How Aesthetics Shapes Our World With Michael Spicher

Tony Martignetti sits down with Michael Spicher to discuss the often-overlooked power of aesthetics to transform our lives. The founder of Aesthetics Research Lab, Michael explains how they champion the idea that beauty is more than just "in the eye of the beholder." He takes a deep dive into how aesthetics delivers a direct impact on our well-being, the spaces we inhabit, and the businesses we run. Michael also talks about its influence not just on our personal circles but even on societal structures like prisons and healthcare. Get ready to re-think your surroundings and discover how a deeper understanding of aesthetics can unlock a richer and more fulfilling life.

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How Aesthetics Shapes Our World With Michael Spicher

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest for this episode, Michael Spicher. Michael is a public philosopher and consultant who founded Aesthetics Research Lab in 2016. He writes and speaks about the impact of beauty and aesthetics for public and professional audiences, which includes a regular column for Beauty Matter.

His book, Digital Fashion: Theory, Practice, and Implications, is a co-edited volume addressing the nature and purpose of digital fashion. He's also finishing up a book called Is Your Business Beautiful? It is set for a 2025 release. As an educator, he lectures at Boston Architectural College and Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He sits on the editorial board of The Philosopher and is a fellow of The Centre for Conscious Design. It is truly an honor and a pleasure to welcome you to the show, Michael.

Thank you so much, Tony.

I'm thrilled to have you here because there are so many things about what you do in the world and the things you speak about that I'm fascinated by. A lot of us want to learn more about those. Some of these things elude us but we need to shine a light on it. I'm looking forward to not only talking about the topics that you talk about but also understanding the journey that got you into this work. That's what we're going to do. Are you cool with that?

Yeah. It sounds great.

Michael’s Journey Into Aesthetics And Beauty

We're going to do this journey through what we call flashpoints, which are the moments in your life that have ignited your gifts into the world. I'm going to turn it over to you and have you share some of the moments that have brought you to where you are. Michael, take it away.

As someone who has been studying aesthetics, theories of beauty, and such for many years, people often ask how I get started in that direction. I will say this, the power and influence of professors is pretty strong. Sometimes professors say things off the cuff that may be ignored by most of the students but there might be that one student that somehow it clicks with them. That's probably what happened to me.

I was in a course that had nothing to do with beauty, aesthetics, art, or anything like that. I don't even remember what the original point was but it’s some analogy to the point that this professor felt the need to say, “Beauty couldn't possibly just be in the eye of the beholder.” He moved on. It had nothing to do with anything to the class.

As someone who has been interested in art my whole life and different things, I thought, “That seems strange. I've never heard anyone say anything other than beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What could he possibly mean by saying it's not just in the eye of the beholder?” That was a huge turning point in my whole life's trajectory because it opened up a whole world of studying beauty. It opened it up further to the wider questions in aesthetics, such as aesthetic taste, aesthetic experience, and the sublime.

That was the biggest moment as far as my whole context and everything. A second moment came for me. Philosophers and scientists, when they study aesthetics and beauty, tend to limit their discussions to art and nature. With research in neuroaesthetics, they add architecture often. It still relates to art in the sense of being human-made.

A second thing happened to me. Around the year 2015, I moved to Boston. I didn't know anyone here except my wife. I wanted to try and meet as many people. I ended up going to this event where at the time, the chief of arts and culture with the city of Boston was holding this event. She was no longer in that position. There's someone else. I met her and asked for a meeting with her to chat.

As we were talking about my interest in aesthetics and different things like that, she said, “I'm not so sure art people are your people.” I don't think she's saying that they aren't my people at all but, “Maybe you're limiting yourself too much.” She made the claim, “Architecture and design people are your people.” In a separate conversation with someone else at a completely different time, they also did the same thing. “Maybe you need to talk to architects and designers.” From there, I realized, “Why would I want to stop with architects and designers?”

In 2016, I created Aesthetics Research Lab as a platform, resource, or think tank, however makes the best way to describe it, to try and find in any area of the world and people's experiences ways that aesthetics impacts their lives. I started meeting people who do things that you would think are much more tied to aesthetics than they seem to be from the people I've talked to.

It’s things like product design and marketing to law, issues like prison reform and climate change. There are all sorts of ways in which I've pulled things together and saw into one area. The problem I kept running up against was I would meet people who are interested in aesthetics and what they do but they feel like no one else is in their context.

