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•In addition to time, works of art will have required special intellectual or creative effort to create. The sheer brains and energy needed to produce Picasso’s or Wagner’s oeuvre is bound, the Pyramids, to impress us. (Speaking of handicaps, consider

Imagine with me for a moment that our world was just as it is today, except that the earth had a slightly different geology: diamonds were common in my imaginary world as beach sand is in ours, while jade was scarce as diamonds. In such a world, would diamonds—normally used ship ballast or as in-fill for building foundations—be laboriously cut employed in jewelry? This is unlikely: sexual selection theory would suggest that in such a world a “sublimely beautiful diamond tiara” would jade inlay in gold might be regarded as exquisitely beautiful. Diamonds imagined world might be used in children’s toys or reflective road signs, but they would never figure in magnificent jewelry. As it so happens our real world, diamonds are both rare and capable of being used dazzling jewelry. (This, incidentally, is in line with what little is known about the early history of bodily adornment. Kathryn Coe observes that some of the earliest known jewelry incorporates materials that were transported—perhaps in trade—over long distances.)

When Veblen says, “The marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as beautiful features of expensive articles,” however, he is not only talking about costliness of materials: the sense of an object’s cost, and therefore its beauty, is increased also by awareness of a slow, painstaking means of production. “Handmade” will therefore always be an honorific designation, superior to “machine-made” in the beauty stakes, irrespective of the fact that the industrial product may be smoother, more symmetrical, or error-free. Error-free machines are much less interesting than error-free hands. In trying to connect the concept of beauty with technical show, the anthropologist Alfred Gell recounts an early personal experience. As a child, he was deeply impressed by a two-foot-high matchstick model of Salisbury Cathedral. This was “a virtuoso example of the matchstick modeler’s art . . . calculated to strike a profound chord in the heart of any eleven-year-old.” The young Gell well understood the nature of the materials—glue and matchsticks—“and idea of assembling these materials into such an impressive construction provoked feelings of the deepest awe.” He says that from a “small boy’s point of view it was the ultimate work of art, much more entrancing in fact than the cathedral itself.” Many of us have experienced similar moments of awe as children and, yes, later on as adults. That it regarded as unsophisticated to find beauty in such humble skill displays matchstick construction shows how contemporary art-theoretical thinking has estranged us from deep sources of aesthetic satisfaction, including the admiration of craft.

There is an enchantment in objects meticulously crafted by the human hand, but at the same time we should not forget that in the nineteenth century, the Gilded Age when Veblen was writing, conspicuous waste with meticulous floral carvings, inane but complicated wood inlays, extensive use of gold, silver, and ivory detailing. That kind of ornamental excess today is largely out of fashion, but conspicuous waste an important factor in the art world—just like every evolved interest, whether we philosophically approve of it or not. It can take many forms. For instance, it is present in the postwar tendency toward the production gigantic paintings that practically need to have new museum wings built around them. If the wall space taken up by the huge canvas in a is in an expensive area of a large city—instead of being in, say, defunct linen factory in the provinces that has been turned into an museum—so much the better. None of this denies that the painting might otherwise be a fine work of art; it is only to acknowledge that work’s size and the costs of display already proclaim its seriousness beauty. If this application of Veblen’s thinking