Is the World Getting Uglier?

0:00If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, I'm TapettheBram. With YouTube Premium, I get ad free videos, offline downloads, and so much more. Try YouTube Premium for two months free. Try out eligibility berries, terms apply, cancel anytime. Why is everything so drab right now? Is it also same, same? You got these coffee shops, they all look the same. Architecture looks standardized. Buildings are colorless. Cars are interchangeable. Then on the other side, you have Trump's gilded oval office. Imagine arch, his garish vision for the reflecting pool.

1:01Say what you all about Donald Trump. He and the modern right, they have a theory of beauty. Not my theory of beauty, but a theory. For a while now, I've been wanting to do an episode on this question. I've seen all of other people ask and that has bothered me too. Is the world getting uglier? And if so, why? Why do we seem to design so much that looks so boring, or on the other side, so loud? And in this moment, when the right has a clear theory of beauty, does the left have any answer at all? Debbie Momen teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She's a longtime graphic brand designer. She revamped logos for companies like Burger King, Seven Up, and Hagen Dazs. And for over 20 years, she's hosted a podcast called Design Matters, where she talks to creative people about design. She joins me now. Debbie Momen, welcome to the show. Thank you, Esmeral. It's great to be here.

2:01So over the past couple of years, I feel like I've read or watched a dozen essays on why everything is getting uglier. And I just read a piece from you with the title, Is a World Getting Uglier. So is it? Depends on who you ask. I'm asking you. My opinion, it's getting more vulgar. In some ways, ugliness can be very intentional. Vulgar is accidental, because it doesn't have intention. Nobody really sets out to make something that's truly vulgar. Certain ugly can be seen through the lens of a trend as being really glamorous or sexy, or interesting, or as aversive. But vulgar is always pretty awful. And I think that is the real word about where we're moving. Give me some examples of this vulgarity.

3:01Well, the cyber truck. There's really no need for a car to look at that imposing and that bloviated housing, where houses are now being raised that fit sort of sweetly on their lots with a front yard and a backyard and maybe little alleys on either side. And now they're being squeezed into the property so that there's maybe six or seven inches of grass between the house and the sidewalk. We're seeing it in clothing, particularly in Gen Z fashion, which I know that the New York Times has been writing about quite a lot. And if there's anything I'm an expert on, it's Gen Z fashion. But that Gen Z fashion is not for all of us. Not forever. Fashion by nature is a type of expression that has an expiration date in it. Or certainly a pause date. It might come back, but for a while it goes out of style.

4:04Some of it is forstop-salessing. Some of it is just trends in style. Whereas houses, cars, vehicles, airplanes, things like that can not to transition very often in the way that they fundamentally look and work. How do you distinguish? And I know this is like the oldest, hardest question and taste. But one woman's vulgarity is another woman's interesting ugly. Absolutely. Is another person's, oh, that's a cool cyberpunk truck. I think a lot of it has to do with proportion. And a lot of proportion has to do with mathematics. And so there are things that are just more lyrically beautiful because they are in proportion. And generally speaking, humans can assess when something is out of proportion, not knowing anything about the math of it, whether it be a building or a car or a coffee mug.

5:05And so if something is out of proportion, it will give us a sense of discompobulation. And it could be the disproportion of a handbag, a skateboard. It could be the disproportion of anything. But things essentially make us feel things. Everything makes us feel something. And when something is out of proportion, it changes the DNA around us. I'm very interested in the way that we notice what the environment around us or the objects around us are making us feel. I always had a big reason you had that Marie Kondo craze some years back. Was it there was a real genius to her giving people a practice of noticing what their objects made them feel. Exactly. People had previously told people to tidy up. What she offered was a way to say, you can tune in to the way your environment is making you feel. But there too, I think you run into this question of much that we now consider beautiful.

6:09When it was built, when it was designed, it was out of proportion. It was brash. It was aggressive. And so the early reviews of it were very negative. So then you get into this interesting question of can you trust what you're feeling in the moment. There's so much to talk about just from that sentence. I want to go back to the first part of what you were saying about how things make us feel. We are social mammals and every single way in which we've been socialized to experience the world around us is based on objects and things around us. And that goes all the way back. 50,000 years ago when we started to create symbols to designate our reality. So the very first marks was what we were seeing around us. So we started to draw on the walls of caves.

7:12After that, we started to advance and move into tribes. What was the first thing we did when we moved into tribes? We designated where we belonged and what we believed in with a symbol. I belong to this religion, you belong to that religion. We signify and telegraph that through the use of this symbol. And it means as much for the people that are part of the same tribe as those that aren't. And that safety and numbers, that security, and we all believe the same thing. So we're not going to go off and kill each other because we all believe in this. It allowed us to prosper and create bigger, stronger social ties when we're in those groups. So that's the whole sort of how do we feel around symbols? We've been trained, socialized to experience the world through symbols, objects, and now brands since prehistoric times. So if you're wearing a certain type of sneaker, you're part of a Nike tribe.

8:16A certain handbag, and that is telegraphing that you're a wealthy woman who bought her handbag on rodeo drive. We're even doing that now. This is really, really interesting to me with plastic surgery. So we can reconstruct a nose or reconstruct lips or reconstruct our butts to look a certain way to signify to others that those values, that that thing we think looks good. Looks good to me, and to you, and you know that I know that I know that we both did that, and we both look good. Now, it also does the same thing for the people that don't like a big butt or a certain type of veneer. So I think that we have to look back at the trajectory of our evolution because looks, size, fashion, hair, all of those things have so much to do with the politics of our time, with religion, and with socialization.

