aesthetics of joy

When a country has suffered a devastating genocide and come out the other side to rebuild, the last thing you expect someone to say is, “They could really use some ice cream!” But it’s exactly what Rwandan playwright Kiki Gakire was thinking when she asked Brooklyn ice cream makers Blue Marble to partner with her in opening the first-ever ice cream shop in her recovering country. The shop is profiled in this season’s issue of Edible Brooklyn, and, in addition to filling my eyes with tears, it reminded me that the need for joy is sometimes counterintuitive.

We tend to believe that people who have suffered and are suffering – those who are hungry or destitute or illiterate or injured– must have only rational needs. We see them struggling in the lower tiers of Maslow’s pyramid and we believe that our only way to help them is to address their physical circumstances. With all our best intentions, we build hospitals and schools, wells and roads. And while these are critical applications of our generosity, and we could redouble these efforts many times over and still not meet the need, some very real and valid emotional needs are pushed to the background. As Blue Marble co-founder Alexis Miesen recalls Gakire saying, “There’s no room to dream when survival is the only goal. You can’t just rebuild roads; you have to repair people, and show that life is good.”

After all, survival is not living. And what “superficial” joyful moments (such as those spent catching cold drips off a cone with sprinkles) do for us is give us a model for what living looks and feels like. It restores our will to strive, when we know what we’re striving for. I was first made aware of this in the preface to Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style, where she discusses men’s rush to shave, women’s application of nail polish, and the reopening of beauty salons in war-torn Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban government. She writes, “Liberation is supposed to be about grave matters: elections, education, a free press. But Afghans acted as though superficial things were just as important.”

Reflecting on this, and the Rwandan ice cream shop, I find my hackles raised at the arrogance of judging such desires and efforts frivolous. In a nation whose founding documents enshrine the pursuit of happiness as a right, how can we dismiss this same pursuit in others as wasteful? It’s unreasonable to expect that people wait until basic needs are met to create joy. It’s not how we are built –and with good reason.

These words of Gakire, quoted from the Blue Marble Dreams website leave me ever more convinced that the pursuit of joy in design is vital. These words will stay with me a long time.

Because we struggle most of the time, we find ourselves aggressive against happiness, love, joy, life. When we have children, we teach them that happiness doesn’t exist; that there is no pure love and as legacy, we give them our despair, our debts, our doubts, our tears, our failures… Rwandan women… want to reshape life in its simple and sweetest form. We want to share moments that are not embossed by despair and death… We want to create a space where poverty, disease, illiteracy… are not obstacles to happiness and barriers between human beings… We have to, for the sake of the health of our soul. The ice cream will have the power to reconcile people with life by providing privileged moments when life reminds them that it is also sweet.

You can read more about the shop here, and support Blue Marble Dreams here.

{via Edible Brooklyn}

These arresting photos of ants come via the Daily Mail. The photographer, Mohammed Babu, set up this experiment after his wife noticed that some ants had turned white from eating spilled milk. By setting up colored drops of sugar water on sheets of paraffin in his garden, Babu was able to create a palette of rainbow ants, their transparent abdomens revealing their latest meal.

There’s an interesting tension here. We’re not used to seeing insects as joyful, and usually regard them with disgust. (Though this may be a cultural response here in the West, as many other cultures do not have this response and in fact view insects as a perfectly acceptable food source.) But in this case, color seems to override our disgust, and the magic of the ants’ transparent bodies revealing the color opposes our instinct towards disgust with wonder.

When you think about it this way, there’s a powerful design principle in here. Aesthetics can create a kind of fascination that overrides our intrinsic responses, even ones as physical and intense as disgust. It would be interesting to see how this fascination could be developed to help us change behavior based on such instinctual responses – not just disgust, but also perhaps anxiety and fear. If we can design something so that it produces a conflicting response to the brain’s natural alarm bells, this tension can trigger a need for accommodation – a need to fit this new occurrence into the person’s worldview. And that need for accommodation, accompanied by delight, wonder, or curiosity, is often the first step towards a changed mind.

