Aesthetic/esˈθetɪk/ – noun, adjective
· concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty
· having or showing an appreciation of the beautiful or pleasing; tasteful, or refined taste
· the philosophy or theory of taste, or of the perception of the beautiful in nature and art
Oxford English Dictionary
CURATING CONTEMPORARY DESIGN
Design is an aesthetic phenomenon. There is almost no part of our daily lives that has not been designed, manipulated and manufactured. The way we furnish our homes, choose our dress or shape our workspace involves aesthetic choices, meaning that we do have aesthetic experience of design and make aesthetic judgments about design objects.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary aesthetic equals the appreciation of beauty. But what is beauty, and is there a single characteristic (or a set of characteristics) that defines it?
The Curator – Polina Angelova gave an answer to this question at the Art Graduate Symposium she was invited to present her dissertation titled “Sense of Beauty in Art, Design and Architecture. How Contemporary Art relates to hidden meanings in the Renaissance?
Since ancient times Greek philosophers were constantly trying to define what beauty is. Plato was the first to bring together beauty and eros, or love. According to Plato beauty was the desire to possess the beautiful, the desire to always possess the beautiful. He linked beauty with goodness believing the former implied the latter. The brilliant English physicist Paul Dirac said that if you had to choose between simplicity and beauty, you must choose beauty, while the mathematician Herman Weil was famously quoted as saying ‘I always try to combine truth and beauty, but if I had to choose I would choose beauty’. The French novelist Marcel Proust insisted one should not ‘worry about intelligence, just go for the raw aesthetic”. But the art critic Clive Bell said, “if you want to know about beauty don’t go to an art historian because he knows too much. If you want to know about beauty you must go to savages and children and uneducated people because they too are able to experience it”.
That we are touched by beauty is beyond the doubt of any human heart or the human mind. We engage with beauty but without our knowledge beauty also engages with us. Thus, we come to appreciate the beauty of an object by using it, the more we use a good object, the more we are able to appreciate its qualities, and we may discover its beauty not just in how it ages, but in how we age with it.
What is a contemporary design object?
‘The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.)”
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation by Jane Forsey
Contemporary is, by definition, what is happening in design at this very moment in time. You might think that contemporary and modern design are synonyms – two styles both describing design that is au Courant, but the reality is that modern design refers to a specific time period from the early to mid-twentieth century and this style informed by the German Bauhaus design is actually a precursor to Contemporary Design.
Polina Angelova’s multidisciplinary approach to design brings totally different perspectives to her practice and moves beyond the simple curation of Everyday Aesthetics and Design. Polina holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Design in collaboration with the Design Museum in London, BA (Hons) in Fashion and Textile and Professional Qualification Artist-Designer from the Accademia D’Arte in Florence. As a Contemporary Art and Design Curator, Polina Angelova focuses on innovation at the intersection of the Arts, Science and Technology.
Polina is a seeker of Beauty who believes that the Universe is all about proportion.