9:21For you, what is good design and what is bad design? Good design makes me feel better about whatever I'm doing and whatever I'm doing it with. It's entirely subjective for me. What my specific definition of good design is for me, it makes me feel better. For the world, I think good design makes the world better. The experiences that people have, the way in which they're able to move through the world, it's easy, it's respectful when I was coming to New York. I was in LAX, and I was in a sneaky line where I had to stand behind a bunch of people in three lines that were all waiting to put their things in a container to then push onto a line. There's no rhyme or reason about where the three are. So even if you're in that position, you're not first. It's whoever got there first and somebody's managing it.

10:24And then you have to sort of really fast push your things through so that it gets through. And I said to the guy, because I knew I was coming here today, I said, who designed this? This was, this is a billion dollar system that's in airports all over the world. And it is the worst design system I have ever witnessed where people are fighting to get their containers into the into the queue. They're fighting to go next. The whole thing was just a design disaster. I think design that's disrespectful. I think design that is greedy. I think that design that is immoral is bad design. One thing I've been thinking about as I've been reading and thinking about these essays over some period of time, my team and I want to do a show on this for a little bit, is the world getting uglier as a genre?

11:25It has sort of two different lines of critique happening in it at once. One is the critique sort of you're offering here, which is it it's getting uglier. The world makes you feel something and the thing it makes you feel is bad. It's a negative feeling tone in the Buddhist terminology. And the other is that the world is getting not what I would call uglier, people often use that word, draper. It is getting more drab. It is making you feel nothing more often. So one of the I think foundation losses here is an N plus 1 essay from 2023. And in that they talk about the drab sublime. The drab sublime unites flat pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure and commercial graphic design, an ocean of stuff, so homogenous and underthought that the world it is inundated can feel like a digital rendering. One reason I should have liked the cyber truck is I don't find it beautiful. What it makes me feel is not good, but it makes me feel something compared to so much else on the road right now.

12:33It reflects somebody's vision. I believe somebody somewhere found it beautiful. Yeah, there are people that buy it. So I think a lot of it comes down to taste and then also how well do things go with other things. The thing about the cyber truck is that the cyber truck infringes on the landscape. Maybe there's a strategy behind it, but I'm not entirely sure what that strategy is. Is it to command attention? Is it to intimidate? What is the intention of this? And when I think about the world getting uglier in its purest form, is the world getting uglier because we're making bad design decisions, or is the world getting uglier because we don't care about what anybody else thinks but ourselves? And is the world getting uglier because we're behaving in ugly ways? Once you start to see people behaving in ugly ways, it's inevitable that that is going to trickle down into everybody else's behavior.

13:40Because if this could happen here, if somebody can get away with doing this, well, then why can't I do it? Well, I want to really position myself here because I think the cyber truck is interesting to argue for, but around. But I want to really agree that it's not like this. But that's important for you to do that. But there is a trend here, right? So I feel like you could imagine two axes here. So there is... Whether something makes you feel anything at all, how much it makes you feel. And then there's whether or not that feeling is good or bad. But there's so much that surrounds us now, so many apartment buildings. I don't find them ugly, but I find it is inoffensive. I feel nothing when I look at them. They are mute to me. So many cars that they're mute to me. When something doesn't have any real intention to it, when it's built without any sense of purpose or strategy or respect for its surroundings.

14:41And that I think is worse than ugly. And maybe even worse than vulgar. I think we have been in a period where a tremendous amount of the world around us from the fashion to the way apartments are designed, to the way cars are designed, to the way places we stay are designed. People describe this in many different ways, but it has been a flattening. But now what I'm seeing is a reaction to that. You're talking about this, I think, a little bit in your essay. You talk about this move towards vulgarity, towards a bloviating style. You can think about Donald Trump fistuning the oval office and gold. You can think about this very attention-grabbing fashion style on Gen Z. You can think about the cyber truck. There was recently, I mean, it's been covered in other places. I moved towards more maximalist design. We've gone from... It looks Maxing. Yeah, looks Maxing is another one, actually. But I'm actually meant in decor. And so you're right, that we're living in an attention economy and attention rewards extremity. That the more design is rewarded for being instantly visible, recognizable and shareable.

15:43The easier it becomes to lose sight of proportion, purpose, and the people have to live alongside it. But I think maybe the other side of it is that we do live in an attention economy. And the more everything is served to us by algorithm, the more also things feel the same everywhere. You go to coffee shops, I mean, as a point, the writer Cal Chicas made. You go to coffee shops in New York, NLA, and Mexico City, and Buenos Aires, and Tokyo. And they're all kind of the same coffee shop. And all of a sudden people... I mean, you can't even differentiate airports anymore. Yeah. So you're going to an airport and it could be any airport in any city of the world. So how do you think about the relationship and the tension between those two things? A feeling of sameness, maybe the people rejecting, but then it creates this... It's creating... I think a move towards what you're describing is a kind of a vulgar or a bloviating answer to that. Well, I mean, if you look back to the original visual language of the iPod, you know, six weeks after 9-11, Apple introduced the first iPod, and that came with the white earbuds.

