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By Root 926 0

that our regard for something beautiful commonly, in great mea sure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.” This is a somewhat different idea: if the association of beauty and expensiveness is just a masquerade then we would be right to reject expensiveness as a regrettable— indeed, reprehensible—confusion that pollutes our sense of beauty. Most theorists of beauty from Kant through the twentieth century if we are looking back not only through history but also to the prehistory of art and decoration, we might come closer to an understanding uncomfortable facts that are bound to irritate this modern aesthetic sensibility. The very idea that costliness and art are intrinsically connected in our aesthetic psychology may be a disagreeable possibility, turns out to be true, it is a fact that is better faced than buried.

Veblen’s example of costliness in this case involves monetary value. Costliness in hunter-gatherer societies would have been measured with money but in terms of time, resources, and the expenditure of labor. sexual selection, these factors involve what Amotz and Avishag Zahavi have called in the realm of animal ethology a manifestation of the “handicap principle.” According to this way of formulating sexual selection, animal shows its ge netic fitness to a mate by squandering resources that fit animal could not afford to waste: the endless singing of a mockingbird and the intense red of a healthy stickleback, not to mention peacock’s tail, are handicaps, proving, so to speak, that “I can take on world with one hand tied behind my back.” Extended to human behavior, Zahavis’ handicap principle throws into clear relief the conspicuous wastefulness described by Veblen. The best way for an individual demonstrate the possession of an adaptive quality—money, health, imagination, strength, vigor—is to be seen wasting these very resources.

The Zahavis’ way of describing sexual selection has been supported economic terms by the anthropologist Eckart Voland, who contrasts useful traits evolved by natural selection with the fitness signals sexual selection: “For useful traits, their production costs are disadvantageous, but unavoidable. With signals [in sexual selection], however, additional costs are what count. Contrary to long-held economic rationality, demand increases together with its price. Useful traits do not utility if their price falls. Signals, on the other hand, lose their function their production becomes cheap.” It follows that in the human realm, people will be ever on the lookout for ostentatious ways to squander wealth: building impractical mansions, driving pointlessly expensive cars, or carrying three-thousand-dollar handbags.

If we extend the various suggestions of Darwin and his followers realm of art, we can see ways in which costliness and waste impinge on beauty. I would summarize the implications as follows:

• Works of art will frequently be made of rare or expensive materials: silver and gold, clear jade, marble that is difficult to transport, jewels, fine hardwoods, unusual pigments, and rare dyes, such as the Tyrian purple of classical antiquity.

•Works of art should be very time-consuming to create. In that sense, they may demonstrate that the maker has leisure— conspicuous leisure—in a way that indirectly indicates that possesses wealth or status.

•Even if a work of art is quickly executed, the skills to make it should have been time-consuming or difficult to acquire. ( skills are often manual, showing fine motor control or dexterity: “He’d painted every hair” or “She never missed a note.”)

• The created work of art may be more impressive if it is remote from any possible use. Expensive and useful can be very pleasant, but expensive and useless might well be much better.

• A sense of waste, and therefore handicap, can be emphasized channeling resources into work that is this fleeting: the perfect centerpiece for an expensive dinner party may be a poignantly lovely ice sculpture. Marble is fine, but ice can be even better from the standpoint