Why Are There No New Aesthetics?

Following the publication of Ruby Justice Thelot’s SEED, Aesthetic Stagnation, and learning he was going to be in town from New York, we jumped at the chance for him to lead our first in a new series of LECTURES. We were kindly hosted at Ashley Saville, the eponymous gallery at 193 Fleet Street, which opened in May this year to much acclaim.

As the evening began, the chairs, which had been carefully placed around sculptures, quickly filled, with people perching on the window ledges, and even sitting just beyond the doorway, happy to hear Thelot speak, even if they couldn’t see him.

To open the LECTURE, Thelot asks the audience a seemingly simple question: what’s the number one song on the Billboard 100 right now? Taylor Swift, Sienna Spiro, Dolly Parton were all offered and all wrong. Thelot finally reveals the correct answer: Ella Langley’s Choosin’ Texas. He explains:

“I do this just to make a small point. We’re artists, designers, whatever, making things for people. We should know what people like. So, why are there no new aesthetics? Perhaps because the cultural producers are out of touch with the mass.” 

Throughout the LECTURE, Thelot welcomed contributions from the audience, such as someone explaining why they prefer one architectural style to another, prompted by Thelot presenting two images: one of the Seagram Building in New York City, the other of the Palais Garnier in Paris. For the audience member, the Palais Garnier holds greater appeal. “It’s beauty for beauty’s sake, whereas this one [the Seagram Building] looks more practical”, they explain. “There’s friction to it [the Palais Garnier] in a way; lots of things that have come together that shouldn't have.” This argument outlining one of the theses Thelot would later lay out: that new aesthetics emerge from synthesis.   

Continuing his use of architecture as a medium to explore the development of new aesthetics, Thelot presents the National African American History Museum in Washington, D.C. alongside The Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library in Johannesburg. The former described as “a great synthesis of almost African vernacular architecture”, with the history of African Americans deeply entwined with Africa. The latter is built from autochthonous minerals and materials and then shaped into curvaceous forms. These two structures illustrating Thelot’s notion of novel aesthetics, from a material, formal and geographical standpoint.

At one point in the LECTURE, discussing Timothée Chalamet’s disparaging comment on arts such as ballet and opera, Thelot argues that films have in fact been opera-fied, explaining opera-fication as “the process by which a medium, once dynamic, becomes ossified and its productions become conventional.” Thelot points to Canadian dancer and choreographer Emma Portner as a tonic to this: taking the tradition of ballet and shaping it into something outside of its original mould. 

Before the floor opens to questions, Thelot traverses the work of choreographer Trajal Harrell, who blends Japanese Butoh (slow and controlled dance-theatre) with Black queer ballroom; the music of the late, great artist and producer SOPHIE; the expansive art of Pierre Huyghe; and the gay NFTs of Dan Keller. 

“What’s your radically optimistic vision for the future?” one audience member asks. “I spend a lot of time working with AI, and a big part of my conversations at my school involve this idea of AI doom and extinction” Thelot replies. “But we’re like cockroaches. I think we’re very hard to actually stop."

Considering the famous quote, popularised by cultural theorist and philosopher Mark Fisher: "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism", Thelot says, "I think I've always been a Fisher hater. I think he's an amazing thinker, but I don't think we should listen to people who are down about what's new in the world.” 

Joanna Lowry, Protein’s Head of Strategy, shares: "one of the things I find very inspiring, which underpins your great lecture, is that new is an inherently good, positive, optimistic thing. Bruno Latour’s [the French philosopher and anthropologist] idea "We Have Never Been Modern" essentially argues we can never really create anything new, we can only pretend to while we make hybrids. So my question is, could there be an optimistic future where nothing is new?” 

“Right now, you can see this deceleration in politics, which in many ways are pushing against the new,” Thelot responds. “This is especially true in Europe, where this new movement of de-growth challenges the need for constant, radical innovation. But I see new as replenishing, rather than extracting.” 

A final question from the audience asks, “If AI has the ability to make things much cheaper, like designing a video game, what are your thoughts on the risks and benefits of this to mass culture?”

“I've heard many sort of proselytisers saying AI will democratise creation. I don't know that creation as an act needs to be democratised. If you wanna make something, there's a pencil”, Thelot offers. “Every single tool has a limited set of capabilities. No matter how hard you try to bend it, break it, hack it, you're still restricted by what your tool can do. I think a more radical vision of AI making things is making new tools that open up new creative potentials. And that is a future I'm very interested in. You're not making a picture, you're making new paintbrushes.” 

Following the LECTURE, the audience had the opportunity to view the gallery’s exhibition –  La Belle et La Bête – which Saville explains is principally concerned with the first aesthetic dilemma. She reveals how the term aesthetics was first introduced into our vocabulary in the 18th century when philosophers like Kant were using it to describe the process by which we determine whether something is beautiful or ugly. This then bled into describing the ways we form such judgements. The Beauty and the Beast fairytale was published around the same time as these dialogues, and is a paradigm Saville transposes into contemporary art through the exhibition, which invites five artists – Erika Trotzig, Tess Tomassini, Jason Shulman, Simon Periton, Chantal Goulder – and one writer – Philippa Snow, to respond to the text in its broadest sense.

“I suppose in doing so, I really proved my own point about the critical demise of beauty in contemporary aesthetics,” Saville notes. “Because it's really a show about monstrosity and abjection.” 

The next LECTURE is already in the works, so make sure you become a MEMBER to be the first to hear about it.