世界是否变丑了？设计美学、权力表达与情感共鸣的对话

Speaker 0: why is everything so drab right now？ is it also the same same？ got these copy shops？ they all look the same architecture looks standardized buildings or colorless。 the cars are interchangeable。 then on the other side， you have trumps guilover over office ice imagined ararch his truish vision for the reflecting pool。 so we will mcdonald trump。 he in the modern， right。 they have AA theory of beauty， not my theory of beauty， but a theory for a while。 now i would wanting to do an episode on this question that i've seen all other people ask， and it has bothered me to is the world getting uglier。 and if so， why why do we seem to design？ so much that looks so boring wearing the other side。 so loud。 and in this moment， when the right has a clear theory， beauty does left have any answer at all。 debby moment teaches at the school visual arts in yyork city e's， a long time graphic brand designer。 she revamp logos for companies like earking seen up in hagging dos。 and for over twenty years， she's hosted a podcast called design matters where she talks to creative people about design。

Speaker 1: she joins me now deadby moment。

Speaker 0: welcome to the show。

Speaker 2: thank you as there。 it's great to be here。

Speaker 0: so over the first couple of years， i feel like i have read or watched。 i mean， it dozen essays on why everything is getting uclear。 and i just read a peace from you with the title， is the world getting uclear。 so is it depends on who you ask？

Speaker 2: i'm asking you my opinion。 it's getting more vulgar in some ways。 uginess can be very intentional。 vulgar is accidental because it doesn't have intention。 nobody really sets out to make something that's truly voulger。 certain ugly can be seen through the lens of a trend as being really glamorous or sexy or interesting or subversive。 but vulgar is always pretty awful。 and i think that is the real word about where we're moving。

Speaker 0: you give me some examples of this vulgarity。

Speaker 2: well， this cyber truck， there's really no need for a car to look that imposing and that blueviated housing where houses are now being raised that fit sort of sweettly on their lots with a front yard in a backyard and maybe little allies on either side。 and now they are 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 jessefashion on which i know that new york times has been writing about quite a lot。

Speaker 0: and if is anything， i'm an expert on its jensey fashion， but that，

Speaker 2: but jensei fashion is not forever fashion by nature， is a type of expression that has an exploration date in it or certainly a posidate。 it might come back。 but for a while， it goes out of style， some of it is four stops s lesson。 son of it is just trrends and style wherehouses cars， vehicles， airplanes thinks like that tnot to transition very often in the way that they fundamentally look at work。

Speaker 0: how do you distinguished？ i know this is like the oldest hardest question in taste， but one woman's volgarity is another woman's interesting。 ugly is another persons。 oh， that's a cool cyberpunk truck eh。

Speaker 2: 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。 not generally speaking， humans can assess when something is out of proportion and genering anything about the math of it， whwhether be a builbuilding or car， or uh coffee mug。 and so if something is out of proportion， it will， if a is a sense of discompopulation， and it could be the discproportion of a handbag of capeboard。 it could be the didispproportion of anything， but things essentially make us feel things。 everything makes us feel something， and when something is out of proportion and changes the dna around us。

Speaker 0: 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 was so a big reason you had that mariranando craze。 some youours back。 was it？ there was a real genius to her， giving people a pracce ce ah 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 but there are too， i think you run to this question of much that we now consider beautiful when it was built when it was designed， it was out of proportion。 it was brush， it was aggressive。 and so the early reviews of it were very negative。 so then you get in as interesting question of， can you trust what you're feeling in the moment，

Speaker 2: there's so much to talk about just from messenence。 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 that goes back fifty thousand 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。 after 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 in numbers that's security。 and we all believe the same thing。 so we're not going to a 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。 weve been trained socialized to experience the world through symbols， objects and now brands since priostorc times。 so you're wearing a certain typof of sneaker。 you're part of a niki tribe， a certain handbag， and that is telegraphing that you're a wealthy woman who bought her handbag on rodae 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 buts to look a certain way to signify the 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 you know that i know that we both get that and we both look good。 now it also does the same thing for the people that don't like a big bud or um a certain type of lineire。 so i think that we have to look back at the trajectory of our evolution because looks size fashion here， all of those things have so much to do with the politics of our time with religion and with socialization for you，

