Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Native-Tongue t1_j6p45im wrote

Reply to comment by MagicBez in This game is so beautiful and aesthetic that I have revisit it every couple of years by Wonder-Lad

Yeah it’s interesting. Originally(in its new usage) it referred to a vaporwave/pastel visual style. Now it just means literally anything with style. Gen z has co-opted the word for better or for worse. It comes across as moronic until you consider that seemingly 99% of that generations style choices in any media/medium is a rehash of styles from the past 40ish years. The way that vaporwave contains a nostalgia for early digital art I think carried over into “aesthetic” which is just anything that has style, a style that is inevitably a rehash of the past because contemporary consumer culture is in a sad art time loop where actually new things are rarely created, this is all Gen Z knows. So it’s still kind of dumb sounding but language changes for a reason. I’ve found the usage so annoying I’ve tried to rationalize it so that’s my theory.

10

MagicBez t1_j6p4q7q wrote

It's probably that first step that throws me off, how the vaporwave aesthetic came to just be called "aesthetic" like it was the only one and then "aesthetic" moved from that to meaning just...looks pleasing? As best I can tell it now just means "looks stylish", I recently saw an ad for a boardgame which described it as "aesthetic looking" and I think they just meant it looked cool.

...as a further aside I'm also old enough to remember when 2000s style was described as a mash up/pastiche of everything that came before so the fact 20 years later that's still how we're describing the vibe (or aesthetic if you will) is curious - especially as there are still clear differences between the two.

4

Native-Tongue t1_j6p7srh wrote

Yeah I get what you mean. It would be interesting to see it’s earliest usage, it feels like somebody just made a vocab mistake and it unquestioningly became absorbed into youth lingo. In a way it just makes sense to me from a kind of cynical art perspective where, now, any style can be absorbed, flattened, and rendered kind of meaningless when it’s being recycled and beaten to death using the methods which we now most commonly exchange visual information, internet feeds. Vaporwave kind of represents a nostalgia for an internet era when something new or original actually felt possible. I’m having a hard to tying all this together in a really specific way but it’s interesting to consider.

2