There's not a single place, except the Aesthetics Research Lab, where people from all different areas who have some interest in aesthetics can find how other people are using aesthetics in whatever it is they're doing. That's why the subheading of Aesthetics Research Lab is Beauty Changes Everything. Whatever it is you find yourself doing, aesthetics makes it better in some sense. It's more focused on my professional development but those are the two key moments of my life.

Beauty changes everything. Whatever it is you find yourself doing, aesthetics makes it better.

Expanding Your Vision And Narrowing Your Focus

Thank you for sharing what you did. I want to take a few moments to step back. First of all, thinking about that conversation with that professor is a rewind moment. You're like, “Say what?” Let's rewind that and think about what he said. That changed everything for you at that moment. That's interesting. It makes me think of this concept I often use with people I work with. It’s this idea of expanding your vision and narrowing your focus.

Your life has been all about expanding and narrowing. You’re expanding the venues of where aesthetics lives and where it could be, and then also narrowing down, talking to people, going deeper into what this is and how we look at aesthetics in these different areas, and allowing people to explore deeper into the concept, not just seeing it in the surface of like, “That's a nice concept.” What does it mean? How does it affect us?

That's why I like the fact that this professor said what he said. At the time, I had no philosophical training so I had no real good rebuttal to what his points were. Every time I thought I had a counter-example or something, he would have a great and smart thing to say in response. It’s like going back to the old drawing board kind of situation. What I liked about it was sometimes we expect people to say beauty is in the eye of the beholder so when someone says the opposite, it causes a surprise.

When I teach or give other kinds of talks or workshops, I often refer to beauty is in the eye of the beholder as an unquestioned assumption. We should question it. Not because we think it's wrong. Maybe it's right but we should at least take enough time. If we're going to spout certain clichés like that, we should at least take time to give it some analysis and see whether or not we find it to be true and why it's true. The other problem is people don't think about what it means. I don't think it has to mean the same thing.

Childhood And Early Experiences

It's almost like, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but why?” That's where it starts to go into understanding the true idea of what it means to be aesthetically pleasing to a person. What creates that for them and others? Is there an inherent quality of that aesthetics that we need to look for? Before we get further into this because there are so many things I want to dig into, I want to understand a little more about before this experience for you. What was your childhood experience? Where did you grow up? Who are your parents? Were they deep thinkers themselves? Tell me more about your childhood briefly.

I grew up outside of Albany, New York. My parents still live in the same house that I was born into. The combination of my parents led to me being who I am. That sounds very generic but in a particular way, my dad's an analytic thinker. He's the kind of person who would cease a problem in our house. If something needs to be fixed and he didn't know how to do it, he would figure out how to fix it instead of calling someone. My mom is a very creative type. She played piano. Even in retirement, my mom has developed a passion for painting. That combination led to me analyzing concepts and the particular concepts being more creative concepts. It's a perfect combination.

I appreciate you sharing that. You're probably like, “Why is he asking this question?” I love it because there are so many elements of our early childhood sometimes that reveal parts of what happens as we move on. It's almost like an inner itch that needs to be scratched.

I have always done art my entire life. That part connects with my interest in aesthetics, even though aesthetics goes way beyond art.

Aesthetics goes way beyond art.

Understanding Aesthetics And Beauty

Let's come back to this idea of helping people understand aesthetics and beauty and the differences between the two. There's a lot about that, which we want to give them a little bit more of a definition or a click-through of, “Here are these concepts that we need to better understand.” If you're willing to go there, I'd appreciate it.

If you look up the word aesthetics in a dictionary, it often says something about the study of art and beauty. That's a good starting point but first, let's say aesthetics goes back to ancient Greece. The word implied the idea of sense perception. There's a very real sense in which anything we see, hear, smell, taste, or touch is aesthetic. It could be bad or good aesthetics but it's aesthetic. There's a very generic sense.

It wasn't until about the 18th century that Alexander Baumgarten, a German philosopher and poet, brought the word aesthetics into its more contemporary usage, especially as a discipline of philosophy. He wanted to challenge the way that we see the world. At that time when reason, logic, and science were taking over, he wanted to bring in the other aspect of experiencing the world that comes through our senses, emotions, and so on.

Even if we think that the ideas of logic, reason, and science are higher or more accurate in some sense, he doesn't want to discount the experiences of aesthetics. For me, what aesthetics involves is the way that the world around us affects us. John Dewey, a philosopher, wrote a book in 1934 called Art as Experience. In this book, he talks about the nature of experience. He says that as long as we're conscious, we don't stop experiencing.