16:48I did not know that was six weeks after 9-11. Those are two events that I'd now put together in my head. Yeah, yeah. And there was a really interesting period of time where as people began to acquire the iPod, they were able to showcase their allegiance with these white earbuds. It was actually really brilliant because the iPod wasn't sitting around, you know, outside of your clothing, it was in a pocket, but the earbuds gave you away, and there was this sense of like, I know that you know that where the early adopters here, and people were very proud of that. Super minimalist, super minimalist, to really be able to cut through all the cacophony of that time. There was still a real sense of minimalism to it, and it's now what, 26 years later, and that is still primarily the language. So much so that every other tech company has taken on that same vernacular. So they all look a certain way because people have an expectation of what excellence should look like.

17:53All of the tech companies, until recently, I think Samsung is beginning to move a little bit further away from that visual language because they brought in, for the first time, ever, a president of design, Moro Portini. So he's making some of those changes, but up until then, we're talking about 25 years of tech looking a very specific way because everybody wanted to seem like the very best. And so it'll be interesting to see how that now changes with new people at the helm, both at Apple and at Samsung. If you're not a subscriber of The New York Times, we have some news for you. You can now explore the times for free without any paywalls at all during your first month in The New York Times app. Hey, what's up guys? It's Hayley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads,

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19:55Midi is a virtual care platform built for women by women and offers specialized hormone care from trained clinicians. Plus, it's covered by most major insurances. Getting started is easy. You can book your first visit with a clinician right away. It's not you. It's your hormones. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit. That's joinmidi.com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage. I think we should have an open relationship. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Let's definitely do that. With our cars. Oh, Flex car. Yeah, that's what I meant too. Flex car is the first and only month to month carlies. Swing from a Wrangler one month to a Prius the next. Flex car. You drive everything. You see the design is a quote deliberate expression of intention. Tell me about that. So in order to do that, I have to go back to, well, what, what is a brand? A brand is manufactured meaning we agree that a crucifix stands for something.

20:57You and I both agree. We might not agree. Hot take on Christianity, a brand. Well, it's just because I want to bring it down to like the most the foundation. The very one of the first brands, although, although Hindu and, and Jane were, were well before that. But in any case, let's just go with something that a lot of people know. It is manufactured meaning that cross could stand for anything. We agree that this crucifix, this symbol that people wear and pray to and worship signifies something. Design is what communicates that differentiation. That is what design is for me. That is the ultimate design definition. It is the communication of differentiation that is made through meaning manufacturer. So I was interested to see you go on that question of intention directly to branding. Because I do take your point that the way the brand or the reputation of meaning of something across great scale is constructed is indeed constructed.

22:04But one of the things that I think is operating here and I'm curious to explore this a bit is that I mean brands wanted to differentiate from each other. I have to. And I think a frustration people have is often that they are under differentiated now. So I think it is widely felt. We can argue whether it's true. But it's widely felt that cars were more beautiful and interesting in the way they were designed 30 or 40 years ago than they are today. And I think that a friend recently to 40th birthday and as a present for him is partner rented him like a classic car. I got to ride around in an old Mustang. I mean people like the old Mustangs more than they like the new Mustangs. I think that's common. But one reason so many cars look similar is that we've learned a lot about how to make the merit dynamic. Like we know things about how objects move through space at speed. That we did not know to the same level of certainty then. And we put pressure on those things through fuel regulation standards and electric vehicle incentives and other things to push car companies in a certain direction.

23:11And so now the cars look more streamlined because that is very very important for their fuel efficiency and their safety and there are other different things that are operating here. And it pushes everything in a certain direction. And so one thing that I thought when I read your definition of design is a deliberate expression of intention is that the intentions we have now include many other things and just beauty or or just aesthetics right. We know more about how to make buildings energy efficient. We know more about how to make sure they don't fall down during earthquakes. And all these things impose strictures that in some of the periods in the past that we often you know lionize for their superior aesthetics. They didn't have to optimize for as much. And so one reason the world is feeling a little bit more same to people in the construction of material objects is actually this like what we're optimizing on things that actually do forces sameness we know things about the world.

24:15That have led us to design things in ways that are more consistent across across different brands. Yeah. And I think that's just a matter of time because once we begin to master these new ergonomic ways of building the next natural step will be to maximize the value via beauty because you will want to differentiate first we're looking at function and then we'll look at aspiration. And that's while you were talking I had the funniest example come to mind which may or may not make sense. But I think back to the days when my grandmother used to wear girdles really ugly really efficient really really ugly now we have spanks and skims essentially doing the same or better work to help shape a woman. But far sexier and far more beautiful so I think it's just a matter of time because that is the system we live in we're always looking to improve and create something better than it was before.

25:18One of the interesting questions that came up when my producers and I were preparing for this episode was my producer lives in a much older home. And it's really beautiful it's like you you take a picture from it from the outside it's got this beautiful tree in front of it I felt something I've never seen our home. So we live so it has sold to it. And also she was saying that part of her really envies people who live in these someone more so less make mansions that are better designed for kids that have a lot more space in them in the way the space is used that have you know central air that have a lot of that have been. Optimized for other purposes and I just think a lot of things in life or like that I think that when you make life frictionless it begins to lose something even if everything else is equal even if sometimes like the quality of the product is is higher. And so I grant completely that you can have an and I have experienced this places homes cars everything right you can have places where somebody's idea of beauty and their idea of function have come into a beautiful union.

26:28But I actually think some of the drabness that we're talking about comes from people living in a world that has been smoothed for them such that it on the one hand works really well. And on the other hand it doesn't feel alive to them. It just sort of has been like flattened into a kind of solar service like what like I'd love to know what you consider that to be. I'm not myself a vinyl collector. But I know many people who are and it is in part like the physicality the annoyance you have to get up and turn it over you have to put the needle correctly. And those record collections mean more to people. Oh yeah spotify libraries and people will say all the sound is warmer. Sure it's a little warmer. I don't think that's what's really doing the work the work is that you end up in a physical tactile relationship where reading books for a kid.

