Portfolio Lens 1
Health, standard of living, wealth, safety, freedom are all measured and tracked, and the object of strategies for improvement. Economic and natural resources similarly so. What if we conceived of aesthetic quality in a likewise intentional manner?
Let’s assume one function of art and design is as spiritual fuel, what strategies for resource management / development might we borrow?
Portfolio theory perhaps? Let’s consider this from an individual (or small group with shared taste) to avoid the issue of trying to ‘value’ aesthetic quality for people with varied tastes.
An actor— either an individual or an institution with singular taste—might make and track a list of aesthetic assets, qualitatively or quantitatively, noting the aesthetic value of each.
What is an aesthetic asset? This seems like it could go a few different ways, but let’s say our time, energy, and money are ‘investable cash’ while ‘assets’ are the specific experiences to which we allocate those resources. Energy goes in in those forms, you get energy back out in the form of rejuvenation—if you’ve invested well, you get more out than you put in.
So, art on the wall in a museum next door is an asset in our portfolio as long as we take the time to visit it. Its price is the time, energy and financial cost of the experience and its opportunity cost is everything else we might have spent that time on. The return is spiritual fuel in excess of the cost— call it some combination of the enjoyment, energy, learning, or motivation gained from the experience.
Liquidity and illiquidity of aesthetic assets
if one rents an apartment and can’t re-paint the walls, then that component of one’s aesthetic portfolio is somewhat illiquid
if one has a lot of experiential options and the time resources for them, then one is very liquid
Historical performance: how rewarding has one’s aesthetic experience of life been to date? Recently? How resilient is one during times of resource scarcity (i.e. have you engineered your life to have beauty even when you are busy and exhausted and don't have cash to spare)? Is one a skilled investor who can follow intuition and find beauty anywhere?
Current portfolio: if you continue with your ‘default’ — i.e. the set of options available to you overlaid with your default behavior and existing knowledge
Expected return: when you step back and list out ~all the experiences you're likely to have, what’s your gut reaction? When you first saw [insert your favorite place or artwork or movie here], what was your reaction? Use that as a unit of experience and compare.
Risk:
uncertainty around the quality or availability of an experience - e.g. the experience of a favorite meal that one can cook at home with common ingredients is low risk, because one has a reliable estimation of it’s quality and availability; meanwhile, a hesitantly planned trip to a reputedly beautiful, but not-so-well-known area is high risk because it might not happen, it might be a logistical nightmare, and it might not actually be beautiful
of course, tastes can also change unexpectedly
something here about risk to specific aesthetic categories — like, in different seasons, or in face of different life or global events, one’s thresholds for different portfolio components might change—i.e. certain volumes of certain experiences are critical requisites to a high quality portfolio, and those thresholds might change significantly
also a major category of the risk of exposure to ugliness to build out on — particularly relevant in that interesting art comes from fringe scenes (SF has incredible creative works, but is also messy and chaotic, in this sense it is high-risk, high-potential-reward)
Investment profile:
What is one’s risk profile? Is one happy hunting a shot at exceptional beauty? Or does one want a steady, consistent return with moderate doses of beauty permeating daily experience? To what extent does one want each in a portfolio? What other risk levels are there? Where is the efficient frontier?
How liquid do you want to be? Do you anticipate changing tastes or changing opportunities for experience, and want to be agile? Do you know what you like and know what it costs, and want to invest recurrently in a contemplative long-term relationship with a piece of art or music or place?
Diversification of assets:
There’s diversification around the uncertainty of quality of experience: a mix of reliable experiences and experimental / high uncertainty / high potential seems reasonable
Probably want a varieI’m not sure if diversification of experience is useful for risk, but certainly thinking of the portfolio holistically to meet varied needs at varied thresholds seems important. Perhaps the better analogy here is ingredients in a recipe.
When to re-balance?
What to think about when evaluating a potential investment?
Market changes and trends
changing tastes (you no longer like a certain aesthetic quality, or the rest of the world no longer likes something that you still enjoy)
changing options (eventbrite shuts down, or a better service comes online, a museum has coupons online, or a friend finds an awesome hike and offers to show you, your workplace is renovated and much more beautiful, an art store opens next door, you move to a new location, your salary increases or decreases)
increased or decreased creative capacity (for the same amount of energy, your ability to craft or augment your environment or experience increases or decreases)
a Target store opens in your area offering low cost, high quality design
Strategies and learnings
note and appreciate reliable vs high-risk/high-reward experiences, and apportion according to personal preferences
For high-risk-high-potential-reward experiences, look for liquidity, diversity, and low-cost: this is a good case for having a list of unusual ideas or plans floating in the background that you could execute on whenever you have the chance (e.g. tickets become available cheaply, you pass by an area for work, etc.— if you have a well built out list of interests, and track their changing cost, extraordinary experiences are more likely to be available to you; similarly, this makes a good case for watching trailers of highly-reviewed movies on the edge of one’s taste, or listening to 20 seconds of an unusual song, or a few pages of an experimental novel in a book store (or in an online sample), or bringing home color palettes to hold against the wall or furniture, or touring other homes — continual ‘prospecting’ for ‘aesthetic gold’, or simply more incremental improvements.
consider planning experiences in context of thresholds of needs — i.e. diversify in accordance with your preferences / key aesthetic thresholds
consider experiences in context of future trends— is your world going to be a sad, optimistic, fast-paced, slow-paced, place in the next year? what do you want to have fueling you and how can you engineer it to accord with your expected time and energy availability?
consider how various choices impact the array of aesthetic options — of course, this is a major consideration when, say an artsy person moves to a new city, or when someone in love with the land they grew up around moves to a new area, but it could probably be done more intentionally by essentially anyone
people often have a ‘bucket list’ of cool experiences they want to try—what would an improved version of this look like? How can one augment that existing technology?
for high-cost experiences, consider options with known availability and known quality: people get into trouble when they spend a lot of time, money, or energy on a concept and it turns out poorly
Questions
What does good individual or collective aesthetic experimentation look like?
What general forms or categories might experiences / aesthetic assets fall into? How easy or difficult is it to transition from one form to another? What can you do to increase the value of an asset (what low energy, low cost ways are there of augmenting an experience?) or decrease the risk (how can you prototype, or ask for references, or otherwise know whether you will like a thing)?
consider the ways different aesthetic forms compound over time (or don’t) — e.g. some music requires practice to enjoy, some visual art requires contemplation, some movies or tv shows are only good the first time, others get better after repeated viewing, some change quality entirely and provide a very different, but also positive experience
different aesthetics / flavors which you can transition between in interesting ways
the series and arrangement of experiences makes a difference
more on personal thresholds of positive and negative and different aesthetic forms or flavors
If there is such thing as a ‘strategic landscape’ or ‘institutional landscape’, then what is an ‘aesthetic landscape’?
Consider risk aversion in an aesthetic context — some people are as or more impacted by ugliness or the lack of beauty than by extraordinary beauty, some folks are more annulled to one or to both — this significantly impacts portfolio construction