What we often think of as an experience has a beginning and an end. He makes this idea that the aesthetic in this more generic sense, there's an aesthetic component of all experience but when the aesthetic component dominates the experience, that's what we think of as an aesthetic experience. We often talk about aesthetic experiences as these lofty things. I understand why because they're the ones that we tend to remember more powerfully like this amazing sunset or standing in front of the Grand Canyon or a cathedral, a work of art, or something but we have this experience every day.

Beauty is maybe the queen of aesthetic properties. A lot of people refer to it as not just a property of aesthetics but also a value for human beings. That's why it has such a place of prominence. In the things I've written, I don't try to define it because I'm not sure that that's a fruitful approach. What I do instead is try to give some of the recurring aspects of it that have been proposed throughout history.

For example, proportion is probably one of the oldest conditions of beauty that people thought, going back to Plato and Aristotle. Also, integrity and radiance. Integrity is having what people would refer to as the appropriate number of parts for something. There was some philosophical baggage to different things for why some of the people originally said that, especially Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages.

One way we can apply integrity is maybe we've seen a movie and it was good but we thought something was missing or there was too much of something. We've all had that experience. Radiance is color and light. Those are the kinds of things that help us understand what beauty is but I'm not sure we're ever going to pinpoint it. What I think is important is not reducing beauty to any one discipline. I see a trend in a lot of laypeople.

There's a lot of research in neuroaesthetics and the psychology of perception that a lot of people are saying, “That's it.” Even some of the leaders of these scientific and people who have written books will often clarify that what they're offering is a biological definition or something like that. It means the implication of that is, “A fuller understanding of beauty is spokes on a wheel.” We need to pull from sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, art, science, or any of these things. That's how we get a more complete image of what beauty is.

Think about the anthropologists who think about these ideas of going to a tribe that has ten different colors of green. We look at it and just see one green. They see ten different greens and they have different shades of green. There are many different ways to interpret something like the neurological and how it makes you feel. All different parts of how you interpret something are in many ways what we need to look at beauty. How are you seeing and experiencing that thing? That's how I'm reacting to that. There's a sense of many different ways to interpret one thing that you see at the different layers.

In some ways, it is the value of philosophy if I put myself on the back. Philosophy is more of a method. It's not limited to certain content. We have our Western and philosophical canon like, “These are the philosophers you should have read,” but there's not a specific content. That's why you have philosophers studying all sorts of things that maybe would even surprise people.

Aesthetics Research Lab

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk a bit more about the journey into the work that you're doing. You decided to double down on this research and start the ARL or Aesthetics Research Lab. Tell me some of the things that surprised you on the journey to creating this work and maybe some things that have been a challenge as you've gotten into this work.

The surprising thing would be how much it resonates with so many people. I have had a few people be like, “Aesthetics, whatever. There are more important things.” I'm amazed at how many people are like, “I've been sensing this for a while.” I started partly because I was more within the walls of academia but also even outside of it, it felt very much like a lone ranger type of situation. I've seen so much more happening in all sorts of places referring to beauty and aesthetics. To me, it's very hopeful.

One of the challenges for me is people don't understand what philosophy is sometimes. It’s the idea that someone sitting around and thinking about their opinions is a false narrative. In some ways, philosophers are by definition interdisciplinary. I know a lot of philosophers who dig into work in physics, psychology, and history. It's drawing from whatever makes sense for the topic you're working on. It’s something that I have to overcome. The first impression is when people have a conversation with me, usually, they begin to understand what it is I'm about, and that helps.

One of my observations has been that we need more philosophers than ever. If you think about a philosopher as a deep thinker and someone who will take problems or things that are happening in the world and go deep into understanding what's going on, we need more of that.

There was a conversation with an architect and a psychologist. It sounds like the beginning of a joke. I asked the architect and psychologist about what they see as the value of philosophy for their work. The architect said, “Philosophers keep us honest.” I took that as a good sign for me.

Is Your Business Beautiful?

That's wonderful. I love that. Let's shift gears a little bit more. You're heading towards a new book, which I'm excited about. The angle on this is an interesting one. I don't want to give up too much of the story. I'll let you reveal this but tell us about where you're heading next.

I've got a draft. I'm working on editing, revising, and all that fun stuff of a book called Is Your Business Beautiful? This idea came to me from two sources. One is what I developed I would call a curated conversation for this group. It was given to business executives. I proposed this idea to think about it. It went over well. That was one source.

