New Article: The Obligation to Beauty
When the dominant culture abandons cultivating taste and aesthetics through creative excess, they leave open opportunities for once marginal groups to become new elites.
This article by Ryan Khurana was published at Palladium Magazine on December 12th, 2025. It will feature in the upcoming print edition PALLADIUM 20: Noblesse Oblige, subscribe today to secure your copy.
In 1990, Roy Halston Frowick, professionally known simply as Halston, lay dying in a San Francisco hospital. The designer who made Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat iconic, who dressed Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor, and who transformed American fashion in the 1970s, was being destroyed by AIDS complications. “I’m just a dressmaker,” he said before he died. “That’s what I do.” Not “I was” a dressmaker. Not reflections on celebrity or Studio 54 or the empire he’d lost. Calvin Klein would later call him one of the greatest American fashion designers who ever lived.
Between 1981 and 1996, AIDS killed an estimated 100,000 gay men in New York City alone. Fashion designers, art directors, gallery owners, theater producers, choreographers; an entire generation whose lives were their art disappeared within fifteen years. Not just the famous names like Halston, Perry Ellis, and Willi Smith, but showroom assistants, stylists, photographers, creative directors, and window dressers. Chester Weinberg, a household name in the 1960s who mentored Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan, has been written out of history books entirely.
The conventional story treats this as a tragic loss of talent. That misses the deeper wound. When these communities died, something died with them that we haven’t recovered: the knowledge of how to live aesthetically, how to organize an entire existence around aesthetic values in ways that produce taste as a natural consequence of being rather than professional competence. To understand this loss requires understanding how taste came to reside in such communities at all.
Around 1800, European men stopped dressing beautifully. John Flügel called this the “Great Male Renunciation,” the moment when men surrendered color, ornament, and aesthetic display to women. The transformation was ideological. The rising bourgeoisie needed to distinguish productive virtue from aristocratic decadence. Beauty became suspect as a frivolous distraction from economic and political utility. Rational productivity demanded the abandonment of aesthetic excess.
This logic spread far beyond fashion. The entire material world reorganized around efficiency rather than beauty. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on universal reason and measurable progress left no room for the particular, the ornamental, the beautiful-for-its-own-sake. Aesthetic concern retreated to specialized domains—museums, concert halls, galleries—where it could be contained and administered, safely separated from the serious business of productive life.
The aristocracy, rather than resisting this transformation, largely capitulated. They maintained wealth but adopted bourgeois values. The ancient understanding that aristocratic privilege carried obligations to exemplify and patronize beauty, to serve as custodians of civilization’s aesthetic inheritance, disappeared under pressure to justify position through utility and merit. European aristocrats who had once competed in architectural grandeur and financed public festivals—the original meaning of “liturgy” was exactly this obligation to support works that elevated community—now sought respectability through productive contribution. The Medici model of patronage that made the Renaissance possible gave way to industrialists funding hospitals and universities.[i] Beauty ceased to be a sufficient justification for existence.
By the early 20th century, dedication to aesthetic values had become the province of artists and bohemians, people explicitly outside respectable society. The bourgeois rationalization of existence left no room for beauty as primary orientation. To dedicate oneself to aesthetic refinement was to mark oneself as unserious, frivolous, or decadent. Taste, once the mark of civilization’s highest achievements, became deviant.
Where did it survive? In marginalized communities that couldn’t participate in respectable bourgeois life anyway. Gay men, barred from conventional paths to social legitimacy, maintained cultures where aesthetic refinement remained an organizing principle. The parties, the fashion—this was a serious form of life oriented toward values the mainstream had abandoned. There was something atavistically aristocratic in this orientation. A remnant of an older world that modernity had expelled from respectability.
In the 1910s and 1920s, Jewish immigrants like Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, William Fox, and the Warner Brothers elevated film from lowbrow entertainment comparable to vaudeville to a new art form. Antisemitism had barred Jews from elite institutions, and Thomas Edison’s film monopoly on the East Coast drove these independents to relocate west to build the social respectability otherwise out of reach.