Speaker 0: what is good design and what is bad design？

Speaker 2: 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 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 york。 KI was in LX， and i was in a sneaky line where i had to scan 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 rimary reason about where the three are。 so even if you're in that position， you're not first， it's whoever got there first， then somebody's managing it。 and then you have to sort of really fast pusher things through so that it gets through。 and i said to the guy， as i knew i was coming here today， i said， who design 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 into the queue。 they're fighting to go next there。 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。

Speaker 0: one thing i've thinking about， as i've been， you know， reading and thinking about these essaover， you know， some period time， my teteand i've wanted to do a show on this for little bit is， is the world getting uger as a johra。 it has shave two different lines of critictic happening in it at once。 one is the critics of you're offering here， which is it is getting uglar it。 the world makes you feel something。 and the thing it makes you feel bad。 it's a negative feeling tone in the woodsh terminology。 and the other is that the world is getting not what i've called ugly， or will people often use that word draber。 it is getting more drive。 it is making you feel nothing more often。 so one of the i think foundation ousis here is an emplst one to say， from twenty twenty three。 and in that， they talk about the dabs subme， the drab，

Speaker 0: Sublime unites flat pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure, commercial graphic design, an ocean of stuff. So homogeneous and underthought that the world it has inundated can feel like a digital rendering. One reason I sort of like the Cybertruck 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. It reflects somebody's vision. I believe somebody somewhere found it beautiful.

Speaker 2: 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 Cybertruck is that the Cybertruck infringes—is it the streetscape? 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 ugly because we are 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. It alters behavior because we see if this could happen here, somebody can get away with doing this, well, then why can't I do it?

Speaker 0: Well, I want to really position myself here because I think this essay argues for—I really could agree that it's not nice.

Speaker 2: But I think that's important for you to do.

Speaker 0: There is a trend here, right? So I feel like you could branch into two axes here. There's whether something makes you feel anything at all, how much it makes you feel; 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. What I find is inoffensive, I feel nothing. When I look at them, they are mute to me.

Speaker 2: So many cars, they're mute to me. When something doesn't have any real intention to me, when it's built without any sense of purpose or strategy or respect to surroundings, and that I think is worse than ugly. And maybe even worse than vulgar.

Speaker 0: 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—which is described in many different ways—has led to a flattening. But now what I'm seeing is a reaction to that, right? You're talking about this. I think a little bit in your essay, you talk about this move towards a vulgarity, towards a bloviating style. You can think about Donald Trump redoing the Oval Office in gold. You can think about this very attention-grabbing fashion style in Gen Z. You can think about the Cybertruck, which has recently been covered in other places—a move towards more maximalist design. We've gone from minimalism to maximalism.

Speaker 0: Maximalist decor, and you write: living in an attention economy, attention rewards extremity; that the more design is awarded for being instantly visible, recognizable, and shareable, the easier it becomes to lose sight of proportion, purpose, and the people to live inside 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—and there is a point the writer Kyle Chayka makes—you go to coffee shops in New York, and LA, and Mexico City, and Buenos Aires, and Tokyo, and they're all the same coffee shop.

Speaker 2: You can't even differentiate airports anymore. You go into an airport, and it could be any airport in any city of the world.

Speaker 0: So how do you think about the relationship and tension between those two things—a feeling of sameness, maybe that people are rejecting, but then it's creating a move towards what you're describing as a kind of vulgar, bloviating answer to that?

Speaker 2: Well, I mean, if you look back to the original visual language of the iPod. Six weeks after 9/11, Apple introduced the first iPod, and that came with white earbuds.

Speaker 0: I did not know that was six weeks after 9/11. Those are two events I had not put together in my head.

Speaker 2: 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 outside of your clothing, that was in your pocket, but the earbuds gave it away. And there was a sense of like: "I know that you know that we're the early adopters here." And people were very proud of that. 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. It's now what, 25 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. All 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, Mauro Porcini. So he is 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.

Speaker 0: In The New York Times, you say that design is a "deliberate expression of intention."

