Time.news – On what basis do we make our aesthetic choices ”, the New York Times asks for an article. If we were to stick to Vance Packard’s 1959 essay entitled “Status Seekers,” the answer is as simple as it is obvious: we do them in the context of our status. At least so in America, where the sociologist has investigated the link between class behavior and everything that affects “you, your community and your future”.
But according to an update of this basic concept, written in 1983 by Paul Fussell (title of the work: “The class: a guide through the system of American status” – pamphlet for professionals to recognize the details that separate rich from the rich really from the tacky rich – Fussell ends with a quiz: which class belongs to “a 50-year-old man on a 35-foot bridge, drinking a can of Bud, assisted by three sexy girls wearing white braces and caps from inexpensive yachting? ”The answer is: high class! And he comments:“ Unless I’m drinking beer from a glass, then it could pass for middle class ”.
The article, however, avoids such obscene comparison and instead focuses on explaining the choices we make every day: “From the jeans we wear to how we get coffee, to the chair we sit on.” All trends, it says, “begin with the combined influence of outsiders and elites”, who are “well paid (economic capital), well connected (social capital) and well educated (educational and cultural capital). Furthermore, they are cosmopolitan ”. In his recent book The Great Mystery of Culture, W. David Marx, for example, divides the analysis of the theme into four parts: the state as it affects the individual; creativity and major cultural trends such as fashion; cultural change; and status in the 21st century.
David Marx, the newspaper suggests, “is engaging in tracing the evolution of products, such as the democratization of chocolate and Perrier, from gourmet delicacies to gastronomic specialties” and it is however “interesting to learn that expensive purebred dogs are a relatively passionate recently, a curiosity that has become popular ”. So Marx’s thesis, which the Times calls “convincing”, is that “money can, in effect, buy the class.” Then the author teases: “Only informed elites know … travel to Marfa, Texas”, which is not exactly a classy place … “Fans of the genre could question themselves about certain choices”, comments the newspaper .
However, Gertrude Vanderbilt, an American sculptor, patron and art collector who died in 1942, warned her own offspring “against men who make money from oil and farm animals because ‘it takes three generations to wash away the ‘oil and two to exterminate the smell of pigs’ ”as she herself put it. If only to live on Park Avenue, at least.
In short, the moral is always the same: the class is not water … but it can make water on all sides …