Minimalism is great, I’m a big fan of stripping away everything that obfuscates the core of the work. But there should be a core to the work, which there is often not in a lot of the work currently.

That is where I believe the seemingly ever-present sentiment of anti-minimalism comes from, for years now I’ve seen people online try to make maximalism a thing, but it always falls just as flat as soulless minimalism does, just more loudly so. The problem these shallow works share is that they are created looking to create things within an 'aesthetic', these aesthetics could easily be confused for artistic movements, but whereas an artistic movement is a set of characteristics that is applied to either explore the tenets of that movement, or because the work and its’ starting material demands it. Aesthetics are chased after to please a supposed audience. The starting material is shaped until it fits the aesthetic.

I'm not a fan of these aesthetics in that sense. They have the same birthplace as the "-core" suffix on the internet. Not nessecarily TikTok or other social media where they proliferate or materialize, but rather the commodification of culture. History rich artistic movements, subcultures, lifestyles and backgrounds are simplified into an easily digestible set of markers for everyone to temporarily dabble in until the next "-core" surges in the algorithm.

That said: I have no real influence over this process, in the interest of feeling autonomy I'll try to focus on why this approach isn't just spiritually and creatively bankrupt, but also leads to weaker results. Because there are lots of examples where creatives have incorporated culture and styles that are not their own to beautiful results.

If I'm honest (or if you take a critical look at my past work) I've been guilty of trying to adopt a style that isn't mine by copying the markers I could spot, but I can also contrast that with moments where I became interested in a style, dove into it and tried to understand it. Worked within its' rules to explore what results I would get, and exactly there lies the difference. I can reject the roots of a style and look only at its' immediately visible characteristics, but by doing so i will always be creating what has already been created, and because I'm human, I'll make errors or miss details that make my end result objectively worse than what I was copying. Or i can approach a style from a place of curiosity, and experiment with it to see what the results will be. The work might be filled with errors since the topic is potentially new to me, but it will be creatively fulfilling and so far: has always turned out better than the attempted copy.