Cheap ornament and status games

Was modernism originally a way to signal taste instead of wealth?

In a very interesting recent essay, Scott Alexander pondered why architecture and other arts in modern societies have moved from being richly ornamented to being visually more austere. He casts doubt on various standard explanations, like the claim that modernism was caused by Protestantism or by a newfound aversion to conspicuous consumption. Although he does not completely commit to an explanation, he seems sympathetic to the idea that the change was driven by rich people shifting from using art to signal wealth towards using it to signal taste. 

The story goes like this. In premodern societies, rich people signalled wealth through richly ornamenting their homes, clothes, furniture and so on. Because ornament was extremely expensive, it signalled wealth effectively. Then in the nineteenth century, ornament became cheap, and its value as a signal of wealth was debased. Since it was now harder to signal wealth through art, architecture and dress, rich people used them to signal taste instead. They did this by inventing elaborate counterintuitive codes for what is and isn’t tasteful, which only people like them had the resources to learn. And so emerged artistic modernism.

I think this is a fun and clever story, and that it may be on to something. But I don’t think the model works as it stands. There are a couple of reasons for this.

Does the story work for other art forms?

Modernism happened more or less simultaneously in literature, painting, sculpture, music and architecture. In the case of architecture, Alexander is right that it followed a period in which many kinds of ornament – the most obvious thing that distinguishes premodernist and modernist architecture – became cheaper. But it is less clear that something similar applies to other art forms. This is a problem for Alexander’s theory, because it surely wasn’t a coincidence that modernism happened simultaneously in architecture and the other art forms. (Alexander himself agrees that the explanation needs to work for all the arts in which the shift towards modernism happened, and cites failure to do this as a reason for rejecting some of the alternative theories he discusses.)

Of the other art forms, the one where an ‘Alexandrian’ story works best is probably painting. The development of photography certainly did cut the cost of representational pictures: having pictures of your ancestors on the wall suddenly became possible for the whole population rather than a relatively small elite. It is at least prima facie plausible that this might have led buyers of painting to seek new ways to use painting to differentiate themselves from poorer people. I am not sure how well that story works – after all, having a painting rather than a photograph would still have been a perfectly good signal of wealth – but maybe the exclusive brand of representational painting was somehow tainted by the cheap adjacent medium of photography.

Sculpture on the eve of modernism (1885). This was about to become profoundly unfashionable, but not because it had become cheap: this piece would have cost something like average lifetime wages at the time of its making. 

Perhaps surprisingly, the Alexandrian story is more clearly wrong in the case of sculpture. It might seem that the costs of producing sculpture must have fallen for the same reasons that the costs of producing architectural ornament did. But this isn’t true. Sculpture in the early twentieth century was mainly produced in marble and bronze: other materials were widely regarded as embarrassing cheap substitutes. Both marble and bronze remained fantastically expensive throughout the period, and remain so today: a life-size marble statue can easily cost £250,000, and bronze is only a little less. In fact, fine marble carving has probably become more expensive in modern times because the process of carving marble, though mechanical, is labour-intensive, and the cost of labour has risen. (I explain both how marble is carved and why labour has become more expensive in this article.) In short, figurative sculpture remained an excellent way to demonstrate wealth, and it isn’t obvious why there should have been elite flight from figuration.

The Paris opera towards the end of the nineteenth-century, still going strong as a signal of wealth. Source.

The Alexandrian story also seems strained in the case of music. Technology had no effect on the cost of composing music, and it probably raised the costs of performing it, again because of the rising cost of labour (string quartets are actually the canonical example of this phenomenon in economics). The obvious invention that Alexander might appeal to is the phonograph, which did indeed appear in the early twentieth century, and which meant that a feeble imitation of live performance became available at low cost. But it is doubtful that tonal music became low-status because phonographs were becoming available. In fact, it just isn’t true that tonal music became low-status: listening to tonal music written before 1914 remained high-status, and remains so today. It is specifically the composition of elite tonal music that declined in status, not its performance: composers like Schoenberg and Stravinsky generally switched over to atonality, and those who did not were stigmatised, but among normal rich people it continued to be prestigious to listen to Bach, Mozart and Schubert. 

A modest circulating library in early nineteenth-century England. Source.

It is also not clear how plausible the Alexandrian story is in the case of literature. Literacy had not been a very good signal of wealth for many centuries: large minorities had been literate since the sixteenth century, at least in Protestant countries where the ability to read the vernacular Bible was highly valued. Book ownership, by contrast, remained fairly low: in early nineteenth-century England, a book cost 5-10 shillings, about £20-40 today, which was expensive in a poor society. But private lending libraries were ubiquitous and offered subscribers books at about 1/25th of this cost. This meant that both the traditional literary canon and the major writers of their own day were perfectly within reach of the nineteenth-century middle classes, and although precise figures are hard to come by, they seem to have read a lot. And this suggests that serious literature was already pretty debased as a signal of wealth long before the stylistic transformations of Pound, Joyce and Celan.

