The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is by Virginia Postrel PDF

By Virginia Postrel

ISBN-10: 0060933852

ISBN-13: 9780060933852

ISBN-10: 0061372218

ISBN-13: 9780061372216

Even if it is glossy leather-based pants, a glittery new Apple desktop, or a clothier toaster, we make vital judgements as shoppers on a daily basis according to our sensory event. Sensory appeals are all over, and they're intensifying, extensively altering how americans stay and paintings. The twenty-first century has turn into the age of aesthetics, and no matter if we understand it or no longer, this effect has taken over undefined, and lots more and plenty extra. during this penetrating, keenly saw booklet, Virginia Postrel makes the argument that visual appeal counts, that aesthetic worth is actual. Drawing from fields as different as type, actual property, politics, layout, and economics, Postrel deftly chronicles our culture's aesthetic significant and argues persuasively that it's a very important part of a fit, forward-looking society. clever, incisive, and thought-provoking, The Substance of fashion is a groundbreaking portrait of the democratization of style and an excellent exam of how we are living now.

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

Example text

In the technocratic era of the one best way, correct taste was a matter of rational expertise (“this is good design”) not personal pleasure (“I like this”). To twentieth-century design theorists, “rationality meant efficiency, professionalism and skill,” notes feminist design historian Penny Sparke, all of which mitigated against an emphasis upon the aesthetic component of home-making, which had emphasised the roles of intuition, instinct and amateurism. This is not to say, of course, that women did not carry on exercising their taste in their homes and continue to enjoy arranging flowers, polishing furniture, fluffing up cushions and arranging knick-knacks on surfaces.

At the same time, recent cultural, business, and technological changes are reinforcing the prominence of aesthetics and the value of personal expression. Each new development feeds others. The result feels less like the culmination of a historical trend than the beginning of a new economic and cultural moment, in which look and feel matter more than ever. I t’s Memorial Day weekend in Dallas, and the heirs of the San Francisco clerks and Populuxe Levittowners, young families with run-of-the-mill white-collar jobs, are shopping for home improvements.

Today, marvels Zappacosta, you not only can get good bread in Silicon Valley, but a local grocery has a thirty-foot-long aisle filled with cheeses from all over the world—far more variety than you’d find in an Italian market. Dark restaurants aren’t classy but old-fashioned. Our generic standards have ratcheted up from Pizza Hut to California Pizza Kitchen, from TGI Friday’s as trendy urban innovator in the 1970s to TGI Friday’s as everyday suburban fare. “BlackEyed Pea used to be a high-design restaurant,” says an architect who specializes in restaurant design.

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


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