The other source was there's a book by Steven de Groot called Organizational Aesthetics. At the beginning of the book, he says it's very common to ask about a business if it's profitable. Maybe less or so but still somewhat popular is to ask whether it's ethical but almost nobody asks whether it's beautiful. He went around to research for this book and asked that question to somewhere between 20 and 30 organizations or businesses. He had other questions as well. He likes to see what they would say if he asked, “Is your business beautiful?”

I got the question from reading his book and developing this workshop. I call the book Is Your Business Beautiful but it's in some ways, it has to do with aesthetics more broadly and how it relates to business, depending on the context. I divide the book into three main parts. What I take to be the three broadest areas of business are people, place, and product. The product includes services, as well as tangible products. The place includes if it's a retail store, it’s the shop but also corporate offices and some of the places. The place also includes your web presence.

People are the ones that maybe some might think, “What does that do?” I'm not talking about whether your staff is attractive. I'm talking about interactions. It has to do with how aesthetics affect people. Since you asked about surprise, one of the things that surprised me when doing some of the research for this book was that I had read an article on the aesthetics of healthcare. I expected it to talk about the space and it did.

One of the things that surprised me very pleasantly is that they've begun to discover that better aesthetics in communications, in which they specifically use the word elegance, more elegant communication, is more effective. It's not merely just more pleasant. If you walk into a shop and you're greeted with rudeness like, “What do you want,” you could say that that communication should have been more pleasant or aesthetic.

It's not just window dressing. What we're seeing is that aesthetics helps the functionality of your business in different ways. This idea is interesting because it goes back to Aristotle. He wasn't talking about business but Aristotle connects aesthetics with functionality very much. He has different reasons for doing so. Some of the reasons we wouldn't necessarily support or care about but the basic principle is in Aristotle.

Aesthetic Design In Environments

It has this sense of intentionality and design, thinking about if we know what the end goal is that we want, then we have to make sure that we get intentional about creating that path towards it and making sure that it's thought through, not just haphazard. I'm intrigued by that. One of the things that keep on coming up for me is this book that I remember reading a while back, which was called Joyful by Ingrid Fetell Lee.

She talks about the idea that bringing color, shape, and design elements into places can change the mood, for example, in prisons. We talked a little about talking to people in institutions. If you bring different elements of aesthetics into their environment, it can change the way they behave. I don't know if this resonates with the work you're doing but there's a tangible element of this.

Prisons, healthcare environments, and nursing homes are all places that could use some aesthetics. I have a friend who's a nurse and I asked him, “We never talked about how our different professions might overlap. I'm curious what you think about the aesthetics of the hospital you work in.” It was cool because he had an interesting answer but no one's ever asked him that. He said, “Our hospital is fortunate.” It’s the one he worked at, not in our area.

He said that the one that he works in has been carefully designed for aesthetics. It has spaces where hospital staff can go to de-stress a little bit. The lighting in the various patient's rooms follows our natural circadian rhythm. There's this button on the wall that you can punch if you need to like if there's an emergency where you have to turn the lights on immediately because something is happening. They thought about the functionality and the aesthetics.

Here's what I thought the sad part was. He's a regular nurse but he says they get a lot of traveling nurses coming through his hospital. The sad part is they refer to his hospital as the bougie hospital. I'm like, “Why is it bougie to have basic aesthetic needs met?” This should be standard. Hospitals and nursing homes have great entrances. Prisons are pretty much ugly through and through.

They want them to be photographable for marketing things. They have to be functional. We have this idea that functionality and aesthetics are two separate things. We've proven over and over again that they aren't. One of the things I challenge people to look for is, not to go into a negative subject or topic, but think about the terrible event of Sandy Hook. They didn't want that building anymore because it had too many horrible memories but they felt like they needed a building to be safe.

They worked safety measures into the aesthetics of the building. It's not like a building with bars and surrounded by cameras. They designed it in such a way. It's an amazing example of a beautiful building that has an astute consideration of functionality. We've proven over and over again that we can do it. When we don't do it, it's because we chose not to, not because we can't.

This is the call to action for everyone. The book in many ways can be this call to action to say, “There is a return on this.” There's a return on aesthetics. If we do this right, it doesn't have to cost us a ton of money to invest in the right things that make a big impact. If you're thinking, “This is nice to have,” it's not just nice to have. The real reason why we need to do it is because it changes everything about your business and institutions. It is the real reason why aesthetics can be the real game changer for anything.