27:36Exactly I have a big Kindle library and I have a big physical book library same so there are places where the fact that the world asks things of you that are you know perhaps like a little bit less convenient. You know the fact that my Kindle is always with me and I can like look up all my highlights on my phone it is more convenient and when I really love a book often just go buy it physically I mean I've actually moved more to physical books in general. Because having it is meaningful to me. Yeah even if it's function is actually objectively somewhat worse. Yeah I 100 100% agree. So how do you think about those the spaces though where there's a conflict. Well I think we're living at a time where the big tension is between convenience and individuality and we are giving up so much of our individuality and our privacy for convenience. That's something that we have to opt into. I don't know that there's anything wrong with having a bit of both but I do think that perhaps if you're extreme on one way or the other you're really missing out on a great deal.

28:46I mean I love being able to read anything anywhere have all my highlights in one place and have 45 books in my pocket. But I also love curling up with a book and filling the pages and being able to look throughout. I also really miss liner notes those little booklets that used to come with ban photos. I mean I also have a final collection so I that will go with me somewhere. I need a really big tomb where I'm going to put all that stuff with me that nobody else wants but I can't get rid of even on my deathbed. So I think it's a matter of where do you where do you live on that continuum? So there's this YouTube video by Cheyenne Quirk about why things are getting uglier and he's walking through London looking at you know lampposts and sewer systems built in an earlier era and comparing it to what's being built now.

29:48And it's not that the new ones are bad they work as lampposts but they are drab and the old ones have these sort of weird fish on them and the new ones are just very functional. And I was watching it and this part on air conditioning units. Oh my god yes. Really struck me so I'm going to show you this because I think it maybe gets us some of things we're talking about. Look at this air conditioning unit. I think this is more about the modern world than anything else, more than phones or social media. It's a miraculous technology one that has changed the world and improved billions of lives. Hence we stick them literally everywhere but it's ugly. Ugly because it doesn't seem to express any belief in the idea that ordinary things can also be beautiful. But worse than ugly it's boring. Now it's going to be a bit more expensive to make it prettier. Take a little time and care and attention but these days it seems that we would rather make more money to make things look pretty.

30:53And maybe that's okay. First of all this is an open call to James Dyson. I interviewed James Dyson last year and one of the things that I learned in my research was James Dyson. All of his innovations have been with air, vacuums, hair dryers, etc. Who better to innovate an air conditioner than James Dyson? He's made the most beautiful vacuum cleaners, the most beautiful hair dryers. James we need you. But I don't think that these are boring. I disagree. I think that they're obtrusive. Boring you sort of fall away from seeing obtrusive it's in your face and it's assaulting. It's they assault you. One thing I thought about with that though is where he ends on cost. I agree with you. One thing people dislike about window AC units is they're obtrusive. But window AC units tend to be put onto older buildings or they tend to be for people with who don't have the money to put in.

31:56Central air. You can get ones that are nicer and less nice looking. I haven't seen any that are truly beautiful but cost actually matters here. And so this is a place where I think there often really is attention. Where you can you know you can put money into the design of things. But if you need to produce things in a very mass way they often look boring. Or they can look very obtrusive. And there is a tension on many products at least between their form and their function. And so one critique you'll often hear of this conversation the kind of conversation we're having is it's a bit elitist that you have beauty is a nice to have. But there was a reason you know what kind of survives from old housing stock is usually not the like the tenement buildings of the poor lived in like those of large have been knocked down.

32:59And you get these nice row houses in Georgetown because I you know people put a lot more money into it. So how much is what we're talking about here the mass production of what was once luxury. And when you make things mass produced it tends to lose character. I think again it really depends on intention years ago target had a wonderful line that they launched called design for all. And they worked with Isaac Mizrahi and really wonderful designers to create sort of bridge lines that you could buy a target that would be less expensive but would still be made with care. I think that Mouji is also another or another company where you can go into a Mouji and things are made with care and they're not overly expensive. There are alternatives years and years and years ago probably at least ten years ago. I became obsessed with the fact that all shower caps were heinous.

33:59I mean truly grotesque and I went online to look for alternatives and I found a company called shower cap as HHH OWERCAP. And they made these turban style shower caps. And yes they are a little bit more expensive than your sort of standard three pack plastic, like Ufant type shower cap but they last forever. And they're gorgeous and suddenly you go from having this piece of sort of fungus on your head that's been sitting in your stall for however long to having this beautifully crafted, beautifully designed object that is not that expensive but signifies that somebody thought that you deserve more respect in that experience and somebody that wanted more respect in that experience. So you are able to find these things they're not everywhere but you do have to look. There's something interesting about that because you actually sometimes get this completely opposite explanation for why many things feel and look worse today which is it they have become cheap.

35:08And so we don't attend to them as much. We were talking in my team as we were getting ready for this about how it used to be hand me down furniture was a really important thing. People got their grandparents bedroom sets all the time. Yeah my grandmother's dining room table. And now I think many families have had the issue it's like the elders pass on or downsizing their home and they want to give what they have, cared about so much was so important to them down to their children their children don't want it. And one reason they don't want it is that we have made furniture much cheaper. And so it's not as incredible an investment for a family to get a bedroom set or to get a dining room table. As you get one from my Kia and you don't have to think about it that much necessarily because you maybe know that this is your starter home and in a couple of years it will probably change it. And so in a weird way when there was more scarcity people had to attend to what they were getting to sort of give that attention you were just giving to that shower cap more often.

