The Origins of Glamorousness

Sunday's New York Times Review of Books has this interesting article on the history and origins of that ubiquitous G-word. Apparently there is more to it than what Fergie told me:

According to Gundle, a film and television studies professor at Warwick University in England, glamour first came into being in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the French revolutionaries and Napoleon Bonaparte dealt a series of crushing blows to fixed social hierarchies and entrenched class prerogatives. During this period, an increasingly powerful bourgeoisie began “contesting many of the hereditary privileges of the aristocracy” and arrogating to itself the nobility’s onetime “monopoly over style, beauty, fashion, luxury and even fame.” Abetted by a burgeoning news media and consumer culture, the middle class succeeded in reinventing the attractions of the aristocratic lifestyle as qualities that were imitable, not innate — as products one might acquire, not inherit. For this reason, Gundle explains, “the advent of bourgeois society did not result simply in the aura of aristocracy passing intact to the new class or even to selected members of it. Glamour was a result of the release on to the market of the possessions, heritage, styles and practices of the aristocracy and of the appropriation and manipulation of these by commercial forces and other actors in the urban environment.”

So just as James Burnham taught us that the ascendency of managers as opposed to owners within the means of production since the postwar era is a result of historical forces progressing towards the lowest possible social elements within the capitalist-created hierarchal framework, the same rules apply to style. Just look at Hollywood movie stars from the 50s and 60s to the 70s. In the early and mid half of High Modernist film you have Katherine Hepburn with her true New England accent to Cary Grant, Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn (blood relation to Katherine, parents BUF members). While Grant and Wood may not have been as upper class in their upbringing as the Hepburn women, they represented an achievable middle class version of the same ideals: unpretentious intellect, class, dignity, and a sharp-as-razor fashion sense that would be welcome at any cocktail soiree or backyard BBQ with friends and neighbors. With the victory of the New Left after '68, these ideals, even on a purely aesthetic plane, were seen a definite no no. So with the 70s comes face time for New York based, working class 'ethnic whites', mostly Jews and Italians. Hence we are treated to such actors as Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Elliot Gould, Robert DeNiro and Woody Allen. In their films, glamour is seen as something quite superfluous and thus only for the women folk, and even there it is severly sudued when compared with the previous decade. This position is not without warrant as many of these films, Taxi Driver and Arkin's Little Murders, in particular, showcase the reactions of ordinary (white) folks to the societal breakdown fostered by the no-standards-by-any-means-neccessary crowd. Fast forward to now and the revival of glamour, having fallen from the grace of the middle classes and the clean cut subtly of the working classes, it now lies soley in the hands of the lumpenized nouveau riche. Gaudy, tacky, classless, and rude. Now this word is most often associated with Negro hop hop 'artists' bedecked in shiny stones dug up by their 'brothers' in Africa, luxury trucks, cheaply made/expensively sold McMansions and waifish or obese white trash popsters (never a body type in between) in the limelight. From New Left to New Class, don't it all look ugly?

A Quick Overview

These days we hear a lot about so called postmodernism, the more public friendly catch all term related to post-structuralist philosophy. Most people who use it falsely refer to junk postmodernism, the grab bag of cultural signifiers used to sell commodities, epitomized by the mere ironic use of things from the past (i.e. wearing a Stryper shirt) to the far more odious constant referencing of movies, music and fads from the past as a means of discussing a shared experience. The latter of which is rapidly becoming the preferred pass time of young Americans. Of course, postmodernism is much more than this. If you need help learning what this is read some Lytoard, Baudrillard and Debord. Since most folks don’t even know what modernism was/is here’s a little refresher course. Note: Modernism with a capital M can really be brought back to the Renaissance in the realm of ideas, the 1700s in economics and politics, and the cusp of the 1800s in terms of art. Since my expertise is aesthetics I will use the image because it is often the best medium to express the zeitgeist. Here I focus on the 20th century meaning of modernism.

Classical Modernism (1890-1939)



Lillian Gish here with a mysteriously alluring gaze. Art movements and artists include: Symbolism, Orphism, Impressionism, Pointilism, Fauvism, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Bauhaus, Antoni Gaudi, Futurism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Cubism, De Stijl, Neo-Plasticism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Expressionism, Der Blaue Riter, Pittura Metafisica, Surrealism, Arthur Dove, Ashcan School, American Realism, American Folk Art & Craft, Edward Hopper, Social Realism, Nazi Art.

Let it be said that while Expressionism continues to get the attention as the first modernist art movement, the credit should really go to the Symbolists. Their portrayl of fin de siecle decadence with debutante lasciviousness and occult themes really puts our going away party to shame. Any occult fascists out there need to stop looking for any surviving copies of James Madole's speeches and focus on this. Meanwhile, Vichy agitprop harks back to bourgeois, quasi-Ancien Regime nostalgia, producing planisme, and setting the stage for High Modernist development.

