A beautiful mountain landscape, the Eiffel tower shining brilliantly in the night, a majestic Medieval castle poking out of a comfy town. These kinds of "beautiful photographs" are so ubiquitous as to become meaningless. You see them on desktop backgrounds, advertisements, Web 2.0 sites.

Thus we become desensitized to the medium and nothing really impresses us. Even if we were to travel to one of these famous places, to see with our own eyes the majestic Neuschwanstein or the sweeping Iguazu Falls, what would be the point? Perhaps we would be moved and impressed and awed for a minute. Maybe even for an hour. We would take a picture and move on.

It's not just nature or great works of architecture. CGI, for example, used to be so new and impressive, but now it is so ever-present and realistic that it ceases to be amazing. We might momentarily marvel at how beautiful and realistic the latest AAA graphics are, but the luster wears off as we are bombarded with "Beauty".

The mainstream sense of conventional "beauty" has been so commodified and amplified and endlessly replicated that it has lost its sense of wonder. These days the things that impress me instead are the strange, the weird, the ugly, the mundane, the unique.