I typically feel that 200 page books deserve more than a two sentence encapsulation, but in this case I need to make an exception. Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style is best summarized as...
Design's everywhere these days, because everyone's a designer! Related finding: there's no accounting for taste.
And I had such high hopes. (There is one interesting chapter titled "The Boundaries of Design," which discusses, at length, the shifting role of city planners from zoning enforcers to taste enforcers, but I think it was interesting to me because of my long history with the people's republic...)
Her presentation of the same at Pop!Tech was similarly disappointing (and I think the two lines of your summary were adjacent bullet points on one of her slides). James Kunstler, who had just given his talk, was shooting daggers at her from his speaker's chair...you could tell he wanted to tear her argument apart.
Posted by: jkottke | Oct 21, 2003 at 01:24 PM
Come on, you have to love the subtitle: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. Wow, that's heady stuff...aesthetic value is REMAKING consciousness? At least she didn't say it was remaking 'community'. God help us if somebody else remakes or reinvents community again before Halloween
Posted by: dick | Oct 24, 2003 at 08:54 AM