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

I came to this book with the same trepidation because I didn't particularly care for Postrel's last book, The Future and its Enemies. But, I ended up a convert. Sure, Postrel's thesis here is a simple one, but this only underscores its elegance. That we all demand ambiance with our coffee and a flourish with our door knobs is something many folks take for granted. But the thing is, it's an unprecedented change in the history of human consumption and I don't know of anyone who has catalogued it like Postrel has. That profitability and business survival increasingly depend on the intangible "feel" of a product or service--and not on its traditional utility--will still come as a surprise to many old-school thinkers.

What Postrel does in this book is engagingly prove her two points beyond a doubt. Sure, they're simple points, but the book is short and packed with interesting anecdotes. I recommend this book to anyone interested in design, but especially to folks who think there's no value in looks or those who might be tempted to fault our modern "consumerist" culture as wasteful.

The book surveys a wide variety of trends -- from fashion to cosmetic surgery to restaurant design -- and shows how they fit this common pattern. We hear about Martha Stewart, Starbucks, the iMac, fashion magazines, tiled floors, nice salad bowls, and the Michael Graves brush from Target. The age of Wonder Bread is gone, and the middle class can now buy a sense of style previously reserved for the wealthy. Postrel declines the enterprise of demarcation and does not try to draw a boundary between art and the pleasures of daily life.

Some of the best passages concern globalization. In Turkey the number of interior design magazines has number from one to forty in a decade. Japan is becoming a fashion capital, while South Korea and Singapore are becoming centers of design (p.14).

Any reader of my own works, which stress how commerce brings us plenty, diversity, and creativity, will not be surprised how thoroughly I agree with Postrel. So I will spend the rest of this review outlining my primary worry with the book, noting that my own research is open to the same questions.

To put it bluntly, sometimes I wonder just how much these aesthetic developments make us better off. No, I am not advocating a return to Mao's gray pajamas. I believe in market-oriented capitalism, including for the arts. But could the baroque proliferation of the aesthetic, in all of its manifestations, be an unimportant epiphenomenon, distinct from the main success story of capitalism? Could "the Buff Revolution," as we now describe the new and growing obsession with male bodies, be a temporary and not very effective antidote against our underlying boredom?

Postrel (pp.74-77) does an excellent job arguing against Bob Frank's relative status idea. We want beauty for its own sake, and not just to look better than others. I will add that the interiors of American homes, over the last few decades, have improved much more than their exteriors, contra to what Frank's hypothesis would predict.

But does beauty make us much happier? Perhaps we get used to our frame of reference and quickly take new beautiful objects as part of our assumed background. Postrel's own text points to some of these worries. We are told "Design that was once cutting edge is now a minimum standard, taken for granted by customers." (p.19) Later she writes: "The aesthetic age won't last forever. The innovations that today seem exciting, disturbing, or both will eventually become the backgrounds of our lives. We won't notice them unless they're missing." (p.189)

A broader literature, focusing on the psychology of happiness, questions whether new gadgets, beautiful or not, make people much happier. Daniel Kahneman suggests that people mistakenly forecast what will make them happy (search our archives at www.MarginalRevolution.com). And after the fact they overestimate the happiness value of fleeting aesthetic experiences, leading them to seek out those experiences again and again, with little real satisfaction.

I can think of a few lines of response. First, an aesthete might argue happiness be damned, and advocate "art for art's sake." Unlike many economists, I have sympathies for this attitude, but only when it applies to Mozart and Michelangelo. The first sentence of the book blurb mentions "airport terminals decorated like Starbucks" and "hair dye among teenage boys," which are much harder to defend in these exalted terms.

A second possibility is that we use the aesthetic to promote ourselves. Maybe blue hair dye per se makes no one especially happy, but it helps teenage boys signal their identities and thus to form the appropriate peer groups. The psychological literature stresses that friends are a good source of real happiness. Our interest in the aesthetic may be an indirect path to better and better-matched sets of friends.

In this case, however, it is less clear how well the modern world is doing. Robert Putnam stresses that, instead of being happy with friends, we are moving to a society of "bowling alone." I will review Putnam's new book soon, but in any case this is a tougher debate than what Postrel takes on. And if we defend the aesthetic for instrumental reasons, suddenly Putnam, not Postrel, is addressing the more relevant debate.

Third, we may choose to side with "meaning" rather than "happiness." Postrel (pp.190-1) argues that material manifestations of the aesthetic bring meaning into our lives. Modern design serves artifactual functions, above and beyond its use as a source of pleasure: "When we too are dust, our descendants will have Fashid's curvy plastic trash cans." What we own is, in part, what we are and what we will be.

Postrel closes the book on this note, and we cannot help but notice the self-referential character of the assertion. I liked not only this book, but also its dust jacket.

Postrel has done her homework on art, design, and aesthetics. As an outsider to the artworld (an economist writing for publications ranging from the New York Times and Reason Magazine), she offers new insights in the stuffy and exclusive club of academia, aesthetics, and art theory. Such cross-fertilization of disciplines offers the potential for break-though observations. Postrel's book proves this point by introducing consumer preferences, the creativity and competition of the marketplace, and product distinction as central to "good" design.

The author gains from others who have likewise crossed their disciplines with art and aesthetics. The observations and findings of noted anthropolgist, Ellen Disanyake is an example. Disanyake studied the visual arts in a wide range of non-western cultures and found some basic similarities in why art (and decorative artifacts)are produced. Essentially she claims that art is "to make something special." That's it.

And in a marketplace driven economy such as the United States, this function of art (and design) is finally being recognized and treasured again after decades of confusion and inreasing academic exclusiveness about the purpose of art. I particularly enjoy Postrel's tongue in cheek summay of form-follows-function purism. She proposes something that must infuriate the purists; A chair's purpose is not to express a modernist idea of "chairness," but instead is to please its owner.

Enjoyment and pleasure are attitudes that too much of the artworld has lost. I find Postrel's anti-establishment writings to be similar to those of distingushed architectural revolutionaries Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and James Wines. Her critical eye also is reminscent of author Tom Wolfe ("From Our House to Bauhaus") as he roasts society's self appointed guardians of good taste.

Virgiinia Postrel builds a convincing and optimisitic case on the role of art and design that must dismay Marxists and others with a negative world view. She does not buy into the premise that that the function of good design is subservient to solving world problems. The function of good design she argues is simply to make life enjoyable. Not a bad idea... but that pisses off a lot of people.