aesthetics of joy

I’m off to the Galapagos for the next days for some joyful adventuring. (I know, life’s rough.) I’ve got a new lens for my Canon so expect some pictures when I’m back. Have a great early August and I’ll see you on the 11th!

An interesting trend: joyful aesthetics being used to make budget-friendly purchases seem more palatable. Walmart’s ads are doing it, as are many of the ads I’ve referenced in my discussions on joywashing. Now, for Fall 2009 Coach is launching the Poppy line, which is a lower priced collection of accessories with a youthful feel. Poppy is an appropriate name, both for the energy and the reference. The inspiration here is unambiguous.

Some items, like the Pop C Large Spotlight bag (below) feel a little done (very Murakami for LV without the Japanese master’s artful control). But I’m sure most people will overlook that and feel delighted by the overall vibrancy of the collection. If you didn’t wear everything all at once, you might find a sustained pleasure in a cheerful bag or sequined flats that brings a little sparkle to an ordinary outfit.

Still, I’m sure there’s a fatigue point with all this. Too much intensity tips over the line from joy into ecstasy, where we revel in overwhelming sensation for a short while until the pleasure sputters out. I almost feel like marketers are trying to make us feel giddy so we forget ourselves and start overspending again. But joy isn’t like that. Joy doesn’t leave you feeling depleted, and it doesn’t give you a hangover. There’s a balance here that marketers and designers are struggling with. Deluging us in positivity is a short-term fix; there ways to design joyfully that don’t need to shout so loudly to be heard.

An attempt to bring “joyous vibrancy” to the city is how Renzo Piano describes his plan to cloak the facades of the new Central Saint Giles development with brightly colored ceramic cladding. He says:

The colour idea came from observing the sudden surprise given by brilliant colours in that part of the city. Cities should not be boring or repetitive. One of the reasons cities are so beautiful and a great idea, is that they are full of surprises, the idea of colour represents a joyful surprise.

Against the muted, often grey backdrop of the London cityscape, I think it would be a joy to walk around the corner and be surprised by the delicious glossiness of red or yellow glazed ceramic. They have the rich sensory appeal of the ripe-apple red double-decker buses or the mailboxes or the Beefeater uniforms. The yellow is like a bright umbrella or a pair of wellies in a storm. These oases of color are arguably more important in London life because of the climate. It will be interesting to see public response to these when they are up.

Thanks Maggie for the tip!

More info and images here.

Vanessa has a nice post on for the love of bikes about these beautiful colored tires. The stripes on the side walls blur together when in motion to create a “speed-blend” effect. What a wonderful example of joyful design! As a rider you wouldn’t even get to see them in action, but you would get to see the delighted reactions of people around you.

Via for the love of bikes (more photos there)

Today’s NYT has an interesting article by Ken Johnson on outdoor art, suggesting that there has been a thematic shift from grand, ideological monuments to works that are designed simply to “divert, amuse, and comfort.” But is there really anything wrong with that?

Johnson writes:

The big problem for outdoor art is the absence of any consensus of values in our pluralistic, multicultural society. It’s hard to imagine a public sculpture of a hero today that would not be regarded by one faction or another as partisan. As an unscientific sampling of art in the public realm this summer confirms, contemporary outdoor art tends to offer unobjectionable, mildly decorative or entertaining and relatively empty experiences.

To me, this conflates two separate questions into one murky discussion. First, what is public art for? And second, is the art any good?

The first is a theoretical question about why we make and commission art and what we seek in the experience of art that inhabits public spaces. It opens the door to a worthwhile examination of cultural values and Johnson’s comparison of Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman monument with the adjacent colorful Franz West sculpture illustrates his point nicely. No doubt there’s been a values shift, but I wonder if it’s not so much the fact that multiplicity makes it hard to commemorate our heroes, but that outdoor art no longer is the primary way in which we achieve this end. Think of the Shepard Fairey Obama poster and you’ll know what I mean. In the olden days, people gathered in public squares, and statues were a way of keeping an image in the public consciousness. Now, people still gather in squares, but mostly for recreation; they do the bulk of their thinking and communicating and even rallying online, and images that stick in the public mind now are frequently discovered and recirculated there.

