Is the World Getting Uglier?

An hour with the designer Debbie Millman on a question Klein says he has seen asked a dozen times: is the world getting uglier? Millman’s answer is that it is getting more vulgar. Ugly can be chosen and can even be fashionable. Vulgar is what you get when something is out of proportion and built without regard for anyone around it: the Cybertruck, the house that fills its lot to the pavement. Good design, for her, is respect.

Klein separates two complaints. One is that things are ugly. The other, which he finds more accurate, is that they are drab: apartment blocks, cars and coffee shops that make you feel nothing. He offers reasons that are not failures of taste. Cars look alike partly because aerodynamics and fuel rules push them there. Houses go grey because a house bought as an asset should not be too particular. His larger claim is that the logic of markets, which wants things frictionless and tradable, has spread into places it did not use to be, and that the loud styles are a reaction to the flatness. Friction is where meaning gets in: vinyl, a paper book, a grandmother’s dining table passed to a niece. He applies the same thought to New York’s subway, where advertising covers a public space for about 1% of the MTA’s revenue.

The last third is politics. Klein argues that the right now has a theory of beauty and the left does not. The right can point backwards, to classical columns and gilt, and has made it policy. Millman reads that as a taste for power, not beauty. Klein disagrees: grant that they find it beautiful, and ask what the alternative is. The left, he says, will not say what beauty should be. Asked whether there is an answer, Millman says only that she hopes so.

Most references hold up: the n+1 essay and its “drab sublime”, the iPod arriving six weeks after 9/11, Samsung’s first design chief, the executive order on federal architecture, and the MTA figure (about $175 million of a budget near $20 billion). Two do not. São Paulo did not remove its billboards “as a test”; it banned them by law in 2006 and the law still stands. Klein’s line that nearly a third of homes sold in 2021 went to buyers who would not live in them could not be traced; the figure that could be found is about a quarter of single-family sales.