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The Future of Aesthetics
Thursday, February 12, 2026, 6:00–7:00pm
Future Café is a student-organized series that provides the opportunity and space for undergraduates to collectively imagine utopian possibilities and long-term futures. Join us for our next meeting to discuss what aesthetics will look like 100, 500, or 5,000 years from now.
As aesthetic form increasingly organizes how the world appears to us, what might the future of aesthetics look like? Once associated primarily with beauty, taste, and art, aesthetics today permeates everyday life, shaping media environments, consumer cultures, urban space, and political imaginaries. Images circulate faster than interpretation, style often precedes meaning, and sensuous experience is routinely optimized and commodified. In such a landscape, what becomes of aesthetic attention and critique?
How do film, digital platforms, and emerging technologies reshape not only how we perceive and evaluate the world? What happens when life itself is aestheticized? Does aesthetic experience still hold the capacity to interrupt or resist, or has it been fully absorbed into regimes of circulation and consumption? Looking ahead, what might aesthetics become in an increasingly mediated and unequal future?
This event is free and open to all University of Chicago undergraduate students; registration is recommended.
