The Useful Disorder of Beauty

Hegel, Lifestyle Culture, and the Aesthetic Illiteracy of the Present

There is a particular kind of comedy — the tragicomic, the slow-burn kind, the kind you laugh at only after you’ve already suffered through it — in watching a civilization misunderstand beauty. We inherited one of the most ambitious aesthetic systems ever produced: Hegel’s vast, deliriously confident attempt to explain why human beings make art at all. And what did we do with this inheritance? We turned “aesthetics” into a lifestyle category, the intellectual equivalent of an oat-milk flat white. An entire culture skim-read one sentence of the Phenomenology of Spirit and concluded that the correct philosophical response was to buy a linen apron, a Marvis toothpaste tube, and an “aspirational” Danish lamp. The contemporary subject now confuses mint-flavoured packaging with metaphysics, as if whitening toothpaste constituted an aesthetic stance. You can almost picture Hegel wandering through a modern concept store, pausing in front of a €175 concrete candle, after stepping over a curated pile of Officine Universelle Buly monogrammed brushes, and muttering (in Swabian despair): “This is not what I meant.” Although, to be fair, muttering in despair was always one of his signature moves.

For Hegel, beauty was not décor. Beauty was not an atmospheric supplement. Beauty was the sensuous appearance of freedom — the moment when spirit, exhausted from skulking around in abstraction, stepped into form and became visible. This was not a compliment to the artwork but a threat: beauty must reveal something. Beauty must tell on us. Beauty must expose the shape of our interiority, even the parts we pretend are minimalistic. And how far we have fallen. Contemporary aesthetic culture has little to do with revelation and everything to do with readability. What is demanded of beauty today is not meaning but recognizability — not the unveiling of spirit, but the smooth, instantaneous communication of taste. Aesthetic experience has been trimmed down into a portable language of signs: the exposed-brick coffee shop, the gallery-wall apartment, the strategically placed stack of Phaidon books nobody reads, and above all, the mass-produced art print purchased from a website whose primary achievement is matching one’s sofa. An entire generation now believes that aesthetic literacy begins and ends with a framed line drawing bought during a 20% discount code.

Where Hegel sought a unity of inwardness and outwardness, we seek only a legible grid that photographs well. A person’s aesthetic is no longer a perceptual signature; it is a PowerPoint presentation of their identity. And a badly animated one at that.

I sometimes think boredom is the last surviving proof that we have a consciousness at all. In a world where everything must stimulate, pacify, or entertain, boredom becomes a small act of rebellion — a refusal to be impressed by surfaces. I’ve written before that boredom is a mirror, a kind of unlicensed psychoanalysis. Hegel, who possessed a heroic tolerance for tedium (and inflicted much of it on others), understood that sitting with a difficult work is already an act of freedom. Boredom forces the eyes inward; algorithmic culture, on the other hand, forces the eyes everywhere except inward.

Charm has become our replacement for beauty. Charm is beauty that has been drained of blood, purified of difficulty, trained to smile. Charm makes no demands; charm flatters. Charm is the reason so many people decorate their homes like lifestyle catalogues and call it “taste.” Charm is why galleries now sell objects that resemble enlarged jewellery display props and insist they are sculptures “about materiality.” Charm is why someone will hang an “abstract print” above their bed and call it a relationship with art. Charm is far easier to survive in than clarity — clarity wounds. Charm seduces. The world is drowning in charm.

And the art world has not helped. Many galleries have become laundromats for aesthetic posturing: sterile spaces selling decorative nothings with conceptual price tags. Anodized aluminium rectangles marketed as “meditations on presence,” blobs of resin presented as “questions of embodiment.” Hegel, I suppose, would not call them symbolic; he would call them confused. They reveal nothing except the terror of meaninglessness dressed as minimalism. It is astonishing how many objects today are sold as art simply because they are expensive, unthreatening, and easily photographed.