Speaker 2: So in order to do that, I have to go back to what is a brand. A brand is manufactured meaning. We agree that a crucifix stands for something. You and I both agree—

Speaker 0: We might not agree on Christianity being a brand.

Speaker 2: Well, it's just because I want to bring it down to the most foundational. The very—one of the first brands, although Hindu and Jain 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 manufacturing.

Speaker 0: It's interesting to see you go on that question of intention directed at branding, because I do take your point that the way the brand, or the reputation, or meaning of something across great scales is constructed, is indeed constructed. But one of the things that I think is operating here—I'm curious to explore this a bit—is that brands want to differentiate from each other, they have to. And I think the frustration people have is often that they are under-differentiated now. So I think it is widely felt—we can argue that 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. A friend recently had a 40th birthday, and as a present for him, his partner rented him a classic car to ride around in, an old Mustang. And I think people like the old Mustangs more than they like the new Mustangs. I think that's common. But one reason so many cars are similar is that we've learned a lot about how to make them aerodynamic. 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've put pressure on those things through fuel regulation standards and electric vehicle incentives and other things to push car companies in a certain direction. And 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 as a "deliberate expression of intention" is that the intentions we have now include many other things than just beauty 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 that impose structures that in some of the periods in the past that we often lionize for their superior aesthetics, they didn't have to optimize for as much.

Speaker 0: One reason the world is feeling a little bit more same to people in the construction of material objects is actually this: what we're optimizing on things that actually do forces the same. We know things about the world that have led us to design things in ways that are more consistent across different brands.

Speaker 2: 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. For us, we're looking at function and then we'll look at aspiration.

And while you're 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 Spanx 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.

Speaker 0: One of the interesting questions that came up when my producers and I were preparing for the episode was: my producer lives in a much older home, and it's really beautiful. It's like you'd be going to take a picture of it from the outside; it's got this beautiful tree. And in front of that, I felt something—I've never seen her home—it has soul to it.

And also, she was saying that part of her really envies people who live in these, for her, McMansions that are better designed for kids, that have a lot more space in them in the way the space is used, that have central air, that have been optimized for other purposes.

And I just think a lot of things in life are like that. I think that when you make life frictionless, it begins to lose something, even if everything else is equal, even if sometimes the quality of the product is higher.

And so I grant completely that you can have—and I have experienced these places, homes, cars, everything, right?—you can have places where somebody's idea of beauty and the idea of function have come into a beautiful union. But 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 flattened into a kind of soulless surface.

Speaker 2: Like what? I'd love to know what you consider that to be.

Speaker 0: I'm not myself a vinyl collector, but I know many people who are, and it is in part like the physicality, the annoying [aspect of] you have to get up and turn it over. You have to put the needle correctly, and those record collections mean more to people than their Spotify libraries. And people will say how 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. Whereas reading books... this Kindle...

Speaker 2: Exactly.

Speaker 0: I have a big Kindle library, and I have a big physical book library.

Speaker 2: Same.

Speaker 0: So there are places where the fact of the world asks things of you that are, you know, perhaps a little bit less convenient. You know, the fact that my Kindle is always with me, and I can look up all my highlights on my phone—it is more convenient.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 0: And when I really love a book, often just go buy it physically. I mean, now actually move more to physical books in general, because having it is meaningful to me.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 0: Even if its function is actually objectively somewhat the same.

Speaker 2: Yeah, a one hundred percent agree.

Speaker 0: So how do you think about the spaces though, where there's a conflict?

Speaker 2: 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.

I mean, I love being able to read anything anywhere, have all my highlights in one place and have forty-five books in my pocket. But I also love curling up with a book and feeling the pages and being able to look throughout. I also really miss liner notes, those little booklets that used to come with band photos. I mean, I also have a vinyl collection, so that will go with me somewhere. I need a really big tomb to put all that stuff with me that nobody else wants, but I can't get rid of even on my death bed.

So I think it's a matter of where do you live on that continuum?

Speaker 0: So there's this YouTube video by Kurzgesagt 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. And it's not that the new ones are bad. They work as lampposts, but they are drab. The old ones have these sort of weird fish on them. And the new ones, that is very functional. And I was watching it, and this part on it, air conditioning units...

