aesthetics of joy

Tonight I had the privilege of speaking at makeCalgary, a conference that looks to design for inspiration on instigating catalytic change in cities. The theme is “provoking Calgary’s next chapter,” and to that end I’ll be sharing some design principles for joyful cities, using examples from New York (which has been experiencing its own waves of inspiring change lately). I was incredibly impressed with the level of dialogue and especially the sensitivity to emotion among the crowd. Calgary is clearly primed for joyful change.

One fascinating discussion emerged around the idea of winter. A commenter observed that very few images in the presentations showed winter, of which Calgary has a hefty one. How do we create joy when the landscape forces us indoors, or at least makes it less natural to want to be outside? A fellow speaker, Rob Adams, head of urban design for the city of Melbourne offered a nice piece of advice from the Danes: “There is no bad weather. Only bad clothing.” I love this because it underscores that joy so often lives outside of the comfort zone. In North America we overwhelmingly design for comfort. But comfort is often inimical to joy because it is so cozy we become complacent and insular, rather than openminded, exploratory, and social. Better to take the advice of a commenter from Winnipeg who noted that residents of that city often skate to work on their river once it has frozen over!

Tomorrow, I’ll be helping to lead a charrette to apply some of the diverse inspirations from different cities to a site within Calgary. Looking forward to sharing back after the conference.

If you’re curious to hear more about what I’ll be sharing, here’s a link to a podcast interview I did with two of the conference’s organizers, Matt Knapik and Kate van Fraassen. Fun!

What do lollipops have to do with keeping the peace? Surprisingly, more than a little. A recent initiative by a city council in the city of Victoria in British Columbia offered free lollipops to drunken revelers leaving bars to cut down on noise and violence after a night out. Councillor Charlayne Thornton-Joe explained that the treats make it hard for inebriated partiers to be too loud, and that they minimize dialogue that could lead to brawls. More practically speaking, they also regulate blood sugar and, like pacifiers, have a calming effect.

While there’s no hard evidence that the lollipops worked, councillor Thornton-Joe says that it seemed to be so effective that the city is considering making it a permanent program. It’s a charming idea – that something so childlike and innocent could disarm a rowdy bunch. And it makes for a joyful image, to imagine adults appeased by candies on sticks.

This is aesthetics of joy at their beguiling best. Sugar, color, and a form that evokes nostalgia for childhood – these things have real power. Contrary to so much of what we are taught, they are not just styling or superficial extras. They are phrases in the language with which our stuff speaks to us, quietly shaping our desires and our behavior. It’s a joy to see them applied in a such a novel way, and for such playful problem-solving. I hope to see this idea take off in other places too.

Photo: Beautiful feather lollipops by Abbey Hendrickson of Aesthetic Outburst, via Pinterest
NPR: “Lollipops: Pacifiers for Bar Patrons?” 

They look almost like brightly colored mosses, don’t they? Like some new form of street lichen. Or a kind of chromatic filling compound. A rainbow grout.

This set of sculptures by artist Juliana Santacruz Herrera is a particularly striking example of yarnbombing, a form of knit or crochet-based street art that frequently reacts to the urban environment. In Herrera’s case, this means applying braided fabric in looped forms to cracks in the sidewalks of Paris. Like the pothole gardens and lego repairs I’ve written about in past posts, Herrera’s works use delight to call attention to the breakdown of infrastructure in the city. Like other yarnbombing projects, they work with maximal contrast – in color, contour, density, and texture – to catch our eyes and make us take notice. While they don’t actually fix the problems they’re addressing, it’s possible that inducing this kind of positive affect makes people more inclined to act to change their environments. More than an angry letter or a protest, these works create a desire to share with others, creating a kind of social momentum.

Herrera’s works are one more example of a phenomenon I call joyful repair – the act of mending or calling attention to a damaged element of the environment using color, texture, playful gestures, and other aesthetics of joy. It’s a form of joyful activism, which tries to bring about change through positive emotion, and it’s one of my very favorite applications of aesthetics of joy.

Here’s another example I’ve had in my files for awhile. Working at a slightly smaller scale, London artist Ben Wilson uses chewing gum splotches as a canvas for tiny, brightly colored sidewalk art. Wilson has been creating the paintings since 1998, and estimates he’s made over 10,000 of the little works! Interestingly, not long after he began his gum-painting endeavors, people began making requests for particular designs, often commemorative. So what began as litter has become an odd little system of tribute, like plaques on park benches or in front of newly planted trees. People want to be associated with something they feel good about, and with a little color and charm, that even could be improperly discarded chewing gum. The sidewalk at first seems an unusually mundane place for this sort of personal connection, but maybe not. After all, the sidewalk is the most intimate of transitory spaces in a community, the backdrop for so many of our daily dramas and spontaneous joys. Filling its holes, reclaiming its blemishes – in some way these are a deeply integral form of reconstruction.