36:12But when people know that they're only going to have the thing for a few years when they know that it's obsolescence is planned for them. Then maybe they don't treat it that way because you know in the back of your mind well it's a temporary investment. It's a temporary visitor in my home so it doesn't need to express as much about me. I feel bad for people that feel that way because why not have everything around you express something about you in some way that doesn't necessarily need to be how much something costs. But I also feel in the case of hand me down family furniture there's a soul that's embedded in that at one point 60 years ago my grandmother sat at that table. Now I didn't need that table anymore because I for a lot of different reasons my wife wanted a different table but I don't want to get rid of it. And so I had it in my basement and my niece needs a dining room table so I am shipping her the table and now she is going to have her great grandmother's dining room table.

37:20To me that is magic to me that is a reason for living that kind of continuity where you can pass something down that has been in a family that's dining room table where people gathered where they ate where they cried where they fought where they did not have anything to do. They did any kinds of things that that has so much meaning embedded in it and that's what I treasure most about objects I tend to be a bit of a pack rat my wife would say I'm absolutely a pack rat but things have sentiment they're embedded with sentimentality with emotion with memory there it's evidence of living that to me is more important than almost anything. In the back of my mind what we've been talking I've been thinking about how different structures in our life operate by different logics and there's a logic of markets and markets like a logic that is frictionless markets hate friction markets like things to be tradable they like things to be legible across great distances.

38:23I was very moved a second ago when you said that giving this table to your niece I think it was is a reason for living that participating in that ancestral continuity has a meaning far beyond the worth of the table if you put it up for sale and eBay or something. And I think could take a kind of buy is that one thing just going on in life is that market logic is eating more and more and more and markets don't as I was saying markets don't really want specificity so I was thinking about homes one thing that has been measured is that people are painting their homes gray more often is a study about this from Washington DC a sharp rise on the number of gray homes. This has been described as the color recession and it's not unknown why it is so nearly a third of American home sales in 2021 when do people who had no intention of living in them the homes where investment vehicle homes are going to be flipped in 2021.

39:26Wow and so if you're seeing your home not as a place you will live for 50 years but either as a place you're trying to sell to someone else and then maybe sell to somebody after that and sell to somebody after that. Or just as a place you're only going to live for a few years because you yourself are more mobile and you only expect to be in this job in Washington DC for you know four or five years then you're going to move back to Asheville North Carolina or something moving that home towards particularity. Right painting it yellow and green because you're an idiosyncratic person who loves yellow and green is not good for the long term resell value of the home absolutely and even more than that I mean I grew up in a place with very strong homeowners associations where you were not allowed to paint your home a lot of different colors. Because it might change the resell value of the homes around you wasn't even about you right is about everybody wanted to make sure their home was an effectively tradable asset. Yep. And so there's this market logic that can infect more and more and that that is you know again part of the trend towards sameness I'm curious how that resonates with us and for you well in many ways it sort of brings us back to the whole notion of somebody raising their house and creating a house that's so big that it infiltrates in that sort of air and space of others.

40:48Because that's exactly what is being controlled here and and that's why it's ugly now I'm I'm sad that there's so much that is being diluted now to eliminate some of what some of what is strange but also really beautiful or also really specific to a person. And look at all the auctions that go on when celebrities die that somebody wants their desk or their hat or you know, Dianne Keaton had an auction her family had no action and all her clothes went on auction and people were clamoring for her bolo hats. So I think that there's this really interesting really interesting thing that I want to do some research now on in that we still want these really expressive ways of differentiating ourselves but within a certain parameter so if we are being urged to to gray down our color palettes.

41:56What does that mean about how much color we can actually express and when we hold back from that what is that due to our creativity and what is it due to or what is it reflect about the way you want to move through the world so one of going back to our earlier access of both there's something that do you feel anything at all versus what do you feel. I have a friend who the way she dresses is meant to make other people feel things. Thank you. Joy whimsy but it's loud like you walk around with her and people are noticing and she is trying to get them to notice and the way I dress and when we move this podcast or video calls me a lot of stress. It's sort of been to not have people notice I don't want you to be thinking about how I like I want you to think it looks nice and then not give it any further thought right and there is this.

43:05Dimension where are you willing to have people have views about you right what your house looks like what you're dressed like how things are decorated. Or you recognizing that some people might love it and other people might hate it right that fashion can be polarizing and design can be polarizing versus do you have a society that in some cultural way has become less comfortable with that right people in it do not want to expose themselves to judgment. They want to be looked at judges acceptable and have the gaze fall off of them. I don't know if that's possible Ezra and even when someone takes a stance against being obvious or loud that choice is still a choice it's still a deliberate decision years ago my father decided that he was no longer going to wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts because he didn't want to be a walking billboard for the brand.

44:09Okay what did he do I can't even say this with a straight face he put a flag pin over the logo. I'm like dad you just exchanged one logo for another now you are representing the United States on your shirt on your polo shirt he didn't want to buy new ones so he replaced the logo the he put the cover up the logo the polo logo with a flag. As soon as you see that flag it signifies something I have always in the last 20 years so years been kind of afraid of wearing color I only always were black always always it's anything else feels too fluorescent I feel like I'm being looked at I sort of this everything goes with everything it blends. My nephew first first realizing it many many years ago he said why do you always were black like oh it's just easier I don't have to decide about too much everything goes with everything he goes that's weird. It is a little bit weird but it's easy for me and I also feel like you in the podcast world to have to then suddenly go into video is terrifying but I do think that every decision we make is deliberate we're revealing ourselves in ways that allow us to be perceived in a certain way.