Speaker 2: Oh, my god, yeah.

Speaker 0: Struck me so, yes, because I think it maybe gets at some of the things we're talking about. Look at these air conditioning units:

Speaker 3: "I think it says 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 would not be a bit more expensive to make it pretty, to take your time and care and attention. But these days, it seems that we would rather make more money than make things pretty. And maybe that's okay."

Speaker 2: 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—vacuum, 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 is sort of far away from being obtrusive. It's in your face, and it's assaulting. They assault you.

Speaker 0: 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 are obtrusive, but window AC units tend to be put onto older buildings, or they tend to be for people who don't have the money to put in central 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 a tension 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 beauty is a nice-to-have. There is a reason, you know, what kind of survives from old housing stock is usually not the tenement-built things where the poor lived. And those have largely been knocked down. And you get these nice row houses in Georgetown, because people put a lot more money into it.

So how much of what we're talking about here is the mass production of what was once called character? And when you make things mass-produced, it tends to lose character?

Speaker 2: I think again, it really depends on intention. Years ago, Target had a wonderful line 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 at Target that would be less expensive, but would still be made with care.

I think that Muji is also another company where you can go into a Muji and things are made with care. 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. I mean, truly grotesque. And I went online to look for alternatives. And I found a company called SHHHOWER CAP, and they made these turban-style shower caps. And yes...

Speaker 2: They are a little bit more expensive than your sort of standard three-pack plastic shower caps, 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 found them. So you are able to find these things. They're not everywhere, but you do have to look.

Speaker 0: 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 that they have become cheap, 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 handed down. Furniture was a really important thing; people got their grandparents' bedroom sets.

Speaker 2: Yeah, my grandmother's dining room table.

Speaker 0: And now I think many families have had the issue where the elders pass on or downsize their home, and they want to give what they have, what they care about so much, what is so important to them down to the children, and the 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 set. You get it from IKEA, and you don't necessarily have to think about it that much, because maybe this is your starter home and in a couple of years you'll probably change it. And so in a weird way, when there was scarcity and people had to attend to what they were getting, they sort of gave that attention you were giving to that shower cap more often. But when people know that they're only going to have the thing for a few years, when they know that its obsolescence is planned for them, then maybe they don't treat it that way, because in the back of your mind, it's a temporary investment. It's a temporary visitor in my home, so it doesn't need to express as much about me.

Speaker 1: 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 handed-down family furniture, there's a soul that's embedded in that. At one point sixty years ago, my grandmother sat at that table. Now, I didn't need that table anymore because of a lot of different reasons—my wife wanted a different table, but I didn'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. To 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 dining room table, where people gathered, where they ate, where they cried, where they fought, where they did all kinds of things—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 packrat—my wife would say I'm absolutely a packrat—but things have sentiment. They're embedded with sentimentality, with emotion, with memory. It's evidence of living. That to me is more important than almost anything in the back of my mind.

Speaker 0: While 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 tradeable. They like things to be legible across great distances. I 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 on eBay or something. And I think a critique I kind of buy is that one thing just going on in life is that market logic is eating more and more and more and more. And markets don't, as I was saying, markets don't really want specificity. So thinking about homes, one thing that has been measured is that people are painting their homes gray more often. There's a study about this in DC, a sharp rise in the number of gray homes. This has been described as the color recession, and it's not unknown why it is. Nearly a third of American homes sold in 2021 went to people who had no intention of living in them. The home is an investment vehicle, or the homes were going to be flipped in 2021. In 2021. Wow.

Speaker 0: And so if you're seeing your home not as a place you will live for fifty years, but either as a place you're trying to sell to someone else, and then maybe they sell to somebody after that and sell to somebody after that; or this is 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 resale value of the home.

Speaker 2: Absolutely.

Speaker 0: 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 resale value of the homes around you. It wasn't even about you, right? It was about everybody wanting to make sure their home was an effectively tradeable asset.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 0: And so there's this market logic that can infect more and more, and that is, you know, again, part of the trend towards sameness. I'm curious how that specifically relates to design.

