Reading Assignment 7
THE TROUBLESOME ISSUES OF CLASS AND STYLE
-The corollary to style is the taste, an interpretation "informed by experiences related to one's social class, cultural background, education, and other aspects of Identity. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdie studied the notion of taste in the 1970's and argues that it was not inherent in particular people but learned through "institutions that promote certain class-based assumptions about correct taste.
-The public appetite for style was fueled by the mass production of the Industrial Revolution. Nineteenth-century factories and standardization expanded public access to manufactured goods, and changed the value of image.
THE PUBLIC APPETITE FOR STYLE
-Walter Benjamin described the nineteenth-century Paris shopping arcades as "internal streets" for window shopping. Much like today's "mall rats", modern consumers wanted both to see and to be seen, creating an appetite for constantly changing visual appearance, status-conscious style, and the consumption of material goods.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
- Modernists who sought social progress, "style" was a dirty word - it was something dishonest, not to be trusted, the antithesis of function. Modern designers decried the ornament and form that were associated with historicism, with nostalgia for a specific past and places that no longer existed, and with an aristocracy that was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the political agenda.
THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT
- The initial goal of the movement was to provide fine design for for every home. This constituted a critique of mass-produced form and the loss of individuality and craftsmanship that was brought about by the Industrial Revolution and exemplified by the exhibitions of 1851 and 1900.
-The Arts and Crafts movement emphasized the beauty of of humble materials and also introduced the notion that middle-class ladies and gentlemen could earn money as designers of furniture and textiles without jeopardizing their social standing.
-By the end of the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement style had been reduced to an established visual language for home interiors, what the historian Christopher Crouch calls a "superficial coding for rusticity and tradition to provide an escape from the industrial present."
