A history of consume society
For most of history, the overwhelming majority of the Earth's inhabitants have owned, more or less, nothing. The clothes they stood up in, some bowls, a pot and a pan, perhaps a broom, and if things were going really well, a few farming implements. Nations and peoples remained consistently poor. Global GDP did not grow at all from year to year. The world was in aggregate as hard up in 1800 as it had been at the beginning of time.
However, starting in the early 18th century, in the countries of northwestern Europe, a remarkable phenomenon occurred: economies began to expand and wages to rise. Families who'd never before had any money beyond what they needed just to survive found they could go shopping for small luxuries: a comb or a mirror, a spare set of underwear, a pillow, some thicker boots or a towel. Their expenditure created a virtuous economic cycle. The more they spent, the more businesses grew, the more wages rose.
By the middle of the 18th century, observers recognized that they were living through a period of epochal change that historians have since described as the world's first consumer revolution. It was in Britain where the changes were most marked. Enormous new industries sprang up to cater for the widespread demand for goods that had once been the preserve of the very rich alone. In England's cities, you could buy furniture from Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Sheraton, pottery from Wedgwood and Derby, cutlery from the smitheries of Sheffield, and hats, shoes and dresses featured in the best-selling magazines like the Gallery of Fashion and the Ladies' Magazine.
Styles for clothes and hair, which had formerly gone unchanged for decades, now altered every year, often in extremely theatrical and impractical directions. In In the early 1770s, there was a craze for decorated wigs so tall their tops could only be accessed by standing on a chair. It was fun for the cartoonists.
So vivid and numerous were the consumer novelties that the austere Dr. Johnson wryly wondered whether prisoners were also soon to be hanged in a new way. The Christian church looked on and did not approve. Up and down England, clergymen delivered bitter sermons against the new materialism. They called it vanity. which was a sin. Sons and daughters were to be kept away from shops. God would not look kindly on those who paid more attention to household decoration than the state of their souls. But there now emerged an intellectual revolution that sharply altered the understanding of the role of vanity in an economy.
In 1723, a London physician called Bernard Mandeville published an economic tract titled "The Fable of the Bees". which proposed that contrary to centuries of religious and moral thinking, what made countries rich and therefore safe, honest, generous, spirited and strong was a very minor, unelevated and apparently undignified activity: shopping for pleasure. It was the consumption of what Mandeville called "fripperies" that provided the engine for national prosperity and allowed the government to do in practice what the Church only knew how to sermonize about in theory: make a genuine difference to the lives of the weak and the poor. "The only way to generate wealth," argued Mandeville, "was to ensure high demand for absurd and unnecessary things.
Of course, no one needed embroidered handbags, silk-lined slippers, or ice creams, but it was a blessing that they could be prompted by fashion to want them, for on the back of demand for such trifles, workshops could be built, apprentices trained, and hospitals funded." Mandeville shocked his audience with the starkness of the choice he placed before them.
A nation could either be very high-minded, spiritually elevated, intellectually refined and dirt poor, or a slave to luxury and idle consumption and very rich. Mandeville's dark thesis went on to convince almost all the great anglophone economists and political thinkers of the 18th century. There were nevertheless some occasional departures from the new economic orthodoxy. One of the most spirited and impassioned voices was that of Switzerland's greatest philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. shocked by the impact of the consumer revolution on the manners and atmosphere of his native geneva he called for a return to a simpler older way of life of the sort he had experienced in alpine villages or read about in travellers accounts of the native tribes of north america In the remote corners of Appenzell or the vast forests of Missouri, there was, blessedly, no concern for fashion and no one-upmanship around hair extensions. Rousseau recommended closing Geneva's borders and imposing crippling taxes on luxury goods so that people's energies could be redirected towards non-material values. He looked back with fondness to the austere martial spirit of Sparta. However, even if Rousseau disagreed with Mandeville, he did not seek to deny the basic premise behind his analysis. It truly appeared to be a choice between decadent consumption and wealth on the one hand, and virtuous restraint and poverty on the other. It was simply that Rousseau unusually preferred virtue to wealth. The parameters of this debate have continued to dominate economic thinking ever since. We re-encounter them in ideological arguments between capitalists and communists and free marketeers and environmentalists. But for most of us, the debate is no longer pertinent. We simply accept that we will live in consumer economies with some very unfortunate side effects to them: crass advertising, foodstuffs that are unhealthy for us, products that are disconnected from any reasonable assessment of our needs. All this in exchange for economic growth and high employment. We have chosen wealth over virtue. An irony-laden acceptance of this dichotomy is what underpins the approach of many pop artists in mid-20th century America. For example, Clijs Oldenburg developed a reputation for taking modest consumer items, many of them food-related, and reproducing them at enormous scale, usually in outdoor settings, in vibrant polyester or vinyl. In city squares where one might once have expected to find statues in honor of political leaders or religious saints, one now came across outsize