In My Opinion
John Fiske

Aesthetic Pleasure - Sept. 2010

That appalling specimen of humanity called Hermann Goering was, I’m sorry to say, a genuine connoisseur. Plunder is hardly an admirable way of building an art collection, but the collection he built was first class - almost as good as Hitler’s! A Dutch dealer, Han van Megeeren, sold him a Vermeer, and selling a Dutch masterpiece to a Nazi was treason, punishable by death. While in jail, van Megeeren confessed that he, not Vermeer, had painted the artwork, and that he’d sold Goering a forgery. (Sadly, he’d sold his forged “Vermeers” to many other collectors and museums as well.) Goering learned of the forgery while he, too, was in prison, facing execution for crimes against humanity. Apparently he was more distressed by the fact that his beloved Vermeer was a forgery than by his own impending death. He also thought that van Megeeren had done more evil to him than he had to the peoples of Europe. He was a true connoisseur.

The Yale development psychologist, Paul Bloom, tells this story in his book, How Pleasure Works, and uses it to illustrate his theory that humans are all, at heart, pleasure seekers in a way that other creatures are not. And to find pleasure, he argues, we are constantly searching for the essence of an object, a person or an experience. Essentialism is, apparently, a hot new branch of psychology, though I’m not sure I needed it to tell me that I’m always looking for pleasure – but then, an awful lot of “science” is common sense in long words. But what lights up the pleasure center in my brain, Bloom tells me, is my sense that I have found the hidden, essential nature of something or someone. This theory explains the deep pleasures we find occasionally in art, music, sex, food and wine and fun. Oh yes, in real antiques, too. Bloom doesn’t mention antiques at all, why are we always the last to the table when Great Things are on the menu?

The taste for cheap
These ideas were swishing around in the back of my mind as I listened to NPR in my truck. The traffic was heavy, so I missed the name of the woman who was discussing her new book on America’s current obsession with cheapness. To sell anything these days, she said, you need a sign showing the manufacturer’s suggested retail price crossed out, then below that the sale price, also crossed out, and then, finally, in huge red numbers, the lowest possible price. Then it will sell. Now, I’m not going down the “discounting” road again: My column on that topic last month met with far from universal approval.

What interested me particularly was her research into IKEA. IKEA, she found, employs 11 designers and scours the world to get the best. It pays them well and gives them everything they need, including high status within the company. But the kicker is that for each design they work on, they are given a (low) cost for which it must be able to be manufactured.
IKEA then scours the world for the cheapest possible wood, which it currently finds in the farthermost reaches of eastern Siberia, where logging is uncontrolled and uncontrollable. It then scours the world for the cheapest factories with, of course, the cheapest labor. So – best possible design, cheapest possible materials, cheapest possible manufacture. I couldn’t help thinking of the old, old adage, “If it’s good, it ain’t cheap; if it’s cheap, it ain’t good.”

The pleasure of the real
What all this is leading up to, of course, is antiques. When design, material and the making are all done by the same hand or eye in the same shop, and that hand or eye belongs to an artisan (i.e. an artist-maker) then there is a good chance that the finished object will embody the essence of its form, and equally importantly, of its time and place as well. van Megeeren’s Vermeer had none of this integrity of design-material-making and it did not embody the time and place of a real Vermeer. To our eyes alone, the van Megeeren and the Vermeer may have looked the same, but our search for the hidden essence tells us exactly the opposite. So, one gives pleasure, the other does not.

An IKEA chair may be great to sit on (I have no intention of trying) but an eighteenth-century Philadelphia chair is far more than a thing to sit on. It contains the essence of its maker, its city and its time, and so it gives us a deep and timeless pleasure. Sure, the IKEA chair will please initially because of its design, and it is certainly typical of our time, all surface, no substance – or, as we used to say in England, all fur coat and no knickers. It cannot possibly give timeless pleasure, because it is time-bound – 10 years if you’re lucky. There is no integrity of design and construction, so the best it can do is please temporarily.