Photos: Mohammed Babu
Daily Mail:  ”Tasting the Rainbow”

Can death be joyful?

The Merry Cemetery is a real burial site in Romania. But instead of the traditional somber aesthetics of death, the headstones feature colorful designs and scenes that explain how a person died. Some of those scenes are not too joyful (see: “Three Year-old Hit by Car,” above) but they do wrap the experience of death in a more uplifting aesthetic package. It may not make you feel any better about the loss of a loved one, but I wonder if it does change your immediate mindset on entering a cemetery. It sets a lighthearted tone that might remind a visitor that life is fleeting, and to spend the visit remembering the joys of being with the deceased, rather than the pain of being without them.

These somewhat gaudy headstones remind me of a procession that went by on the day we buried my grandmother. We were driving back from the burial, and at that moment a hearse drove up with an enormous picture of a deceased woman on top, ringed with many garlands of flowers. It was so visually loud I had a moment of synaesthesia: I could practically hear a marching band accompaniment to the parade-float aesthetics of the hearse. It was a jarring contrast with the understated, Bach sonata aesthetic of the funeral we had just attended, and my cousin couldn’t help but say, “That is so not Nana!” It was true, and we burst out laughing. Nana was reserved, self-effacing, elegant, in life and in death.

But to each his own. Apart from a merry cemetery or a joyful hearse, have you come across other ways people create a joyful celebration of a person’s life, after death? Do you know of any other joyful funeral rituals, either personal or cultural?

{via boing boing; images: Michael Foord}

This was a nice find in an email from a reader this week: a visual poem called “How To Be Alone” by filmmaker Andrea Dorfman and writer Tanya Davis. The joy of being alone is an interesting contrast to all the recent research about how important social connection is to joy and to long-term happiness (some of which I alluded to in my most recent Core77 column). At first it seems that hanging out alone is antithetical to joy, especially given social stigma against it. But I like the poem’s observation that often when you’re alone is actually when you meet the most interesting people. That’s certainly been my experience when traveling — it’s easiest to be alone as a stranger in a strange land, and people often surprise me with their friendliness. I still have friends today that I met on solo adventures in various parts of the world.

Being alone is also an optimal time for finding “flow,” Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s name for being absorbed in creative pursuits. There is also social flow, for sure, but the individual kind has a certain kind of satisfaction to it because it’s all yours.

Solitude is often painted as deprivation, but it can just as easily be self-indulgent. I don’t think I’m one of those people who will ever strap on dancing shoes and go to club on my own (maybe because I just don’t go to clubs that much even with others), but I do savor a little bit of time out every week (this blog being a big product of that). I’ve always been that way too — as an only child growing up in the suburbs, I spent a lot of time watching the world go by from the branches of an old beech tree. It’s nice to see this simple pleasure encouraged, not in the typical authoritative self-help tone, but in a matter-of-fact, yet whimsical way. I like the idea in the poem that to be alone for those not used to it is brave, rather than something you should feel normal doing. We evolved to seek companionship. We find safety in numbers. Solitude can feel unnatural, but rewarding.

It’s not a typical aesthetic of joy. It may even be a counter-aesthetic of joy, in the traditional sense. But I think there’s a quiet delight to be found here.

{Thanks, Johnny.}

Can something say “Keep Out!” and still be joyful?

This was the question that popped into my head as I considered the Razzle Dazzle Sculptural Security object, the angular plywood contraption jammed in the window of the house pictured above, by Detroit-based Design 99. The purpose of the Razzle Dazzle (more examples of which you can see below) is to protect empty houses from squatting and vandalization, a common problem in Detroit neighborhoods. An alternative to boarding up doors and windows, the method signifies that someone is interested in looking after a place.