There’s something else here, too. Projects like this are a signal that someone cares about a place, that the condition of that environment matters to someone. Someone is paying attention to the details. To make something beautiful is to invest time and energy in it, and these two are the most valuable, limited resources we have. We perceive this signal of caring and passion, often unconsciously, and we typically follow in kind. We read our landscape for cues about how to treat it, we draw inferences about the inhabitants, and we subtly alter our behavior to maintain this condition – or enhance it. These aesthetic signals often become a discourse of community, a conversation between the denizens of a place that leads, via a subtle form of one-upmanship, to the organic growth and improvement of our favorite places to call home. Alain de Botton has written (I’m paraphrasing here) that one of architecture’s purposes is to inspire us to be better people, and I would say the same for any of these urban interventions. We see improvements, and they unconsciously motivate us to improve ourselves.

Joyful repair projects can serve as jumpstarts for this process. This project, though not new, is a great example of this principle applied over a large scale. Called “Favela Painting,” this brightly colored village is the work of Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn. Working in a slum outside Rio, their goal is to use art “as a tool to inspire, create beauty, combat prejudice, and attract attention.” The care and passion embodied by the murals effectively transforms the favela from outside in. Some really thoughtful words about the effects of this project, on the Magical Urbanism site:

‘Favela painting’ affects the aesthetic order of how favelas are perceived from within and outside its natural embryonic growth. Colour brings hope. It brings a different understanding of space and its people, inviting others to co-create and co-represent much more constructively and positively life here. It appeals to our senses in a way that we do not reject but embrace these places and the potential for better life. It articulates a different discourse of social change; of engagement, contributing to improve life for favela dwellers.

It’s hard to say it any more succinctly than “color brings hope.” It suggests energy, and as such it has an uplifting and an attractive power. It’s a harbinger of better things to come. As I think about the phenomenon of joyful repair, I’m reminded of the root of the word repair, the Latin parare, “to make ready.” By repairing things, we are making them ready again. By repairing them joyfully, we’re making them ready for wonderful things to happen in the future.

Images: Juliana Santacruz Herrera on Flickr via designboom; Ben Wilson via Inhabitat; Favela Painting via The Fox Is Black.

{Thank you Maggie and BD}

This book, by artist Kyo Myoung Kim, fascinates me. Spotted at an exhibit at the Cabinet space in Gowanus, Brooklyn a couple of months ago, the book has been lodged in my mind ever since. I can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to write this way, to communicate with a color language. Would you type it on a rainbow keyboard? Or compose on a color wheel? What kind of pen would you have to design to produce these signs?

Imagine the experience of creating this book, translating it from words into reds, violets, and oranges. What would it be like to be drilled as a child on a chromatic alphabet? To unlock meaning effortlessly from this linguistic confetti?

Hue, saturation, value: What roles would these play? I can’t help but push this further. Pure hues might be phonemes, and the lengths of the bars might indicate inflection. Value might be volume. Saturation might be emotional tenor. Can you imagine the beauty and the power of a language like this? I was reading this week about how phonetic languages (most Western languages), as opposed to pictographical languages (Chinese, Japanese, etc.), offer the flexibility to be able to write in dialect. I never thought about this before, but because all we’re doing in writing English is transliterating sounds, we can change these sounds around to suggest a drawl or foreign intonation. A language like this color language I’m suggesting, though it would be nearly impossible to master, would allow new layers of meaning and direction to rise from the page. Think how crude our written tools of emotional expression – the all caps, the exclamation point – seem, against the possibility that words themselves could be colored based on emotion and volume. In a novel, you could see an argument set in dark, deeply saturated bars. A mumbler would speak in strands of near-grays. A languid, happy character would shine through long bars of bright pastels. A new richness of plot and character would be available to writers and readers.

A reader would not actually need to understand the language to feel some of the meaning. Like spoken language, where we understand much from inflection, even in languages we’ve never heard before. One could flip through a book in this color language and feel the arc of the story, understanding the emotional narrative if not the descriptive one.

This language also would mean the same speech might look different when uttered by a different speaker. I’m imagining a poem written in this language, transcribed as read by three different readers. How different these would look, but still comparable, because all the hues would be the same. Or imagine a small book, with a series of poems as read by two readers, the two variations facing each other across the pages. (A project for a rainy day.)

