shutterstocktilialucida.
tilialucida/Shutterstock
We locate beautiful items quicker than less appealing ones.
A perfectly imperfect tea bowl.
Zen Rial/Moment via Getty Images
‘Wabi’ and ‘sabi’ are Japanese words with long histories, but they are rarely used together in the way Western designers have come to use the term.
T.J. Thomson
Camera rolls reveal how photography is transforming in the smartphone era.
Influencers have started filming themselves shopping for supplies, prepping food, refilling containers and organizing their pantries.
Valeriy_G/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Maybe you can’t have a designer kitchen. But you can still beautify your bulk food storage.
Investment in public parks can help reduce crime.
Peter Titmuss/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
People may think that green spaces often hide criminals. On the contrary, there is evidence they contribute to reducing crime.
The bodies in Lizzo’s video aren’t chiseled like the Greek statues seen in museums.
YouTube/Lizzo Music
The classical tradition has long excluded anyone who wasn’t white. But a succession of Black female artists have attempted to broaden these ossified boundaries.
Not so funny: a male Love Island contestant said he disliked ‘fake’ women.
ITV Plc
A woman’s right to use fillers and have plastic surgery was a topic of discussion on the show after a male contestant alluded that he found women who used such enhancements ‘fake’.
Andrew Jackson
Pristine and beautiful or black and dirty? As bushfires become more frequent and we look to Indigenous fire control practices, it is time to reconsider our attitudes to burnt earth.
@AnnastaciaMP/Twitter
Pastel colours and serif fonts: is Annastacia Palaszczuk trying to be an Instagram influencer?
Infrastructure as art: Jacob van Ruisdael, ‘Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede,’ c. 1670.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Are facilities that produce necessities like energy and clean water doomed to be ugly? Not when artists and landscape architects help design them.
There’s a creeping conformity taking place on the web.
Mint Images via Getty Images
Design bloggers have long had creeping suspicion of a more monolithic web, so a team of researchers decided to analyze the aesthetics of nearly 10,000 websites.
Students wear Guy Fawkes masks during a protest on November 5 in Hong Kong.
Jerome Favre/EPA
From Chile to Lebanon and Iraq to Hong Kong, the same masks have become a common language to register dissent.
‘Psychedelic,’ an image created by the algorithm AICAN.
Ahmed Elgammal
An algorithm named AICAN has been ‘taught’ the entire canon of Western art history – and now produces, titles and sells works of its own.
MaximP/Shutterstock
The number of people going under the knife for a big bum is increasing – but it carries the highest risk of death in any cosmetic surgery.
Take off time.
Kirsty O'Connor/PA Wire
The changing aesthetics of protest allow many more voices to be heard.
Detail from Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anmatyerr people.
Yam awely 1995
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
150 x 491 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of the Delmore Collection, Donald and Janet Holt 1995 © Emily Kam Kngwarray.
Today, beauty counts for little in the judgement of works of art. But our felt experience of beauty connects us with an object’s maker, revealing a pure moment of humanity.
Tommy Wiseau clutches a football in ‘The Room,’ the 2003 film he wrote, produced and starred in.
Wiseau Films
Sometimes a work of art is characterized by a string of failures, but nonetheless ends up being a gorgeous freak accident of nature.
‘The Dictator’ (2012) by Sacha Baron-Cohen plays on the fact that kitsch is used by dictators and fundamentalists to redefine our world.
Zennie Abraham/Flickr
Kitsch has slowly become the main cultural reference for all that surrounds us, and thrives in propaganda.
A fern repeats its pattern at various scales.
Michael
Fractals are patterns that repeat at increasingly fine magnifications. They turn up in the natural world and in artists’ work. Research suggests they contribute to making something aesthetically appealing.
Johanna Altmann / Shutterstock.com
Whether the ubiquity of fiction has devalued truth or enhanced morality has been in doubt for over 2,000 years.