A strong thread of joyful activism runs through all of Design 99′s projects: the brightly-painted Power House, a community space cum sculpture made from a previously empty house, or the Neighborhood Machine, a similarly hued Bobcat with trailers that can be appended for various urban renewal tasks, such as gardening and collecting found material. For these projects, aesthetics of joy such as bright color, stripes, and other patterns catch the eye and raise awareness for urban renewal projects. They also telegraph the spirit of the movement, and offer an exuberant energy that might inspire volunteers and invite onlookers to join in. The aesthetics visually convey the intent of the artists behind Design 99, Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope:

The Power House intends to be a stimulator and not an end in itself as a singular art object. The Power House is a broadcaster of potential ideas and a place to plug those ideas into. The Power House will be used as an interactive site, by us and by our neighbors. The Power House will become a symbol for creativity, new beginnings and social interaction within the neighborhood.

But while the house and the machine seek to invite, the purpose of the Razzle Dazzle is entirely different. It’s a three-dimensional “No Trespassing” sign. So there’s an inherent tension between the spiky, angular form, which articulates (and enforces) the “stay away” message, and the vibrant pattern, which is a visceral enticement. There is also a tension in the way the piece is crafted. The Razzle Dazzle’s form is haphazard, seemingly cobbled together from debris — something you might expect to see at an abandoned site. It looks like it might itself be an act of vandalism. But the deliberate color treatment transforms the meaning of the piece. It says, “Someone put me here on purpose,” and therefore, “Someone cares about this place.”

In this way, the Razzle Dazzle is inviting. Through a splash of color, it offers the promise that a space will be inhabited by people who will care for it and restore it. It’s an invitation to return, suggesting that next time you visit, it may not be an abandoned shack, but a lively business, a vibrant community gathering space, or a home. It’s a joyful “Keep Out,” because it’s also a “Come Back Soon.”

{via Core77}

Power House and Neighborhood Machine

Neighborhood Machine with solar panel trailer attached

Gardening trailer for Neighborhood Machine

Razzle Dazzle Sculptural Security objects

In case you missed it, this Idea Lab visualization from Sunday’s NYT Magazine made me smile, and made me think.

It’s interesting to me the way aesthetics can transform the emotional tenor of content. Though the subject matter has a negative slant (partially genuine, partially comic), the circular shape, colors, and stripes emanating like rays of light from the center make the whole thing kind of delightful. But why? I think it’s because our emotions react to aesthetics before they process content. Even when the aesthetics and content are dissonant, the aesthetics guide our reactions, I guess because in most circumstances, aesthetics are an accurate shortcut to understanding content.

What are other good examples?

Rob Walker (of Consumed) had an interesting post on his blog recently evolving the discussion around my Psychology Today post about Unhappy Hipsters and the emotional tenor of modern design. He picks up on my assertion that delight is at root an emotion connected with abundance. In my post, I wrote:

I think that modernism’s restrained quality is fundamentally in tension with the idea of delight. Delight is an emotion of abundance — a celebration of sensation and richness. Delight and joy are primally connected to wellness, and wellness in nature is lush, plump, vibrant, and bountiful.

Walker observes that there’s often something enchanting about abundance in the context of interior design, such as in many of the homes featured in “Sneak Peeks” on the blog Design*Sponge. (The photo above is from a similar type of series: The Selby‘s photos of the homes of creative people. This one is from the home of Sydney gallerist Sarah Cottier, photographer Ashley Barber, and their daughter Ruby.) We value a little abundance in the form of creative clutter because it makes a space invitingly human; collections of real things arranged at non-90 degree angles tell us we’re in a home, rather than a sanitized photo studio or furniture showroom. At the same time, Walker voices a healthy skepticism about the joys of abundance:

I am somewhat cautious about that connection between delight and abundance. Buying into that idea full-on would be emotionally catastrophic — I mean, maybe those “hipsters” are unhappy, but watch an episode of Hoarders and decide for yourself how delightful that abundance seems.

