard of Graves, but his playful toaster quickly becomes the chain's most popular—and most expensive—model. The number of cosmetic surgeries in the U.S. jumps 153 percent from 1992 to 1998, to more than a million a year.
Kinko's launches a $40 million campaign to convince customers that everyday communication requires polished graphics: "Sometimes it's not not just what you say, but how you say it." The number of nail salons doubles in a decade.
Business executives enlist Hollywood stylists to dress them. Real estate agents hire "stagers" to redecorate homes for sale. Suburbanites engage professionals to adorn their houses for Christmas. Making things look good is a growth business.
A Time cover story hails "The Rebirth of Design," declaring "America is bowled over by style." The number of industrial designers employed jumps 32 percent in five years, and there aren't enough applicants to fill all the jobs. "We're seeing design creep into everything, everything," says Mark Dziersk, president of the Industrial Designers Society of America.
It is the age of aesthetics. A fascinating, challenging, unsettling age—for businesses, for individuals, for politics, for culture.
Aesthetics is the way we communicate through the senses. It is the art of creating associations and reactions without words, through the look and feel of things. Aesthetics is about presentation and immediate response, about perception and emotion, not cognition. The knowledge it conveys is pre-articulate, although, upon reflection, we can often express and explain aesthetic effects. As industrial designer Harold Van Doren said of his field in the 1930s, aesthetics is "fundamentally the art of using lines, forms, tones, colors and textures to arouse an emotional reaction in the beholder."
It's tempting to equate aesthetics with beauty, but that definition is too limited. Depending on what reaction the creator wants, effective presentation may be strikingly ugly, disturbing, even horrifying. (The title sequence to Seven comes to mind.) Or it may employ novelty, allusion, or humor, rather than beauty, to arouse a positive response.
Because aesthetics operates at a pre-rational level, it can be disquieting. We have a love-hate relation with the whole idea. As consumers, we enjoy sensory appeals, but we fear manipulation. As producers, we worry about the competition, even as we seek to use aesthetics—from personal beauty to attractive brochures—to our own advantage. As heirs to Plato and the Puritans, we distrust the senses. We suspect sensory impressions as deceptive, inherently false.
Aesthetics is "the power of provocative surfaces," says a critic. It "speaks to the eye's mind, overshadowing matters of quality or substance." In the marketplace, runs this critique, we are seduced by style—enticed to pay more for less because the item in question comes in a pretty package. Many a curmudgeonly commentator, discounting the accompanying aesthetic experience, has groused about the high price of Starbucks coffee.
This suspicion is not confined to the marketplace. Centuries of poets and parliaments, as well as some contemporary feminists, have denounced feminine adornment as deceptive. In the late 18th century, the British Parliament attacked "designing women," annulling the marriages of those who enticed husbands with "scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes and bolstered hips." In recent years, Naomi Wolf has excoriated the "beauty myth" and Susan Faludi has warned that men, too, are being drawn into a phony "ornamental culture." Men's growing concern with their looks, warns a magazine headline, is "Turning Boys Into Girls."
In the 1996 afterword to The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell ties together these two anxieties, charging that courtesan style has infected market relations: "All modern advertising is geared to this task of selling illusions, the persuasions of the witches' craft. That is a contradiction of capitalism." To Bell, market exchange cannot survive, but cannot escape, the false lure of aesthetics.
Yet aesthetics is not mere illusion. It has a substance of its own. Aesthetic value is real value, which is why producers win customers by selling it. "In a world in which most consumers have their basic needs satisfied, value is easily provided by satisfying customers' experiential needs—their aesthetic needs," write Bernd Schmitt and Alex Simonson in Marketing Aesthetics (1997). Appearance counts—not just in traditional beauty industries such as fashion, cosmetics, or entertainment, not just in the luxury market, and not just in economic relations.
This is only natural, say the biopsychologists. We are sensory creatures, and many of our aesthetic reactions have a biological base. In recent years, these researchers have found some universal patterns in what humans, from infants to adults, find attractive in other people, in music, and in landscapes. People perceive some things as beautiful without regard to culture or context—symmetrical faces, smooth surfaces, specific color combinations. Aesthetics is not merely a matter of social manipulation.