When you cannot succeed by conventional metrics, you can either resign yourself to marginality or reach for something higher than what the respectable world offers. Marginalization doesn’t automatically produce taste, but combined with aspirations toward forms of life that the dominant culture has abandoned, it creates conditions where aesthetic dedication becomes possible again.
The material consequences of the AIDS crisis were immediate and visible. By 1990, New York Fashion Week’s menswear offering had become what The New York Times described as “smoothly traditional,” with overbearing reportage of uber-masculine silhouettes, a retreat to hetero-normativity even in fashion’s most subversive corners. The creative infrastructure that connected underground gay aesthetics to broader society was decimated. Fashion became sanitized, risk-averse, and derivative.
The financial backing and creative mentorship networks that had sustained aesthetic innovation simply disappeared. The flattening accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s. Great menswear magazines that had been organs of taste, like Esquire and GQ, devolved into listicles and product roundups. When anything goes, everyone does the same thing. The paradox of infinite choice is homogeneity.
Without communities organized around aesthetic values, the culture defaulted to what algorithms and focus groups could optimize: the safe, the familiar, the efficiently producible. The broken links in the creative chain were never repaired because the knowledge of how to forge them, passed between people who shared forms of life, had died with the bodies. This completed the Enlightenment’s war on beauty. The last substantial communities in Western culture who understood how to live aesthetically had been eliminated by disease.
Taste as a Way of Life
Giorgio Agamben argues in Creation and Anarchy that modernity fundamentally misunderstands creation. We think art means making objects: paintings, sculptures, buildings. But the Greeks distinguished poiesis (creation) from praxis (production). Poiesis wasn’t about outputs. It was a mode of existence. The artist wasn’t someone who made art but someone whose entire life constituted artistic engagement with the world.
Halston didn’t study fashion theory and then apply it to design. His existence, however debauched, constituted an aesthetic form of life. The clothes emerged as a natural expression of how he lived. You can’t recreate this through education. Fashion schools can teach techniques, historical knowledge, and professional practices. They cannot teach you to organize existence around beauty.
Medieval apprenticeship understood this. You didn’t learn sculpture by studying technique in isolation. You lived with a master, absorbed their entire way of being in the world. Michelangelo didn’t attend art school. He lived with Lorenzo de’ Medici as a teenager, surrounded by poets, philosophers, collectors, and power brokers. The Sistine Chapel is inseparable from the form of life that produced it.
Modern culture has inverted this relationship. We’ve made the work primary and reduced life to production processes. Walk through any major contemporary museum. You’ll see expensive art, prestigious names, wall texts explaining theoretical importance. What you won’t see is curation emerging from a life lived in service of beauty.
Contrast this with spaces that did and still do. The Wallace Collection embodies Sir Richard Wallace’s specific obsessions with 18th-century decorative arts. The Morgan Library manifests J. P. Morgan’s mania for illuminated manuscripts. These aren’t museums in the contemporary sense. They’re dwellings that happen to be open to the public. Wallace and Morgan didn’t curate by studying what experts valued. They collected what they found beautiful through lives spent in sustained aesthetic attention.
There is something essentially religious in authentic aesthetic dedication, though modernity has obscured this connection by separating beauty from transcendence. Art and religion were once indistinguishable. The cave paintings at Lascaux, dating to the early Magdalenian period, were not leisure activities but ritualistic practice, mystical initiatory rites binding community to cosmos through visual form. Over millennia, the primitive shaman was supplanted by the theologian and psychotherapist. Functions once unified were differentiated. The nature of the liturgical has been eroded in both. Religion in modernity became self-help rather than an all-embracing constitution of reality, while art became something one occasionally makes time to peruse on a Saturday afternoon.
