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:
Part of this, I think, can be attributed to social media and its relentless invitation to aestheticize even the most mundane corners of domestic life, kitchen cabinets included.
From Salon ● Jul. 11, 2026
Either way, the urge to aestheticize work remains.
From New York Times ● Mar. 1, 2023
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
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
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
He did admit that the one critique of “All the Light” that landed a blow was that he had aestheticized the war, not really showing the suffering of the Holocaust.
From New York Times ● Sep. 16, 2021
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
And I think it’s that they are able to exacerbate and make more palatable the violence of its own history and iconography by aestheticizing it and not making it abject.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 3, 2018
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
Are you talking about the risk of aestheticizing?
From Salon ● Sep. 26, 2012
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