The Dark Side of Wabi Sabi

I just watched that show where Marcel Theroux (however you spell his name) went to Japan to find out about Wabi Sabi. Even at the end of the show I got the distinct feeling that he still didn't get it and that he'd never get it. It reminded me a lot of the time I tried to explain Aestheticism to a boy who had taken the module because he didn't know what else to take. The boy didn't get it and after four hours and many cup of coffee of me explaining it to him, he still didn't get it.
Put in the simplest terms, I think both wabi sabi and Aestheticism are concepts you have to feel rather than know on an intellectual level.
This made me think about the connections between the two artist principles. At a glance they seem to be almost polar opposites. Wabi sabi is all about simplicity, usefulness and imperfection whereas Aestheticism is all about uselessness, artifice and an attempt at perfection.
However, I couldn't help but make the comparison. They both seem to be artist movements which have bled over to become a way of life.
At the heart of both there is a maxim of living in the moment and disinterestedness.
I was reminded of Plato's Symposium where he talks about beauty and seeing beauty in common things to reach a kind of state of beauty nirvana that he couldn't describe.
Compared to the context of austere zen Buddhism and the discipline of tea ceremonies, the setting of the Symposium in a kind of party populated to by drunk beautiful young men seems to make the Western concept jaded from the start.
Saying that, something Marcel actually managed to spot was the love of artifice and hedonism of modern Japan. So it looks like both these movements have a similar flaw and it lies in the heart of existentialism. To the zen monks this means that you have to live each moment striving for some kind of sublime purity but to the average person it means bugger everything and enjoy every moment in whatever way you feel is best.
A similar phenomenon occurs in aestheticism where the urge to experience as much of beautiful life as possible becomes increasingly extreme until it leads to all kinds of debauchery (a wonderful word if you ask me) and crazy goings on.