This contrast — between joyful collecting and anxious hoarding — raises some big questions that push the discussion on abundance into an important area. It’s clear there’s a line where things go from joyful plenty to horrifying excess. But where is that line? And why do many of us seem to have so much trouble staying on the healthy side of it?

A clue to our precarious relationship with abundance lies within our own brains, and the neural wiring that underpins our emotional responses. Many emotional reactions are triggered unconsciously by aesthetic (or sensory) elements. Aesthetic elements can take on different meanings through cultural encoding and personal experience, but underneath these layers there is often a kernel of biological inclination, shaped by evolution. One example, which I alluded to in my PT post, is people’s general preference for curves. A primal, unconscious part of our brain (the amygdala) has an intrinsic, background-level fear response to sharp corners, a reaction that makes sense. This emotional response raises our alertness around potentially harmful objects, and by consequence, our chances of survival. The response is purported to have developed over the more than 80,000 generations of the Pleistocene era when humans were evolving into their present form, and were surrounded by an environment where the angular things they might have encountered included cliff edges, tree branches, and predators’ claws — all things around which it’s unwise to be too cavalier.

I believe there’s a similar evolutionary principle going on with abundance, a hardwired predilection etched deep into our brains. My view is that a preference for abundance is a natural residue of generations of evolution in an environment where “too much of a good thing” conferred greater chances of survival. This is why we pig out beyond satiation at buffets and why candy stores make us feel like kids — because these things are aesthetic signifiers of a secure resource stream, something we are predisposed to celebrate and revel in.

At the same time, what was adaptive in the Pleistocene can be maladaptive in the post-industrial age, especially when taken to extremes. For most of us living in the first world, the unpredictable cycles of plenty and privation have been leveled out to such an extent that our greatest want is a lack of ripe mangoes in January. Abundance runs amok; it clogs our arteries and our atmosphere and it accumulates not just in the homes of hoarders, but throughout our environment. It hogs resources, giving some people unimaginable riches while consigning many more to persistent scarcity. This state of affairs is clearly not joyful; it’s rife with guilt, anxiety, and shame. When the population of humans was small relative to the available resources, and resources came and went in uncertain cycles, an insatiable craving for abundance made sense; now, this proclivity can be a truly destructive influence.

But our genes don’t know this. So the hardwired emotional responses that once worked so well to enhance our well-being and survival are now sometimes odds with the same ends. We stuff ourselves, shop-till-we-drop, and hoard because on some level it feels good, even if consciously we know it’s not good for us. Fortunately, we are not slaves to our genetic predispositions. While their influence over our behavior can be profound, it is modulated and controlled by a frontal cortex capable of understanding the dilemmas we face and making necessary tradeoffs. One way we do this is by exercising control over our actions, turning down a second helping or politely declining a tempting sales pitch. Another way is through the design of our environment, and this is where I think an aesthetics of abundance could be quite powerful. Can we design a feeling of abundance without the actual abundance, i.e. without having to use a lot of material, or hoard a whole ton of stuff?

What follows are a few early observations on the idea of aesthetics of abundance, along with some examples. Celebrations such as festivals are a big inspiration in this area, because they often feature abundant, yet temporary, displays, meaning they often need to feel big but be small enough to pack away later. Balloons are often used to create a sense of abundance, even though the actual material they consume is comparatively small. Confetti (though problematic in the cleanup), is another example of a product that creates a sense of abundance with little material. Surface treatments, such as patterns, can also create a feeling of abundance, particularly stripes and polka dots. I love how these stripes on the side of the Barcelona Flower Market seem to swell and move, suggesting the bounty inside:

Designer Paul Smith certainly understands this principle as well:

Another example — these polka dots from the Trash: Any Color You Like project take a feature of city life that normally fades into the background and makes it feel more abundant (an effective way to get people to reflect on the consequences of abundance!).

