You have an eye for form, you might appreciate this. It's certainly heightened my awareness. Might be an important book some day.
For Virginia Postrel, the only thing wretched about the culture of consumerism is the excessive criticism of it
by Tom Carson
The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness
by Virginia Postrel
Artifice has somewhat traditionally been humanity's best bet for making our surroundings more congenial, but a daunting wad of highfalutin opinion tells us that what was fine for the Medicis turns wicked once Dubuque gets in on the act. Nine tenths of the critical writing about commodity culture could be anthologized under the title Killjoy Was Here; whether the point of view is Marxist alienation or post-structuralist hauteur, it's a given that the critic is monkishly immune to the gratifications involved. Yet that's just why, tested against everyday life as most people experience it, the bulk of all this intellectual hectoring is inhumane rubbish—contemptuous of desires that aren't necessarily as unworthy or manipulated as charged.
It's in debunking materialism's Gradgrinds that Virginia Postrel's brightly argued, maddeningly blinkered The Substance of Style is most provocative. A consumer advocate of a distinctly novel sort, Postrel defends our right to follow our bliss to the mall, pursuing beauty however we see fit; she also celebrates the vastly expanded options for doing just that in today's varied marketplace. Even when you want to quarrel with her, you're exhilarated by her challenge to preachy notions about the spuriousness of all manufactured delights. From Walter Benjamin to Thoreau wannabe Bill McKibben, we've never gotten a break from hearing that the contrived, sensational world we live in is a travesty. But after a century-plus of mass communications and mass manufacturing, can't we at least agree that the shock has worn off a bit?
Because it's groundbreaking, The Substance of Style is likely to annoy people both for what Postrel is saying and for what she omits (and I'd disagree with the second complaint far less than the first). But it deserves to be taken seriously, because it's the kind of book that crystallizes attitudes and assumptions that have pervaded contemporary life without much intellectual rationale. If sixties counterculture was—as critic Robert Christgau once called it—"that unprecedented and probably insupportable contradiction in terms, mass bohemia," today's cultural keynote, though a contradiction only to snobs, is something weirder: mass aestheticism, sought not in museums or concert halls but in practical everyday objects, home and commercial décor, hairstyles and costume.
Postrel, an economics columnist for The New York Times, is marvelously informative about two related phenomena that educated, moderately affluent Americans simultaneously enjoy and deride: first, consumer items, from tchotchkes to whole environments, now cater to pretty much every conceivable taste; and second, all sorts of items formerly peddled (and purchased) on strictly utilitarian grounds now emphasize design and sensual appeal. Even when Postrel's examples are familiar, the specifics can be eye-popping; it's one thing to know that architect Michael Graves designs household items for Target, but another to learn that the chain now sells over 500 Graves-designed products. In one of her funniest set pieces, Postrel lists the currently available models of the lowly toilet-bowl brush, from Rubbermaid's choice-of-seven-colors $5.00 version to the eight-buck Michael Graves one at Target to designer Philippe Starck's $32 Excalibur model and up.
One reason this gambit has a nervy side is that Postrel isn't using designer toilet-bowl brushes to send up ridiculous excess. While you wish the $400 gold-plated version gave her pause, she's trying to bring her readers around to recognizing the contrasting absurdity of thinking we're more virtuous if our brush stays spartan, ugly, and generally unlovable. In this case, her claim that aesthetic pleasure is the only conceivable motive—because prestige can't be involved, she says—is fairly shaky, since every hausfrau and most hausherrs know that bathrooms are the acid test of gentility. Yet she's right that there's no reason to keep toilet-bowl brushes unattractive, and so long as we need 'em, why shouldn't Graves design them? He's making himself of use to the public—a good thing for an architect to do, even if Frank Gehry will go to his grave believing otherwise.
On a cultural level, Postrel's larger contention is that today's let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom proliferation of aesthetic options is liberating, not debauching. As she sees it, consumers' pleasure in those options, besides being valid in its own right, involves meaningful self-expression. It's no longer about keeping up with the Joneses, if indeed it ever was, but about declaring either independence from or tribal kinship with them
theatlantic.com |
