The aesthetic bankruptcy of corporate culture

[sabotabby]

There's much to detest in the corporate culture of late-stage capitalism, but its failure on an aesthetic basis is something that really fascinates me. Driving home from Niagara-on-the-Lake—a town with some truly lovely architecture—bcholmes and I passed a rather fascinating building. I wish I'd snapped a picture because there's no way I can adequately describe how ugly this building was. It was this sprawling complex with a green roof—not green as in full of plants or carrying an aged patina, but a deliberately bright green roof meant to evoke an aged patina, kind of. Because aged patinas are stately and sophisticated, even when rendered in plastic. It was impossible, at a glance, to look at this building and determine its intended use. It looked halfway between a mega-church and a shopping mall (as I put it, "a perfect symbol for our age") and fully hideous.

I'm currently reading (for class, obviously) Steven R. Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and given how vigorously this book is pushed in our education system, it's a goddamned miracle that I haven't had to read it until now. I'm finding it impenetrable. I say this as someone whose favourite author is James Joyce. But I can't read this. My eyes skim over and bounce off of the page like pebbles on the surface of a lake. There's nothing to grasp on to, just made-up businesspeak and mangled prose. My assigned chapter begins with a quote from Bush and, early on, hits the reader with this abortion of a sentence: "Synergy is the essence of Principle-Centered Leadership."

That is not writing. Someone swallowed jargon and vomited it all over a page, and then a publisher published it because that's how so many people speak (and think) these days.

I'm reminded of the contrast between the writing just before and in the early stages of the Russian Revolution, and the clunky, bureaucratic, heavily stylized prose that followed when Stalin came to power.* This shift is, of course, mirrored in the visual; think of the two impossible architectural projects, Monument to the Third International and Palace of the Soviets. You don't need to know anything about Soviet history to guess which one was designed right before purges were about to happen.

I'm no religious sort, but I remember hearing something—probably from an art history prof—that really stuck in my head about how, at one point in Western history, the tallest and grandest buildings were churches, and now they're bank towers. Think of the Gothic cathedral and the mosque versus the big glass box. Today, we can barely imagine what an inspiring building ought to look like; the best we can do is crumple up a piece of paper and call it architecture.

It's the same with prose. We're trained to believe that graceless, clunky writing with a maximum number of "impactfuls" and "bottom-linings" thrown in will somehow make us better, effective people. I don't think it does. The worst thing about aesthetics is that they come out of nurture, not nature, so if you're trained to think via ungainly prose, your very thoughts become ungainly over time. Remember, the people who crashed the economy were all about synergy.

I don't, of course, expect that every book be written in clear, graceful language, any more than I expect every building to be beautiful. But I do wonder why we promote rather than bury this sort of aesthetic. It says something ugly about our culture. How do you inspire anyone to believe in anything with buildings, and books, like these.

(Shorter sabotabby: But I don't wanna do my homework.)

* The best analysis of how and why this happened that I've come across can be found in Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Highly recommended.

Comments

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

Was the building the Crossroads centre? I couldn't find any pics online but it's a giant complex that's made to look like it's several types of building (row houses, office building, church) all stuck together.

[sabotabby]

No, though that is hideous too. This one, yes?

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

yes, that one! though that pic doesn't give a good sense of how weird the building looks from the outside. on the inside it's quite pretty, i went to a wedding there once.

[sabotabby]

Well, the house parts aren't bad. I could see how it could be nice inside.

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

yeah it was scary when considering their actual beliefs and such, but an okay place to have a gathering.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

who's the one giving head?

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

Pretty sure it's Sabrina, but it might be Chrissy, I'm often quite distracted at that point ;) It's from American Psycho.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Oh, it looked like it came from some queer thing. I was expecting a dude. Oh well!

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Ha, thought you'd link the Gehry but you went right for the Libeskind! Well played!

