Why is a banana on the wall worth a million dollars? Why does a toilet in the middle of a museum become a masterpiece of art? What makes people think that fallen sunglasses on the floor of the MoMa are a hidden artwork? ^ScT1kKdjM It all comes down to aesthetics and the value that people ascribe to certain asethetics. The value that people ascribe to artifacts is dependent on how far up the ladder of understanding they can take on the artifact itself. Every artifact that can be interpreted by humans has a ladder of understanding towards knowing it’s true, whole nature. The understanding is contextual dependent on the person and what first steps the artifact offers to people making an ascension attempt. For things that we are intimately familiar with, it’s natural for us to ascend the steps quickly and there are few things hiding in the deep, waiting for us to toy with the meaning of. On the other hand, those that we don’t understand, that are unfamiliar to us, that are strange and bewildering yet seductive and beguiling, are the ones we struggle most with ascending the ladder. For man-made artifacts, the ladder is carefully constructed by the creator. It’s why most creatives are able to grasp the entire mosaic of the universe they’re trying to introduce in their minds or in an interconnected network of their working documents but have to spend a lot more time polishing it up, scaffolding the ladder for others besides themselves to climb. Their minds have shortcut scaffolding that makes it easy to ascend to the top because the creation emerged from there, so their ultimate task is extracting the key infrastructure from their mind and embedding it into the artifact itself for others to take advantage of. Go too far and it becomes overwhelming and laughable — it’s why you can overexplain a joke or a painting. The joy and fulfillment of intimately understanding an artifact through your own mental gymnastics comes from that journey just like coming to a conclusion on your own is far more effective and long-standing than someone telling you what to think. We have to form the mental scaffolding in our own heads that makes it easy for us to come to the ultimate conclusion rather than following someone else’s scaffolding. The purpose of polishing and setting up hints at the infrastrcture that was used to create the piece is that it gives viewers a hint at what directions to turn and what geometries to try. Sharing thoughts is like a universal construction project. Each our minds is a palace of memories, ideas, and opinions. Each piece on display has been formed inevitably from the experiences, content, and people underlying them. When we produce works into the outside world, we give a picture, one of the finished product, and a starter kit for others to attempt. They may turn it into something completely different starting from the starter kit or they may arrive ast something close to the original. It’s a compounding, exponential explosion of artifacts of meaning that coalesce into meainginful relationships and objects. Sometimes infrastructure becomes canon, like starter pokemon for our lives. We follow these templates for most of life, coming to the conclusions set forth in the handbook, following the plot lines that we’re told to follow to become the X at the end of the handbook. Yet in that path, we see so little of the world, so little of life. We’re granted a small slice of what is right with no freedom to explore, to play, to piddle. The love and genuine unbounded curiosity that emerges from a fundamental seek for aesthetic is where we become intimately familiar with the freedom of our minds. Of having a tool that allows us to meta-program and think orders of magnitude above our realities. Of seeking beauty for the sake of beauty and condensing that beauty into an artifact that can be manipulating and conceptualized at a glance, a form of translation and compression that makes something bearable for the world to lay eyes upon. The key is making the translation as lossless as possible. but on a spectrum where it’s not too overwhelming to take in at once, It’s likethe perfect balance between dense piece of bread and a bread that feels like air ^Ru-nc7nCC questions how might we increase the propensity for people to understand aesthetics, to be free to seek aesthetic for the sake of aesthetic and connecting it back in a way that people understand rather than for capitalistic desire?