Dear Folks,
Aesthetic criteria are routine in exhibition design done for major institutional galleries and museums, along with budget and schedule; and design proposals in that context are assessed by sophisticated clients who are well aware of the emotional and educational impact of visual experience. For example, an exhibition for Henry Moore must respect his materiality and historical context; and also meet the legally mandated aesthetic preferences of the Henry Moore Foundation, which has good reasons for its choices. Designers are not the sole conveyer of some lonely aesthetic torch.
In addition to the sources recommended by Doreen, a fast dip into Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct (2008) offers entertaining Darwinian explanations for human aesthetic preferences around things like cuteness (see also: Konrad Lorenz, 1943; Pittenger et al, 1979); symmetry (see also: Brown et al, Nature, 2005); and the pretty blue landscape so beloved of calendar designers (see: the Savannah Hypothesis).
Regarding that blue landscape, Russian artists Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar commissioned a series of international surveys asking ordinary people what they wanted in a work of art. The results were used to generate a series of "Most Wanted" paintings (c. 1994), including"Most Wanted: China," "Most Wanted: United States," and so forth, all of which featured a blue landscape. The motives for this project were sincere. Melamid stated: "Polls are maybe one of the only means of communication between the upper classes and the lower classes.... I truly believe that the people's art is better than aristocratic art." He added: "I'm thinking that this blue landscape is more serious that we first believed... it's the paradise within... we came from the blue landscape and we want it" (The Nation, 1994).
I personally hold political qualms about the claims of high-brow aesthetic virtue as made by the self-annointed geniuses of historic Modernism. Let us not forget that Le Corbusier is also responsible for Chandigarh (1951-1956), in which no part of the housing was used as intended: closets became shrines; and petit Indian housewives had to cook on the floor of their galley-style kitchens because the poured-concrete counters were too high to reach (Brolin, 1976). There are good reasons why Modernism failed, and its occasional moments of splendour should not encourage us to swallow without question the associated polemical arguments.
Heidi Overhill
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