Wednesday, September 26, 2007
“Few enterprises are so hopeless as a contest against fashion.” –Samuel Johson
Posted by Zach in News

 

 

 

I am stunned by the part that fashion plays in opinion. We don’t use pudding to measure the height of a man—He’s 30,000 scoops of pudding tall. Why would we use something so amorphous and ever changing as fashion to measure the height of a work of art or worse, an ideology?

It is currently in vogue to have a personal creed so flexible that one can cling to the bucking upheavals of fashion and never be compelled to let go. You have to be able to shape shift in a blink and go from supreme idolatry of Britney Spears to ruthless contempt. And if Britney cries on Oprah, you better have enough plasticity to switch back to idolatry should the whimsy of fashion demand it.

In 1843, William Lathrop wrote the book The New Englander. It laments the softness of boundaries that delineate fashion from taste. The thrust of the argument is this: Fashion glories in the new. Taste glories in the good. When taste and fashion become indistinct, the pursuit of the new replaces the pursuit of the good.

In Lathrop’s words, “Fashion is like sin; no mere expulsive effort can destroy it. It can only be destroyed by a higher love.” Lathrop’s higher love is love of the good, which presupposes a love of taste.

Basically, one can eat a muffin, and if one’s palate is precise, one can say, “This has nutmeg, and cinnamon, etc.” If one’s aesthetic taste is cultivated, one can say, “This thing has virtue and truth and beauty.”  In contrast to fashion’s tendency for wholesale approval or rejection, taste permits reserved appreciation.  It allows one to say, “this baby is valuable, but I don’t care much for the bathwater.”

Fashion unfortunately has a deep cultural foothold, and the benefit of a slogan, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  It’s hard to dislodge something so quotable. People who would never for a second say “Truth is in the mind of the beholder,” don’t hesitate to spiral down the banister of David Hume’s skepticism: “Beauty in things exists merely in the mind that contemplates them.”  Though one might intend for such a statement to insulate against criticism, it inevitably invokes a longing to sit at the cool beholders’ table.

My aim is not to berate people that like the statement “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” The same people incongruously love The Ugly Duckling, and say ‘Beauty is on the inside’. They aren’t trying to further Aesthetic anarchy. They’re tying to defend Eleanor Roosevelt or somebody. However, the casual assent to such a statement makes aesthetic anarchy hard to oppose.

When anarchy breaks out, Fashion is more than happy to ascend the throne and say “Most important band of our time, one of the most important albums of the year, the greatest writer of the decade, one of the best films to come out of the new generation, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Minimalism, Futurism, Constructivism, Op art, Pop art, Vorticism, Orphism, Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism.”  Get on board!

Fashion’s usurpation of taste’s rule is so complete that college students in America are unable preserve their pre-college values or beliefs.  At the very least, they’re unable to say that 90 percent of the music programming on their college radio station is poor.

Samuel Johnson claimed, “Few enterprises are so hopeless as a contest against fashion.”  Any one that’s attempted to express an unfashionable opinion in a trendy environment knows that this is true, but perhaps few enterprises are as worthwhile.  It’s always good to contest the rule of a tyrant.  The best way to swim against the stream of a mindless culture is to embrace those things that are eternal and unmoving.  If we cultivate a discerning palate we can snap out of the mindless worship of the new and instead embrace the good.  Life tastes good for those with good taste.

2 Responses to ““Few enterprises are so hopeless as a contest against fashion.” –Samuel Johson”

Julie comments:
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

This is a beautifully true line: “college students in America are unable to cofess publicly that most Indie Rock sucks.” Fortunately, being out of college, I am able to declare the crappiness of most Indie Rock with abandon.

jon comments:
Thursday, October 25th, 2007

It’s one thing to presuppose a transcendent standard of beauty. It’s another to know what that is. Would you argue that it’s possible to ascertain said transcendent standard of beauty in order to determine how closely, say, Joni MItchell or Alice in Chains conforms to that standard?

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