I suspect there might be two unexpected discoveries in this exercise. One, that the immediacy of color might change the meanings of words. Some words might be unexpectedly beautiful, others jarring, depending on the new system. A kind of synaesthetic onomatopoeia might emerge. And secondly, that folding emotion into language might create a different kind of awareness of emotional content in dialogue. If we had to encode what we’re feeling in language, how would this articulation affect us? And if our emotion were indicated in our writing, how might our relationships change? Would we feel closer to each other, or would new misunderstandings arise? Would color language be a truer reflection of our minds? Or just a richer one, without any bias towards precision or accuracy?

Correction: The name of the artist of this piece should have read Hyo Myoung Kim. Apologies for the error. You can find more of Hyo Myoung’s work here.

New York magazine’s Lady Gaga cover story this week again had me thinking about joy. She’s so playful with fashion and identity that I can’t help but feel a sense of delight at her style choices. In December I considered some of Gaga’s outfits and concluded that the bubble dress was the most joyful. So it gave me a little burst of joy to read that Lady Gaga seems to feel the same way:

Gaga was very taken with her new “bubble dress” at this point, and we talked about its unreality, the beauty of the imaginary. Everyone wanted that dress, but it wasn’t a dress at all—it was a bunch of plastic balls. “On my tour,” she declared, “I’m going to be in my bubble dress on a piano made of bubbles, singing about love and art and the future. I should like to make one person believe in that moment, and it would be worth every salt of a No. 1 record.” She dropped the accent for a moment now—the real girl, unartificed, was right underneath—and leaned in. “I can have hit records all day, but who fucking cares?” she explained. “A year from now, I could go away, and people might say, ‘Gosh, what ever happened to that girl who never wore pants?’ But how wonderfully memorable 30 years from now, when they say, ‘Do you remember Gaga and her bubbles?’ Because, for a minute, everybody in that room will forget every sad, painful thing in their lives, and they’ll just live in my bubble world.”

That’s joy, right? Something evanescent but memorable, something that stays with us in a way that is compelling, repeatable, and a little bit timeless. A little bit of the imaginary where it doesn’t quite belong.

I am a big fan of snow. I know it’s inconvenient. I know it piles up in big drifts that make it hard to get around. I know you have to shovel it within 4 hours in Brooklyn or you’ll get a ticket. I know it looks pristine for about 30 seconds in the city and then it turns poo-brown and ugly. I know all this but there’s really nothing you could say that would make me love snow any less.

My first reaction to snow is always a visceral call to memories of childhood joy: “Snowday!” Just the barest snippet of a winter weather forecast or a “storm warning” brings a rush of delight. As a child, a forecast of snow meant I immediately put down the books and pencils and stopped doing my homework, and started dreaming of sledding and hot chocolate and the general indolence of a holiday in the middle of the week. Occasionally the snow failed to materialize, and I was on my way to school with a pack full of unlearned knowledge and bad excuses. But usually the comforting voice of the local radio announcer would announce my school closed along with my best friend’s, and we would grab our matching orange plastic sleds and head for the hills. As an adult, I see snow, and I turn right back into this little girl (in the red, on the left):

There’s a personal joy for me in those memories — in having them and sharing them. But I think there’s a deeper, more profound joy to be found here, one that is more universal because it derives from the aesthetic experience of snow. There’s something magical about snow, the way it drops from the sky with the lightness of cotton, and yet rests so heavy on the earth. There’s a sense of awe created too, by the extent of its scale, both macro and micro: snow covers everything, quickly and indiscriminately, and yet miraculously, because the scale of each flake is so diminutive.

These are common joyful elements that I have written about before, but looking at the commonalities illuminates the many facets of snow’s delight. With its lightness, snow is like bubbles, feathers, dandelion seeds, marshmallows, and meringue — transcendent things that are made of and at home in the air. With its scale, snow can be like the ocean, the redwoods, or the Grand Canyon — awe-inspiring in its vastness. And yet, as tiny things, snowflakes are like jewels, like haikus, and like hobbyist’s miniatures — joyful things made precious by the intricacy they possess in such small scale. Snow’s magic is the magic of invisible sources, of something from nothing. A snowfall is a slow-unfolding abracadabra moment of a rabbit being pulled from a hat, an extended display of the tangible emerging from the intangible as it blows and accumulates into drifts.

