“Totem of tasteful extravagance”: Abbeville’s Courbet.
In the current edition of Vanity Fair, cultural critic James Wolcott laments “The Vanishing,” i.e., the disappearance of visible, tactile media products (books, records with album art) into the digital ether. At stake in this transition, says Wolcott, is nothing less than culture snobbery itself. If we can’t show books off in the subway or display albums in our apartments, how will we ever dazzle the world with our impeccable taste?
This is a matter of no small consequence to the Arbiters of Style, but Wolcott has scant comfort to offer us. Indeed, his vision darkens still further as he ponders the stuff of our very livelihoods:
At the high end of coveted-object acquisition is the coffee-table book, that chest of dreams, that ocean-liner view. Expensive to produce, difficult to market, a bear to cart around, the coffee-table book is an illustrated commemorative tablet dedicated to the history, appreciation, and subtle nuances of aristocratic objects of contemplation and acquisition (fashion, flowers, gardens, lavish interiors, jewelry, deceased Hollywood royalty, masterpiece paintings, baseball collectibles, ballerina toe shoes). Totems of tasteful extravagance with a tendency to monumentalism, the most monolithic of them—[various non-Abbeville books cited]—are tombstone mothers that need to be trolleyed in from the freight elevator and installed where there’s no danger of their tipping over and flattening some child, pet, pint-size grandparent, or small village. Can the average coffee-table book survive The Vanishing? Debatable—there’s something about even the most enticing specimen that evokes a weary sigh. Opening it, turning its pages, often just seems like so much work.
Until those last few sentences, we were beaming with pride (if only we’d come up with “totems of tasteful extravagance with a tendency to monumentalism” as our company slogan). By the end, however, it seems clear that Wolcott views high-end illustrated books as a bloated luxury the world will no longer indulge. We, of course, respectfully beg to differ. To us, opening a beautiful book is not work but sheer play. And the passage quoted subtly highlights a flaw in Wolcott’s argument: the sensuous experience of the luxury book is something digital media can’t easily reproduce, so he’s forced to dismiss it through strained comedy rather than logic.
Still, in worrying about the increased difficulties of culture snobbery, Wolcott’s heart is in the right place. And we have some comforting words to offer him: human beings are so instinctively hierarchical—not to mention aesthetically opinionated—that we’ll always find ways of establishing who’s who as far as taste goes. Album art is a genuine loss, but the music, at least, can still be played aloud for others to judge. As for books, the print versions are still dominant for now, and we suspect will be widely available for a long time yet. Libraries are one reason; another is that book readers and culture snobs, as groups, are growing ever more congruent with time, as the attractions of newer media thin the ranks of the former. In other words, the kind of person who still reads Dubliners (or a Courbet monograph) is increasingly likely to be exactly the kind of person who wants his fellow subway passengers to know it. Meanwhile, the unstoppable rise of the e-reader is being discussed by some in the media as a fait accompli, but early sales statistics remain inconclusive. We’ll see.
Tags: album art, e-reader, future of publishing, james wolcott, vanity fair
