Like - The Consumer Aesthetic Research Institute

A few months my friend Caleb asked me what I thought of CARI and I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. He then said something like, “Oh you’ll really like it” and he was right. CARI is the Consumer Aesthetic Research Institute, which is really a loose collective of people who are dedicated to exploring and taxonomizing various consumer aesthetics, which they define as “as a visual movement unified by overarching attitudes and themes that survived long enough or became popular enough to be appropriated by capital.” It’s a fascinating project for anyone who notices the aesthetic world around them, particularly when you’ve lived through enough aesthetic phases but don’t know quite how to describe them. This the greatest strength of the project: the devised nomenclature for the various consumer aesthetics. Fraserurbane, Global Village Coffeehouse, Teen Punk, and Utopian Scholastic are among my favorite categories they’ve identified and not really for their aesthetic values. But their names bring shape to the visuals in an uncanny way. They impose coherence on a series of things that were created separately but in dialogue with each other. They bring these movements together in ways the people making them would not have considered themselves. After all, designers and art directors don’t tend to work in such an academic-lite fashion and clients tend to just want to see things then be told how their new look and feel is part of a broader cultural aesthetic moment. Have fun exploring what CARI has to offer. You’ll either get to relive a moment from your past or get a good look into what the future will bring as consumer aesthetics get recycled at ever increasing clip.