I regard aesthetics and notions of beauty as having no fundamental basis, though many forms of art, such as J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor, are artistic creations of exquisite enjoyment for some, including myself. Instead, I regard them as fashions of the moment. What are highly desirable in one generation may be despised by another, and sometimes return to favour a generation later -- the Victorian fireplace in my present house is one example. It only escaped the modernisers during the last 50 years because an old man lived here and refused to have any changes made to the house.
The city of Bath in which I live was chock-full of wonderful Tudor buildings until about 1740. I have an early print of what it used to look like before the John Wood and the other builders tore it all down in the 18th century and replaced it with Georgian architecture everywhere. This, now, is considered a beautiful city. I had a shock some years ago when I visited Laycock Abbey not far from here. In the cloisters, some of the wonderful Gothic wall carvings in the Perpendicular style is shown to have covered over a previous cladding in Early English style -- quite as beautiful in its own, simpler way. The later Tudor builders didn't destroy the previous building (it would have been too expensive to have done so) but they certainly had no notions of the beauty of a century previously.
Virginia Postrels is a prolific libertarian writer on economics and in her most recent book The Substance of Style she discusses the importance of fashions in the economic scheme of things. Although she is writing of superficial matters almost all her examples of desirable consumer products and branded goods are those of what I term "infills" or "adjuncts" to what were originally status goods. Although they are bought to denote status they are only the pale reflections of what were originally status goods -- powerful drivers of economic growth in previous times. The goods that Virginia Postrel writes about are useful maintainers of the economic system but that's all they are. However, her book is a useful commentary on modern times.
M'mm ... I see that Virginia Postrels mentions Vance Packard's "drive for status". I read a lot of him when I was young. Perhaps, subconsciously, I've been more influenced by him than I realise. I must re-read him!
Keith Hudson
<<<< BUYING SOFAS, STEALING BEAUTY
Francis Morrone
I like that. Im like that. This phrase recurs through Virginia Postrels provocative book, The Substance of Style.The phrase is, she suggests, the credo of our age, which is the Age of Aesthetics.
At first, that notion seems counterintuitive.After all, many among us regard our time as something less than a Renaissance in the arts. I am not sure whether Ms. Postrel would agree or disagree with that assessment. For, though her subject is aesthetics, she concerns herself not at all with the fine arts. Rather, she writes of style as in lifestyle.
We live, Ms. Postrel says, in a time when the aesthetic imperative pervades all aspects of our lives. As the Western economies grew, they first took care of outfitting our lives with material goods ample shelter, ample clothing, refrigerators, automobiles, and so on. These would have seemed ultra-luxurious in earlier times, but we quickly came to regard them as necessities. Having, as it were, conquered scarcity, now we seek to render our lives expressive through our adoption of styled products.Where once a refrigerator represented convenience, it is now, by its styling, a form of self-expression.A good-looking refrigerator allows us to make a statement about our lives, values, and aspirations.
A noted libertarian editor and economics writer, Ms. Postrel seeks to enter a realm that would appear to be outside of her specialty. But, as she points out, aesthetics and economics are now so intertwined that any economics writer who fails to discuss aesthetics misses a major perhaps the major economic phenomenon of our time.
Others, of course, have noted the convergence of the aesthetic and the economic typically in a condemnatory way as part of a social critique of the role of the fashion cycle in planned obsolescence. Ms. Postrel celebrates the aestheticization of our world and the seemingly infinite variety of expressive forms thus engendered. Ours is the most pluralistic and democratic time in the history of style.
From dreadlocks to Starbucks, from PowerPoint to Pottery Barn, Americans today can't get enough of the delirious array of design that permeates their persons and environments. In today's aesthetic profusion, the choice of thirty-five thousand colors of plastic, fifteen hundred drawer pulls, thirty thousand fonts, motifs from nearly every culture that has ever existed serves a variety of tastes and circumstances.What's remarkable is that this profusion is so readily, immediately available, in stores and on the Web. Thousands of home-decorating items available at middle-class retail stores were, not very long ago, available only at enormous expense through professional designers who dealt with for the trade-only merchants.
This aesthetic plenitude fuels our economy. Producers compete on the basis of styling, and its not just womens coats and automobiles were talking about. Its paper clips, and pagers, and letter openers, and shoelaces, and bath mats, and bandages, and ballpoint pens. There may well be not a single item of household or personal use that is not now available in some professionally styled and usually quite attractive variant.
Ms. Postrel points out that economists do not yet possess adequate means of understanding how much value aesthetics adds to the economy. I might replace a table lamp that I bought for $40 a decade ago with a new one that costs, adjusted for inflation, $40. To an economist, one $40 table lamp is as good as another $40 table lamp.Yet the one just bought might be, say,a Michael Graves lamp from Target. You get the idea. Producers have ratcheted up the aesthetic value of their products, such that the overall value has, Ms. Postrel argues, increased dramatically. They are thus adding huge amounts of value to the economy in ways that defy conventional economic analysis and therefore mask the economys true growth.
Ms. Postrel celebrates the mix-and-match aesthetic of do-it-yourself interior decorating middle-class couples perusing the vast offerings of the Great Indoors or Restoration Hardware. These couples' choices, drawn from a variety of sources and styles and price ranges, beget self-expression and identification with certain values I like that. I'm like that. It's not at all, she says (and I agree), about the Vance Packard-defined drive for status. Its actually, remarkably, earnest and soulful.
