Mindlessly scrolling through the mod lists and [pause] there it is! THE mod of my dreams: https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/11153
“邮票风格小美化” or Postage Stamp Icon Modification (directly translated as “stamp style small beautification,” but like…that’s not a comprehensive enough translation, in my honest opinion) (I speak Chinese).
In this mod, the avatar’s stamp, or the region surrounding the avatar’s actual face/upper torso is modified to be pinker, gothier, loli-like (read: Cuter™). This made me think about how I was interacting with the game in terms of community development and “beautification.” What is beautification in the context of Stardew Valley? Is it just interdependent living, or is it a digital re-imagining of concerns surrounding gentrification and the Modern Cafe Industrial Complex?
Doubling back, while I knew the translation wasn’t necessarily the most descriptively sound way to express a modification, I still wanted to think more about the “beautification” piece, separate from the game. What is beautification, how does it work on an aesthetic level, and then on a systemic cultural level? How can we extrapolate the idea to a cityscape to describe and understand human’s affinity for beautification and social reform (read: Order And Control)?
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For the baseline, our friend Wikipedia supplies a comprehensive definition of beautification, both in the (1) aesthetic and (2) metropolitan sense.
(1) aestheticism and beauty
When speaking on beauty and beautification in the philosophical and aesthetic sense, a judgement always presupposes the description; the way humans understand the world around them is by forming opinions about items, scenes, scapes, ideas, and literally everything else in the entire world.
disclaimer: I am not well versed in debates on philosophical logic and opinion development.
…maybe I should’ve mentioned this earlier….anyways.
Continuing this crash course, here is another blurb, and then a text extraction to exemplify this, being the nature of aesthetic judgements, further.
Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability,… Thus, judgements of aesthetic value can become linked to judgements of economic, political or moral value.
These moral value judgements are imperative to human understanding, and in a thesis titled Ideas and Beliefs in Architecture, Ivar Holm includes that, “…values are typically “those things we care about, that matter to us; those goals and ideals we aspire to and measure ourselves or others or our society by,” describing two things at once: one, the individual projections of ideals and aspirations and their influences on our ability to evaluate things, and two, status hierarchies can then be developed out of evaluations of whether something measures up or not.
If an item or concept is ascribed a value, whether it be negative or positive, a response is elicited and judgements of that item/concept are subsequently developed. When experiencing beauty elicits a physiological response, like pupil dilation, and an intellectual one, like the inclination to describe its beauty and be in awe of it, thus adding positive value to it. Karl Aschenbrenner, in Aesthetics and Logic: An Analogy, writes that, “Connotative relations are visually powerful and tend to draw attention to themselves alone,” poignantly describing how relational judgements are often so powerful when thinking of art and aesthetics, that one’s perception of the idea being related to, and not even necessarily that of the idea that provoked the relationship itself, is strong enough to create judgement about the idea in question. TL;DR: The judgement and perception of the thing being recalled is strong enough to influence the perception and opinion of the thing that recalled it. If blonde hair reminds me of hotdog water, and I hate hotdog water, blonde hair doesn’t stand a chance against my better (read: biased) judgement. Bookmark this for the synthesis moment at the end.
“Connotative relations are visually powerful and tend to draw attention to themselves alone.”
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(2) aestheticism and the city
Let’s revisit that TL;DR – “The judgement and perception of the thing being recalled is strong enough to influence the perception and opinion of the thing that recalled it.” If potholes remind us of ugliness, isn’t it our civic duty to change this? Yes! But not without questioning why we deem it ugly. With concepts like ugliness and beauty accompany a host of interpretations – economic, racist, modernist, etc. In terms of urban planning and modern architecture, modern beauty lies in utility. Buildings like Solstice and Vue 53 are aspirational models of modern living for many. The walls are white, the appliances shiny and the amenities useful; everything’s perfect! As such, non-usefulness is deemed superfluous and unhelpful, and thus ugly, in which case needs to be changed!
However, this perception and subsequent narrative (created through government-adjacent groups and publications like NGOs, architecture firms, urban planning elites, etc) influences the citizenry to support the “need for change” without necessarily thinking about why the perceived “beauty” lies in a very specific, confined space that only economic and social hegemons (now) can control. Think redlining, hostile architecture, and modernist coffee shops that only take card; all visually arousing, and in some ways efficient, but morally and ethically concerning. Is hostile architecture beautiful because it has cool shapes and kind of looks like an art project, or because protects property from being exploited, and safety is akin to beauty in that it also has been ascribed a positive value? Or is the concept of exploitation so severely warped that the only way to understand it in our society is in terms of distinguishing and subsequently weaponizing binary conceptions of ugly/beauty, modern/decrepit, or non-white/white?
This is not to say that potholes shouldn’t filled – they need to be! They’re dangerous and portals to the Death Dimension – nobody wants that. However, there is a hierarchical and centralized (read: governmental) selection process that picks which potholes should be filled; lovely, clean (read: white) neighborhoods deserve filled potholes to preserve their loveliness, and ugly, decrepit (read: non-white) ones don’t (don’t you love read; -ing…). A social hierarchy must be maintained to reify status and economic aspiration to keep people in constant competition, and the nebulous space between ugly/beauty on that spectrum is where this propagates. The “stamp style small beautification” is a beautiful (read: positively valued) example of this: if I value beauty and aesthetic, I value the ability to make things beautiful and are driven to take subsequent action. In beautifying the avatar’s background, OP is signaling dissatisfaction and wants to change it. In a non-commercially driven society, this beautification could be seen as just a life-enhancing “ooh, so pretty, I like, monkey see, monkey do,” change which is pretty harmless. This is, until capital gets involved, and then every modification is whittled down to an opportunity for capital acquisition.
(3) aestheticism and beauty in the city
R
eread that last sentence. Beautification efforts in communities are effective when they serve the community effectively. This chapter of the Community Tool Box talks about establishing neighborhood beautification programs, their merits and the things we should be cautious about when implementing these programs: gentrification, misplaced value ascriptions for capital gain, wildlife and plantlife preservation. They also discuss the merits of advocacy and capital investment for the well-being of neighborhood inhabitants, which is also imperative to understanding where the balance is between relative decrepitude and gentrification. Not all neighborhood beautification methods are necessary, especially if they’re just gentrification efforts in a Cute Glass Bottle. I don’t need Plein Air when Robust and True North exist, but I’ve been sold into the aesthetics of modernity to the point that excuses can be made in Plein’s favor. Blegh, no more! Reject modern “beauty”, embrace “ugly” tradition! Reject manufacture, embrace authenticity!
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