People who work in offices without any natural light claim that 47% feel depressed. Depending on which statistic or sometimes how they ask a question, it curbs the answer a little bit. I've seen statistics where 48% to 60% of people are looking for a new job either actively or at least casually. That's a huge number and it costs a lot of money to hire people.

What other studies have shown is that you can increase employee retention and productivity by 30% by adding art and aesthetics to your office. Some of it has to do with art programs. We talk about team-building exercises and a lot of that involves going in the woods or playing laser tag. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that but one other way that you can is to even write up your work.

Work on some creative projects together as a team-building exercise. The great thing about it is creativity begets more creativity. It's a fact. We've been trained as adults to leave our creativity in elementary school. That's such a misguided way. Think about the buildings like children's hospitals, children's libraries, sections of libraries, and other things. Compare the aesthetics of those with the aesthetics of their adult counterparts. Hospital waiting rooms are extremely dark and depressing places. Why does it need to be that way? Those places have to be functional.

I remember being at a hospital waiting with someone who was about to have surgery. The only aesthetic element they added in this waiting room was a giant television blasting the war in Ukraine. How is that relaxing for somebody about to get cut open? It's not. The thing is we can measure this. We can measure the fact that viewing art, aesthetics, and beauty lowers your cortisol levels and heart rate. We can prove that. It's not even a matter of someone's opinion anymore. We've shown this over and over again at this point.

I love that you're doing this and you're passionate about this. There's no doubt about it. Me, too. I'm on board. In one of my upcoming episodes, I'll be having the authors of Your Brain on Art, which are Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. I'm excited because I love the work that they're doing as well. I've had a lot of people who are on this mission to change the way we think about art in the world. I'm so glad that this conversation can be another wonderful addition to this way of thinking in the world, which we need to shift.

I should add a plug here. Susan Magsamen is at the Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins. She’s about to start the Narrow Arts Research Center. I'll be a contributor to that as well.

Actively Cultivating And Expanding Our Aesthetic Taste

That's wonderful. Before we come to a close, I have two more questions. Is there anything that you want to share that you haven't shared? It’s maybe a thought or even inside about yourself that you've learned along this journey that would be meaningful in this moment.

The biggest thing I would share is the need to be active about our aesthetics, taste, and future. Sometimes we say things like, “I like this music or movie.” There's some truth to that. Things hit us by accident. You're walking through an art museum. Maybe you're done for the day. You've already been there long enough. You're trying to leave and go to the door to get out of the museum. As you're leaving, you happen to glance over and this work of art captivates you. That can happen.

I like to make the analogy with food. If you put food in your mouth, you do technically taste it but that's not the same thing as someone who understands what they're tasting. It takes a little bit of effort but we know that we can increase and expand our aesthetic taste and begin to learn how to better attend to our surroundings. Understanding how our environment affects us is crucial. The problem is most of us do not work or live in extreme ugliness.

One of my earliest memories before I had any of the vocabulary of aesthetics is walking through the projects in Philadelphia and feeling the weight of oppression on me. I had a sense that if I lived here, I wouldn't want to live at all. Many people don't live in that more extreme situation. We don't notice that our surroundings are having a very mild negative impact on us. Learn to pay more attention to that and be able to think enough to ask the question, “Is this environment okay?”

We often do not notice the mild negative impacts our surroundings have on us. Learning to pay more attention to our environment is crucial.

I love what you're sharing. It's slowing down and bringing more awareness into the moment of the things that are around you. Notice more. We can all benefit from that, good or bad. It doesn't have to always be about all the wonderful things but it can also be like, “What's not serving me in my environment that I might need to change and have a better feeling about where I am?”

It's reorienting and elevating aesthetics to its proper place. When people think about what we're talking about, they may not resonate with every example I give or something like that. “I don't care about music.” I know people like that. “I don't care about artwork.” That's fine. I would challenge you to maybe give it a chance. It's like someone saying, “I don't like jazz.” Jazz encompasses an 80-year period, if not more than that. “Which jazz don't you like? Have you heard enough to make that huge blanket statement?” We need to reorient ourselves to the value of aesthetics.

Impactful Books

I don't want to keep you very long here but I have one last question, which I always ask. What are 1, 2, or 3 books that have an impact on you and why? I can't wait to hear it.

I'll start with one that maybe doesn't fully have to do with the aesthetics or my work as a philosopher. I've always liked reading fiction. When I was a teenager and younger, I had a lot of intentions to read more and I never did. I didn't read a lot of books when I was younger. I was playing catch-up. I found a list of classic books that people should have read as a starting point. I was looking through them.

