Skip to main content

The Substance of Style, Part IV

Manolo Blahnik Women's Hangisi 105 Embellished Satin Pumps - Blue Satin - Size 37.5 (7.5)

A final observation on Postrel's 2003 book on the aesthetic age.

Here we get to the politics of it. On the municipal level, she gets to score some points at the expense of the busybodies of building and planning codes and the busier bodies who live and breath to enforce them, and who make up their own additional rules in the process.

She takes as a case study here the town of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, of which she writes:

"Mount Pleasant does have lots of explicit design rules -- no neon, for instance -- but the board's critique is open-ended. If members don't like glass block or ceramic tile, they say so, even if the city has no law against either material. An architect who wants his plans approved will bend his client's budget, tastes, and aesthetic  identity to  suit the board. all the more so if he expects to submit future plans to the same board."

With the result, she says, that the various streets of Mount Pleasant all end up looking the same, and the expense of living in or even moving through the town is a mite less Pleasant than the name seems to promise.

And yes, Postrel is aware that the push to conformity is not unique to the public sector. Private condo boards can be as dogmatic, their critiques as ad hoc and open-ended, as those of which she complains above.  But that arises a consequence of the operation of freedom of contract and is subject to natural market checks. The Mount Pleasant planning board is a greater offense, both politically and to her mind aesthetically.

A final point:   the conventional statistics by which the United States measures its economic success are more pessimistic than facts justify. We can see this once we put on the goggles of the aesthetic age.

"Although government statisticians make some adjustments for easily measurable improvements like computer memory or car features, they would treat this season's designer pair of $70 embroidered women's dress shoes as the equivalent of last season's $70 pair of plain women's dress shoes....If you're toting up national income or measuring consumer price increases, a $20 steak dinner at a beautifully designed restaurant is just like a $20 steak dinner in a warehouse environment."

And with that I conclude, leaving my reader to his/her own reflections.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
9 comments
Read more

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...
17 comments
Read more

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...
4 comments
Read more