Variegated color and texture treatments also work to create abundance. Because of the rainbow hues, these chopsticks feel like “more” than they would if they were all one color.

A feeling of abundance can also be created with form and texture, such as with the ruffles that are in shop windows across the country right now for spring.

Abundance is not just about form, but also about context. A teaspoon of sprinkles feels abundant on an ice cream cone; in a giant field, the same teaspoon is insignificant. The cornucopia symbol is apt — abundance needs something to spill out from, a container to press against. It’s easier to make a small home feel abundant than a big one, which is a counterintuitive principle of some comfort to us small-apartment city dwellers. By designing small frames, we can make the things inside feel more bountiful. There’s also a role for design in illustrating the line between abundance and pure excess. That’s part of why the Design*Sponge “Sneak Peeks” are so satisfying. They show managed clutter, abundance in balance. Like a healthy psyche, they are full of emotional experiences, memories, and desires, arranged with some acknowledgment of a rational super-structure. Effusive, but not chaotic.

Like anything taken to extreme, abundance ceases to be joyful once it crosses a certain line. Science doesn’t offer much insight as to where the line is; we just know it when we see it. Love in excess becomes infatuation. Self-confidence becomes narcissism. Neatness becomes compulsion. Too much of any good thing is no good at all. The overstuffed houses of hoarders and the ultra-minimal, bare bones interiors featured in design magazines are two ends of a spectrum of beliefs about homes and happiness. I could just as easily take on the hoarders as the zen-modernists, except for one thing — no one is advocating the hoarder lifestyle. Even the hoarders view their condition with shame. Minimalism, on the other hand, is often preached as a lifestyle nirvana — a blissful, transcendent state achieved by letting go of material things. For some people, this kind of muted emotional landscape is a relief, a break from a high-stress job, information overload, or a plethora of buzzing devices. But for most of us, I’d contend that this kind of environment runs against our emotional nature. We’re made to feel joy in an abundance of color, texture, and sensory stimulation; it’s what makes the neurons fire and the brain grow and develop. Rather than fight it, I’d love to see us use design to create a more sustainable kind of abundance, one that gives us delight without compromising the joy of generations to come.

Images: Barcelona Flower Market via yatzer; Paul Smith Mini via Flickr; trashbags by Adrian Kondratowicz; chopsticks via DWR; ruffles: S/S 2010 shows by Oscar de la Renta, Valentino, and Colette Dinnigan, via Style.com.

Murketing: Clutter, Objects, Joy
Psychology Today / Design and the Mind: Unhappy Hipsters: Does Modern Architecture Make Us Gloomy?

Over the past few days, I’ve been watching as the Christmas trees are put out to pasture on the city streets. For these first few weeks of the new year, it’s like an urban forest has sprung up from the sidewalks, already half-dead and dejected. And it occurs to me that it’s a good example of an object whose emotionality is transformed by context. A Christmas tree in the living room is a festive delight, a beacon in the room, a centerpiece to gather around. A Christmas tree in the street is waste wood, a symbol of extravagance and indulgence. Before December 25th, a Christmas tree is an aesthetic of joy and anticipation. After Jan 2nd, it’s trash to be dealt with, with connotations of loss and sadness. Time and place radically redefine the emotional meaning of this object.

Countless other objects experience similar emotional redefinition in our lives. The security blanket we thought we could never live without becomes embarrassing in our tween years. A precious gift from a lover becomes anathema after a breakup. A knickknack that always seemed ugly in a childhood home can suddenly seem joyful in our own. As I thought about these examples, and the Christmas tree, it reminded me of an early idea I had in my work on joy — the idea of emotional sustainability.