Underlying all of this, for me, is a kind of joy of transformation. Snow is itself a shapeshifter, first light, then heavy; small, then large. It is moldable, a substrate for transient sculpture, be it snowman or snowangel, or merely a snowweapon in the form of an icicle or a ball. But more significant is what snow does to what’s around it. In this sense, snow is an intrusion, a new element that transforms its context by its presence. Snow’s intrusion into a city is all-encompassing. Snow’s color and texture redefine the setting. Its volume and density redefine the action. It blankets, it bleaches, and it slows. Snow changes our behavior; it gives us permission to be more playful. And snow changes the feeling of even indoor spaces, making them more intimate and cozy.

The pleasure of this transformation is heightened because we know it won’t last. Days, sometimes weeks, after the first magic act of its appearance, snow performs a second one, disappearing into what seems like nothing. We revel in it because we know it’s an evanescent joy. And we’re not sorry to see it go because we know that like all true delights, it will come again.

{Thanks to Rachel for inspiring this post!}

Happy new year, everyone. I love the first day of a new year! It’s like freshly fallen snow — pristine and beautiful and no one’s had a chance to muddy it up yet. It’s full of freedom and possibility. I have to say I have a good feeling about 2010. Personally, I have some exciting things on the agenda, like turning 30, for one, and another piece of news which I’ll announce later this month. I’m also excited to keep AoJ going and growing this year. In the last few months of ’09, my masters thesis took priority and there are a bunch of developments I’ve wanted to make to the site that I had to put on hold. January will see a nicer sidebar with a better “joyful linklist,” tighter categories and tags, and a “recent comments” section. I also want to add some “similar posts” links and generally make navigating the site a simpler, more enjoyable experience. In addition, I have a few resolutions for Aesthetics of Joy in 2010:

Praxis
In the last year I’ve concentrated on identifying and explaining joy from a scientific and an aesthetic perspective. Over the next year I really want to focus on ways of designing and expressing joy — applying all this theory to the myriad design problems out there in the world. In the end, the only way that these ideas will have any value is if we do something with them. Praxis is about putting theory into practice, finding ways to help designers of all different kinds bring joy into their work, and helping people bring joy into their lives, through aesthetics. In the beginning of this year I want to do some trial-and-error on a few ways of bringing AoJ to life, and I hope you’ll let me know what you think of them.

Interviews and guests
In 2009, I focused mostly on my own ideas of joy, synthesized from various readings and discussions. I did many interviews with a wide range of experts on different topics, but I rarely posted much about these interviews on the blog. This year, I’d really like to explore other people’s perspectives on joy, and present some interviews and guest posts on different subjects.

Testing the limits of AoJ
2009 was all about defining the essence of joy. Now I want to push the boundaries and understand the margins. I want to look at things that start out joyful but become less so over time, or things that seem unpleasant on the surface but turn out to be delightful. I want to hear counterarguments and examine outliers and puzzle over things that challenge the theories behind AoJ. What are joy’s limitations? Can joy be restrained? Can it be silent? Can it be colorless? Can it be mean, wasteful, or selfish? What is joy good for and what is it not good for? I want to understand how far we can take joy, and where joy can take us, to get a better idea of what AoJ’s role should be in people’s lives.

Practice / preach
And finally, I want to do more practicing what I preach. I’ve always had a fairly healthy inner child, but this year I’m ready to do a little experimenting on myself. First up: my quest to find a joyful form of exercise to liven up my routine. Any suggestions? Let me know.

Now that you know my new year’s resolutions, what are yours? Any joyful ones? What are you most hopeful about for 2010?

Image: pamhule (CC)

With all the holiday festivities upon us, I’ve been thinking a lot about joy’s celebratory side. (Please forgive if these thoughts are a little rough, as I’m also simultaneously editing my thesis document and my attention is a little divided.) It’s interesting to think about what kind of adaptive value celebration has in human life. Why do we celebrate? Or rather, why do we need to celebrate?

We know that cultures all over the world celebrate, and though we celebrate in different ways, we often celebrate similar things: lifestage transitions, marriages, births, harvests, seasonal shifts, and good fortune. And though celebrations of foreign cultures may seem filled with alien customs, aesthetically there are many common elements. Sweets, such as cakes or candies, are common, as is alcohol in cultures that consume it. Bright color, music, and dancing are typical in celebrations around the world. Light is a particularly important element, as in the Christmas tree, the menorah, and the fireworks displays that commemorate a range of festive occasions. And exuberant bursting gestures — like those of fireworks, but also the breaking of a piñata, the throwing of confetti, and the open-armed jump for joy — seem to originate from the very nexus of joy within the human soul.