hamburgers, giant cheesecakes, huge fries decked with ketchup, or, perhaps Oldenburg's most famous work, a 12-meter high stainless steel inverted ice cream cone. Oldenburg's vast versions of small things playfully directed our attention to the peculiar dependence of modern economies on the mass consumption of what are, in human terms, some deeply negligible products. Yet the scale of Oldenburg's objects was only superficially absurd, because it rather precisely reflected their actual importance in our collective economic destinies. nevertheless as oldenburg seemed to concede it was peculiar to be living in a civilization founded on the back of buns and sweetened tomato paste a bathos hinted at by the deflated detumescent appearance of many of the giant burgers hot dogs and pizzas The one question that's rarely been asked is whether there might be a way to attenuate the dispiriting choice, to draw on the best aspects of consumerism on the one hand and high-mindedness on the other, without suffering their worst sides: moral decadence and profound poverty. Might it be possible for a society to develop that allows for consumer spending and therefore provides employment and welfare, yet of a kind directed at something other than vanities and superfluities? Might we shop for something other than nonsense? In other words, might we have wealth and a degree of virtue? It is this possibility of which we find some intriguing hints in the work of Adam Smith, an 18th century economist too often read as a blunt apologist for all aspects of consumerism, but in fact, one of its more subtle and visionary analysts. In his book, The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith seems at points willing to concede to key aspects of Mandeville's argument, consumer societies do help the poor by providing employment based around satisfying what are often rather sub-optimal purchases. Smith was as ready as other economists to mock the triviality of some consumer choices, while admiring their consequences. All those embroidered lace handkerchiefs, jeweled snuff boxes and miniature temples made of cream for dessert, they were flippant, he conceded, but they encouraged trade, created employment and generated immense wealth, and and could therefore be firmly defended on this score alone however smith held out some fascinating hopes for the future he pointed out that consumption didn't invariably have to involve the trading of frivolous things he had seen the expansion of the edinburgh book trade and knew how large a market higher education might become He understood how much wealth was being accumulated through the construction of Edinburgh's extremely handsome and noble Newtown. He understood that humans have many higher needs that require a lot of labour and intelligence and work to fulfil, but that lie outside of capitalist enterprise as conceived of by realists like Bernard Mandeville. Among these are need for education, for self-understanding, for beautiful cities and for rewarding social lives. The ultimate goal of capitalism in Adam Smith's view was to tackle happiness in all its complexities, psychological and not just merely material. The capitalism of our times still hasn't entirely come round to resolving the awkward choices that Bernard Mandeville and Jean-Jacques Rousseau circled. But the crucial hope for the future is that we may not forever need to be making money off rather exploitative, silly or vain consumer appetites. that we may also learn to generate enormous profits from helping people as consumers and producers in the truly important and ambitious aspects of their lives. The reform of capitalism hinges on an odd sounding but critical task: a new kind of consumerism. The conception of an economy focused around buying and selling services and goods focused on our higher needs
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part2
How to reform the capitalism
Artists and supermarket tycoons
The Shanghai-based artist Xu Zhen is one of the most celebrated Chinese artists of our age. He operates in a variety of media, including video, sculpture and fine art. His work displays a deep interest in business; he appears at once charmed and horrified by commercial life. In recent years, he has become especially fascinated by supermarkets. He’s interested, in part, in how lovely they can be.
Xu Zhen, ShanghArt Supermarket, 2007/2014, Installation
Xu Zhen loves the alluring packaging, the abundance (the feel of lifting something off a shelf and seeing multiple versions of it waiting just behind) and the exquisite precision with which items are displayed. He particularly likes the claim of comprehensiveness that supermarkets implicitly make: the suggestion that they can, within their cavernous interiors, provide us with everything we could possibly need to thrive.
At the same time, Xu Zhen feels that there is something quite wrong with real supermarkets – and with commercial life in general. The products they sell are rarely the things we genuinely need. Despite the enormous choice, what we require to thrive isn’t on offer. Meanwhile, the backstories of the brightly coloured things on sale are often exploitative and dark. Everything has been carefully calculated to get us to spend more than we mean to. There’s cynicism throughout the system.
In response, the Chinese artist mocks supermarkets repeatedly. His work involves recreating, at very large scale, entire supermarkets in galleries and museums. The products in these supermarkets look real; you’re invited to pick them up, but then you find out they are empty, as physically empty as Xu Zhen feels they are spiritually incomplete. His checkouts are similarly deceptive. They seem genuine: you scan your products at a high-tech counter, but you then get a receipt that turns out to be a fake; you’ve bought nothing of value.
The supermarket installation takes us on a journey. At first it gets us to share the artist’s excitement around supermarkets, then it punctures the illusion: it’s a giant, deliberate let down. It’s significant that Xu Zhen’s critique of supermarkets is ironic. We tend to become ironic around things that we feel disappointed by but don’t feel we’ll ever be able to change. It’s a manoeuvre of disappointment stoically handled.