45:23Clothing and objects and cars and houses and sneakers and handbags all express that in a way I'm not sure people mean that much by the Ralph Lauren brand so it may not be a great example but when people put a flag pin on now like particularly like the post 9-11 world and in that period it it was a very very very specific kind of statement about yourself that maybe it wouldn't have been at other times when it was just a you know people of American flags they had an FDR picture hanging in their house or separately what it meant to do. To have a mouth picture or a stall in picture in those societies meant something different than in societies where is much more of a choice whether or not you hung those you're talking about the sort of emotional resonance being different between Ralph Lauren and a flag pin no what I'm what I'm talking about here what I think I'm talking about here I is that the logic of branding. We have become so used to thinking of it as branding as corp like the thing corporations are trying to do with it that even when the symbol is coming out of a non commercialized sphere a sphere that would understood to be representing very different things about somebody we almost now sort of see them all on all on the same plane you know when I was a kid I

46:44was a gold high which is a Jewish symbol and I were that at a time when I was quite religious as a kid I would appear around want to be a rabbi and and what that meant to me wasn't what it meant to me some years later when I like got my first Nike shoes or when I was trying to dress to fit in with other kids like I was expressing something that was more private I mean it was existing publicly too but it wasn't and I think these are different. And so it's funny because it's not where I thought our conversation would go but I think it's a very interesting place for it to go which is places where maybe. Logics or ways of accessing the world that should remain separate actually begin to converge and and I want to get into the public and private spheres here and maybe go to do it is this we sent you an email asking you for an example something ugly that you thought was good design and you talked about these ads used to be on the subway from doctor Zimor is it more.

47:44Doctor is so can you can you describe them for you know listeners and audio here. Yes doctors is more was a dermatologist he I don't know if he's still alive but he's definitely not in practice anymore and for many many many years he essentially took over the billboards in the New York City subway system and had really garish short truce orange lots of rainbows doctor Z was will fix your face you know all about what your high hopes could be to eradicate acne they were really hideous really really hideous but over time they were enormously consistent they used the same visual language over and over rainbows rainbows and really badly current type and terrible vertical and horizontal scaling and bad silhouettes but they became sort of like the crazy

48:55Eddie ads of the seven days crazy Eddie his prices are insane part of the tapestry of the New York City subway system and so they became really familiar and ultimately really really important to branding even when something is ugly if you see it enough times it becomes something that you recognize and you begin to associate with something that thing could have good feelings it could have bad feelings again back to the feelings and in the case of Zizmor because he seemed like a nice guy and there were no scandals and he seemed to do good work and he was inexpensive and he talked to the populace people love these ads they love them what people get so upset about now when you change logos it's not so much that the logo that is being changed is any good it's that it's taking us away from the thing that we're most familiar with and in the day and age where everything feels so tenuous taking that familiarity away even if it's a juice

50:03corn makes people feel really insecure so I want to take this on a different direction so I was looking at those ads and I think they're wonderful and one reason they're wonderful though ugly and weird and crowded and is that they feel like a person was behind them not a committee yes they don't feel like they came out of a sophisticated branding agency that had you know a kickoff meeting and a scoping meeting and you know you can you can feel the the sort of bureaucratic energy behind you know very sophisticated campaigns but to go back to this point of maybe the market eating a lot of other spaces and imposing its logic on them a column I have wanted to write and not written in part because I've been afraid of the reaction to it is that as a newcomer to New York City I moved here three years ago I find the presence of the advertising on the New York City subway and on the buses really sad and not that it doesn't exist in other places it does that we're not you know the MTA is not the only transit authority that raises so many

51:17advertising but that is a public space it is actually one of the most remarkable public spaces I think in American life the New York City subway for whatever its flaws is incredible is egalitarian it is all stratas of society mixing with each other it is people going in all kinds of places and yet it is all happening beneath the glare of these ambulance chasing attorneys and Tinder ads and plastic surgery ads for long time the subway system I would walk into with my kids it had an ad for the reboot of the exorcist above where we walk in and it was black and white and these two girls faces and they're like spitting blood it was his horrifying grotesque ad and I looked into this the MTA gets about 1% of operating revenue from advertisements and on the one hand I know that the mom administration is trying to make buses free and isn't it a little bit elitist to say you should spend that money on making the subway is non commercial rather than making the buses free and on the other hand as I thought about writing this piece it seems to me that maybe public spaces

52:30should not be commercialized in that way maybe this should be a space of oasis from constant advertising from your attention and your visual field being captured by the market these ads make the New York City subway much uglier than it could be yes so what I love on the New York City subway is sometimes will use the spaces for ads and put poetry there like that's really beautiful they occasionally have art on them I think that's really cool it has like a very old style progressive movement like the enriching of the citizenry you can imagine a world where that was the only thing that existed that was you know non-utilitarian visuals there and I think it'd be really beautiful if the ads were gone it's like the market has eaten something that is for the public and the market is the dominant visual language in something that they are not the dominant player paying for it they don't pay for most of it you're a visual prisoner yes and and we used to I mean if you go back to the 50s and 60s people worry a lot about how the visual field is being taken over by advertising yes and we've come to accept it in a way that is

