- 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 shapeshift 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. He laments the softness of the boundaries that dilineate 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 pusuit 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 discerning, 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 the history of aesthetics, the Theists have had the easiest time defending eternal verities–because the eternal truths rest in the fountain of God’s character.
Fashion has a weapon as well: The metally naked statement, “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 endless bannister of David Hume’s skepticism: “Beauty in things exists merely in the mind that contemplates them.”
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, Minimailm, Futurism, Constructivism, Op art, Pop art, Vorticism, Orphism, Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism.”
Fashion’s ursupation of Taste’s rule is so complete that college students in America are unable to cofess publicly that most Indie Rock sucks.
It’s a sad state.
categories
Ben
Cory
Justin
Matt
Zachpast articles
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- March 2007
- January 2007
- November 2006
- October 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- February 2006
2 Responses to ““Few enterprises are so hopeless as a contest against fashion.” –Samuel Johson”
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.
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?