A lot of art is ironic in its critiques of capitalism; we’ve come to expect this. It mocks all that is wrong but has no alternatives to put forward. A kind of hollow, sad laughter seems the only fitting response to the compromises of commercial life.
Xu Zhen is trapped in the paradigm of what an artist does. A real artist, we have come to suppose – and the current ideology of the art world insists – couldn’t be enthusiastic about improving a supermarket. He or she could only mock from the sidelines. Nowadays, fortunately, we’ve loosened the restrictive definitions of what a ‘real’ man or a ‘real’ woman might be like, but there remain strict social taboos hemming in the idea of what a ‘real’ artist could be allowed to get up to. They can be as experimental and surprising as they like – unless they want to run a food shop or an airline or an energy corporation, at which point they cross a decisive boundary, fall from grace, lose their special status as artists and become the supposed polar opposites: mere business people.
We should take Xu Zhen seriously, perhaps more seriously than he takes himself. Beneath the irony, Xu Zhen has the ambition to discover what an ideal supermarket might be like, how it might be a successful business, and how capitalism could be reformed. Somewhere within his project, he carries a hope: that a corporation like a supermarket could be brought into line with the best values of art and assume psychological and spiritual importance inside the framework of commerce.
Thousands of miles away from Shanghai, in the flatlands of East Anglia in the northeastern tip of southern England, just outside of Norwich, lies an impressive modern building completed in 1978 by the architect Norman Foster. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts is filled with some of the greatest works of contemporary art: here we find masterpieces by Henry Moore, Giacometti and Francis Bacon.
The collection is made possible thanks to the enormous wealth of the Sainsbury family, which owns and runs the large supermarket chain that bears its name. Discounted shoulders of lamb, white bread and 3-for-2 offers on tangerines have led to exquisite display cases containing Giacometti’s elongated, haunting figures and Barbara Hepworth’s hollowed-out ovaloids.
The interior of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Copyright: Oxyman, 2008
The gallery seems guided by values that are light years from any supermarket. It is intent on feeding the soul. The patrons and curators are deeply ambitious about the emotional and educational benefit of the experience: they want you to come out cleansed and improved.
From a very different direction, the Sainsbury family arrive at a strikingly similar conclusion to Xu Zhen. Art and supermarkets are essentially opposed. Like Xu Zhen, the Sainsbury’s are caught in an identity trap, although a very different one: that of the philanthropist. The philanthropist has been imagined as a person who makes a lot of money in the brutish world of commerce, with all the normal expectations of maximising returns, squeezing wages and focusing on obvious opportunities –and then makes a clean break. In their spare hours, they can devote their wealth to projects that are profoundly non-commercial: the patient collection of Roman coins, Islamic vases or modern sculptures. But the philanthropist knows that if they ever took an art-loving attitude to their businesses they might suffer economic collapse. Instead of making big things happen in the real world, they would become mere artists who make interesting little things in the sheltered, subsidised world of the gallery.
The situation is strangely tantalising. The artist finds a little that is loveable and much that’s wrong around supermarkets, but can’t imagine running or bringing the ideals of art into action in one. The supermarket owners love art, but can’t imagine bringing their psychologically and aesthetically ambitious sides into focus in their business. These two parties are both like pioneers, at the edges of unexplored territory. There is a huge idea they are both circling round. The goal is a synthesis of business and art: a supermarket that was truly guided by the ideals of art, a capitalism that could be compatible with the higher values of humanity.
Up to now, we have collectively learned to admire the values of the arts (which can be summed up as a devotion to truth, beauty and goodness) in the special arena of galleries. But their more important application is in the general, daily fabric of our lives – the area that is currently dominated by an often-depleted vision of commerce. It is a tragic polarisation: we encounter the values we need, but only in a rarefied setting, while we regard these values as alien to the circumstances in which we most need to meet them. For most of history, artists have laboured to render a few square inches of canvas utterly perfect or to chisel a single block of stone into its most expressive form. Traditionally, the most common size for a work of art was between three and six feet across. And while artists have articulated their visions across such expanses, the large-scale projects have been given over wholesale to businesses and governments – who have generally operated with much lower ambitions. We’re so familiar with this polarisation, we regard it as if it were an inevitable fact of nature, rather than what it really is – a cultural and commercial failing.
Ideally, artists should absorb the best qualities of business and vice versa. Rather than seeing such qualities as opposed to what they stand for as artists or business people, they should see these as great enabling capacities, which help them fulfil their missions to the world. Xu Zhen will probably never get to build an airport, a marina, an old people’s home or a supermarket, but the ideal next version of him will. We should want to simultaneously raise and combine the ambitions of artists (to make the noblest concepts powerful in our lives) and of business (to serve us successfully).
Part1
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#Part2
Kpl Klink
in reply to Zack Labe • • •