Yet beauty retains its sacred character for those who pursue it seriously. The person whose life is oriented around aesthetic values operates according to logic that transcends utility, that recognizes in material form something pointing beyond the merely material. Because of Catholicism’s insistence on beauty as a theological necessity, as a manifestation of divine order in sensible form, it has, surprisingly, sometimes even been adopted by gay creatives from Oscar Wilde in the 19th Century, Karl Lagerfeld in the 20th, to Dolce and Gabbana today. The elaborate liturgy, the vestments, the architecture, the music; these weren’t decorations applied to worship but constituted worship itself. Beauty was the form truth took when it entered the world.
The common factor among people who developed genuine taste has always been willingness to embrace excess. Our contemporary understanding of excess has been shaped by logic, reducing it to consumption or debauchery, but this is impoverished. The lukewarm mediocrity of comfort is rational and efficient but worth nothing more than being spewed out. Traditions of excess recognized it in saints and sinners alike. St. Catherine of Siena and St. John of the Cross weren’t collecting trinkets or attending parties, but their whole being exuded an excess that horrifies a life of comfort. Modern mystics like Simone Weil starved themselves to death in the name of a genuinely philosophical life. This is excess as rejection of the middle path, as commitment to values that make no sense within frameworks of rational self-interest.
An unaesthetic life erodes that part of the soul that seeks excellence, honor, and recognition of what is higher. When everything becomes optimized for comfort and convenience, when every aesthetic concern must justify itself through utility, we become smaller. People don’t just want things. They want to want better things. This is what philosophers call higher-order volitions, the desire to have different desires, to be the kind of person who values what is genuinely valuable. When you encounter someone living aesthetically, you don’t just see beautiful objects. You see a life that makes you want to live better. This is the aspirational quality of taste, its essentially religious in character as a call to transformation.
Higher Means Oblige to Higher Ends
Those with means face a choice. You can optimize your life for conventional success while treating aesthetic concerns as hobbies requiring no serious commitment. Or you can organize existence around aesthetic values in ways that violate professional norms and economic rationality.
The second path requires genuine sacrifice, not necessarily poverty or suffering, but willingness to prioritize beauty over optimization, sustained attention over efficient productivity. For those with financial freedom, this becomes an obligation. If you can afford to live otherwise, why wouldn’t you?
The person who spends years visiting every significant building in their region, learning to see architectural proportions directly. The person who maintains extensive correspondence with online interlocutors to endlessly debate the finer points of science or philosophy. The person who hosts gatherings where aesthetic experience takes precedence over networking utility. These practices seem frivolous to modern sensibility. That’s the point. They violate the logic that everything must justify itself through productivity metrics.
The person whose existence centers on beauty develops perceptual capacities that people living conventionally productive lives cannot access. They see things others miss not because they studied harder but because they live differently.
Contemporary wealth has mostly abandoned the aristocratic understanding that privilege carries responsibility. The spaces we build are predominantly ugly. Today’s elite justify their position through meritocratic achievement. The software engineer who optimizes his productivity stack while living in an efficient but mediocre space demonstrates that success requires no aesthetic intelligence. The contemporary elite exist as training data for future AIs: perfectly reproducible, optimized for metrics, lacking any unique character that will challenge the world after they’re dead.
Contrast this with someone who uses financial freedom to cultivate sustained aesthetic attention. These individuals provide models of how to live that transcend achievement. The software engineer can look to well-off peers and think, “I should optimize my career trajectory better.” They look at someone living aesthetically and recognize something outside their professional logic entirely, a call to something higher than what the rationalized world offers.
This kind of change can’t be brought about through existing political mechanisms. Neither liberal democracy nor consumerism has means for prioritizing beauty. The structural forces that produced this situation—the Enlightenment’s rationalization, capitalism’s reduction of value to price, bureaucracy’s demand for quantifiable metrics—continue operating. You cannot argue your way out of aesthetic wreckage using the tools that created it.
The alternative is withdrawal into domains where aesthetic values can be primary. Not withdrawal into irrelevance or private indulgence, but the creation of forms of life that operate according to different logics than the surrounding culture. Every person living aesthetically in a culture that devalues beauty demonstrates that alternative orientations remain possible. When you organize your life around beauty, you become magnetic to others who feel the insufficiency of rationalized existence but lack models for living otherwise. The natural aesthetic draw enables the formation of authentic communities that can’t be manufactured through mission statements or organizational structures.