The unintegrity, if there is such a word, of the IKEA chair explains the high value of real twentieth-century chairs, such as those by Marcel Breuer or Alvaar Alto: The integrity of design-material-construction that comes from the controlling, creating eye of the artisan, even though they were made in a factory, allows us to find in them an essence that is as “true” as that in a Philadelphia Chippendale.

The hand and eye of the artist-maker is critical for the production of pleasure. The pleasure given by an artwork, Bloom goes on to explain, involves not just the pleasure of the finished object, but also the insight it gives into the process of creation. The way the paint was laid on the canvas; why the vase of flowers is here and not two inches to the left; how light is transformed into yellow paint – we need to understand, or at least intuit, moments of creation like these to gain the full pleasure that the painting can offer. The same is true for an antique. The connoisseur will gain as much pleasure from the underside and interior, where the process of creation is most easily visible, as from the outside. No one in their right mind would want to turn an IKEA chair upside down to inspect it – not that we’re given the chance. It’ll come in a flat box, some-assembly-required, in the belief that if we invest our own time and energy into it, we’ll value it more highly! Hmm…marketing theorists seem to live on a different planet than I. Best possible design, cheapest materials and manufacturing, and me as the final hand in the manufacturing process. Some essence there…

Bloom makes another point with which I enthusiastically agree: We are surrounded by objects and immersed in experiences that have no essence – they please temporarily but give no pleasure, which is why we frantically consume one after another, desperately seeking a sense of pleasure that is real. Reality television is to reality as a van Megeeren is to a Vermeer. Now, of course, these things and experiences have a pleasing quality, otherwise we wouldn’t indulge in them, but in a very real sense, they’re not real.

Bloom tells of many convincing studies showing that, as infants explore the world around them, what they most want to do is to distinguish clearly between what gives them an essential pleasure, and what doesn’t – is this really my security blanket or merely one that looks like it? Is this my teddy bear, or one that looks identical but really isn’t? Not too dissimilar from Hermann Goering. Bloom says that this search for the essence is itself an essential characteristic of humans.

Another factor (I’m compressing his argument like mad) is what anthropologists call “contagious magic” and Bloom calls “positive contagion.” When someone pays nearly $50,000 for a tape measure owned and used by J. F. Kennedy, he or she is paying for a real connection with a famous person. That’s contagious magic, though how pleasurable it is remains open to question. But contagious magic/positive contagion also comes into play in our pleasure in a painting or an antique. If our contagion is with Vermeer (his hand held the brush that put this smear of paint right here) we’re happy, and the painting is worth the price we paid for it (however high). If it’s with van Megeeren, the contagion is negative, we’re not happy and the painting is valueless. In an antique chair, we are in touch with the artisan, even though we may not know who he was; our pleasure is enhanced if we do know his identity. In an IKEA chair, no contagion is possible at all; the creative process is so inauthentic that there is no artisan reachable beyond it.

Our world today may divert us from this essential search, because so much of it is simulated, not real, and the electronic environment that now saturates us may make it even harder for us to distinguish between the simulated and the real, whether in people, things or experiences. Authenticity is slipping away from us, but authenticity matters, oh yes, authenticity matters: Being able to distinguish between the authentic and the inauthentic is, according to Bloom, a fundamental life-skill. Lose it, and we cannot function effectively in the world.

In simulation-saturated world, a real antique will necessarily be an oddball – but it’s a necessary oddball. For the people who love them, Philadelphia chairs and Vermeer paintings help them function better in the real world – I once heard the African-American philosopher, Cornell West, say, “It’s listening to the blues that keeps me going.” I know what he means, I know what Bloom means – I sip a glass of real wine and my eyes play over a box whose carving is the work of a seventeenth-century artisan that is just as essential as the work of Vermeer. Looking at that box helps keep me going.

John Fiske