But hard-wired reactions don't explain everything either. Aesthetics always operates in a personal and cultural context. Something novel may be interesting, or something familiar comforting, without regard to ideal beauty. The Michael Graves toaster is cute—rounded and friendly looking—but it hardly represents enduring beauty. Its aesthetic appeal lies in whimsical cheerfulness. The explosion of tropical colors that hit women's fashion in 2000 was a relief from the black, gray, and beige of the late 1990s, while those neutrals looked calm and sophisticated after the riot of jewel tones that preceded them. Psychologists tell us that human beings perceive changes more than we notice levels.
Through cultural and personal associations, we also bring emotional substance to various surfaces. We like streamlining because it seems "modern," or fluffy pop music because it reminds us of our youth. We enjoy some aesthetic elements more over time, as we develop a taste for them or explore more of their pattern and depth.
We also use aesthetics to create new associations. Style is a powerful tool for forging individual identities, and for signaling those identities to others. Businesses have long understood the relation between aesthetics and brand-building, but the same is increasingly true of individuals. The once-rigid style hierarchy has broken down. One defining aspect of the new age of aesthetics is that individuals have become more assertive and more interested in self-expression. They do not simply imitate their social betters or seek to differentiate themselves from those below them.
Instead, a profusion of subcultures, often marked by distinctive styles, has increased everyone's daily encounters with a broad range of aesthetics, heightening awareness and accelerating aesthetic evolution. Both consumers and designers have more sources from which to pick and choose elements, increasing the potential supply of aesthetics combinatorially. One result is that styles that were once fraught with symbolism—blonde hair on black women, earrings on men, crosses, bindi—start to lose their meanings. Look and feel become less stable as social signals, even as their importance to individuals increases.
In other words, aesthetics is neither a natural absolute nor a pure social construct. It is a complex discovery process—a search through trial and error, experimentation and response, for sensory elements that move or delight. We are always trying new aesthetic combinations. That process is open-ended and competitive, and it is one in which people may fervently disagree.
But the very power of beauty encourages people to become absolutists—to insist that other people's stylistic choices, or their tradeoffs between aesthetics and other values, constitute a form of pollution. This conflict is nothing new, but it is intensifying. If the world in general gets more aesthetically pleasing, the things we find ugly or disconcerting stand out. We start to expect beauty, as we individually define it, to be ours by right, even if that means trampling on other people's privacy, creativity, or personal style.
These conflicts are already intense in land-use law, where aesthetic regulations have become common only in the past 20 years. In 1999, for instance, Portland, Oregon, passed an ordinance restricting the styles of house facades. The goal, said a local official, was to "put a stop to the ugly and stupid houses that we see going up." (His own home, critics noted, would not meet the new standards.) Meanwhile, in New York's Hudson River Valley, Bard College was forced to move a proposed performing arts center, at an additional cost of $10 million, after neighbors raised a ruckus with the planning board. Their objection: The stainless steel structure, designed by innovative architect Frank Gehry, wouldn't look right in their landscape.
Such direct battles over what looks good aren't the only conflicts spurred by the increasing importance of aesthetics. "Look and feel" is in fact a legal term of art, defining what's protected as trade dress under intellectual property law. As the economic value of aesthetics rises, businesses and artists sue more often to limit recombination and imitation; one such case, concerning fashion knock-offs, recently reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Employment law, too, has become an aesthetic battleground, as employers and employees litigate over whether anti-discrimination law applies to personal beauty and individual style.
The new age of aesthetics is disorienting, all the more so because we tend to be trapped in ideas that are only partially true: that beauty is merely superficial, for instance, or that aesthetic standards are timeless and absolute; that intangible value is not real, or that aesthetic experience is a luxury that matters only to artists and the rich. When aesthetic issues enter the political arena, particularly on the national level, they are either hopelessly confused or, most often, disguised as something else. And though the indicators are all around us, we have not incorporated the rising value of aesthetics into most of our economic discussions or considered its implications for employment, productivity, regional development, or business strategy.
