This has led to generational tension, especially around the existential challenge of climate change. Young people are fearful, they have little trust in institutions, and they’re dealing with high levels of stress and anxiety. In another section of New York Magazine, the author Malcolm Harris wrote about a meeting he’d attended with Shell’s top executives on the subject of how the company could transition its business in the face of the public’s changing attitudes toward what it does for money. Later, Fischer points out that the color palettes - muted, pastel - might have something to do with “Now More Than Ever, anxiety, the news,” although she adds that the real point is probably just that the glare of our phones has made looking at gentle things enticing.Īt the same time, aesthetics aren’t the whole story, and corporatized self-soothing can only go so far in a world where we’re all aware of the existential threats that the recent global rise of authoritarian politics and a changing climate portend. Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same. In this era, you come to understand, design was the product. They’re ads, sure, but they’re so well designed. These aren’t ads that bellow or hector they whisper, in restrained sans-serif fonts, or chastely flirt, in letters with curves and bounce. The products on view - cookware, supplements, stretchy clothes - occupy blank pastel landscapes manipulated by a diversity of hands. And then there are advertisements, making up a visual world of their own. A dental clinic called Tend provides “curated, seasonal toothpaste” in what’s billed as “The Brushery”: a “swishy, swirly room just for freshening up” (it has marbleized turquoise concrete sinks). There’s a place to do laundry that looks like a spa, a place to get therapy that looks like The Wing, a boutique newsstand that sells scented candles and has an app.
She writes about an imagined future museumgoer who might stumble across a room that exemplifies this era of design: Writing in The Cut today, Molly Fischer dwells on millennial aesthetics - both the visuals and the consequences. Aesthetics have begun to stand in for financial stability. It’s why all the brands sound like that now. Hence the rise of the word “adulting,” which turns things like doing your taxes into a marker of how grown you are.Īt the same time, the corporate world has figured out that it’s easier to sell a vision of an unencumbered life to anxious young people than it is to do almost anything else it’s why KitchenAid mixers and other markers of conspicuous domesticity can stand in for something like homeownership, at least to a certain segment of people. It has made it hard to feel like an adult. As the critic Hua Hsu observed in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, the present feels like “a seamless seesaw between anxious dread and ecstatic bliss.”Īesthetics have begun to stand in for financial stabilityįor young people, who have grown up both seeing everything and only recently being able to participate in the systems that affect them - due to a toxic mix of precarious underemployment and student debt - things have come to seem more dire than ever. (Joe Biden! Kids in cages! Conveniently timed Supreme Court challenges!) Obviously that’s gotten worse lately, as there’s a significant virus outbreak currently taking shape across the globe.Īnd yet the task of living leaves little room for despair and, in fact, requires regular transfusions of delight, wonder, and surprise - or, at least, something that feels close. The internet, being the modern forum it is, has allowed people to see what’s happening across the world in what feels like real time: it is possible to discern the end of contemporary life and convenience in the climate-enhanced natural disasters that happen more regularly than they ever did before, for example, even as it’s very easy to name the ongoing political catastrophes that are reshaping what America itself means. Doesn’t it feel like the world is ending? This is an age of generalized anxiety, and also it’s Super Tuesday.
0 kommentar(er)