Speaker 1: Well, in many ways, it sort of brings us back to the whole notion of somebody razing their house and creating a house that's so big that it infiltrates into that sort of air and space of others, because that's exactly what is being controlled here, and that's why it's ugly. Now, I'm sad that there's so much that is being diluted now to eliminate 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, where somebody wants their desk or their hat. Joan Didion had an auction, her family had an auction, and all her clothes went on auction, and people were clamoring for her big boho hats. So I think that there's this 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 gray down our color palettes, what does that mean about how much color we can actually express? And when we hold back from that, what does that do to our creativity?

Speaker 0: And what does it do to, or what does it reflect about the way you want to move through the world? So going back to our earlier axis above, there's something about: 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—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 moved this podcast to video, it caused 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 look. I want you to think it looks nice and then not give it any further thought, right? And there is this dimension: 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. Are 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. Whereas a society 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, judged as acceptable, and have the gaze fall off of them.

Speaker 1: I don't know if that's possible as well. 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. Okay, 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 polo shirt." He didn't want to buy a new one, so he replaced the logo.

Speaker 1: You put covered 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 twenty years or so, been kind of afraid of wearing color. I only always wear black, always, always. Anything else feels too fluorescent. I feel like I'm being looked at. Everything goes with everything; it blends. When my nephew first realized it many, many years ago, he said, "Hey, why do you always wear black?" I go, "It's just easier. I don't have to decide about too much. Everything goes with everything." He goes, "That's weird." "Yeah, it's a little bit weird, but it's easy for me." And I also feel like, 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, including clothing and objects and cars and houses and sneakers and handbags all express that in a way.

Speaker 0: I'm not sure people mean that much by Ralph Lauren and brands. It may not be a great example, but when people put a flag pin on now, like particularly in the post-9/11 world and era, it was a very, very, very specific kind of statement about yourself that maybe wouldn't have been at other times when it was just, you know, people about American flags. Or they had an FDR picture hanging in their house; or separately, what it meant to have a Mao picture or a Stalin picture in those societies meant something different than in societies where it was much more of a choice.

Speaker 1: You're talking about the sort of emotional resonance being different between Ralph Lauren and a flag pin.

Speaker 0: No, what I'm talking about here, what I think I'm talking about here, is the logic of branding. We have become so used to thinking of it as branding, like the thing corporations are trying to do with it, that even when the symbol is coming out of a non-commercial sphere, a sphere that was understood to be representing very different things about somebody, we almost now sort of see them all on the same plane. You know, when I was a kid, I wore a gold Chai, which is a Jewish symbol.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 0: And I wore that at a time when I was quite religious, to the extent that on the playground I wanted to be a rabbi. And what that meant to me wasn't what it meant to me some years later when I got my first Nike shoes or when I was trying to dress to fit in with other kids, right? Like I was expressing something that was more private. I mean, it was existing publicly too, but it wasn't the same. And I think these are different. And so it's fun because this is not where I thought our conversation was going to 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 I want to get into the public and private spheres here, and maybe a good way to do it is this: we sent an email asking you for an example of something ugly that you thought was good design, and you talked about these ads that used to be on the subway from Dr. Zizmor.

Speaker 1: Or is it Zizmor?

Speaker 0: So can you describe them for, you know, listeners in audio here?

Speaker 1: Yes, Dr. Zizmor 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 chartreuse, orange, lots of rainbows. "Dr. Zizmor 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: signature rainbows and really badly kerned type and terrible vertical and horizontal scaling and bad silhouettes. But they became sort of like the crazy ads of the seventies—"his prices are insane"—part of the tapestry of the New York City subway system. And so they became really familiar, and ultimately, really beloved. Now this is something that's 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—it could have good feelings, it could have bad feelings, again back to the feelings. And in the case of Dr. Zizmor, because he seemed like a nice guy, and there were no scandals, and he seemed to do good work, and he was somewhat inexpensive, and he talked to the populace, people loved these ads. They loved 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 day and age where everything feels so tenuous, taking that familiarity away, even if it's a juice carton, makes people feel really insecure.

