aestheticize
Americanverb (used with object)
Etymology
Origin of aestheticize
First recorded in 1895–1900; aesthetic ( def. ) + -ize ( def. )
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Since purchasing the site in 1977, he has constructed a labyrinth of chambers and tunnels that aestheticize the experience of sky-watching.
From New York Times ● Feb. 24, 2022
Even on the bigger, splashier international canvas of “The White Tiger,” there’s a becoming modesty to Bahrani’s filmmaking and a palpable reluctance to sensationalize or aestheticize his protagonist’s poverty.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 21, 2021
Sanders can aestheticize his practiced cantankerousness for laughs and sympathy without anyone asking if its a put-on.
From The Guardian ● Mar. 7, 2020
Theodor Adorno said, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”: any attempt to aestheticize the camps, to redeem the irredeemable, only trivializes the events.
From The New Yorker ● Jan. 8, 2017
Those who need a little more guidance might try locating someone who can aestheticize.
From Salon ● Jan. 28, 2016
In one sense, she’s dealing with a rights issue too painful to be aggressively aestheticized, but she’s also exploring a blood-soaked injustice that can’t be treated conventionally.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 9, 2026
Utterly and unapologetically aestheticized, it reveled in its surfaces, while Modernism had everything from the political to the spiritual on its mind.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 23, 2025
For years, the egg has ruled the breakfast table like a sun god—worshipped, aestheticized, endlessly fiddled with by men in starched aprons and women with ring lights.
From Salon ● Nov. 13, 2025
But the brawl, at least at first, is not aestheticized.
From New York Times ● Mar. 6, 2023
Its real legacy, though — its pathos and odd magic — is in how it smoothed the mess of the moment into radio-ready coherence; how it aestheticized the pomp of politics into song.
From Washington Post ● Nov. 20, 2020
But this is no navel-gazing exercise in aestheticizing detritus or finding beauty in ugly places.
From New York Times ● Jun. 30, 2023
Still, she remains clear-eyed about the so-called dark side of art because there is always the danger of aestheticizing suffering.
From The Guardian ● Jun. 14, 2016
Taboos are misread into Jacques Rivette’s essay “On Abjection”; his warning against aestheticizing matters of life and death is distorted into worry about pictorializing almost anything.
From The New Yorker ● Feb. 2, 2016
Rappmund isn’t merely aestheticizing sludge and ruin, putting lipstick on a pig.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 27, 2015
Are you talking about the risk of aestheticizing?
From Salon ● Sep. 26, 2012
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
