Material Girl
Atlantic, The, October, 2003 by Tom Carson
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Artifice has somewhat traditionally been humanity's best bet for making our surroundings more congenial, but a daunting wad of highfalutin opinion tells us that what was fine for the Medicis turns wicked once Dubuque gets in on the act. Nine tenths of the critical writing about commodity culture could be anthologized under the title Killjoy Was Here ; whether the point of view is Marxist alienation or post-structuralist hauteur, it's a given that the critic is monkishly immune to the gratifications involved.
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Yet that's just why, tested against everyday life as most people experience it, the bulk of all this intellectual hectoring is inhumane rubbish—contemptuous of desires that aren't necessarily as unworthy or manipulated as charged. It's in debunking materialism's Gradgrinds that Virginia Postrel's brightly argued, maddeningly blinkered The Substance of Style is most provocative. A consumer advocate of a distinctly novel sort, Postrel defends our right to follow our ...