She also writes of the democratization of graphic design. With personal computers and stores like Kinkos, everyone now produces his own brochures, flyers, business cards, and letterheads. Law firms that once eschewed creating a visual identity now flaunt logos on four-color promotional brochures. House cleaners looking for work post ads with mixed fonts and with clip art. Ms. Postrel takes umbrage when professional designers look at these productions and cringe. She comes close to saying there is no such thing as bad design, that our pluralistic culture has made the commissar of taste a thing of the past. I like thatrules.
Ms. Postrel points out that part of the problem with establishment design, particularly of the modernist variety of the last half-century, is that it actually disrespected the visceral verities of good design. Part of the reason for the public's intense clamor for aesthetic goods is the retreat from stultifying modernist orthodoxies that are inimical to the human spirit. If modernist design ideology promised efficiency, rationality, and truth, she writes, today's diverse aesthetics offer a different trifecta freedom, beauty, and pleasure (the brand promise, incidentally, of the rapidly expanding Sephora cosmetics stores). Thus do we live in a momentary often delightful chaos that shall inevitably morph into better practices through trial and error. Eventually, aesthetic harmony shall prevail.
Ms. Postrel is one of the sharpest critics of Modernist ideology I've read in some time. This does not mean that she does not love certain Modernist products as examples of style that might be mixed and matched with different styles. She exemplifies, in an acute and articulate way, the present moment, in which Modernism has devolved from ideology to another style among many.
Modernists have a curious relationship to the aestheticization of the world. They did, of course, attempt to carry a basic sense of design through to all areas of life from door handles to cities.While they mandated and dictated, they also placed great emphasis on design and packaging. Don't forget that the Museum of Modern Art displays an Electrolux vacuum cleaner and a Chemex coffeemaker, a helicopter and a car. But those of the Modernist persuasion also castigate the frivolity of our aesthetic way of life, and that is because Modernists valued above all what they called authenticity.The cult of authenticity may, Hallelujah!, be on the way out. The best part of Ms. Postrels book is her denunciation of this cult.
She devotes much space to issues of urban design. (This certainly must be the first book that ever tried to draw an aesthetic line from breast enlargement to urban planning.) Can the libertarian champion of pluralistic design get behind design guidelines, whether they be for suburban sub-divisions or urban historic districts? Surprisingly, yes. Hers is one of the best analyses of this situation I have read, and one of those most rooted in common sense. She suggests that small, rather than large, areas have every business imposing stringent guidelines. What matters is choice among areas with different guidelines or no guidelines. Even on the larger scale, she backs basic guidelines pertaining to street layout, open-space distribution, and such though not to the design of façades. The careful reader of Jane Jacobs will feel right at home with Ms. Postrels views.
Still, though I agree with much of what is in The Substance of Style and would like to agree with more that I have instead taken under advisement I did feel certain pangs while reading.
I agree with Ms. Postrel that our aesthetic plenitude is, in general, a good thing. I take great delight in the snazzy styling of my household detritus. Yet I cannot help thinking there may be a few more trade-offs than Ms.Postrel admits. She errs, I think, in suggesting that the quality as well as the fine styling of most of the goods of our lives has risen in the Age of Aesthetics.Who among us actually believes that the constructional standards of middle-class furniture or of men's clothing has actually risen within the last quarter-century? It just isn't so.
New apartments in New York, even very high-class ones, are downright poorly constructed, not only in comparison to pre-war apartments but even in comparison with the apartments of the 1950s and 1960s. The same is true of most new houses for the middle class, including the McMansions.Not only do they look like a strong wind will take them down, but they are, for all their aesthetic trappings, ill-proportioned, both in their external detailing and in the layout of their internal spaces.They are badly designed.
Just so, do special effects actually add value to movies, as she claims in one of her most willfully perverse passages? While I dont doubt that she has a personal taste for the sensory bombardment offered by contemporary films, her value-added contention is absurd on the face of it. (Seen Citizen Kane lately?)
My other major problem arises from my having, by sheer coincidence, just read William Langewiesche's spell-binding article, in the Atlantic Monthly, on the international shipping business. A major part --perhaps the major part -- of how producers have been able to pull off their stunning feats of aestheticization is by shifting manufacturing overseas, thus cutting costs of production. Ungodly numbers of the affordable, high-style products with which middle-class Americans now outfit their lives come from abroad across the oceans in container ships. So many containers arrive daily at American ports that only the merest fraction can be inspected.
Oceanic shipping is, Mr. Langewiesche makes clear, anarchic. We do not know the provenance of most of the ships that arrive in our ports. Did you know that Osama bin Laden operates a fleet of oceangoing vessels? Authorities can't tell his apart from thousands of others. This may represent the greatest menace we face from terrorists.Yet to inspect all ships, or to limit shipping, would mean, effectively, an end to our aesthetic economy.
But that's a subject for another book. In the meanwhile, agree or disagree with Ms.Postrel, she frames her subject in such a way that I believe one cannot understand our America without reading her book.
Francis Morrone writes the "Abroad in New York" column in the New York Sun
The New York Sun -- 3 September 2003 >>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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