Bauhaus, by science or magic
Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are funding a new aesthetic:
We're more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works? Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So, what should the future actually look like? There will not be singular answers to these, but we are very interested in attempts to answer the questions. In particular, we would like to fund some artists who are thinking about them.
I am, by default, a fan of anything Patrick and (to a lesser extent) Tyler place their money towards. First and foremost, this seems like a better way to allocate resources than the null hypothesis.
But I am confused by their framing of Bauhaus as a primarily aesthetic movement, and it perhaps illustrates why this risks feeling like a feint at vibes more than a serious exercise in cultural renewal.
It is worth reading the original Bauhaus manifesto by Walter Gropius, which still rings true today:
The ultimate goal of all art is the building! The ornamentation of the building was once the main purpose of the visual arts, and they were considered indispensable parts of the great building. Today, they exist in complacent isolation.
Bauhaus was founded not as a patronage project but as a response to a cluster of structural failures: mass industrialization lowering the dignity and coherence of objects, labor becoming increasingly alienated from capital, and the widening stratification between domestic, civic, and commercial life. It was an attempt to re-embed design, craft, and meaning directly into the machinery of modern production. This is not dissimilar to today:
- Globalization and large language models have collapsed the economic floor for creative and artisan labor;
- software and social platforms have dissolved locality, replacing place-bound civic life with abstract global interfaces;
- the physical substrate of daily life—housing, tools, infrastructure, education—is increasingly mediated by opaque technical and financial systems that are fully legible only to those who are deeply embedded in them.
A more earnest attempt to replicate the Bauhaus would exist not by funding the outermost civilizational layer, to steal Brand's metaphor (fashion), but instead to more deeply examine and embed people into the infrastructure and governance of which our consumptive lives are downstream.