The sans-serification of everything
Today’s aesthetic style is same day delivery
A depressing aspect of the present moment is that both a Wells Fargo commercial and the latest Netflix Chef’s Table special have the exact same aesthetic. If you muted them, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish the two. All of contemporary life, it seems, from ads to entertainment, has blended into the same pathos-soaked and insipid shade of beige. Everything is the same color now.
Media from across all platforms has been thrown in the same blender and pulsed on high, so that now even when you consume one medium you consume them all. Watch a contemporary sitcom today and the dialogue reads like a Twitter exchange. Catch the latest radio hit and it sounds like a TikTok soundtrack. Turn on a new standup special and it feels like an hour long Instagram story.
If art is a mirror society uses to look at itself, maybe these flavorless texts are doing their job, showing us our sanitized world and selves, what I call the sans-serification of aesthetics. Everything is smooth with rounded edges, utterly frictionless and almost immediately forgettable since there’s no texture for it to grab hold of anything in our psyche.
The problem is our culture is too obsessed with looking at itself in the mirror, with taking selfies, and so maybe art shouldn’t be yet another mirror. Maybe now we need art to be more funhouse mirror, showing us a caricatured version of ourselves with exaggerated features. Or maybe art should be less mirror and more window, or telescope or microscope, allowing us to view the world beyond us in mechanical detail.
I was watching Chef’s Table and it was like 10% about food and cooking and 90% about self-help and a bizarre gloss of pseudo-philosophy. Should a cooking show be a place you go for philosophy and self help? Maybe. I’m not saying that’s necessarily the problem! One view of art is that it defamiliarizes the familiar, it turns the banal into the fascinating. That could mean finding philosophical depth in an TV show episode about barbecue, I suppose, but instead the episode on barbecue felt less like defamiliarizing barbecue to expose the philosophical ambiguities undergirding it and more like using barbecue to sell the same threadbare lessons we find in Wells Fargo commercials and Instagram self-help posts.
Good art defers — meaning it delays our perception so that we don’t discern the text’s meaning immediately. Good art elongates the experience of perceiving the text’s aesthetics and forces us to wade through themes. Today’s monochromatic aesthetic style doesn’t defer. It delivers the media to us in a package that is immediately recognizable and understandable; today’s aesthetic style is same-day shipping. No wrestling, no elongation, no struggle. Everything is the same shade of beige, more or less. We can fill in blanks way too easily now. The formula is laid bare. It’s not about savoring the art and thinking through it but rather consuming it’s calories as quickly as possible, not so that you force yourself to reckon with challenging questions, but so you can say you have consumed something.
