Maximizing the contradictions

I've already complained about how, in this twilight of the Late Modern collage aesthetic, consumers are required to put a lot of time and effort into expressing themselves through creative consumption. So now I'd like to propose a better, newer, more advanced transitional aesthetic -- a tide-over until the recession-delayed New Sportswear.

I mentioned it in my post about Unhairdos. My idea is called Beautiful Ugliness and would consist of ensembles, in various mediums including but not limited to fashion, in which disparate elements are combined without regard to aesthetic harmony and in fact with the goal of creating dissonance.

I think Beautiful Ugliness is a good next aesthetic step because it's a clear way to acknowledge a problem that I think we as a culture are avoiding: that our current mash-up culture is a temporary, uneasy compromise at best and is not helping to move us forward. Because, I think, we are so afraid of facing the huge difficulty of collectively fabricating more original cultural forms to meet our modern human needs, we're procrastinating by obsessively trying to make mash-up culture "work." And of course it feeds into consumerism, too. If everything is original and different but everything has to "match" and "balance," etc., you have to spend a lot of time shopping for the right-color, right-style, right-"wrong," in a way, products. Magazines and TV shows are full of advice on how to make all the crap work together. Obviously it's a big strain on everyone. Why not put a stop to it with something a little more "real" and honest?

Instead of "right-wrong," I propose "wrong-right." This means, instead of trying to sublimate the apparent "wrong"-ness of our mismatched culture into the "right"ness of matchy-matchyness, let's put it out there, create obviously "wrong" mash-ups, and decide to accept these as the new "right."

Think about it: when you look around as you walk down the street, does everything match? It absolutely doesn't. When you walk around in nature, in a forest, say, everything matches to some degree. But in artificial human environments, aesthetic continuity exists within individual, self-contained environments such as stores, sure -- but not (except in the strip-mall environments that almost everyone agrees are heinous) in larger blocks of what actually constitute our living environments. If you look at a whole block, a whole street, together -- everything clashes. Everything is a jumble. Because it wasn't masterminded; it's the result of evolution, not intelligent design. And lots of city planners would tell you that that's precisely what makes good neighborhoods good. So why don't we expand this aesthetic, which is so expressive of what's good about melting-pot culture, and apply it more deliberately?

I love what Andy Warhol wrote in THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol about his own version of Beautiful Ugliness:

I really look awful, and I never bother to primp up or try to be appealing because I just don't want anyone to get involved with me. And that's the truth I play down my good features and play up the bad ones. So I look awful and I wear the wrong pants and the wrong shoes and I come at the wrong time with the wrong friends, and I say the wrong things and I talk to the wrong person, and then still sometimes somebody gets interested and I freak out and I wonder, "What did I do wrong?" So then I go home and try to figure it out. "Well I must be wearing something that somebody thinks is attractive. I'd better change it. Before things get too far...So I think, "How weird. I know I look bad. I made myself look especially bad--especially wrong--because I knew a lot of the right people would be there, and still someone somehow got interested..."

Of course this, like a lot of what Warhol wrote, is intentionally facetious/misleading, as what he called looking "awful" and "wrong" was a large part of the cult of personality he deliberately fostered in order to get the attention he claims he was avoiding. This ironically-ironic ambivalence towards the positive-attention-getting potential of "ugly" aesthetics would be one of Beautiful Ugliness's contrbutions to the cleansing transition out of irony into Post-Postmodernism.

Arguably some hipsters dress Beautifully Ugly, but most try to make stuff match and "look good." I just think it would be so cool if more people tried to "look bad." And wouldn't it be amazing if "bad" became the new "good"? Maybe that extreme of topsy-turviness would be enough to "reset" us aesthetically so we could come up with some good new stuff.