On Creating Things Aesthetic

With On Creating Things Aesthetic, American artist Leonard Koren continues his prolific writings about art and design, offering a pared-down, demystified overview of the mental operations involved with creating things aesthetic. The book is therefore a disarmingly clear and unsentimental look at the creative process by an eminent creator, in which photographs and examples of design serve as points of reference for what the creative process – at its most sophisticated – can yield. Koren was a founding member of the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, a wall-painting collective, and an important voice behind the development of postmodern aesthetics in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

An excerpt

The use of the word ‘practice’ as in ‘her creative practice involves . . .’ began showing up with increased frequency during the 1970s in academic papers relating to conceptual art. The conceptual artists of that period produced many interesting ideas but few, if any, physical artifacts. So what were the critics and the art historians of that era to write about?

“Fortunately most conceptual artists could articulate, with remarkable clarity and specificity, the substance and subtleties of their thinking. This articulation was perceived to be a part of the art itself. ‘Practice’ then became the term used to denote the totality of thought, intention, and action constituting a conceptual artist’s working life—at least according to those writing about it.

“Subsequently, as contemporary art in general began to evolve in a more idea-driven (i.e., conceptual) direction, this use of ‘practice’ expanded even further. Today the term is used by most creators in the aesthetic domains to describe the essential contours of their working lives and creative production.”

About the author

Leonard Koren was trained as an architect but never built anything—except an eccentric Japanese tea house—because he found large, permanent objects too philosophically vexing to design. Instead, he created WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, one of the premier avant-garde magazines of the 1970s. Since then, Koren has produced books about design (Arranging Things: A Rhetoric of Object Placement) and aesthetics (Which "Aesthetics" Do You Mean: Ten Definitions).