High Modernism (1945-1977)



Brigitte Bardot: always sexy, superb French Pop mistress and now contemporary eco-fascisti! Art and architectural movements include: Abstract Expressionism, CoBrA, International Style, Brutalism, LeCorbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Art Brut, Art Informel, Arte Povera, Pop Art, Op Art, Color Field painting, Nouveau Realisme, Gutai Group, Black Mountain School, Fluxus, Norman Rockwell, Minimalism, Photorealism, French New Wave (film), Underground comix, Earth/Land Art.

With a howdyhowdy American A-0K, the postwar boom produces a trust in the ideals of modernity like never before. Coinciding with this dawning of the American Century, the drunken misogynists of the New York school dominate in the world of paint. While ostensibly celebrating Estadounidense-centric individualism and ruggedness it still manages to be propped up by spooks in the State Department. Reaping the benefits of some New Amsterdam gimp's corporatist error while gloating over the defeat of fascism proves quite contradictory when the roots of the New Development become exposed. Nevertheless, this era remains stylistically the tops for Occidental Modernity. Skeptics of the previous phrase need look no further than CoBrA for proto-NatAnarch culture:

Their fundamental values were nonconformity and spontaneity. Their inspiration was children's drawings, the alienated and folk art, motifs from Nordic mythology, Marxism. They rejected erudite art and all official art events. They sought to express combination of the Surrealist unconscious with the romantic forces of nature but unlike the former group they felt an abstract idiom better served that purpose. They were primary distinguished by a semiabstract expressive paintings style with brilliant color, violent brushwork, and distorted human figures.

Late Modernism/"Post-Modernism" (1977-Present)



Bearing some resemblence to a certain member of the Martense family, we have this slag as an icon for the miscegenation generation. Even when she's in her Sunday Best she's at best the type of girl you might let blow you at the your friend's wedding after you've had one too many a Maker's Mark mint julep. Art and styles include: Neo-Expressionism, Video Art, "Conceptual" Art, Pop Surrealism, Neo Pop, Photorealism, Collage Revival, Young British Artists, Urbania/Street art/Wiggerism, Performance art, Adobe Photoshop templates, Flash templates, After Effects templates, Art that looks like art from the past, Art that is really visual Identity Politics.

And so we have the famed End of History. Not so much a victory for Fukuyama's vaunted free market as social democracy (see Kojeve for this one). I'll skip all the adjectives to describe this point in history that any college course will elaborate on and get right to the meat'n'potatoes of the zeitgeist: unoriginality and boredom. Everything has supposedly already been done before so lets just loot the past like a pile of clothes at Dollar A Pound. Rock&Roll ended after grunge and so now it's either rehashing garage rock, psychedelic, or post punk. Good styles nonetheless but why settle for some cardboard facsimile when the global market is giving you access to music actually from that era you never knew about before? Electronic music has actually gotten edgier and less derivative. Film and fiction has gotten progressively worse and are currently lurching in the gutter waiting for some absent minded passerby to accidently step on them. In an era dominated culturally by establishment liberalism (i.e. aggressive mediocrity), the human interest story and the cut-up-narrative novel is all that is churned out, not to mention some forged Holocaust memoir every month. I think there was some sort of silent literary coup d'etat after John Cheever died. This was probably about the time that the MLA went from meaning Modern Language Assocation to Maoist Literary Assembly. Meanwhile, in the realm of politics, the rise of radical Islam as the current radical chic proves once and for all that capital R revolutionaries are really just absolutist, self-righteous Puritans who lack social skills and proper table manners. I'm with Proudhon, the anarchist is simultaneously the biggest radical and the greatest reactionary. Yours truly for the eternal return of the Golden Age of the Occident.

Looking Back Over the Horizon

In 1951 the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was designed by Minoru Yamasaki. At the time it was built it epitomized American postwar confidence in urban planning, technology and forward-thinking ideas, in short, modernism. By 1972, it was being demolished, having become a symbol of the failure of government intervention into housing problems, the utopian intentions of ideologically driven architects and as some more astute observers would have it, the end of modernism.



On Septermber 11, 2001, the twin towers known collectively as the World Trade Center, designed by the same man who created Pruitt-Igoe, are taken down by human will and ingenuity. This day represents the actual symbolic end of the modernist project as the aftermath of this action would collectively cause many otherwise easily duped folks to seriously reconsider the ideals which they had otherwise taken for granted. Granted much of this massive paradigm shift would take the form of a militarized, over emotional defense of such ideals, but this quite dogmatic and illiberal form of expression simply proves that the legitimacy of such ideas are on the fritz, so to speak.

Sometime last month, I came into the possesion of a number of copies, dated from the early 1960s to the mid 1970s, of the hardcover magazine 'Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art.' Just flipping through them and seeing the articles featured and pictures printed made me realize how much better things were culturally and aesthetically in the era of the 20th century known as high modernist. Of course, there is a direct line of progression from the 'shoot for the stars' (literally) optimism and the sexy but reserved chic styles of the Anglo-American jet set in the 1950s to mid 70s to the perpetual purgatory of hyperreality, multiculturalism and architectural abomination of the 1980s to present, but in the spirit of cut'n'paste I've decided to showcase the good, show where it went wrong and how it can be revived.