Radical Aesthete

Definition

The radical aesthete is Kevin Melchionne's term for the person who can actually live in a work of art: "it is possible to inhabit the Glass House, but obviously one must be a special sort of person whom I shall term a 'radical aesthete'" (p. 230). The figure is defined by three features. (1) Priority of aesthetic pleasure: the radical aesthete "gives to the search for aesthetic pleasure more importance than most people and is perfectly satisfied to live in ways that others perceive as dreadfully uncomfortable, even inhuman" (p. 230). (2) Rule-following habitation: to live in a work of art "one must respect it as a designed product, that is, one must live according to its rules" — not moving furniture, not adding objects, keeping mess at bay; "the respectful occupant must be a curator of sorts, preserving the house while living in it" (pp. 229–230). (3) The perfectly habituated body: the radical aesthete's "repertoire of habits" both does everything a home requires and does it "in a way that respects and reflects the artistic integrity of the space"; in a hyperorganized environment, "design leads and habit follows," the body is "implicated in the idealized order," and the occupant's pleasure is the embodied — "one might say, 'synaesthetic'" — sense "of being inside, indeed, part of the composition" (p. 231). Philip Johnson is the figure's near-incarnation: "he gives to the search for aesthetic pleasure more importance than most people," he "inhabits the house in perfect harmony with its severe rules, which, after all, are presumably his own" — and, crucially, "he did not design the house for anyone but himself" (p. 230). The radical aesthete is thus not a universal model but a limit case whose domestic practice explains how ordinary living-in-a-house is "an environmental art."

Key Thinkers

• Kevin Melchionne — the concept's author (1998/2006): the term, the three features, and the sociological distribution (below).
• Philip Johnson — the figure's real-world candidate and its doubt (not yet paged — see log): the self-declared embodiment ("dreadfully uncomfortable, even inhuman"), whose standing "it scarcely matters" to verify, since the point is to "sketch out the domestic practice of this special person – a limit case of sorts" (p. 230).
• Stanley Abercrombie — the position's negative definition (not yet paged — see log): the theorist who insists "we cannot live in art or even in a 'white cube'" — the radical aesthete is the counter-example Abercrombie's dictum excludes (p. 228).

Related Concepts

• glass-house — the figure's proving ground: the house "celebrated as great architecture" yet "sneered at for being unlivable" (pp. 228–229).
• hyperorganized-environment — the figure's habitat: the environment where "the house is a spectacle to which the inhabitant must adjust" and neatness "would have to be perfectly habituated" (pp. 231–232).
• habit — the figure's medium: the habit-repertoire "fully responsive to the organizational and aesthetic terms of inhabited space" (p. 231); the inversion of habit's usual direction (design orders habit, not habit design).
• aesthetic-experience — the figure's reward: "Pleasure resides in the implication of the body in an aesthetically pleasing scheme, not just experience of space as an aesthetically pleasing visual field" (p. 231).
• art-of-domesticity — the figure's significance: the limit case through which "the very way of living in [a house] is also an art, made and remade on a daily basis" becomes visible (p. 230).
• occupant-as-designer — the figure's inversion: where the occupant-designer asserts authorship by rearranging, the radical aesthete forfeits rearrangement to protect the author's composition — the curator-occupant against the arranging occupant.
• taste — the figure's stance radicalized: not taste as choice among styles but the subordination of all other goods to aesthetic coherence.
• self-fashioning — the figure's life-form: "single people living tranquil lives of autocratic self-indulgence" (p. 232).
• sterility-of-perfection — the figure's vice, Baldwin's name for it: the perfection that is "so beautiful, yet so cold" — with Melchionne's reply that the severity is only "an extremely refined version of what any sensitive homemaker creates" (p. 230).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Living in Glass Houses (Melchionne 1998/2006) — the concept's founding and sole source: the definition (p. 230); Johnson's embodiment and the comfort quip (p. 230); the stage-set doubt and its irrelevance ("half stage set, half hotel room," p. 230); the discipline of implication ("the art of maintaining the discipline of implication in the order," p. 231); the pop-Freudian epithet ("subject to the pop-Freudian epithet anal. The spaces demand too much," p. 231); the dumpy-room inverse ("the fastidious feel uncomfortable in a dumpy room," pp. 231–232); the sociology ("single people living tranquil lives of autocratic self-indulgence or very wealthy families who can pay to have someone else maintain, that is, clean up, the rarefied design," p. 232).

Open Questions

• Freedom or discipline? The radical aesthete's "perfectly habituated" neatness reads as autonomy (living by one's own rules — Johnson's "presumably his own") and as its loss (unconscious habit doing the aesthetic's policing). Is the radical aesthete the aesthetic life perfected or the person whose habits have captured them? See habit.
• The curator-occupant's authorship paradox: the radical aesthete "must be a curator of sorts" (p. 230) — an occupant whose whole art is not designing. Is this the limit that proves the occupant-as-designer thesis (arranging is design) by negation, or its refutation (the finest inhabitation is the one that forbids arrangement)?
• Gender and labour: the radical aestheticism of "very wealthy families who can pay to have someone else maintain, that is, clean up" (p. 232) means the figure's art can rest on invisible domestic labour. Is the radical aesthete (like the flâneur) a gendered leisure-class figure — and does the "care-work" the chapter names (p. 230) belong to someone else? See tidying, gender-and-the-interior.
• Is the nonradical's discomfort the concept's real evidence? "even the nonradical is aware of the way some spaces seem to require our bodies to aesthetically conform" (p. 232): if bodily aesthetic conformity is universal, is the radical aesthete simply the person who says yes to a demand everyone feels — and is the difference one of doctrine or only of hedonic tolerance?