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The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture,  Consciousness
The Substance of Style How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce Culture Consciousness
Author: Virginia Postrel
From airport terminals decorated like Starbucks to the popularity of hair dye among teenage boys, one thing is clear: we have entered the Age of Aesthetics. Sensory appeals are everywhere, and they are intensifying, radically changing how Americans live and work. We expect every strip mall and city block to offer designer coffee, a copy shop wit...  more »
ISBN-13: 9780060933852
ISBN-10: 0060933852
Publication Date: 9/1/2004
Pages: 237
Rating:
  • Currently 3.2/5 Stars.
 3

3.2 stars, based on 3 ratings
Publisher: Perennial
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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Write what you know: basic advice imparted in any writing class. Ms Postrel, writer of an economics column for the New York Times, knows widgets. In *The Substance of Style*, Ms Postrel admirably follows the maxim that serves as the title of my review: although putatively *about* style, it's really a work wholly about aesthetic widgets. Beauty (is Truth/Truth, Beauty) may be too important to be left to the aesthetes--paraphrased from the dust jacket--but it's of far too much significance to be remanded over to the economics columnists. (The philistinism displayed by the author's positive reviewers--such as Barbara Jacobs of the ALA, who writes of "Keats's 'Beauty is life, life, Beauty'"--Ode on a Styrofoam Starbucks Coffee Cup?--says a great deal.)

Is this what cultural criticism has come to? Somebody revive Neil Postman, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford--anybody.

That is all ye know on earth, & all ye need to know, about this book.


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