One of my goals with Aesthetics of Joy was to explore the emotional relationships between people and things, to try to understand how we could design things in more emotionally satisfying ways. Emotionally sustainable objects are the things that manage to stay relevant to our feelings over long periods of time, bringing joy repeatedly as we interact with them and use them. By contrast, emotional obsolescence is the quality of things that wear out their welcome, providing an initial burst of satisfaction that is not replicable. I realized early on in this project that emotional obsolescence and functional obsolescence are often out of sync, so that we have things that are broken but still emotionally valuable, and equally problematic, we have things that are emotionally obsolete but that work perfectly. Our landfills are dense with both these types of items — items with residual, unexploited value. And when we look at the problems of designing for sustainability, I think we can’t ignore that just dealing with biodegradability or disassembly or planned obsolescence is not enough. Truly sustainable design takes emotional value into account too.

It occurred to me as I looked at the Christmas tree that objects trigger positive emotion and fit into our emotional lives in different ways. Some are intense and euphoric, like a new gadget; these occupy significant but transitory spaces in our hearts. Others are joyful: they elicit strong feeling, though less intense, that comes and goes in waves. These things are repeatedly joyful throughout long periods, or even our entire lives. And then there are contentment objects — things that give us a low-level glow, a soft, pleasurably feeling of security. These objects are not the ones we desperately covet, but our emotional bond with them is durable. A antique chair or soft rug might be an example of this kind of object.

No kind of object is inherently better than any other, but just like a balanced emotional life, we need to keep things in healthy proportion. A sane emotional life has lots of contentment, some joy, and occasional encounters with ecstatic novelty. Our object lives should probably be similarly balanced. Lots of things that are soothing and make us feel good, a bunch of wonderful things that are truly joyful, that make us smile whenever we encounter them, and the occasional transitory novelty. The thing is that each of these categories of objects has different design imperatives from an aesthetic and a material standpoint. Gadgets, whose emotional character is intense but emotional life cycle is short, have the aesthetics right (sleek, sharp, and über-shiny), but the material wrong. These objects should be totally transient in their design, able to fit seamlessly back into the biological and technical cycles McDonough and Braungart propose in Cradle to Cradle. Other objects that have more lasting emotional relevance need not worry as much about end-of-life issues, but should be designed for durability, so that they can be maintained and passed on.

Misalignment between physical design and emotional character is rampant. The Christmas tree, which started me down this whole line of thinking, is a perfect example. 33-36 million Christmas trees are “produced” (um, cut down?) in the US each year, and another 50-60 million in Europe. The tree’s emotional character is joyful, its appeal recurring at the same level and at precisely the same time each year. But, its design is out of step with that character, because (practically speaking) it must be killed to be transported, and it cannot be preserved or stored. This creates huge waste. What’s needed (if we were going to design one from scratch) is a Christmas tree that lasts forever and yet shrinks down very small for storage. It also needs to have all the multisensory appeal of a real tree, and perhaps a kind of quirkiness that makes it look different every year. And best of all it would be size-adjustable, so that it could grow with a family as they move between homes over the years. Or, another way to design it might be to create a system of local tree farms that minimize transportation cost and waste, paired with a system for using the discarded trees that somehow extracts value from them.

These might be silly approaches, but the point I’m trying to make is serious — namely that emotional life cycles can serve as a guide to product life cycles, telling us what is appropriate aesthetically and materially in design. My ideas on this are still evolving, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

{Photos via Christmas tree}

No question that the economy has the fashion industry feeling hacked to bits, and this was apparent on the runways. At Commes des Garcons Rei Kawakubo’s clothes looked artfully pieced together from odd bits salvaged from a besieged factory. Interspersed with elegant minimalist pieces, Raf Simons’s show at Jil Sander had a few pieces with opaque layers largely eviscerated and overlaid with netting. But no one expressed the bathetic anguish designers felt at having their wings clipped with more humor and charm than Viktor and Rolf.

I can only imagine how the faces of the front row must have lit up to see these gored, sliced, and shaved tulle gowns come down the runway. Yes, they are marred by violence. But they’re so sweetly absurd that for me they are still an aesthetic of joy.