Gehry really enrages me. It's anti-architecture. It's a three-dimensional oxymoron. The eye and the body can make no sense of the space. Everything is frustrated. Not to valorize the preciousness of "a pattern language", they have a point - architecture is about human occupation, human purposes, and Gehry is the architect of the post-human. Even in his early work, before he discovered crumpled paper and computer aided design, his stuff looked like giant stretched prisons. It's the latest version of the kind of ideological modernism that demanded flat roofs even in climates that made them nonsensical, because pitched roofs are the roofs of the peasants and the peasants are an inherently conservative class, or whatever it was.

Or, he's one of the architects of the post-human - but at least people like Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas manage to make their buildings look like giant mechas or space needles that are coming down on us from some monstrously-scaled brobdingagian inhuman future. They have monumentality, even if it's the monumentality of the hecatomb. Gehry just seems to think it's funny.



There's Orwell's thing on how bad writing is fascist, but I'll have to dig up a tortured bon mot by Adorno. Or as I should say, ping you with my drill down into the low-hanging fruit of the content. We can loop-back over the deliverables.

[sabotabby]

Well, I hate Gehry worse, for all of the reasons you mention and then some (his anti-accessible redesign of the Art Gallery of Ontario still sticks in my craw, because only a fucking sadist takes wheelchair ramps out), but if I pick on Gehry all the time, people might think I don't hate the other starchitects. And they're all quite despicable. It's like, if you're an architect, you can be a) unemployed, b) throwing up malls and cookie-cutter houses for some company, or c) one of three people in the world who is allowed to express their, er, "creativity." Which is why our modern landscape is so atrocious.

pitched roofs are the roofs of the peasants and the peasants are an inherently conservative class, or whatever it was.

Hahahah. Ohdearlord. I should have picked on Gehry. He really is the worst of them.

Or as I should say, ping you with my drill down into the low-hanging fruit of the content. We can loop-back over the deliverables.

You have a talent for this. I'm a little frightened.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

The AGO is boring, more than anything. So much money and what does he do with it? A giant trout? You can't even see it properly from the street! At least the back side has a cool shade of metallic blue. If the trout had been at the back, at least we could have taken a good glance at it from the park. It's all wrong.

I adore his stairways but they seem just tacked on.

Also, special hate for Gehry: Jean Chrétien organized that he would get his Canadian citizenship back, which he had renounced years ago, somehow without having to pay Canadian taxes.

[sabotabby]

He also got rid of the café that a dude I used to know designed and that I thought was a beautiful part of the building, all open and airy and such. The new café isn't as good.

Also, special hate for Gehry: Jean Chrétien organized that he would get his Canadian citizenship back, which he had renounced years ago, somehow without having to pay Canadian taxes.

Oh, ewww.

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

Holy Shit, reading that Covey shit. It's like pop-capitalist-post-structuralism for the masses who love all that NLP crap!

And looking at your last link pictures reminds me of this quote from Terence McKenna:

"You know, there’s a lot of talk about cultural death and disenfranchisement, and it’s usually couched in terms of some happy naked people in the rainforest, or in Tajikistan making their rugs, or milking their camels or something, and isn’t it too bad that their culture is being blown up and traded in for mall culture and shopping by remote; but in fact, all culture is being destroyed. All culture is being sold down the river by the sorts of people who want to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse! And that’s not the victory of somebody’s culture over somebody else’s culture; nobody ever had a culture like that! That’s just the victory of schlockmeisterism and crapola over good taste and good sense!"

Somehow I ended up on God Building, today (probably when researching Bogdanov), and it seems like Lunacharsky and Bogdanov and their kind seemingly "got it" and wanted to tap into that aesthetic sense (along with all the humanity behind it), but Lenin squashed it in the name of an Atheist Non-Religion Religion.

Your description of the building reminded me of the McMansions and the horrid evil things that they were with the vinyl siding and back but masonry front-face... Facade, keeping up appearances, but it's not like we're fucking idiots you jagoffs, you have a shit house like the rest of us, and you put a goddamn fugly faux-brick on the front to try to keep up your nouveau rich facades.

