craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

I think pinterest is pretty good for people attempting to ~cultivate an aesthetic~ in a way that tumblr or whatever else isn't. Then again, I kind of only had experienced it in passing before going to see a guy I knew in high school speak about some site he'd come up with, which ended up being.. pinterest. whoops.

maybe that's unfair to pinterest but i saw that's where the image was sourced. idk, i think pinterest is ok for "developing an aesthetic" in the 'inspiration board'/'scrapbooking' sense but sometimes how it's used is problematic to me -- like, it just seems like a very public way to window shop and exhibit your taste as a consumer, where we all get to pretend to be our own fashion / lifestyle / decor mag editors.

though in a way i guess you could see that as somehow positive or democratizing, how our aesthetic preferences as consumers are increasingly transmitted 'laterally' instead of passed down from established tastemakers, but i'm not sure it works out that way in the end.

see also: svpply.com

how is it any better or worse than wearing clothes as a way of exhibiting your taste as a consumer?

trading and sharing and copying images of clothes is not the same as wearing those clothes, for a start. not necessarily 'better' or 'worse' but different

I mean it's less veiled and it seems vulgar cause it's breaking accepted rules about how you're supposed to exhibit your taste. but overall it's not doing anything new, it just lacks subtlety I guess. maybe there's some inherent value in that subtlety and value in the games we play being complicated, I've never been so sure.

maybe that's unfair to pinterest but i saw that's where the image was sourced. idk, i think pinterest is ok for "developing an aesthetic" in the 'inspiration board'/'scrapbooking' sense but sometimes how it's used is problematic to me -- like, it just seems like a very public way to window shop and exhibit your taste as a consumer, where we all get to pretend to be our own fashion / lifestyle / decor mag editors.

though in a way i guess you could see that as somehow positive or democratizing, how our aesthetic preferences as consumers are increasingly transmitted 'laterally' instead of passed down from established tastemakers, but i'm not sure it works out that way in the end.

with iatee here. my first thought was "it's just like clothing". as clothing, speech and body language are to human self-expression in physical public space, text, images and page design are to humans in digital public space. and the costume displays of certain people will always seem "vulgar" to certain other people. we don't define ourselves in isolation but rather in relation, and self-identification is inherently oppositional. "not that but this."

what exactly is that individual self-expression though? seems like the identity being expressed is as a consumer itself.

agreed. it's electronically-facilitated ostentation.

wonder if the availability of this technology creates a new opportunity for objects to create our identity, as opposed (or in addition to) using objects to express our identity.

'vulgar' kinda connotes low class / lack of refinement, though, and i'm not sure that's how i feel about this phenomenon -- some users certainly have a sophisticated, finely-tuned appreciation for the products they are selecting (dare i say 'curating' -- no, i dare not) and sharing, which can come across like the performance of class distinction, whether they actually buy the products or not.

agreed. it's electronically-facilitated ostentation.

all forms of human identity expression = plumage.

ostentation = plumage i choose to sneer at as "too garish".

what exactly is that individual self-expression though? seems like the identity being expressed is as a consumer itself.

same could be said of clothes, shoes, haircuts, makeup & general style. we buy these things and wear them not just to keep ourselves warm, dry and clean, but to show other people who we are. same with cars, houses and anything else we buy and display in a public or even a private fashion: the prints we hang on our walls, the pets we choose, the pens in our pockets.

we also "consume" from a buffet of culturally-offered attitudes, beliefs, modes of speech & behavior and various identity-defining memes, and we "advertise" these things to others by speaking, talking and otherwise presenting ourselves as we do.

doesn't this take away the need to be able to afford something to 'wear' it? isn't that better, more egalitarian?

we buy these things and wear them not just to keep ourselves warm, dry and clean, but to show other people who we are. same with cars, houses and anything else we buy and display in a public or even a private fashion: the prints we hang on our walls, the pets we choose, the pens in our pockets.

