pretty things and money

[metaphortunate]

"Ornament...in economic terms it is a crime, in that it leads to the waste of human labor, money, and materials." - Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime", 1908

It amuses me no end that the decoration-is-evil function-straitjackets-form simply-expressed-structure aesthetic philosophy that hypercapitalist Ayn Rand gave her architect hero in The Fountainhead has its roots in the socialism of Red Vienna. Loos makes some fairly dodgy blanket aesthetic statements, but a large part of his argument is economic:

The harm done by ornament to the ranks of the producers is even greater...the craftsman producing the ornament is not fairly rewarded for his labour. The condition among wood carvers and turners, the criminally low rates paid to embroiderers and lace makers are well-known. An ornamental craftsman has to work for twenty hours to reach the pay a modern worker earns in eight. In general, decoration makes objects more expensive, but despite that it does happen that a decorated object, with materials costing the same and demonstrably taking three times as long to produce, is put on sale at half the price of a plain object. The result of omitting decoration is a reduction in working hours and an increase in wages. A Chinese wood carver works for sixteen hours, an American labourer for eight. If I pay as much for a plain box as for one with ornamentation, the difference in labour time belongs to the worker. And if there were no ornaments at all—a state that will perhaps come about after thousands of years—we would need to work for only four hours instead of eight, since at the moment half of our labour is accounted for by ornamentation.

It's hard to believe Loos' argument that ornament is a crime against the worker who produces it, when the woman I bought a nursing necklace from on Etsy (in an effort to keep the Junebug's mind on his work, and completely ineffective incidentally) advertises her necklaces with

Life Circles Necklaces are handmade with care by a part-time working mother. Thank you for helping to support my family so that I can spend more time at home with my child :-)

But is it a crime against me? Does the societal expectation that women spend a good chunk of their income on ornament, make us poorer in the same way that Loos claims it made his Austria poorer:

As far as the economic aspect is concerned, if you have two people living next door to each other who have the same needs, the same aspirations, and the same income, but who belong to different cultural epochs, you will find the man of the twentieth century getting richer and richer, and the man of the eighteenth century poorer and poorer. I am assuming, of course, that in both cases their lifestyles reflect their attitudes. The man of the twentieth century needs much less capital to supply his needs, and can therefore make savings. The vegetables he likes are simply cooked in water and served with a knob of butter. They taste good to the other only if there are nuts and honey mixed in, and a cook has spent hours over them. Decorated plates cost more, while twentieth-century man likes his food on white crockery alone. The one saves money while the other throws it away. And it is the same with whole nations. Woe betide the people that lag behind in their cultural development. The English are getting wealthier, and we poorer…

I think about this when I go to Etsy. And when I pass by stores that J describes as "candles-and-sandals" - you know the ones, they infest every tiny tourist town. And every time I walk down my block, past the nail salon, with the pathetically hopeful balloons tied to its outdoor folding list of prices. There's this sector of the economy that seems to largely consist of women selling pointless ornamentation to each other. I don't understand how it works. It's like that joke about the small town that survives by the residents taking in each others' washing. Where is the money coming from? Is it coming from husbands?

Comments

[oursin]

There's a whole lot of politicised aesthetic puritanism in the early C20th that has a macho, society-is-too-feminised, tone to it.

Ornamentation can be too much, and it can be Just Right, as I discovered when looking at baroque churches in Vienna, most of which were OTT but some of which showed the effect that the others were trying for. And sometimes OTT works, as with Leccesian Baroque, which tips over into positively hallucinatory.

Functionalist minimalism can be aesthetically pleasing, or it can be just BLEAK and DEPRESSING.

While I have no doubt that there is still a lot of Female Fancywork being produced, just as in the Victorian era, I suspect blanket dismissals as possibly coming from the same place as diatribes about hordes of scribbling women writing novels. There's good and bad and absolutely awful.

My beloved Dame Rebecca (pictured in the icon) has several wonderful passages in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon about the craft traditions of Serbian women and female creativity.

[amaebi]

I've read your quotations from Loos four times now, trying to understand the theoretical basis behind them. (In other words, it hasn't been easy. Of course, I'm only reading these snippets-- but they are very, very strange to me, and I've read a lot of economics, from Plato and Aristotle to the so-called mercantilists, through the classicals of the 18th and 19th centuries, the development of neo-classical microeconomics and Keynesian macroeconomics, and then the economics of my lifetime, stopping only about ten years ago, when I left academe.)

From what you have here, All I can smell on his breath is some kind of aestheticized labour theory of value, combined with a wages fund doctrine. (The wages fund doctrine presumes that payment to labour is determined by a a firm's beginning-of-period pool of accumulated funds, which is then paid out proportionally to workers. There was something to it when there was little or no ability to borrow, but it hasn't been up to much for a long time.)

One of the things I always think in periods when women seem to take fresh enthusiasms for crafting is that paid employment of women's energies, talents and abilities has taken another dive.