53:42a little surprising and a little sad and represents a diminishment of our ambitions for public space or the built environment well part of it is that the ads are really ugly if they were interesting if they were provocative if they were something that made you think or inspired you then it might be a little bit different but if you're writing this article two things that you might be interested in sam palo for a while took all their billboards down I don't know if they still yeah I don't know if that's still the case but they did that as a test and it really changed the visual environment and then Ed Roussé the artist has a whole series of pieces he did a whole series of pieces of blank billboards and it's beautiful no messages just the white plane billboard in urban environment and it's really quite provocative that's so interesting about sam palo and I mean you go to I mean I've been to other countries in the subway systems and you don't always have advertising everywhere so to me it gets to something we're talking about which is we have begun to accept the logic of the market in a lot of spaces you might have not expected the market to be we begin to see things that are not market based like religions in market terms yeah

54:56and you know the market I think has certain desires it's not that the market hates beauty it would love to sell you something beautiful but the intentionality of the market is to sell product we see ads now in over urinals and public bathrooms I mean really that's when you want to get somebody's attention I mean there's virtually no space that is left free from a corporate mark you have logos on eggs on the actual egg Hey what's up guys it's Hayley Bailey okay I need to tell you about something I just got YouTube premium it's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst I get free I get back room play and there's like a ton more in there you should try it if you like YouTube you'll love YouTube premium try it now for two months free at YouTube dot com slash premium

56:03if you like YouTube you'll love YouTube premium hi I'm Sean Evans from hot ones and I want to tell you about YouTube premium it has offline downloads so you can watch without Wi-Fi background play so you can lock your phone and it still plays baby oh and it is completely add for you free yes I said it add free try YouTube premium for two months free at YouTube dot com slash premium trial eligibility varies terms apply cancel anytime this podcast is supported by Viking committed to exploring the world in comfort journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking long ship with thoughtful service destination focused dining and cultural enrichment on board and on shore and every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos discover more at Viking dot com this podcast is supported by SOTFA have a big day coming up remember tomorrow starts tonight with the restorative sleep you need to perform at your best the kind every SOTFA mattress is designed for so whether it's the first day of school a

57:09new job or an important presentation SOTFA helps you be the best version of you visit sotfa dot com that's s a tva dot com as we're getting into politics here I want to ask you about there's been a real movement on the right in recent years to in in a very certain way resuscitate an argument about beauty and you've seen it in a me Donald Trump uses the word beautiful yes more than any president I think probably ever and certainly his idea of beauty is not my idea beauty but he cares about it yeah and there's now even a term for it let's not forget Mara Lago face is a lot of it in our culture right now and you know they are building things and going back to neoclassical you know architecture in different ways and it's not just him it's sort of all the people around him I thought this from from Tucker Carlson this clip I'm going to show you was genuinely interesting

58:11this is another third rail in American politics you're not allowed to note that our buildings are grotesque and dehumanizing why are they bad because they're ugly and ugly dehumanizes us and by let me be more precise about what I mean when I say dehumanizing dehumanizing is the act of convincing people that they don't matter that they are less significant than the larger whole that they are not distinct souls that they are not unique that they are not created by God that they are merely putty in the hands of some larger force him starting by saying you're not allowed to talk about this is strange because you're definitely out to talk about this but you do see a move on the right to say that we have allowed like beauty to become subordinate as a public goal I'm curious what you thought of it well it's the first time I think I've ever agreed with Tucker Carlson ever but I don't think it's true I don't think that's true about the right at all if that were the case then there would be much more of an uproar about what the president is doing

59:16to the White House to the East Wing to the arches that he's putting up to the reflecting pool I mean there's so much damage that is making Washington uglier I don't I don't see how that is being protested by the right well don't they think they're going to make it more beautiful doesn't Donald Trump think his reflecting pool is luminous I don't know anybody that's like you know that that the Oval Office that looks really good now Trump the person who thinks that is Trump but I mean that very serious but no I do too that there's nobody on the right saying you know what let's invest in gold filigree no one's talking about that that's not a trend that's catching on in any way thankfully well let me make not the argument for what they're doing but I think the challenge they are posing that is interesting for liberals and people on the left to try to take seriously the rights rediscovery of classical architecture of Roman columns the right because it is a more pretty the modern right in America is a much more reactionary movement

1:00:25it is able to locate a very clear moment of beauty which is old things and you know in ways where if you read the white nationals right they're very explicit about this you know what they understand is like the the European inheritance and I think that the left and the term elect is tricky because obviously you know you've moderates and liberals and leftists but has more trouble knowing what it wants to answer this with not because it doesn't think beauty is important but because it doesn't want to dictate what the beautiful should be who I to say and it's not binary and it's not binary and so you have an interesting thing where I do think that the right is doing something interesting and trying to move ideas of beauty back to something more set more centrally contested in politics and I'm not sure I've really seen an answer or even like a willingness to to argue about it with them among people on the the left in part because if you understand the past to be full of problems and you want to move to a future that is not yet built

1:01:37well what what visual grammar what visual language can everybody agree on for that? well nobody will ever agree not one there will never be one way of assessing beauty but I I do want to make a distinction between taste and style and power and so I don't think that anybody on the right is looking back to Roman and Greek architecture or the architecture of Versailles and thinking now there was some really magnificent architecture I think what they're actually saying is this is the type of power that's represented this this architecture is representing a certain power and that power is the way we want to lead I don't know I don't think that's I don't agree with that I think they really do think it's beautiful or at least I think it's worth trying to grant them that they think it's beautiful