I’m not saying that a million YouTube hits has the commemorative value of a bronze monument; my point is rather to suggest that the way we use public space is mostly geared towards leisure, so it makes sense to me that enjoyment would be a driving factor in selecting work for this realm. When you leave your office building for your 10-minute “lunch hour,” what would you rather see: a fearsome general in smiting posture, or a bunch of children playing hide and seek around a colorful set of forms? Perhaps this is selfishness, to prefer to have art that brings us enjoyment over art that honors the sacrifices of others. But perhaps it’s just human.

Joy has an important place in urban outdoor art because our limited open space is vital to our mental and emotional wellbeing. I don’t think it’s always a conscious criterion of those that commission such works, but certainly many artists derive pleasure from creating works that inspire nothing more cerebral than delight. And yet, delightful can also be meaningful. There’s no law that says that only somber works have intellectual value. (If there were you might have to banish the Impressionist wing of the Met from school field trips.) Joy is a constant human craving, and much of the artistic experience is to celebrate and revel in this.

Agree or not that joyful art has an important role in the world of public sculpture, the question of quality is still a separate issue. Johnson’s veiled derision suggests he does not think many of these works are very good. Commenting on the Afterparty installation by MOS in the courtyard at PS1, Johnson writes with tepid enthusiasm, “it nicely exemplifies the inoffensive spirit of public art today.”

But inoffensive is not in and of itself bad. Not all art has to provoke, particularly in public spaces which are primarily for enjoyment. This does not forgive weak execution, but suggests artists and curators do better to make the reality as joyful as the intent.

NYT: “Well-Behaved Street Corner Sculpture”

PS: I have to add that I intensely dislike that installation at PS1. I know it’s trying to be all Bedouin-tent-y, but I find it kind of dank and Hobbit-like and totally in keeping with the cranky weather of this summer. It may be inoffensive to my dignity but it affronts my senses. I’m sorry, I like you PS1 but I don’t like that.

I’ve been playing around with headers for a few weeks now, and finally I’m ready to share. Love it? Hate it? Let me know!

Spending so much time looking for joy shows up in my Flickr faves. Everything about this matrix just makes me feel good!

Let the Outside In from Caitlin Parker on Vimeo.

Oh wow. I love this weird, whimsical look into a world we usually pay no attention.

via @design_sponge

I’m not sure why I find Sophie Blackall’s illustrations of Missed Connections so joyful. There is something bittersweet about these missives, written with the knowledge that recapturing such an evanescent bond is deeply unlikely. And yet, there is joy in the moment of connection, the feeling of some tiny but important event between two people. It occurred,(something anyway), it can’t be undone, and maybe, just maybe, it could change both lives forever.

The moment becomes aesthetic when we look at the charming, quirky details people remember about each other. The noisy tambourine and green skirt, the blue hat, the hula hoop, the fear of birds. The aesthetics of missed connections are a study in that which stands out from the rest of the gray city, things which disrupt our attention, make us look and, more often than not, give us a sense of joy that sticks in our memory, at least for the short-term.

For me, the greatest joy lies in the naked hope people display in these postings, believing that the world is full of gifts that come at unlikely moments, and that there’s no shame in believing they’re meant for you. City life is full of guarded, careful interactions. Missed Connections are an oasis of vulnerable openness and optimism, and even if their subjects never reconnect, I love that someone is bringing them to life.

The city has caught the polka-dot bug, and it’s spreading like wildfire. I was pleasantly surprised to see a new crop of green dots in Herald Square, so new they were still surrounded by yellow caution tape. As I was poking around, I caught sight of a truck being loaded up with big green paint sprayers. I interrogated the gentleman in the photo below (who, despite the surly expression, was actually quite amiable) and he confirmed my suspicion that he and his companion are in fact the New York City green polka-dot painters!

Now that I had so serendipitously come face-to-face with these agents of aesthetic good cheer, I couldn’t let them go without another question. “Why are you out here doing this?”

The duo’s answer was satisfyingly, joyfully simple: “Why not?” And really, why not? I couldn’t think of one good reason.