Beautiful performance of Monteverdi's "Vespers for the Blessed Virgin" in a very cool Baroque (?) church:
There's something deeply wrong with this picture, though. Every single thing in this video that was designed more than 100 years ago is beautiful. Every single thing in it that was designed in the last 50 years is ugly. At some point in the last ~100 years, we gave up on making practical things that are also beautiful.
It's not that we can't afford to do it. It's not that we don't know how to do it. It's not that we don't care. But for whatever reason, we just don't.
The systems that make things now aren't capable of making things like this. People, individually, have the means, the will, the knowledge, the heart. But the way people are organized makes it impossible for all of that to be realized, to be made manifest in the world.
I've seen this play out in software companies. Put a bunch of lovely, motivated, talented humans together in a room, pay them a good salary, and... get banal slop. At scale!
Here's hoping that within the next 100 years we'll figure out a better way.