So I am doubtful that premodernist music, sculpture or literature suddenly became affordable to non-rich people around 1900. Literature was already affordable, sculpture never became affordable, and most forms of live classical music remained pretty expensive. This suggests that diminishing ability to signal wealth cannot explain the flight from these premodernist styles in these media. And if it can’t explain the flight from premodernist music, sculpture and literature, it is doubtful that it can be the true explanation of the flight from premodernist painting or architecture either.

Did rich people actually lead the flight from premodernist styles?

Discussing music and literature leads me to another doubt about Alexander’s model. According to Alexander’s model, the key driver of the shift to modernism is a change in the taste of rich buyers: buyers start demanding modernism, and artists adjust themselves to their market, and then maybe poorer people subsequently follow the tastes of rich people through standard patterns of emulation. But in many cases, this just isn’t how it happened. In general, the rise of modernism was driven by artists, and rich people followed only later – if they followed at all.

This is most obvious in the case of music. This interesting website has a database of all operas performed globally today. Of the top fifty operas by number of performances, only one was written after 1914 (Turandot, 1924), and none is modernist. All, that is, belong to the ‘ornamented’ (‘Tartarian’) phase of classical music. The vast number of modernist operas written over the last century have virtually no place in the performance canon: the rich people who patronise opera simply have no interest in them.

This is clearly a general truth. Few billionaires are interested in Boulez, Lachenmann and Messiaen. They either listen to popular music, or to premodernist classical music. And this has always been true. I cannot think of any pioneer modernist composer who reluctantly abandoned Romanticism because atonality was where the money was.

Something similar seems true of literature: tycoons and dukes are surely no more likely than standard middle-class people to read Joyce, and much less likely to do so than, say, university professors or highbrow journalists. In the case of painting and sculpture, the situation is a little more complex. Rich people certainly do buy modernist art today, and some of them did so even in its pioneer phase. But it is still doubtful that the development of modernist painting and sculpture was driven by rich patrons. The traditional story of the modernist artist suffering poverty and ostracism for his art is partly mythical, but not entirely so: most modernists would have been bemused, not to say outraged, by the suggestion that they were following the market. The intelligentsia embraced modernism first, and the rest of the bourgeoisie gradually fell into line over the next generation.

One of Mies van der Rohe’s traditionalist potboilers. The Mosler House, Babelsburg, 1926. Source.

On the whole, something like this is true of architecture too. Early modernist architects often struggled to get customers: Mies van der Rohe was not unusual in having to continue to design classical houses to make ends meet, even after he had come to regard it as a bankrupt style. Gradually, modernist architects convinced a handful of clients – usually wealthy intellectuals rather than the super-rich – to let them design villas. But modernism only became the default style of rich people well after it had won the support of key cultural elites. Britain’s architecture schools switched over to modernism in the early 1930s, at which time the vast majority of new houses for British rich people were still in the conventional Neo-Georgian or ‘Stockbroker’s Tudor’ styles. Remarkably, Britain’s architecture students were overwhelmingly being trained in modernist styles at a time when the number of fully modernist private houses in Britain was barely in double digits.

In interwar England, Neo-Georgian and Neo-Tudor were still the normal styles for expensive houses. On the market today for £12,000,000. Source.

The pattern, then, is that modernism was driven by artists and the intellectual circles that surrounded them. In the case of some arts, especially music but also literature, it never really left those circles: modernist music has a tiny listening public and the richest people today are barely aware it exists. In the case of other art forms, rich people were eventually drawn in to some degree. But even once they started patronising modernism, it is not clear they were ever really in control of its development. I am reminded of Tom Wolfe’s imagining of the team from the telecoms giant AT&T approaching their architect, Philip Johnson:

One could see the scene: the CEO, the chairman of the board, and the whole selection committee, representing the biggest corporation in the history of man, approach the architect, making imaginary snowballs with their hands and saying, ‘Please Mr Johnson, we don’t mean to interfere in any way. All is ask is, please, sir, don’t give us a flat top’.

Wolfe exaggerated. Many rich people came to actively like modernism and patronised it willingly. But I suspect he was not altogether wrong in his characterisation of the relationship of the rich and their architects:

After 1945 our plutocrats, bureaucrats, board chairmen, CEOs, commissioners and college presidents undergo an inexplicable change. They become diffident and reticent. All at once they are willing to accept that glass of water in the face, that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one’s bourgeois soul, known as modern architecture.

And why? They can’t tell you. They look up at the barefaced buildings they have bought, those great hulking structures they hate so thoroughly, and they can’t figure it out for themselves.

So: there was no general crisis in the ability of premodernist art to signal wealth around 1900. Some of the premodernist arts continued to be good for signalling wealth, and some of them weren’t good for signalling wealth in the first place. And sure enough, wealthy people don’t seem to have led the charge away from premodernist styles: the rich abandoned premodernist styles slowly and reluctantly, and in some cases they never abandoned them at all. 

As I said at the start, though, I think Alexander is onto something. Alexander suggests there has been a shift from signalling wealth through art to signalling ‘taste’; he argues that the much-remarked inaccessibility of modernist art is inherent in its appeal, providing a way of sorting those who possess ‘taste’ from those who do not. None of the above contradicts those claims, and in fact I find them highly intriguing. Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes.  I don’t have a good theory of it yet.  But I would like to.