Our wiki is a comprehensive encyclopedia of online and offline aesthetics! We are a community dedicated to the identification, observation, and documentation of visual schemata.
What is an aesthetic? Why does everyone always argue about what aesthetics should be on this wiki?
The short answer: A collection of visual schema that creates a "mood."
Some types of aesthetics include:
Aesthetics originated from Internet communities (Ex: Cottagecore, Dark Academia)
National cultures (Americana, Traditional Polish) Note: Most articles that try to describe a national culture will be deleted. These articles should have a higher quality and risk stereotyping a nation.
Genres of fiction with established visual tropes (Ex: Cyberpunk, Gothic)
Holidays with iconic imagery and colors (Ex: Christmas, Halloween)
Locations that have expected activities, components, and types of people (Ex: Fanfare, Urbancore)
Music genres with consistent visual motifs present in cover art, music videos, etc (Ex: City Pop, Emo)
This does not mean all music genres should be present. For example, Pop and Alternative bands' do not have shared visual traits.
Periods of history with distinct visuals (Ex: Victorian, Y2K)
Stereotypes (Ex: Brocore, VSCO)
Subcultures that share music genres and fashion styles (Ex: Raver, Skinheads)
The long answer:
The word "aesthetic" originated as the philosophical discussion about what beauty is, how we should approach it, and why it exists. However, Millennials and Generation Z started using that term as an adjective that describes what they personally consider beautiful. For example: "After Denise finished watching The Virgin Suicides, she said, 'Wow. That was so aesthetic.'"
Aesthetics have now come to mean a collection of images, colors, objects, music, and writings that creates a specific emotion, purpose, and community. It is largely dependent on personal taste, cultural background, and exposure to different pieces of media. This definition is not official and can be debated. There is currently no dictionary definition that captures the complexity of this phenomenon, which arose in the Internet youth. Rather, people who participate in the community "know it when they see it." These elements are constantly debated, as the opinion on whether or not some aesthetics exist or are valid is constantly debated. This is especially true since everyone's own personal life factors into their opinions.
Here is an example of a debate that is going on within the community. Whether or not Lolita is an aesthetic varies on what counts as visual elements. On one hand, lace, petticoats, and bows are valid elements of visual schema. Those elements combine to spark feelings of kawaii, de-sexualization, rebellion, and appreciation of antique. On the other hand, aesthetics are made up of elements other than fashion, such as home decor or music. Fashion is the visual element, rather than the components making up the coord/outfit. That element is part of broader schemas such as Goth and Victorian. What counts as an element and what qualifies as sparking an emotion is a complicated subject.
So right now, the subject is trying to be defined by the community. What either fits into a larger schema or is distinct enough to warrant its own aesthetic is difficult to say and would depend on who you are asking.
Originally captured as the medium for Ed Ruscha’s creative work, the more than 65,000 photographs selected from this archive present a unique view of one of Los Angeles’ quintessential streets, Sunset Boulevard, and how it has changed over the past 50 years. Ed Ruscha, with help from Getty and Stamen Design, is making this amazing collection accessible to you: explore his images of Sunset and discover your own story of Los Angeles.
Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from collective amnesia? This VPRO Backlight documentary tracks down the amnesiac zeitgeist starting at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, whose world-famous 250-year old library was lost to budget cuts. The 400.000 Books were saved from the shredder by Ismail Serageldin, director of the world-famous Library of Alexandria, who is turning the legendary library of classical antiquity into a new knowledge hub for the digital world. Images as well as texts risk being lost in this ‘Digital Dark Age’. In an old McDonald’s restaurant in Mountain View, CA, retired NASA engineer Dennis Wingo is trying to retrieve the very first images of the moon. Upstate New York, Jason Scott has founded The Archive Team, a network of young activists that saves websites that are at risk of disappearing forever. In San Francisco, we visit Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive that’s going against the trend to destroy archives, and the Long Now Foundation, which has put the long-term back on the agenda by building a clock that only ticks once a year and should last 10,000 years, in an attempt to reconnect with generations thousands of years from now. Directed by Bregtje van der Haak / produced by VPRO Backlight, The Netherlands You can watch the Dutch episode here: http://tegenlicht.vpro.nl/afleveringe... For broadcast rights: www.nposales.com / info@nposales.com.
This site is being developed by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the static traditional Western art history textbook.
A wiki story
Universal access to human knowledge