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:
Sanders can aestheticize his practiced cantankerousness for laughs and sympathy without anyone asking if its a put-on.
From The Guardian ● Mar. 7, 2020
Movies dramatizing the Holocaust play a peculiar role in memorializing history, in that the barbarism of the subject defies attempts to aestheticize it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 28, 2019
“Mindhunter” doesn’t aestheticize or elevate the likes of Kemper.
From New York Times ● Oct. 12, 2017
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
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
The artfully but naïvely biased mural aestheticized the racism, social inequality, and power inequities of colonial enterprise, a picture of what the scholar Edward Said called “orientalism.”
From New York Times ● Nov. 16, 2022
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
Richard Misrach’s luscious photographs of the cruel fence are so acutely aestheticized that a viewer begins to question the very nature of the loveliness he is seeing.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 18, 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
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