the new default is ugly
walk through any new housing development. look at the buildings going up in city centres. browse modern furniture catalogues.
the other piece of this is the compulsive need to subvert. beauty can't just be beauty anymore. it has to be a statement.
look at fashion. models can't just be attractive. they have to be unconventional. gap teeth. shaved eyebrows. deliberately weird proportions. the ugly becomes avant-garde. if you put a conventionally beautiful woman on a runway, you're basic.
this started as genuine subversion. challenging narrow beauty standards had merit. but subversion has become the orthodoxy. being contrarian is now the safest, most conformist position you can take. everyone's transgressing in exactly the same way.
we didn't just lose ornament. we lost the reflex to ask the obvious question: is this actually beautiful?
and "minimal" became the polite way to stop asking.
minimal became a cover story
minimal can be a real aesthetic. restraint, proportion, clarity.
what most people mean by minimal now is just omission. no detail, no craft, no point of view. the default web template is the same everywhere: hero image, sans-serif font, whitespace, call-to-action button.
it's not taste. it's cost-cutting with better lighting.
the economics of ugliness
beauty is expensive because it's made of time: skill, iteration, and people who have standards.
the market optimises for speed and margin. bureaucracy optimises for requirements and risk.
when you're selecting for that, you filter out the kind of person who asks "is this good?" and keep the kind of person who asks "does this ship?".
do that long enough and judgment becomes the rarest input.
outsourcing taste
taste is the final thing that cannot be bought. you can buy the surface area. you can't buy the eye.
and that's why rich people keep trying to outsource it. hire the agency. hire the consultant. buy the references. buy the vibe. it gets you something that looks expensive, but it doesn't get you judgment.
there are a few people who have the eye and defend it even when it's inconvenient. as much as i don't care for video games, figures like hideo kojima come to mind. a thorn in the side of his benefactors, because he actually has a vision.
the rick rubin misunderstanding
there's a clip going around of rick rubin saying he has no technical ability at all.
people are hearing that as "technical skill doesn't matter." that's too literal. he's not saying craft is irrelevant. he's saying taste is upstream of craft. the person with taste decides what should exist. the technicians execute.
you need taste. more specifically, you need someone stubborn enough to defend it. you need an asshole with taste.
say what you want about steve jobs, but he was exactly that: an asshole with taste. he wasn't the best engineer in the room. he was the person willing to kill the wrong thing, insist on the right thing, and make everyone else clear a path for it.
software is the same story. writing code was never the hard part. the hard part was knowing what to write, what to cut, and when to stop. that's why i'm not that concerned about ai taking my job. code generation gets cheaper; judgment doesn't.
most management has zero technical taste. they can track velocity, budget, and delivery dates, but they cannot reliably tell good from bad in the work itself. taste is built over a long time. some people are born with a better eye, sure, but even then it still has to be trained.
factory farmed taste
once taste becomes a procurement problem, you get culture built out of signals instead of judgment.
a24 is a good example of factory farmed taste. kino if you will.
the powers that be hate that they can't make art on an assembly line.
so you get the same concoction of white people hate that's everywhere in hollywood, but this time it's shot in 4:3 and has a grade on it that makes it look like someone's vomited on it.
the wes anderson problem is what happens when the style becomes the point. film bro circles replace art with if you know you know. everyone's just head nodding with each other now. zero substance.
and thats why you have figures like basquiat. as much as i don't give a shit about his art, he's useful as an example of money showing its limits: it can fund output, it can manufacture scarcity, it can buy social proof. it still can't manufacture judgment.
swiss discipline, real taste
this is where swiss design is useful as a sanity check.
"grid systems in graphic design" by josef muller-brockmann is basically the modern bible for fundamentals. margins, spacing, ratios, alignment. the boring stuff that makes everything else possible.
you're not better than the fundamentals.
international typographic style isn't empty minimalism. it's constraints that force decisions: grid, alignment, hierarchy, typography, spacing. when it's done well it feels clean because someone cared about proportion, not because someone deleted half the page.
and no, i'm not doing the tired thing where everything from 1900 and before is beautiful and everything after is junk. plenty of older stuff is ugly. plenty of modern stuff is great. the difference is fundamentals.
the "everyone's special and has something of value to contribute" thought process turned into everyone thinking they're geniuses by taking something good and turning it upside down. novelty as a personality. subversion as a substitute for taste.
me and my girlfriend recently went to a design museum in lisbon and the entire basement floor was just photos of some ymca / camp looking guy in striking poses. it was trying so hard to be anti-beauty that it circled back into pure costume. clearly this type of self-flagellation isn't anything new, but this is unfortunately what people think style is. fortunately the third floor was all the 'heres the original eames prototype' stuff that I was looking forward to.
and it makes the point cleanly: you can buy the grid and the typeface. you can buy the software and the brand guidelines. you still can't buy the judgment that makes it work.
what can be done
i'm not optimistic about the incentives changing.
but individually you can refuse to participate. choose beauty when you can, even when it's slower or costs more. maintain old things instead of replacing them with the newest smooth rectangle. develop your taste on purpose: look at old cities, old books, old objects, go to a design museum, until you remember what good looks like.
someone has to care.