Speaker 0: So I want to take it in a slightly different direction. So I was looking at these ads, and I think they're wonderful. And one reason they're wonderful, though ugly and weird and crowded, is that they feel like a person was behind them, not a committee.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 0: They don't feel like they came out of a sophisticated branding agency that had, you know, a kickoff meeting and a scoping meeting. You know, you can feel the sort of bureaucratic energy behind ubiquitous corporate 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 haven't written, in part because I've been afraid of the reaction to it, is that as a newcomer to New York City—I moved two or 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, of course it does; the MTA is not the only transit authority that raises some money through advertising. 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 incredibly egalitarian. It is all strata of society mixing with each other. It is people going in all kinds of places. And it is all happening beneath the glare of these ambulance-chasing attorneys, and Tinder ads, and plastic surgery ads. For a long time, the subway station I would walk into with my kids had an ad for the reboot of The Exorcist above where we would walk in. And it was black and white; it was these two girls' faces, and they're like spitting blood. It was this horrifying, grotesque ad. And I looked into this: the MTA gets about one percent of operating revenue from advertisements. And on the one hand, I know that the Adams 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 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 should not be commercialized in that way. Maybe this should be an 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.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 0: What I love on the New York City subways is sometimes they will use the spaces they use 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 feel, like the enriching of citizenry. You imagine a world where that was the only thing that existed that was, you know, non-utilitarian visuals there. And I think it would 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. They don't pay for most of it.

Speaker 1: You're a visual prisoner.

Speaker 0: Yes. And we used to—what I mean is, if you go back to the fifties and sixties, people worried a lot about how the visual field was being taken over by advertising.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 0: And we've come to accept it in a way that is a little surprising and a little sad, and represents a diminishment of our ambitions for public space of the built environment.

Speaker 1: 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: São Paulo for a while took all their billboards down. 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 Olafur Eliasson, the artist, has a whole series of pieces...

Speaker 1: He did a whole series of pieces of blank billboards, and it's beautiful, no messages, just the white plain billboard in an urban environment, and it's really quite provocative.

Speaker 0: That's so interesting about São Paulo. And I mean, you go to—I mean, I've been to other countries and their 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've begun to see things that are not market-based, like religions, in market terms. And 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.

Speaker 1: We see ads now over urinals in 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.

Speaker 2: You have logos on eggs, on the actual egg!

Speaker 0: 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 a very certain way, resuscitate an argument about beauty. And you've seen it. Donald Trump uses the word "beautiful" more than any president, I think, probably ever. And certainly, his idea of beauty is not my idea of beauty, but he...

Speaker 1: Cares about it. Yeah, there's now even a term for it. Let's not forget Mar-a-Lago face is actually a charm/trend in our culture right now.

Speaker 0: And you know, they are building things and going back to neoclassical architecture in different ways. And it's not just him; it's sort of all the people around him. I thought this from Tucker Carlson, in this clip I'm going to show you, was genuinely interesting.

Speaker 3: This is another third rail of 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 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 like beauty in the hands of some larger force.

Speaker 0: I'm skeptical of the "you're not allowed to talk about this"—it's strange because you're definitely allowed to talk about this. But you do see a move on the right to make beauty become supported as a public goal. I'm curious what you thought of it.

Speaker 1: 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 to the White House, about what he's doing 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 see how that is being protested by the right.

Speaker 0: Well, don't they think they're going to make it more beautiful? Doesn't Donald Trump think his reflecting pool is luminous?

Speaker 1: I don't know anybody that's like, you know, that the Oval Office looks really good now. The person who thinks that is Trump.

Speaker 0: But I mean that very seriously...

Speaker 1: But no, I do too. There's nobody on the right saying, "You know what, let's invest in gold filigree." Nobody is talking about that. That's not a trend that's catching on in any way, thankfully.

Speaker 0: Well, let me make not the argument for what they're doing, but I think the challenge they are proposing that is interesting for liberals and on the left to try to take seriously the right's rediscovery of classical architecture, of Roman columns. The right, because the nature of the modern right in America is much, much more of a reactionary movement, it is able to locate a very clear moment of beauty, which is old things. And in ways where if you read the white nationalist writings, they're explicit about this—you know, what they understand as the European inheritance. And I think that the left—and the term "left" is tricky because obviously, you know, moderates and liberals and others—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 am I to say?

