The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain 1550-1960

Rating:
Summary: Good read
Review: The author challenges the basic idea that the English gentry self-destructed by spending too much in a quest for "conspicuous consumption." Instead, he argues, the spending of the gentry, especially on large houses and gardens, was for the purpose of providing employment, and consciously so. Foreign trade was restricted because it had the effect of disrupting society and displacing domestic industries and putting people out of work. The agricultural surplus was expended in large homes, gardens, and furniture, often 25% of the house, in order to supply work for the local townspeople. Thus the idea propagated by the Whig critics of the gentry, that they were vain and only spent money wastefully in self-aggrandizement and conspicuous consumption, was picked up and mindlessly repeated by the scholars, such as Tawney. The story of Adam Smith, that the gentry lost their pride of place by spending on trinkets of frivolous utility like buckles and watches, is false in the sense that it fails to recognize the public-spiritedness of the gentry, their genuine sense of noblesse oblige. By making them out to be ridiculous, the Whig critics often performed the same function as the critics of the clergy and religion. Ridicule was the weapon of choice. The other interesting aspect of the book is tracing how tastes changed. Smith notes that the new taste in design was for things that seemed useful. This idea is reiterated by Veblen, who argues that in a wage economy, luxury often takes the form of useful things. That is why in an increasingly consumer economy, ie not an ecomomy of waste like that of landed gentry, luxury can only take the form of useful objects. The author then follows this pattern through the Victorian age, where he notes that industrial design becomes very utilitarian. There is a debate, for instance, as to whether china should have ornamental designs or whether that is wasteful. Nice pictures too.

Rating:
Summary: An interdisciplinary tour de force!
Review: This work by a professor of art history and architecture at the University of Essex in England constitutes a Great Books course in miniature. From the window of his specialties, Jules Lubbock reviews four centuries of political, economic, and social history, delineating their influences - including those of sumptuary laws, or restrictions upon consumption - upon aesthetic concepts of design and town planning, as well as the effects of theological, moral, and nationalistic ideas on the evolving physical appearance of Britain in general and of London in particular. The reader's familiarity with Plato and Locke, Disraeli and Bevan, Pugin and Inigo Jones, is extended and made vivid. Discourses on the design of everything from buildings, carpets, and furniture to items as seemingly insignificant as an excessively or inappropriately decorated tea cup, cream jug, or gas lamp are brilliantly analyzed for their larger social and moral implications. Although Professor Lubbock's point of view is unmistakably Protestant Episcopalian rather than high-church Anglican Catholic, his nationalism therefore betraying a clear and not atypical though well-compensated bias against Roman Catholicism and Islam, these very British traits nonetheless do not prevent him from depicting and appreciating fully - even celebrating - the ecclesiastical beauty and pervasive influence of classical or Gothic, French (e.g., Pugin) and Italianate art and architecture. The author traces the transfer of power from the landed aristocracy - whose maintenance of magnificent country estates he attributes not to intraclass rivalry but rather to a benign desire and recognized duty to provide hospitality and employment through "housekeeping" by leading a simple, virtuous life at home in the country in preference to residing in the more appealing, sophisticated, and corrupting milieu of London - to the gentrified commercial classes whose ascendancy resulted from the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant increase of international trade. True to his holistic approach, Professor Lubbock makes frequent references to the reflections of these trends of intellectual history in British philosophy and, especially, literature, citing Shakespeare, Milton, Addison and Steele, Pope, Hume, Dickens, and Wordsworth explicitly and novelists such as Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Austen, and Thackeray implicitly - in so doing, incidentally giving the lie to the New Critics' foci upon literature in a vacuum and upon "universal" character development to the exclusion of historical context. The author's own book is filled with handome reproductions and illustrations of the works of art and architecture that he so expertly describes, and it contains amusing parables written by some of the renowned personages into whom he breathes renewed vitality and relevance.