Hegel’s system endures because it does not flatter us. It demands too much. Art, in his view, was not about pleasure but about consciousness — the heavy work of making spirit visible. The Greeks, with their too-perfect bodies and too-perfect tragedies, represented for him that fleeting moment when humanity briefly succeeded in giving form to freedom. Since then, we have lived in the long hangover. Romanticism arrived with its tremors and its confessions, and we inherited its inward turn without any of the metaphysical backbone. Where Hegel saw subjectivity wrestling with itself, we see moodiness presented as depth. Self-analysis has been rebranded as aesthetic sensitivity. Interiority has been flattened into a series of “relatable” emotional slideshows. We mistake curated vulnerability for intimacy and lighting design for sincerity.

This is where lifestyle culture enters — not as frivolity, but as philosophical collapse. Lifestyle is the modern version of Hegel’s symbolic art: forms straining toward meanings they cannot deliver. The self becomes a tower of signifiers — the apartment that promises coherence, the wardrobe that promises identity, the caption that promises intelligence. None of these reveal spirit; they merely perform its absence. Everything gestures; nothing discloses. It is no coincidence that the most widespread fear now is the fear of being misunderstood. People who live in curated aesthetics cannot bear opacity. Opacity threatens their brand strategy. And yet opacity — the refusal to clarify oneself to the world — is the birthplace of all meaning.

I recognize this impulse in myself. I have catalogued fragments with the devotion of someone who knows that memory is erotic, that eroticism rescues what history forgets. I have written lists as if they were lifelines. But attention is not aestheticization. Attention is confrontation. Aestheticization is anesthesia. The distinction is moral, and like most moral distinctions, it is deeply unfashionable.

And perhaps this is the true crisis: not beauty itself, but the collapse of the internal architecture that allows attention to become form. We speak of “aesthetics” with the breezy confidence of people who have never once examined their own perception. We forget that to construct anything meaningful is first to hollow out space — to clear a path through one’s own noise. The form is not decorative. The form is the event.

Style, in this sense, is nothing more than attention leaving a trace. It is the choreography of one’s inner weather. Most people, when they speak of style, mean likeness: sameness disguised as personality. Coherence without consciousness. But coherence, like charm, is a form of cowardice. Taste suffers a similar fate. What passes for taste now is merely appetite — the restless cataloguing of wants. But taste is the intelligence of feeling — the instinctive architecture by which we sort the significant from the trivial. Taste is dangerous precisely because it cannot be performed. Preference is safe; taste is diagnostic.

And so boredom becomes one of the last remaining forms of truth. People treat boredom as an aesthetic failure, but boredom is a mode of consciousness — perhaps the last one we possess. Most of the art worth engaging with now is boring — not because it fails, but because it refuses to entertain. Duration, not pleasure, has become radical.

Certainty unsettles me far more than ignorance. Certainty has no elasticity, no humor, no air. Intelligence is tedious when it cannot be tender; stupidity, at least, has room to breathe. What I value is the person who burns slightly at the edges — who refuses comfort, who stands at an angle to the world. Madness, in this sense, is not pathology but fidelity: fidelity to perception, to solitude, to the unbearable weight of being alive without softening one’s edges.

And perhaps this is where beauty must go next: toward discomfort, toward difficulty, toward the refusal to please. The aesthetics of the present suffer not from excess but from politeness. Even transgression has been domesticated into aesthetic branding. Difficulty, however, remains honest. Difficulty cannot be consumed. Beauty, if it is to matter, must resist efficiency. It must resist charm. Resist coherence. Resist the pressure to be flattering. Beauty must return to what it always was: crisis — a controlled fracture in perception, a brief disorientation that forces the self into clarity.

Only then can it reclaim what Hegel understood as its task: the appearance of freedom — trembling, uncompromising, and entirely uninterested in being liked. And perhaps that is enough.

*For transparency: I, too, have been seduced. I own a personalized hairbrush. I own an offensively priced candle. I have no moral high ground, only receipts.