Skip to main content

The Substance of Style, Part I

The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (P.S.)

Sixteen years ago, Virginia Postrel was a well-known author in libertarian circles, in the 1990s she was the editor in chief of REASON. Not long after she stepped down from that post, though, she came out with a book on what was, to many of her admirers an unlikely subject, in The Substance of Style (New York, 2003).

The subject was the economics of the look and feel of things: ordinary things, not objects denominated "art." In part, it is about the artfulness of product design. But Postrel's interest in the aesthetics of ordinary life went beyond what one typically thinks of as product design issues -- it included everything from hair style to the aesthetic component of building and planning codes.

I will spend all this week posting about it, so this is the first post of a planned foursome.

The chief point of this book is that we are entering a distinctive age in human history, an "aesthetic age," one in which the look and feel of things is and will continue to be of unprecedented importance. Matters once regarded as frivolities are becoming central concerns with less and less apologetic knee bending to the curmudgeons who still complain that they are frivolities.

I was thinking of her book in recent days after channel-surfing to a television show about plastic surgery. For an actress who wants to continue to look as if she is 21, cosmetic surgery may be a profit-and-loss calculation. The appeal of such surgery, which has expanded, though, well beyond any narrow confines, raises the musical question: Why?

There is a nice quote in Postrel's book on p. 7 from "theorist Ellen Dissanayake [who] defines art broadly as 'making special.'" I had never heard the quote before, or heard of Ellen Dissanayake for that matter. I've looked her up since and have to say: her point is different from Postrel's. Postrel is trying to say we are n a new age. Dissanayake is discussing human nature, taking an "ethological" view of art, that is -- we make our things (and even perhaps our faces) special because that is the sort of animals we are.

Still, they are not contradictory insights.

To be continued.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...