Speaker 1: And it's not binary.

Speaker 0: And it's not binary. And so you have an interesting thing. I do think that the right is doing something interesting in trying to move ideas of beauty back to something more essentially contested in politics. And I'm not sure I've really seen an answer, or even a willingness to argue about it with them among people on 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, well, what visual grammar, what visual language can everybody agree on for that?

Speaker 1: Well, nobody will ever agree. There will never be one way of assessing beauty. But 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 are actually saying is: this is the type of power that's represented. This architecture is representing a certain power that we want to lead.

Speaker 0: 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.

Speaker 1: But 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-a-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 does this represent to them?

Speaker 0: So I think I agree that the set of the tributaries of why we think a thing is beautiful is very complicated. And what you're saying, even at the very beginning, the proportionality and the mathematics. And I mean, get into these things like what is the perfect figure, or you know, the looksmaxxers and the men's movement now are sitting there like measuring the proportional difference 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.

But I take the right as—or at least this part of the right as—even if power is part of it, believing now and having a kind of politics of beauty that I don't think George W. Bush had, that I don't think Mitt Romney had, that I think is a sort of new entry into politics, right? The immediate executive orders on neoclassical or classical architecture. And I guess one of my questions—because I do think people, including on the left (where a lot of the articles about everything becoming ugly that we're talking about are coming from), I don't think people have a feeling that the world is becoming less beautiful to them without wanting 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.

Speaker 1: Right. That's "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. That could be behavior, that could be social structure, that could be architecture, art, music, politics, et cetera. So I think that's all part of it, right? It would be shocking to me if Make America Great Again or the current president was like, "Let's innovate a new style of architecture to represent our future." That's not going to happen.

Speaker 0: So alongside that this new right, which I think is reaching backwards in its design aesthetic, you also have the tech right. We've talked about the Cybertruck a bunch in this conversation, but crypto and software have had a very legible visual language. You have a certain amount of AI, from slop to art, but you do have an 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. Of course, how you think about that as a contestant...

Speaker 0: Because what you think it is communicating, because think it's one faction of design.

Speaker 1: That is apparent now, because I could also point to Apple Park and the beauty of 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 round 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.

Speaker 0: There's always more than what we've been talking about this very much, but a lot of what we talking about, I think in a sometimes sub rosa, sometimes explicit ways, masculine and feminine coded. I mean, Cybertruck is a very male design, say what you will about it. And you're describing 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?

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 0: So do you think about in a sort of modern ways, a kind of answer to what the Mar-a-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 ugly. And 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 garish, because it is vulgar, because it is out of proportion, because it is about power, because it is about intimidation.

Speaker 1: And I'll be very honest. It represents politics that I don't believe in. Yes.

Speaker 0: And so do you think there's an answer to that you do believe? 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?

Speaker 1: 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.

Speaker 0: And I think that's a place to end. So then always, always final question: what are three books you recommend to the audience?

Speaker 1: So I'm giving this a lot of thought. I'm 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 that changed my life. So I'm going to, if that's okay, with your permission.

Okay.

So number one, it's a book of poetry called The Voice That Is Great Within Us. It's by Hayden Carruth, and it is a 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 Olson called Maximus to himself. P.S., I named my dog Maximus. That's number one.

Number two is what I think is one of the greatest love stories of all time, a book written by Gabriel García Márquez called Love in the Time of Cholera, 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 Bloomsday, which is the day in the life of Leopold Bloom that James Joyce wrote about in Ulysses, and took a walking tour of Ireland and went to Sandycove. 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 Roxane Gay. And when I read that book, I fell in love with the author sight unseen, just reading her words, so much so that I reached out to her. I wanted to get her on my podcast. She said no. I tried to stay in touch; she was very squirrelly about it. And then through a mutual friend, she got wind 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 Roxane Gay, that is a wonderful fourth recommendation, a Debbie moment.

Speaker 0: Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Ezra.