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 ...
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The notion that we have moved into an age of aesthetics has a number of applications, from child psychology to municipal politics to the accuracy of the national economic statistics. I'll stick with child psychology today, and I'll wait until tomorrow to remind you that Postrel is, after all, a libertarian author and there is a politics to everything she writes, even when (as for some chapters in this book) it is not at all in the forefront). Child psychology. She observed a father telling her daughter that she shouldn't be so concerned with looks, that there are superficial and meaningless. She thinks this bad advice. "When a father tells his teenage daughter that looks are 'meaningless,' he is not assuring her that she is attractive or will become so over time. He is saying that she's loved and valued for her other traits, regardless of how she looks -- a loving but irrelevant affirmation. Her looks do mean something important to her. They do...
Continuing our look at Postrel's book THE SUBSTANCE OF STYLE. There is a theory known to undergraduate psychology students as the "hierarchy of needs." It is the notion, associated with the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who formulated it in the middle of the last century, that the lower level needs must be satisfied before one's attention turns to the level of needs next up. One secures a place to defecate before one even goes looking for food. One has to have a certain level of material comfort, including at least a diminution of hunger pangs, before one moves on to looking for a mate, developing friendships, joining clubs, etc. And so forth upwards to such lofty goals as self-actualization and "transcendence." At first glance, one might take some of what Postrel says as in accord with this notion. After all, the "aesthetic age" upon which we have entered seems to be a matter of concern chiefly with the wealthier nations, nations where rela...
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 c...