This is the crucial insight that distinguishes living aesthetically from technocratic solutions like effective altruism, a philanthropic movement that tries to rationally plan optimal resource allocation toward measurable good. This approach inevitably reproduces the flattening. The necessary institutions must emerge as organic consequences of people truly living enriched lives, gathering around shared aesthetic commitments that transcend calculable benefit.
The Bloomsbury Group, the early 20th-century cultural clique that counted among its members Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes, didn’t form because someone wrote a strategic plan for cultivating British modernist aesthetics. It emerged from people who shared forms of life: writers, artists, and intellectuals organizing existence around beauty, conversation, and creative work. Bauhaus didn’t succeed by optimizing pedagogical outcomes. It succeeded because Gropius gathered people committed to aesthetic values and let institutional forms emerge from their practices. Authentic aesthetic communities arise when people living beautifully find each other, not when institutions try to manufacture community through programming.
The communities that preserved aesthetic knowledge through the 20th century often did so at tremendous cost. The drug use, the promiscuity, the self-destructive behaviors that marked parts of pre-AIDS gay culture; these were not sources of taste but symptoms of marginalization. When a community is denied participation in respectable society, when conventional paths to meaning are foreclosed, desperation follows. This is not something to romanticize or seek to imitate.
What needs recovering is the principle they accidentally preserved: that life can be organized around aesthetic values as primary orientation. The tragedy is that this principle, once central to aristocratic self-understanding and religious practice, has been expelled from respectability. Taste became deviant not because it was inherently transgressive but because the Enlightenment’s rationalization of existence removed it from the realm of legitimate aspiration.
The work of building the institutions that can sustain aesthetic forms of life begins with individuals committed to living them. Not from policy proposals or foundation grants, but from people whose entire existence testifies that beauty matters more than efficiency, that tradition carries wisdom that rationalism has abandoned, that there are forms of human flourishing the modern world has lost.
If you have the freedom to choose how you live, then make beauty your organizing principle. This will feel irresponsible at first. You’ll be violating deeply internalized bourgeois norms about productivity and achievement. Good. Those norms produced the aesthetic wasteland we inhabit.
Ignore them. Spend years, if necessary, looking at architecture, painting, and design. Train your perception until you can recognize quality directly, not through credentials or consensus. Build libraries not of books you’ve read but books worth living with. Maintain practices that seem inefficient: handwritten correspondence, elaborate meals, gatherings where no business gets conducted.
Create spaces that embody beauty. Your dwelling should challenge everyone who enters it to consider whether they are living well. Not through expense or display, but through evidence that beauty has been prioritized over convenience. Your environment trains your perception and announces your values to others. Make it worthy of sustained attention.
Most importantly, refuse the false choice between aesthetics and community. You’re not cultivating taste for private satisfaction. You’re becoming a node in networks that don’t exist yet, preparing the ground for institutions that can’t be planned but must be grown. When you live aesthetically, you become visible to others who feel trapped in rationalized existence. They’ll find you. The communities that matter form through recognition, people whose lives testify to shared values discovering each other.
Every person who organizes existence around beauty plants seeds that others can tend. The patient work of cultivating taste in yourself and enabling it in others through example. When enough people live this way, the institutions necessary to sustain and transmit aesthetic knowledge will arise as a natural consequence.
The call is to reject the modern bargain that made productivity primary and beauty optional. To reclaim the aristocratic and religious understanding that those with freedom bear responsibility for exemplifying and creating beauty that enriches everyone. To demonstrate through how you live that alternatives to the rationalized world remain possible. This is the most radical act available: living in ways that refuse the terms modernity has set, that prepare the ground for cultures not yet born. In an age of aesthetic ruins, every person who lives beautifully becomes an ancestor to possible futures. This is your opportunity and obligation. Begin.
Ryan Khurana is a non-resident fellow at FAI and a former associate editor at Palladium Magazine.