# A Call for New Aesthetics - Patrick Collison call artists, designers, architects

Source: https://newaesthetics.art
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/A-Call-for-New-Aesthetics-Patrick-Collison-call-artists-designers-architects?index=0x694ffea89bd4f4845335f05080c38117edf587a3f6ac6bd7d8790f11f0de93a895bfd5a5
Submitted by thatalexpalmer.eth on 2025-12-27 UTC, 6 upvotes, 0 comments

## Summary

Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen are offering grants of $5k to $250k to artists, architects and designers working to define a new aesthetic for the twenty-first century. They say the Bauhaus shows how deliberate artistic ambition can shape a century, and they ask what the aesthetic of the present era will be and what new directions are beautiful. The grants focus mainly on visual arts and architecture but are open to all mediums, and the funders are neutral on AI use, though they will not fund work that is already ubiquitous. Applications are to include examples of work and a rough plan for the grant, and an update says the applications far exceeded expectations and grantees have been contacted.

## Article

We, Patrick and Tyler, have differing views of the artistic merits of Bauhaus, but we are both very impressed by the movement's success: they sought to define an aesthetic for the twentieth century, and basically did. Bauhaus obviously sits as part of broader tides—functionalism, constructivism, De Stijl, etc.—but the project also shows how intentional artistic ambition can succeed. Everything from modern offices to modern tech hardware is in some sense downstream of Bauhaus.

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.

Circa 2026, beauty can be found in strange and unusual places. It does not always announce itself as such. It can violate our expectations in unreasonable ways. It often springs from an understanding that the world has changed fundamentally, and matters of the aesthetic need to recognize and respond to that. What can you do that that will surprise and inspire me?

In 1925, Ortega y Gasset said "modern art, on the other hand, has the masses against it, and this will always be so since it is unpopular in essence; even more, it is antipopular." Sagmeister and Walsh argue that we've stopped trying to produce beautiful work, and Nicholas Boys-Smith shows empirically that modern buildings are substantially less favored than designs that respect the specific character of the place. So, what are new directions forward? What is new and also beautiful?

Grant. We are seeking to fund artists, architects, and designers who are consciously working to define New Aesthetics.

Our primary interest is in visual arts and architecture, but open to all mediums.

AI presumably opens interesting new opportunities, though we haven't seen much great work that only uses AI. (If jazz didn't exist, could you prompt Suno to create it? This seems like an open problem.) As such, we're neutral on the use of AI.

We will not fund work that is already ubiquitous today.

Mechanics

Grant size: $5k – $250k.

Application: Include some examples of your work along with a rough description of what you'd use the grant to do. We don't know how many applications we'll receive, so please make your work as easy to assess as possible. Whether or not English is your first language, we much prefer applications written by humans over those written by AIs.

Declines: To keep logistics simple, we will not inform declined proposals of our decision.

Nominations. You can nominate someone else. If you do, please describe why, and include relevant examples of their work.

Update (April)—Thank you to the hundreds of applicants: there were far more than we expected. Grantees have been contacted. We will soon announce the full list of grant recipients.