Maximinimalist aesthetics permits simple, plain forms, amidst lavish ostentation and outright froo-froo; but it mandates plain be framed, beside ornament and bric-a-brac, in such a way that simplicity is most likely to be eye-catching, as plain things next to fancy things go. 1/

That's why no one has ever said that "A Theory of Justice" works for aesthetics. Rawls lacks visual-political flair. A G.A. Cohen-style designer is going to say: I see what you are going for here and it won't DO. You might as well just fancy it ALL up to a middling degree. 2/

Such 'gilt by association' to alleviate guilt by association is unsound. A Burkean decorator, by contrast, is happy to have large areas of minimalist plainness, but only thereby to accentuate the brightness of the few spots of ornament and gold. This is maximax aesthetics. 3/

You may not like it. It's brutalist baroque but it works. (Maximax critiques maximinimalism on the grounds that it declines into minimin. Everything is plain, but in a way that accentuates the plainness of everything, making it all equally hard to bear looking at.) 4/

I hereby launch a vital subfield at the intersection of design and politics. It includes such timeless topics as 'the aesthetics of intermediacy'. 'Civil society and the baroque diagonal', 'Montesquieu and Mount Askew.' https://petapixel.com/2013/04/15/the-great-compositions-of-photographer-alfred-eisenstaedt/ 4/

'Justified Type and Justified Types: From Plato to Print'. 'Jackson Pollock, Robert Nozick, and the Discontents of Patterned Distribution'. 'Reading Rubens "The Fall of Phaeton" Through Tocqueville's "Democracy In America".' 5/

'Golden Ratios and Getting Ratio'd: The Aesthetics of Ostracism in Visual Media and on Social Media". This will of course be at least as interesting to @jtlevy as that thing on octopi. 6/ https://crookedtimber.org/2018/02/01/the-birth-of-intermediacy/