this isn't universally true, i don't think! there's a real 'class' element to all of the FINE TASTE bidness. f'rinstance i did not choose my car, it's just the one i inherited when i was 16, most of my clothes are a jumbled assembly of cast-offs, and i hang prints on my wall that i have been given as gifts. i emphatically do not curate a wardrobe (well, i do in the sense that i try to appear clean and neat and relatively coordinated and in clothes without holes), but i would very much welcome the opportunity to step up my wardrobe, if finances and lifestyle allowed for that luxury. i would hate for anybody to think that i'm a slob –– but i would equally hate for anybody to make grand assumptions about who i am (besides some very, very bare bones observations) based on the clothes i wear, car i drive, or prints that hang on my wall.

i have no idea why 'class' is in quotes

there's a difference between pinterest and svpply accounts and say, a wedding registry or an amazon wishlist. they don't necessarily imply an intent or need to purchase certain products. i still think they manage to express a sort of desire, which may or may not be aspirational, but it's a bit fantastic. idealized. what would you buy if you didn't have to pay? what would your life look like?

i guess there's not much difference between this and, like we did in years past, flipping through fashion / lifestyle / decor mags and looking at and wondering what it would be like to own all the fine things. but what was a private activity is now shared, and that commercial desire becomes the means of self-expression.

i don't know, there's something weird about the social aspect and i can't pin it down exactly.

it just seems like a very public way to window shop and exhibit your taste as a consumer, where we all get to pretend to be our own fashion / lifestyle / decor mag editors.

There was some semi-scientific article about how regular users of pinterest do use it like window shopping, and actually end up buying less overall. So maybe it helps people focus their consumption?

Most people don't actually buy clothes based on magazines anyway, ime, they just go to a regular set of stores and maybe buy a couple items that appeal or go together

i'm all for these local yokel sustainable ecology-minded young people with shitty jobs and no cars!

― scott seward, Monday, March 12, 2012 11:24 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*The New Yokelism* was gonna be the title of my book. hand-crafted hatchets. farmer's markets. noise bands. you know, my scene.

― scott seward, Monday, March 12, 2012 11:25 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

needs a catchy subtitle though. a la this old thread:

Quick! What Is The Title Of Your New Ludicrously All-Encompassing Zeitgeist-Seizing Non-Fiction Book About The End Of Everything

― scott seward, Monday, March 12, 2012 11:27 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As an aside, I was just thinking about how "local" has kind of taken the place of "imported" as a signifier of a certain kind of taste. Which is an interesting turnabout. Probably should go on that other thread about craftsmanship and virtue and stuff.

― the prurient pinterest (Hurting 2), Monday, March 12, 2012 11:28 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the nyt thread and this thread are my two fave rolling threads. despite the fact that the nyt itself drives me COMPLETELY insane these days. but, i guess this is where my head is at and where my interests lie. class, craftsmanship, and the end of the world. my three main interests these days.

Wendell Berry has an observation about how you didn't see the word "fresh" in food marketing (if there even was such a thing) until it was no longer taken for granted that most food was fresh.

cf "local"

relatedly, the use of farm imagery on food packaging in the era where food gets further and further away from the farm (both physically and in composition)

that's not true across the board, there's not a plow on the wrapping for taco bell's dorito-shell tacos or whatever

like I would imagine that the farm imagery has a pretty high correlation w/ actually-less-scientifically-fucked-up-food

yesterday i saw some plastic garbage bags for sale that said they were made from "100% recycled farm plastic". farm plastic! REAL plastic made on farms. not that bullshit chemical plastic you get in so many places these days.

... increasing use of farm imagery in an age where fewer and fewer people associate farm machinery with drudgery, isolation, prickly heat, pig shit, or their drab relatives.

iatee I think that's kind of getting away from Berry's point, which I probably didn't make clear. I don't think he literally means that the further something is from the farm the more farm imagery it has, so that skittles come in a package that looks like a corn husk and is stamped with a cattle brand or something. He just means that you didn't have farm imagery as a marketing tool until people were no longer getting most of their food from a farm or one step removed from a farm (e.g. a farmer bringing the food to market). Like "farm fresh" isn't an exciting concept when it's what most food actually is, and a lot of food that was described as "farm fresh" when Berry wrote The Unsettling of America (1977) was not literally farm fresh.

