Aesthetics, Taste, and the Limits of the Self

I always return to these questions: What is beauty? What is aesthetics and taste? Why do they matter to us? We each have our own ideas about this. Culturally, we tend to use beauty, aesthetics, and taste almost synonymously. Have we relegated aesthetics to simply vibes and styles? Do we still think of beauty as always in the eye of the beholder? Smarter and more talented people than me have tried to answer these types of questions for eons. But their answers feel incomplete to me. I feel like we’re thinking about aesthetics too narrowly and that our definition of beauty is too subjective.

In contemporary culture we think of aesthetics the way we think of a room’s design, or someone’s fashion sense, or an art show. It’s how something presents itself with a sense of creativity and personality. It feels like there’s a little bit of magic involved because we can’t quite explain what’s happening—it’s a vibe.

The idea of aesthetics has shifted over time. At different points, it’s been framed as a matter of taste, or as a kind of judgment, or as a feeling of pleasure stirred by beauty. Each of these captures part of the picture but doesn’t look deep enough. These days we kind of think of aesthetics as all of that and treating it as simply our response to the world. When we should be thinking of it as something that helps shape how the world appears in the first place. What I’m interested in is the deeper structure where aesthetics organizes our perception of the world, individually and collectively, often long before we become aware of it.

When I think of the aesthetics of my paintings, it’s about the choices I’ve made. What I’ve included, what I’ve left out, and how I’ve arranged everything on the canvas. Even the choice of the canvas itself—the material, shape, size, and orientation. It’s the colors I choose, the brushes I select, the subject matter I’m focusing on, and what I’m foregrounding or letting fade into the background. There’s a kind of curation happening both consciously and unconsciously. My own intentions guide some of it, but much of it feels already shaped for me by experience, culture, class, economy, history, and taste. There are countless choices I’ve disregarded or never even noticed, playing out beyond the edge of my awareness.

That same quality shows up in a song, a garden, the dashboard of my car, a conversation with a friend, an ambitious ant colony taking over my trash can, a law, a school play, the quilt of flyers stapled to a utility pole, or a protest. Each of these carries an aesthetic structure. Patterns of inclusion and exclusion, attention and omission, that give the moment its particular shape.

Aesthetics isn’t just how something looks or feels. It’s the underlying logic that allows the world to appear to us. It organizes what gets seen and who gets heard. It decides what appears on the surface and what stays hidden. There’s an aesthetics to art, to science, to politics…to life. Aesthetics structures the abstractions, conditions the forms, and shapes the appearances of both the human and the more-than-human world. (I’ll have more to say about this in an upcoming essay.)

And somewhere in that process, something appears that wasn’t there before, some kind of emergent quality—a presence I can’t explain. It’s something I don’t just see but also feel, not emotionally, but through a deeper register of resonance.

So if we think of aesthetics as the pattern that shapes how the world shows up, then beauty is the moment when that pattern comes alive—when something suddenly feels charged, luminous, or full of presence. But is beauty still just “in the eye of the beholder" or is there more to it?

We feel beauty in the morning light spilling into the room, in a loved one’s face while they’re sleeping, in a meal with friends, in Mary Ann Unger’s sculptures at MOCA, in a pair of shoes, or in the sound of someone practicing their saxophone in the courtyard. Beauty is everywhere, in everything, all the time. It’s just that we’re not always in tune with it.

In fact, there’s so much beauty in the world that it would be too overwhelming to take it all in all the time. So we develop tastes. Taste filters the world’s beauty into smaller, more manageable chunks so we can stay with it, learn from it, and feel it more deeply. In that sense, taste is how we tune our attention toward certain forms of beauty and away from others. THAT beauty exists is universal. WHERE each of us finds it is more personal. Taste is the structure that connects the two—the inherited and learned filter that shapes how we recognize and relate to beauty.

Our tastes come from everything that has shaped us—where we grew up, who raised us, what we’ve been taught to value, what we’re allowed access to, what we can afford, and how we see ourselves or how we want to be seen. Tastes continually change and evolve.

On a personal level, no taste is better or worse than another; each is simply a way of finding our way toward beauty. My taste in velvet Elvis paintings isn’t any better or worse than someone else’s affinity for Claude Monet or Tracey Emin. Collectively, though, tastes can be trained, hardened, or co-opted—reinforcing group preferences and allowing power, markets, or ideology to define beauty for us instead of leaving us open to other forms. When that happens, taste stops being a guide and starts becoming a form of control, feeding the feeling that beauty is something we need to capture and possess.

But there’s a catch, we can never truly possess beauty. Oh, we try. We take a picture of a beautiful sunset or landscape and are disappointed that it didn’t capture “the” experience. We try to paint it, and the painting is beautiful and it’s close, but it’s not the same. It has its own beauty now. We try to buy beauty, we try to steal it, replicate it, or sell it. When we think we’ve found a way to own it, there’s a sense that something is still missing. These possessions simply remind us of “the” experience.

Maybe beauty isn’t something to be kept. Maybe it’s something that keeps moving through us. Every attempt to contain it only shows how alive it still is—always slipping away because it’s still becoming.

Because no matter how much we own, we never feel like we’re fully connected to that beauty, it’s always somehow just out of our reach. We experience something so amazing that we don’t want the moment to end, but on some level we know it will. There’s a sort of paradox in beauty. It’s both abundant and ungraspable. We try to catch it and devour it but it just evaporates in our hands. This is the ache of beauty.

To better understand this idea of the ache we need to talk about the idea of the self. From a cognitive standpoint, the self isn’t a fixed thing but an ongoing model the brain generates to manage and mediate its relation to the world. It’s a dynamic simulation—a kind of internal interface—that helps the system predict, organize, and respond to what’s happening around it. To keep the model stable, the brain had to draw a line—an artificial boundary that says, “this is me, and that’s everything else."  That separation lets us reflect, abstract, create, and manipulate the world around us. We can create art and culture and money and politics. But it can also make us feel disconnected from the world. It can convince us that the world is something to control, dominate, bend to our will, or extract from with impunity and a feeling of superiority.

When we see beauty, on some level beneath our conscious awareness, we’re reminded of two things simultaneously: that we are connected to a world that is bigger and grander and more amazing than ourselves and at the same time that we are separate and disconnected from it. So when I talk about the “ache of beauty,” the ache is that feeling of ambivalence. That tension is what gives beauty its power.

But do other “things” experience beauty? I would say…not like us. Why? Because they haven’t separated themselves from the world. They are already and always a part of it. In a way, they experience beauty all the time, at every moment—not just in special moments or in special relations.

So this idea that experiencing and appreciating beauty somehow makes humans better than or more than anything else in the world seems backwards. Beauty actually points out the limitations and the contradictions of being human. We should admire the mushrooms and the wind and the waves and the worms and the dirt because they’re experiencing beauty all the time; it’s their default mode.

Maybe this is what art is for—to stay inside the ache a little longer without trying to resolve it. To build forms that let us sit with it rather than try to capture it. Every brushstroke and every arrangement is a way of asking the world to reveal itself again, where we find the boundary between self and the world to be blurrier than we thought. Viewing and making art is a practice in staying open to what can’t be possessed. We can learn how to feel the distance and the connection at once, without flattening it. That’s where I want to stay, in those in-between spaces: between presence and absence, between seeing and being seen. Because beauty isn’t something we make, it’s something that reveals itself.