Observations on Style and Other Discomforts

Notes on: Crisis of Aesthetic Expectations, Boredom, and the Refusal to Please

Modern aesthetics remains in dominated by a tired ideal: beauty. As if the purpose of art were to soothe, to charm — to “deliver something pleasing” to the senses in the same way science is assumed to “deliver truth” to the mind. But this is a misreading, both of science and of art. Science is not only about truth; it is about process, structure, precision. Art is not about beauty. It is a mode of attention — a deep, often inconvenient consciousness. To insist that art “say” something beautiful is to mistake its function entirely. Art discloses. It cuts into the surface of things. It reveals the silent as perceptible.

We speak of construction, but to construct anything meaningful is first to expose space — to hollow out what is hidden, to make room for perception. A work of art is not always a statement but always a gesture, not an answer but an atmosphere. The form is not decorative. The form is the event. (This applies to all mediums of perception.)

Aesthetic experience continues to be mistaken for taste, as if taste were simply the sum of individual cravings and sensory tendencies. But taste, at its core, is not subjective — or at least not merely. Taste is the intelligence of feeling. It governs our reactions not only to paintings or prose, but to people, to decisions, to ideas. There is such a thing as visual taste, emotional taste, even moral taste. Some have taste in the structuring of thought; others in the calibration of intimacy. Few have both. Taste is not systematic, but it is not random either. It reveals a logic - a rhythm of mind, a consistency.

Style, then, is the visible trace of this logic. It is not fashion, but the means by which one’s attention imprints itself onto matter. Style is change made visible. It is the way perception becomes form. And to be conscious of style is to be conscious of one’s historical position — to know that every gesture belongs to a lineage, that every mark is a response, however oblique, to time.

I do not care whether someone is clever. Intelligence, on its own, is tedious. It is not something I admire so much as something I notice - like a flickering light in a room full of noise. What matters more is what people do with their intelligence - whether they can be tender with it. Intelligence is not a virtue but a tool, useful only in moments of crisis. In the flow of life, stupidity is just as valuable. Sometimes it is even more so - a kind of freedom from knowing too much. I like the disorientation of not knowing — it means I’m in the presence of something larger than me. It reminds me that the world exceeds my understanding.

There are people I find myself drawn to: not because they’re brilliant or charming, but because they burn. They stand alone. They refuse comfort. There’s something in them that gives me permission to do the same. Madness, in this sense, is not pathology but fidelity — to perception, to solitude, to the unbearable weight of being alive without softening the edges.

I have noticed how often I watch others to detect their limits, as if to map the perimeter of their being. But obsession is a narrowing force. It shrinks the world. It makes it hard to see what is still possible — in others, and in myself. The more I try to understand everyone, the less I seem to be present in my own experience. Perhaps I would be more myself if I understood less of what people meant, if I consumed less of what they produced, if I smiled less, spoke with fewer flourishes.

The problem is not attention, but what we give our attention to. And nowhere is this more evident than in how we think about boredom. People dismiss things as boring as if that were the final judgment, as if boredom were an aesthetic flaw rather than a mode of consciousness. But boredom is not failure — it is a mirror. It reveals the rhythms of our own focus. Schopenhauer, rightly, placed boredom alongside pain as one of life’s great afflictions. Pain for those who lack; boredom for those who have. A cruel symmetry. In a culture of overstimulation, boredom may be the last honest response.

Most of the art worth engaging with now is boring. Not because it fails, but because it resists our need to be entertained. The demand that art divert us is a capitulation to comfort. It disarms art’s capacity to rupture. Art that entertains too easily becomes advertisement. Perhaps what is radical now is not beauty but duration — not pleasure but persistence.

And writing? I don’t write to say something. I write to allow something to exist outside of me, in a form that resists completion. A text is not a message. It is an object. I want what I write to affect others — but not in any particular way. There is no correct response. If I do it well, the piece will belong more to its readers than to me.

Every aesthetic stance today is a form of resistance. And so I ask myself: what is the radicalism that belongs to my temperament? Not the one I wish I had, but the one that moves through me already. Maybe it’s the radicalism of stepping back. Of refusing noise. Of making space. Of writing without resolution. Of choosing, again and again, to remain difficult — not for the sake of provocation, but because difficulty is honest.

I have no desire to simplify. I want to stay sharp. I want to stay uncertain. I want to remain at the edge of clarity, where the only thing I can trust is the feel of the language — and my own refusal to be seduced by beauty.

*Not to be mistaken for the current usage of “aesthetic,” which too often refers to a curated moodboard of appetites. What is meant here is closer to Hegel’s trembling Idea — not its flattened, lifestyle derivative.