This may be shown by an illustration taken from outside the range of our
everyday habits and everyday contact, and so outside the range of
our bias. Such are the remarkable feather mantles of Hawaii, or the
well-known cawed handles of the ceremonial adzes of several Polynesian
islands. These are undeniably beautiful, both in the sense that they
offer a pleasing composition of form, lines, and color, and in the sense
that they evince great skill and ingenuity in design and construction.
At the same time the articles are manifestly ill fitted to serve any
other economic purpose. But it is not always that the evolution of
ingenious and puzzling contrivances under the guidance of the canon of
wasted effort works out so happy a result. The result is quite as
often a virtually complete suppression of all elements that would
bear scrutiny as expressions of beauty, or of serviceability, and the
substitution of evidences of misspent ingenuity and labor, backed by a
conspicuous ineptitude; until many of the objects with which we surround
ourselves in everyday life, and even many articles of everyday dress and
ornament, are such as would not be tolerated except under the stress of
prescriptive tradition. Illustrations of this substitution of ingenuity
and expense in place of beauty and serviceability are to be seen, for
instance, in domestic architecture, in domestic art or fancy work,
in various articles of apparel, especially of feminine and priestly
apparel.
The canon of beauty requires expression of the generic. The "novelty"
due to the demands of conspicuous waste traverses this canon of beauty,
in that it results in making the physiognomy of our objects of taste a
congeries of idiosyncrasies; and the idiosyncrasies are, moreover, under
the selective surveillance of the canon of expensiveness.
This process of selective adaptation of designs to the end of
conspicuous waste, and the substitution of pecuniary beauty for
aesthetic beauty, has been especially effective in the development of
architecture. It would be extremely difficult to find a modern civilized
residence or public building which can claim anything better than
relative inoffensiveness in the eyes of anyone who will dissociate the
elements of beauty from those of honorific waste. The endless variety of
fronts presented by the better class of tenements and apartment houses
in our cities is an endless variety of architectural distress and of
suggestions of expensive discomfort. Considered as objects of beauty,
the dead walls of the sides and back of these structures, left untouched
by the hands of the artist, are commonly the best feature of the
building.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account