A brief departure from the aesthetics of joy to consider a very different kind of aesthetic…. I’ve never seen anything like these Sydney dust storms and I must say they freak me out. A world gone red is an eerie aesthetic, like something out of a sci-fi film. Out of curiosity I’d love to be there to witness it, but at the same time I think I’d find it really unsettling.

I write a lot here about the pleasure of oddity, when something defies our expectations of what it should be like. In this case, the sky is defying our color expectations, being red instead of blue, but it’s frightening, not joyous. A rainbow changes the color of the sky too, but our reaction is the opposite. I think magnitude must be an issue here. A red sky surrounds us ominously, its origins vague, its duration uncertain. A rainbow is distant, comparatively small, and fleeting. Color is one of the most powerful and immediate aesthetic signals, but its meaning is inscribed in scale and context.

Photos: Flickrblog

The headlines have been comical. “Richard Perry in the Sky With Diamonds,” reads one. “Jeff Koons’s Blinding Bling,” blares another, calling out the controversy over hedge fund founder Richard Perry’s installation of a giant green diamond-shaped sculpture by Koons on the terrace of his penthouse apartment.

Art is a terribly subjective thing, which is how you get debates such as this one, which has led to myriad complaints and has even forced Perry to shift the direction of the sculpture to prevent light reflections from its mirror-polished surface from “burning like lasers” in a neighboring penthouse. (Ah, the problems of the very rich!)

You could argue an aesthetic of joy here — the oversized scale, the delicious shininess — though perhaps it’s not so layered as joy and may be more novelty than joy. My friend Deirdre says it makes her happy, though she can see how the neighbors might not be so thrilled. When private taste impinges on public eyeballs, the line between joyful and hideous can get awfully blurry. Is a work of art or a piece of decor still joyful if it bothers some to the point of agitation?

I have a post in draft form (that I hope, eventually, will see the light of day) about universal vs. individual aesthetics of joy. Of course everyone has different things that bring them joy, but they don’t necessarily conform to what would be defined culturally as joyful aesthetics.

My project generally focuses on the more general, more universal aesthetic patterns because it makes it easier to draw lessons that can be applied broadly to design. But occasionally I come across what I would call a “counter-aesthetic” of joy: an object or space that on the surface looks to be the very opposite of joy, yet someone has managed to wring delight from it.

The trigger nearly always has to do with personal experience, as is the case here, with these photographs of the Gowanus Canal by José Gaytan. Gaytan, a Brooklynite who grew up in Juarez, Mexico, was attracted to the canal by a familiar smell. “That aroma is embedded in my brain,” he says, “a mix of sewage, kerosene and oil.” Which doesn’t sound so appealing, except that it reminds Gaytan of his handyman grandfather, and the junkyards he used to play in while he was alongside him on jobs.

This illuminates one of the true marvels of emotions in the brain. Aromas, colors, textures, sounds — all of these things can become associated with positive or negative feelings through experience and memory. Especially aroma. Current research suggests that smell is processed differently in the brain from the other senses, and may therefore have a stronger link to long-term emotional memories. So a smell (stench?) that for most of us might connote filth in need of a Superfund cleanup, for someone else evokes the joy of childhood.

Where this gets interesting is art. To feel joy where others don’t is wonderful, yet limited. But to try to shine a light on your joy and share it with the world, especially when it involves overcoming preconceived notions, is a powerfully transformative act and deserves a place in the schema of aesthetics of joy. A success in this regard is to make us see a place with fresh eyes. As Barbara Wing, curator of the Brooklyn Public Library’s exhibit of Gaytan’s photographs, says, “He really looks at details we don’t notice. The colors are fantastic, almost painterly.” Just as long as they don’t come with the smells. . .

Thanks for the tip, Dad!

Exhibit, at the Brooklyn Public Library, now through August 29th
NYT story