The Substance of Style by Virginia Postrel
(HarperCollins) $24.95
As anyone who had to wear a uniform in grade school (or middle school, or high school) will tell you, the impulse to identify ourselves through clothes is so deeply rooted that it can’t be suppressed by rules. Virginia Postrel’s favorite example of this is that after the fall of the Taliban, the rush in Afghanistan was not to democracy, but to the beauty parlor. “Liberation,” she writes, “is supposed to be about grave matters: elections, education, a free press. But Afghans acted as though superficial things were just as important.”
No doubt they are; it’s certainly not a shock that freedom of expression, in whatever form, is a human need. And according to Postrel, the author of The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, we now live in an age in which it’s possible to express yourself aesthetically in more ways than ever before. From hotels to hairstyles to toilet brushes, the world is full of diverse visual choices, and they are all available and that’s just great. Postrel, an economist (you may be surprised to learn, rather than a design or art historian), rejects the Puritan distrust of ornament, the killjoy notion that a surface is not as important as what lies beneath it. Even to suggest the latter is to be the scolding former; distrust of style, to Postrel, is Taliban. To ignore aesthetics is to “deny human experience and ignore human behavior.”
Which makes her, even in the abstract, rather hard to argue with, even though argument is exactly what this book needs. It is jam-packed with numbers and statistics toward proving points that hardly need proving–for example, that more things in more variety than ever before are being manufactured, and we’re slurping them up at an unprecedented rate–while ignoring the larger ramifications. Dwelling on ramifications isn’t pleasurable, and pleasure drives the argument–which is simply that the things which give us pleasure are good. To deny that there’s value in the real pleasure from a Michael Graves teapot (now democratically available at Target), she argues, is to suffer the worst kind of elitism, and it leads directly down a slippery path to top-down culture, snobbery, and condescension. That we all have access to these pleasing objects is only good, no less from an economic point of view, of course, than an aesthetic one.
After a while, as is probably already obvious, her labored arguments wax very, very dull. And there is something even more troubling about Postrel’s line of thinking, something harder to pin down in among her cheerful invocation of diversity, abundance, and choice, something darker about what’s happened to meaning and (to be perfectly fogeyish) ethics in among all the pretty things.
Not everyone wants to be visually stimulated all the time. There is no discussion of relief from the overdetermined (and frequently overdesigned) environments we’re constantly subjected to, and there’s no mention of taste in its essential definition–the slow accumulation of an aesthetic that happens as you learn what you like and what you don’t, the shaping of a room or an aesthetic (in the philosophical sense) over time. This philosophical notion of aesthetics is absent from Postrel’s argument, as though affinities with objects are nothing more than passing fancies, soon to be replaced by others. (This is, in fact, exactly what the people selling you those pleasurable objects want.)
Postrel presents a series of proofs of her Age of Aesthetics theory–and “aesthetics” here simply means “looks,” or in Postrel’s favored diction, “look and feel”–all of them presented in a bright tone that is curiously without judgment. What are we to make, then, of the evidence that “a British boutique hotel chain… hires only attractive employees (with good personalities)”? It’s a few chapters on before Postrel dives into the ethics of things, but her discourse there is still equivocal and bereft of something–let’s call it humanity. In the case of Jennifer Portnick, an overweight woman who filed a complaint when Jazzercise wouldn’t hire her, Postrel seems genuinely miffed that anyone would second guess the aesthetic judgment of Jazzercise, its right to control the company’s “look and feel.” Never mind that people, no matter how much time they spend turning themselves into unique brands–leaving aside the idea of whether or not an obese woman ought to teach exercise classes–are not design.
One of the things that leads her down this appalling road is an altogether faulty definition of art, and a concomitant misunderstanding of the difference between art and design. “Not all visually sophisticated consumers,” Postrel writes, “want art to impress their friends, hobnob with the gallery crowd, or make money as an investment. Some just want a more attractive living room.”
Which means, of course, that Postrel has dumped meaning, content, allusion, and thought from the realm of what differentiates art from a toilet brush (pace Duchamp), and once you’ve done that you’ve pretty much lowered it to the visual level of anything else. Which is fine with her; we’re free to borrow freely from the world of visual effects, and without guilt. Like dreadlocks? Wear them; never mind the religious or racial history, dreadlocks are there to serve you, as are little square black glasses, and spiked dog collars. Never mind meaning; meaning is disposable. What is not disposable is the ineffable, diverse collection of signifiers that is you.
But diversity is not the same thing as complexity, especially when it’s being marketed to you. Postrel dismisses as Babbittry the fear that design obscures and manipulates, but sees nothing wrong with stores or conferences using music and lighting that “gets inside the minds of attendees and triggers the right feeling.” She is particularly enamored of Starbucks, and the way that each store is different, so that if you don’t like one Starbucks there’s one across the street that might appeal to you more. What goes unsaid, of course–because she never saw a deeper, more complicated question she couldn’t avoid–is why there are Starbuckses across the street from each other, and what that has cost us.