And then, you know, when most people had American-made goods and took that for granted, "imported" was a big deal and a sign of wealth. I mean certain specific kinds of imported shit can still be a sign of wealth, but now most cheap crap is imported, so the mere word "imported" is hardly a luxury signifier anymore. And for the same underlying economic reasons, "local" is.

fruit pops - with 10% real fruit!!

i actually saw that once

and in my mind i basically typed out a certain percentage of this thread

Yes!

Which also reminds me of Clorox's new "Green Works" brand, which advertises stuff along the lines of "96% naturally derived"

although I guess that's getting a little off topic

"The ‘alternative’ ideal of a life based on the art of ‘getting by’ is also disappearing. Small-scale handicrafts, little self-produced undertakings, the street selling of objects, the necklaces... Infinite human tragedies have unrolled in dingy, airless shops over the past twenty years. Much really revolutionary strength has been trapped in illusions that required not a normal amount of work, but super-exploitation, all the greater because it was tied to the individual’s will to keep things going and show that it was possible to do without the factory. Now, with the restructuring of capital and the new conditions resulting from it, we can see how this ‘alternative’ model is exactly what is being suggested at an institutional level to get through this moment. As always, they see the way the wind is blowing. Other potentially revolutionary forces are now shutting themselves up in electronic laboratories and burdening themselves with work in dark, stuffy little premises, demonstrating that capital has won over them yet again."

from where?

Although I don't really buy this:

"illusions that required not a normal amount of work, but super-exploitation, all the greater because it was tied to the individual’s will to keep things going and show that it was possible to do without the factory"

because that seems to equate any kind of hard work at all, even entirely self-directed, with "exploitation"

i'm not necessarily in agreement, by the way. i just read it recently and thought it fit in with this thread.

(and btw, it was written by the infamous Alfredo Bonanno, an Italian anarchist).

this was touched on in MAN BRANDS, I think, but crafting is a scary word for dudes (and I bring it up here because all the words in the title are basically dude catnip) and this has fallout where most DIY/craft mags and things like Pinterest are either aimed directly at women or wind up being heavily populated by women.

Is there a verb that could be synonymous with crafting that lacks the gender baggage?

Sympathize lots with that paragraph - I think a lot about how I could probably get by with my skills (broad construction knowledge, but I'm not a master carpenter or anything of the sort; lots of experience with design and computers) as long as I could content myself with living in a cheap location and not aspiring in any way to normal middle classdom (ie kids).

i sympathize with it because i would like to live in a world where our projects and our dreams are not innately tied to an economical structure. what he seems to be saying, thus far in my reading, is that the problem is not that people desire to make things away from factories and other means of mass production, but that even these handicrafts and 'artisanal' pursuits (or whatever) are innately tied to a capitalist economical matrix that is exploitative. the branding of such pursuits as 'anti-corporate' is, in his eyes, recuperative and self-exploitative, and will eventually be subsumed by a culture of capital anyway.

ok.

i mean, i think one's sympathy with his ideas is directly proportional to one's personal distaste for/disgust towards capitalism.

Capitalism wrecks people, man. I know this b/c I just saw Death of a Salesman starring spiderman

Think Biff Loman would move to North Dakota but tbh this belongs in the limbo thread

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/t-magazine/culture/inside-the-world-of-sound.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1334175867-EONRKO+YJKDAcMPl2nP4/A#

“In the ’80s, things just literally fell off a cliff.” Or, as he states pointedly on the O.M.A. Web site, “People not only forgot what great sound reproduction sounded like, but at this point, most have never even heard it.”

I am about to hear it, through the Imperias, which go for $175,000 and are tall like basketball players, each speaker horn cut from solid Pennsylvania black walnut, polished to a vaguely midcentury West Coast finish.

Fuck you, clown.

High-end audiophiles always strike me as the sort of people who would never ever go to a concert.

they can't afford to! they spent all their money on the vaguely midcentury west coast finish.

I am pretty sure half these dudes own four albums, and three of them are different remasters of Dark Side of the Moon.

is 'midcentury' code for craftsmanship? lol

oh, lol, they actually mention that on the second page

can't read the article, gfy nyt