The Zen in the Aesthetic Blog
It was one day last summer that I said, “enough!” and put my foot down. I had gotten fed up with some discussion on tumblr or other, and decided that, for my own good, it was time that I insulate myself from the “mainstream” and start what is known as an “aesthetic blog.”
I’ll admit part of the desire was to cultivate a social-media presence that would be palatable to potential employers and my mother. I thought, why not kill two birds with one stone? There’s nothing objectionable about typography, architecture, fashion, photography, flowers, etc., basically, the “nice” from “sugar, spice and everything nice.”1
So I set out to work. I unfollowed blogs that I had followed long ago out of political aims. I unfollowed most meme blogs and most of those “funny video blogs.” Of course, I kept a few around if only because I sometimes liked to break up the aesthetic with something funnier and perhaps a bit more “crass,”2 and to share with my friends and keep up to date on the latest content that the tumblr hive-mind is producing. To replace what I had given up, I followed dozens upon dozens of blogs that focused on fashion, photography, typography, architecture, design, and more.
What resulted was a concerted effort to bear my new blog. I began with a sprint, reblogging over 200 new posts daily and adding countless more to my queue, to get me off and running. Shortly, people began to notice: I received compliments about my new aesthetic choice from the most unlikely sources, and began to grow my follower count ever so slowly.
But curiously, what began as a way to bolster my presence on social media and show employers that I am Hip™ with Social Media® evolved into a way to curate a collection for myself. I slowly lost all pretense that what I was doing was for my career (though I hope it might help me some day) and began to fall in love with the process. I downloaded new extensions (particularly XKit) that made my work easier; I began to use the queue more and more. I eventually came to a system where I post either 10 or 20 times a day from my queue (varying on whether or not I have exams or papers due) which I try to keep as close as I can to 300 (the maximum).
My blog list began to grow and soon my dashboard became almost exclusively other “aesthetic blogs,” who reblog me and I reblog back. My friends make occasional appearances, as do the few other blogs I kept around, but for the most part, every three or four days I get to go on an exciting adventure and see what I’m going to be reblogging today.
And while I sometimes wish I had a more tailored focus, such as being a fashion or typography blogger, I appreciate that what I do is trans-genre, trans-medium and trans-temporal. There is something to be said about seeing a 1920s advertisement page alongside contemporary Korean fashion alongside a picture of lilies. Surprisingly, the three don’t clash. Hardly anything I post ever clashes, and I don’t mean that as a compliment to myself. Instead, the items on my blog sit in conversation with each other, a conversation about what is beautiful across genres and mediums, across time and space. The conversation is a conversation about aesthetics at its most pure level.
What began as a project to boost my professional image nine months ago soon became something more. It became a place to post what I thought was worth looking at in the broadest sense of the term. It became my own way to explore the world of beauty and what it means to live within it.
Photo by Daisuke Mizushima; the model is Kentaro Sakaguchi. You can follow my aesthetic blog at retropostmodernsim.tumblr.
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In the interest of giving credit where it is due, I took this idea from a friend who had done something similar. I thought it was strange at first, but I have quickly come to love it. ↩
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I use this word with much hesitation. “Crass” implies heavily that something is not worthwhile nor “refined,” a word which is steeped in so many implications of high culture that I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I maintain that my blog covers the beautiful in everything from high culture to low culture and everything in between, from the past to the present. But for lack of a better term I use “crass” – perhaps to mean something that is more “mindless” than “mindful.” ↩