1:02:42but I think they think it's okay I agree there I think they think it's beautiful because it represents a certain type of leader and a certain type of power and those things you can't always separate it's like Mar-Lago face being beautiful for a certain reason those people think it's beautiful you and I might not but they think it's beautiful I'm not questioning somebody's own sense of what is beautiful to them but what I think is more important than what they think is beautiful is why why do they think it's beautiful what is this represent to them so I think I agree that the set of the tributaries of why we think a thing is beautiful are very complicated going back to what you're saying even at the very beginning about proportionality and the mathematics and I mean you'll get into these things like what is the perfect figure or you know the looks, macsars and the men's movement now are sitting there like measuring the distance the proportional distance of their whatever to their whatever and why people have come up with what they think is beautiful is obviously contested and then as you also said changes over time

1:03:49but I take the right as or least this part of the right as even if power is part of it believing like now having a kind of politics of beauty that I don't think George W. Bush had that I don't think Romney had that I think is a sort of a new entry into politics right the immediate executive orders on you know neoclassical or classical architecture and I guess one of my questions because I do think people including on the left is where a lot of the articles about everything becoming ugly that we're talking about are coming from I do think people have a feeling that the world is becoming less beautiful to them and I think they want this represented I think that there is a yearning for beauty to be a publicly held value again but I think the right always has an easier time with this because they can sort of just reach back right that's that make America great again well if you're making America great again you're going back to things that were once considered a certain way

1:04:49yeah that could be behavior that could be social structure that could be architecture art music politics etc so I think that's all part of it it would be shocking to me if make America great again or the current president was like let's let's innovate a new style of architecture to represent our future that's not going to happen so alongside this new right which I think is reaching backwards in its design aesthetic you also have the tech right we've talked about the cyber truck a bunch in this conversation but crypto and NFTs had a very legible visual language you have a certain amount of AI from slop to art but but you do have a kind of emerging language of what the kind of digital design of the future is supposed to look like it's certainly a theory of the future I'm curious how you think about that as like a contestant and what you think it is communicating

1:05:52I think it's one faction of design that is apparent now because I could also point to Apple Park and the beauty of the building there and the buildings there which are truly extraordinary as a counterpoint to some of that interestingly a lot of the cyber chic is very linear very sharp edges whereas Apple Park is all rounded edges you see that in Bilbao you see that in some of the way the Whitney was redesigned so I think that that's there also but like everything else I think that we're in this space of tension between which visual language is going to win out there's always more than one we've been talked about this very much but a lot of what we're talking about I think in a sometimes sub-bros that sometimes very explicit ways masculine and feminine code it I mean cyber truck is a very male design say what you will about it

1:06:53and you would just talk about like sensuality and curves I mean how much is some of the fight we're having here about the sort of larger political but gender war dynamic that we've been in I'm going to go back to what I said before I don't know that it's a gender war so much as a power play how do we believe power should be communicated and visualized and that's I think what we're seeing now so do you think about in a sort of modern ways a kind of answer to what the Mar-Lago world has come up with for their beauty do you think there is an answer to that you know you can say yes the world has become uglier I think it's something you're saying and what you're sort of saying is what they are doing is ugly because it is garrish because it is vulgar because it is out of proportion because it is about power because it is about intimidation and I'll be very honest it represents politics that I don't believe in yes and so do you think there's an answer to that you do believe in and that does allow though you know people whose politics you do agree with to speak about beauty in a way that is more legible and inspiring to people

1:08:05as well I'd like to say yes I'd like to say yes in my practice I am an analyst I look at the time and back to try to make sense of what's happening right now I'm not a futurist I'm not even sure I would claim to be an optimist but I hope so I want to say I hope so I think that's a place to end so then always our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience so I've been giving this a lot of thought going to name three of my favorite books over the course of my life and then I'm going to push in one more that I discovered in the last decade or so that changed my life so I'm going to if that's okay with you please okay so number one it's a book of poetry called The Voice That Is Great Within Us it's by Hayden Karuth and it is a remarkable remarkable collection of 20th century poetry that's where I first became aware of my favorite poem of all time which is a poem by Charles Olsen called Maximus to himself

1:09:09PS I name my dog Maximus that's number one number two is what I think is one of the greatest love stories of all time it's a book written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez called Love in the Time of Calera which has the greatest last line of all time in a book and so you have to read it all the way through before you get to that and then my third book is a book that I hope one day to be able to do a visual version of I fell in love with this book in college it's James Joyce's Ulysses I even went to Ireland for Blooms Day which is the day that the day in the life of Leopold Blooms that James Joyce wrote about in Ulysses and took a walking tour of Ireland I went to Sandy Mount Strand and those are my three favorite books books have profoundly changed my life but more recently in 2017 I started reading a book called Hunger by Roxanne Gay and when I read that book I fell in love with the author

1:10:17sight unseen just reading her words so much so that I reached out to her I wanted to get around my podcast she said no I tried to stay in touch she was very squirly about it and then through a mutual friend she got win that I was actually not a crazy person and then I asked her out on a date in 2018 and in 2020 we got married so my book Hunger by Roxanne Gay that is a wonderful fourth recommendation Debbie Melmond thank you very much Rose Ra this podcast is supported by Viking committed to exploring the world in comfort journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking long ship

1:11:23with thoughtful service destination focused dining and cultural enrichment on board and on shore and every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos discover more at Viking.com