shether in the ether

“With industry appears antiphysis; as soon as the worker asserts his rights, the realm of man ceases to be natural. In producing, man forges his essence; in consuming, the consumer recognizes himself and reappears as producer in the object consumed: he consumes what, in other circumstances, he could have produced, and what appeals to him in merchnadise is the indubitable mark of human labor: a polish, a softness, a roundness, a sharpness of color that cannot be found in nature. With the advent of a manufacturing society, aristocracy, taste and naturalism disappear altogether, as is foretokened by what is happening in America. The aesthetic sensibility will preserve norms, but these will be very different. For the time being in our ambiguous society, at this strange moment in our history, significations interlace, naturalism and artificialism coexist; one starts a line of argument according to the rules of artificialism and ends according to naturalistic principles. There are still people who play the aristocrat and who have trained themselves to derive pleasure from lace; but ask them why they do. Well, it is because the machine - even when it imitates the lacemaker’s actual mistakes - cannot replace her long patience, the humble taste, the eyes that are ruined by the work. In short, they are contaminated, without even realizing it, by present-day ideology; they base the value of the luxury article on human labor. Hand-made lace is more beautiful because the worker works more, more laboriously and at a lower salary. We caress this exhausting labor on the lace; fashionable people might even go so far as to say that it is the pure labor (without machines). Thus, taste remains, but it loses ground and takes on the name good taste in opposing pure artificialism, which becomes bad taste. Between the model and its imitation, between the natural product and its synthetic reconstitution, the man of bad taste, with inflexible rigor, immediately chooses the copy.”