It seems clear to me that celebration is a universal human drive that like curiosity or lust is hardwired into us by evolution. That the aesthetics of celebration also have universal elements suggests that perhaps these elements have had a long association with events to be celebrated (sweetness, for example, would be a natural correlate with fruit harvests, and light a natural relationship to seasonal celebrations). The question is, is celebration itself adaptive — does it have a function that aids in the survival of humans and the propagation of the species? Or is it a byproduct of evolution, having evolved in the company of other traits that enhanced gene dispersal? I haven’t read any definitive treatment on the subject, but I believe there must be at least some adaptive value. In his book The Art Instinct, evolutionary theorist Denis Dutton references the importance of social cooperation in the evolution that got Homo sapiens where we are today. I think celebration is like a social form of reward that motivates cooperation and helps maintain social harmony. It also strengthens bonds that may be needed in tougher times. (Perhaps companies who eliminate holiday parties in an effort to save costs might be well-advised to reconsider, given these insights.)

I hope you have a wonderful holiday this season, whatever you are celebrating! And if you have any thoughts on this topic, please share them: How else could celebration be adaptive? What are celebration’s benefits? How is celebration good for us?

Image: Michael™. Poor dog!

These joyful Christmas cones in Barcelona’s Mercat Santa Catarina square are bike powered! Passersby can hop on for a few minutes to keep the LEDs going. Now if only they could find a way to get the Rockefeller Center skaters to fire up NYC’s big tree…

See more bike-powered holiday installations on Vanessa’s joyful blog for the love of bikes.

Riaz has these great photos of Pakistani cargo trucks on his site. He says:

What’s amazing about this is that these are just regular cargo trucks. The truck drivers put in this much effort into almost every single vehicle you see.

In Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, there is a tendency towards embellishment of buses and the like, but I have never seen anything like this! They may strike a Western eye as a little gaudy, but you can’t deny there is so much love in these designs. I’m especially struck by the contrast between the plain attire of the drivers and their over-the-top vehicles. I wonder if this somehow became a sanctioned form of self-expression, and so, in the face of sumptuary convention, all creative energy gets channeled here.

See the full set here: Truckistani

Glow-in-the-dark mushrooms — another weird and wonderful innovation from Mother Nature. Seven new species of bioluminescent mushrooms were recently discovered by scientists in places as diverse as Japan, Belize, Brazil, and Jamaica.

{via Wired}

Patterns give me joy, and this quiz from @Issue magazine suggests that they bring joy to many cultures around the world as well. The quiz asks you to match the patterns above with the nationalities that created them, showing the diversity and distinctiveness of the ways we express ourselves in non-linguistic 2d terms. The differences interest me less than the fact that all cultures seem driven to create in this way; to abstract, in varying degrees, our essential experiences into color, line, shape, and repetition.

Take the full quiz here.
Via Joyful Delight

I’d consider leaving the country to get to use these on my mail, if only they weren’t fictitious!

From A Field Guide to the Stamps of the World by Gavin Potenza, available in poster form here.

Along the lines of the You Are Beautiful and Operation Nice projects I wrote about last month, HopeRevo aims to produce a “hope revolution” through the leaving of positive affirmations in notes around cities. The element of surprise is key here; messages we might tune out in expected places have a way of striking us differently when they come at us out of context.

A similar initiative, which strives to create a more personal, hopeful connection is Hope Is In The Cards, which asks every American to send just one message of hope to someone else.

I love that these initiatives rely on the old tradition of notes and letters. It’s often said that paper and ink seems more special than digital communications. Aside from the extra effort such a missive demands, there’s also the sensory impact: the experience and anticipation of opening an envelope, the texture of the paper, the scent and weight of it all. It’s a beautiful way to spread more joy in the world.

Thanks Matt for the tip!

Today I’m mesmerized by these photographs by the Taiwanese brother and sister photographers John&Fish. More on their photostream.

You know when you come back from a vacation so good you just wish you could relive it over and over again? Well, over the next 14 days I’m going to be reliving my most joyful encounters with wildlife in the Galapagos, one photo each day.

The waved albatross of the Galapagos mates for life. As adults, they spend most of their lives alone at sea, but each year they meet on the same island to mate and nest. Their period of reacquaintance includes a complex dance where male and female bow to each other and click their beaks together.

I know birds have famously small brains, and perhaps it’s an anthropomorphic fallacy to attribute emotion to a behavior that is so clearly coded as instinct. But, I can’t help but see joy and love in the eyes of these birds as they perform these rituals.

The full set of my Galapagos photos (about 60 or so) appears in my Flickr photostream, in case you want to check them out.

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.

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.