I happened to be at a bookstore and was in between books. I was like, “I'm going to get one of the books from this list.” I was looking at the list and walking around. I found a copy of Of Human Bondage by William Somerset Maugham. It's probably my favorite novel ever because upon finishing it, I thought I didn't just want to read fiction. I want to write it.

I haven't published anything yet but I've written a lot of fiction. I have at least one novel that I've considered writing and I've sketched out a lot of ideas for. Even if I never published fiction, to me, doing something creative, even if it's only for yourself, enhances your life. I have at least a goal to publish one short story at some point but I don't publish anything that way. It's fine. It helps me think about the world in different ways, create a character, and put myself in different characters.

Years ago, before I had any formal study in philosophy, I had heard that there was this philosopher named Søren Kierkegaard. I happened to mention this to a guy I knew. He happened to go to this person who had died. There was an estate sale and his wife was selling off all of his books and different things like that. This person I know happened to see this selection of Kierkegaard books on the shelf.

He made some joke about it. The person he was with thought, “He must like Søren Kierkegaard. I'm going to buy him this stack of Kierkegaard books.” It turns out he had no interest in reading Kierkegaard so he gave me all of these old Kierkegaard books that were probably originally printed in the ‘70s or ‘80s maybe, if not earlier. One of them was this abridged version of the journals of Kierkegaard.

My introduction to philosophy was reading Kierkegaard's journals. One of his books was called Attack Upon “Christendom”, which is a short scathing critique of the church in Copenhagen. Kierkegaard was an interesting character. He was very religious but was also very much against the formalized church that he referred to as Christendom. He would sit at the cafe across the street from his church on a Sunday morning so that everyone could see him not going to church. He would do stuff like that. There are a lot of books on aesthetics I could refer to but I don't know if there's a single one that influenced me as that professor's comment.

When you said about making art for art's sake or your own sake, I said that to someone. I've been doing some stencil art. It’s not ready to share, nor do I care about sharing it. It's more for the sake of doing it and I'm enjoying that.

I do painting music and writing. Sometimes, I have long delays in between some of these but painting helps me think through. For me, the challenge is trying to visualize some of the ideas I have in philosophy. I had one series of three paintings. I've already painted over most of them because they were awful. It was like, “Could I visualize this idea?” To me, writing, painting, and playing music are ways that help me think through the things I'm thinking about for my life and beyond that. Kurt Vonnegut said, “Practice an art, even if you're terrible at it. It makes your soul grow.”

I’m not pretty sure if Kurt Vonnegut didn't believe in an actual soul. He meant more in a humanistic sense. He also implies writing a poem to a friend, even if it's terrible. The act of being creative does stuff to you. I still do this sometimes and I don't know if people still do this because sometimes they text each other. If you leave a note saying, “I've gone out for a walk,” to whoever family member or roommate you have, write it in the form of a poem. We think of art and aesthetics as often these high lofty things but sometimes they're very small little things that people have referred to as glimmers. That's a whole other topic.

Michael, thank you so much for this. I don't want to keep you much longer. I could talk to you for hours. This was wonderful. Thank you so much for everything you shared.

Thank you for having me.

Of course. It has been truly a pleasure, Michael. Before I let you go, I want to make sure that people know where they can find out more about you. You offer a class or maybe you'll be having it again on on aesthetics. Share anything you want to share in this moment.

I have two websites. One is AestheticsResearch.com. The other is my name with my middle initial R so MichaelRSpicher.com. Aesthetics Research is if you want to read up on aesthetics and the different ways it affects. The Michael R. Spicher website is more about consulting, speaking, and other kinds of practice. I do also offer a Substack that most of it I give away for free. I have one stream that's behind a paywall because it's a massive project on the history of aesthetics. We're only at the medieval philosophers so there's still plenty of time to jump in at the ground floor on that one. That one does cost money because it's a huge undertaking for me.

Thanks again for coming on the show. Thanks, readers, for coming on the journey with us. I know you're leaving blown away and ready to start to embrace your level of artistic beauty, if you will, and explore aesthetics in your life. That's a wrap.

Thank you.

Important Links

• Aesthetics Research Lab
• Beauty Matter
• Digital Fashion: Theory, Practice, and Implications
• The Philosopher
• The Centre for Conscious Design
• Art as Experience
• Joyful
• Your Brain on Art
• Of Human Bondage
• Attack Upon “Christendom”
• Substack - Aesthetics Research Lab

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