Aesthetics, Popular Visual Culture, and Designer Capitalism

While rejecting modernist philosophical aesthetics, the author argues for the use in art education of a current, ordinary-language definition of aesthetics as visual appearance and effect, and its widespread use in many diverse cultural sites is demonstrated. Employing such a site-specific use of aesthetics enables art education to more clearly address the realities of everyday life under designer capitalism, a socio-economy based on the drive to create evermore desire. Aesthetic manipulation is viewed as a primary means to facilitate the smooth operation of this system. The recent craze for Bratz dolls is used to illustrate the centrality of aesthetics to designer capitalism. Finally, the author offers suggestions as to how art education can view consumer products like Bratz as pedagogic opportunities. The kind of aesthetics considered in this article is quite different from the modernist aesthetics that was so influential in art education throughout most of the twentieth century. Modernist aesthetics, as derived principally from Kant and his predecessors, was typically characterized as separate from life, universal, self-sufficient, focused mainly on art and entirely uplifting. It effectively separated fine art from popular culture, seeing the former as quasi spiritual, the later as base [1]. By contrast, this article draws upon how aesthetics is employed outside the specialised areas of art, literature and art education [2]. Aesthetics is viewed in site-specific and social terms – in what has become an ordinary language sense of the word as applied to everyday experience as diverse as sport, consumer goods, plastic surgery, television and so on. I argue that adopting this use of aesthetics is particularly useful for those advancing a visual culture approach to art education [3]. It allows art educators better to deal with the increasing aestheticisation of everyday life under conditions associated with the current development of consumerist capitalism, often called late capitalism [4], or what jagodzinski calls ‘designer capitalism’ [5] where the economy is no longer thought to be based on desire so much as on the drive to continually create evermore desire. I will discuss Bratz dolls as an example. Bratz appeal to their preteen girl market as ‘so cool’ by offering what is arguabley a ‘hooker chic’ aesthetic, and at the same time they offer an empowering identity in part by becoming a consumer [6]. Nevertheless, I will suggest that like all other consumer products, they offer pedagogic opportunities to art educators who take seriously the visual culture of their students.