If you wanted a creative movement whose logo is a Predator supported by glossy, multicolored toy balloons, London would be its natural launchpad. There are even technical aspects of London – like the relentless machine surveillance – that no other region can match. Where else would something like this emerge nowadays, if not London? London's not so perky and dopey as it was in the miniskirted days of Mary Quant, but it's still London. It must pain them to be praised for being important to us foreigners. I don't believe that the New Aesthetic crowd, who are Britishly reticent and decent and all that, much wants to be branded as a significant avant-garde group. Not being British, I always like to spare the blushes of the British. With the New Aesthetic, they're coming up with something that looks more or less like a weltanschauung. They are focussed and energetic, and some of them are getting famous fast. They do have some strange ideas, but they can't all be crazy. These people are working creatives of Bridle's generation, with their networked tentacles sunk deep in interaction design, literature, fashion and architecture. The New Aesthetic has the "scenius" of London's Silicon Roundabout to support it. He chaired the panel and he did a good job of it. I was glad to see a volunteer for this public labor. To be an art-guru is never an elective office. James Bridle has never yet claimed to be the Andre Breton-style Pope of the New Aesthetic, but in practice, nobody ever asks the central questions of anybody else but him.
James Bridle is the master of that salon. They were fully-briefed and they sounded plausible. Everyone participating in it (for the record, that was James Bridle, Joanne McNeil, Ben Terrett, Aaron Straup Cope, and Russell Davies) had a clear idea of what the concept meant and why it mattered to them. It's exhilarating to see such things attempted, especially in a small auditorium before the straights catch on.
Lush, humanistic, exotic crops will grow from that smoking, ashy techno-rubble of ours, someday. There are ways to make that stark, lava-covered ground artistically fertile and productive. It should be much better acculturated than it is. The New Aesthetic concerns itself with "an eruption of the digital into the physical." That eruption was inevitable. Our own day has those good and sufficient reasons. But they always happen for good and sufficient reasons. Sometimes they're as big and loud as Cubism, sometimes they perish like desert roses mostly unseen. This is the attempted imposition on the public of a new way of perceiving reality. This is one of those moments when the art world sidles over toward a visual technology and tries to get all metaphysical. That's more or less what it is, and although it belongs to a small group of creatives right now, we have every reason to take it, and its prospects, seriously. The New Aesthetic is image-processing for British media designers.
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