It's disgusting. It's hipsterism in every facet of modern culture, it's the abortion of style in the name of style, it's the mish-mash of hip-hop without any taste, it is devoid of meaning it is the crushing of the human soul into one stone cold diamond that goes "bling!" and then dies a lifeless death. Enjoy your own supernova, you tasteless American gits.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

The fun thing with vinyl siding: It burns awfully well.

[sabotabby]

Y'know, on that same drive we were talking about Casablanca, and I was thinking, hey, Western culture does have some valuable things in it, and how is it that there can be three Transformers movies but when was the last time Hollywood put out something like Casablanca. It's not even a populist "what the people demand" kind of thing, because no one actually wants vinyl siding if there's a choice.

[the_axel]

My favourite summary of contemporary capitalism: "The public want what the public get".

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

Bang, you put your finger right on it; this is something that bothers me greatly.
People have always complained about the debasement of their language as it changed; just as they have always compalined about Kids These Days.
Perhaps 1100 years ago Anglo-Saxons held forth about this ugly newfangled Middle English.
But it seems to me that this is something different, and not always encountered as a language develops; that what we are seeing is language designed to obscure meaning, to deflect responsibility (and therfore blame), and to blur and soften its impact to the point where it really becomes more and more difficult to comprehend, not less.
I don't need to recommend Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" to you, you've probably read it a dozen times; but everyone who hasn't taken it to heart should be beaten about the head and shoulders with a copy of the essay, printed onto sheet lead and rolled up tightly.
Orwell wrote over 60 years ago; since then there have been at least three generations of brains passed through the education system, each one learning to write more crappily and less inspiringly than the last.
It really is no wonder why our culture grows uglier and less inspiring every year - to the point where a departure from it becomes harder and harder to even imagine (another very good point Orwell made with his construciton of Newspeak).

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

But we've had George Carlin

[sabotabby]

There's a richness to the slang of Kids These Days. I can joke around about it and lol ironic l33t-speak, but it creates new words for new meanings and plays with language and I can't see it as a bad thing that's destroying Proper English. But business-speak is different. It exists, as you (and Orwell) say, to obscure meaning rather than to create it.

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

It's sadder when you start to understand what the things are talking about. Like, oh yeah, synergy!

I did like Tariq Nassim's Black Swan even though it's entire point was "no one knows anything and all of their theories are bullshit" and it goes on for 300 pages.

Xerox is also the best go-to example for everything since they are the company that create a market and dominated it (1960s), ignored competition and disruptive innovation (1970), developed new products without knowing what to do with them (1980), attempted nuisance suits (1980s) and then just screwed the pooch (onward).

The last term is a favorite in management courses.

[sabotabby]

Screwed the pooch is probably one of the few business-isms I find useful. The rest, though? Not so much.

[sabotabby]

LOL. I crack up every single time I see that. It's such a shitty building. I like their sci-fi gift shop, though.

[sabotabby]

AWWW NO I LOVE THE SPACE NEEDLE. When it fogs up it looks like a goddamned UFO.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

That's awful. I'm sorry.

[ironed_orchid]

Perth seems to be a big fan of the crumpled up silver paper look.

[sabotabby]

My condolences.

[ironed_orchid]

Last night there was an earthquake in Melbourne and today on facebook I saw this (It's the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and when in Melbourne I usually spend time there because they have great exhibitions, but fuck it's ugly.)

[sabotabby]

Bahahaha.

[baroncognito.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to remember the last building I marveled at.

I can't say that I find the big glass buildings to be aesthetically void. Yes, if you isolate one, it's dull, but when you get number of them together and construct a skyline, interesting things will happen. The ugly buildings are simply a different texture on the skyline.

But large buildings outside of a city are rarely happy, because buildings are social creatures.

[sabotabby]

I think the first time I saw a cluster of big glass buildings reflecting the water, I thought it was kind of cool. Now they're everywhere, though. It's not even impossible to design a non-ugly skyscraper, but no one bothers. They just slap up the glass towers and know that people will buy in.

[seanmonster.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of a line from 30 Rock:

Jack Donaghy: We have to synergize backward overflow.
Liz Lemon: What?
Jack Donaghy: You have to fire ten percent of your staff.

[sabotabby]

*sob*