The original owners of Chadstone may well have preferred the style of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele 11 in Milan, the largest shopping centre in Italy. Despite this, they made the rational, accurate calculation that not enough of their customers would mind what it looked like, that
Not enough people are annoyed by this.
100. Main entrance to ChacUtone Shopping Centre. Melbourne. Australia, 1960
not enough people would refuse to buy a toaster or tennis racket in it simply on the basis of its appearance. Myer Emporium were exploiting a vacuum of taste in which the public were still awaiting the Walter Pater, the Herbert Read or (more likely) the Jeremy Clarkson of shopping mall aesthetics, and in the meantime were unaware that they had any particular distress to articulate.
The history of the careers of critics shows us both the opportunities and the challenges facing anyone setting out to raise standards of taste in a new area. It took Herbert Read 40 years to accomplish his goal; he had to write dozens of books and deliver hundreds of lectures. Still, all he managed to do was to get a very narrow section of British society to look more favourably on certain objects in museums. But that wasn't nothing. With enough determination, and in a wide range of commercial areas, good critical voices should be able to spur on a love of goodness and a hatred of mediocrity. In the process, and over time, this could be enough to substantially transform where money can be made, and hence how capitalism operates.
The people who built this knew they could make a profitfrom beauty.
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101. Giuseppe Mcngoni, Galleria Viuorio F.manuclc II. 1865
Towards an
Enlightened
Capitalism
What we arc aiming for is enlightened capitalism: a system within which businesses remain sufficiently attuned to economic reality to be profitable and to sustain and increase their own activities without needing outside support, but also stay focused on providing optimal goods and services. It means a business culture devoted to what is genuinely worthwhile and admirable as well as to the many disciplines required to flourish in a competitive marketplace.
At present, this usually sounds like a contradiction. We are haunted by the worry that it is impossible to do good things and make money at the same time. The worry goes to the very heart of our anxieties about capitalism. We fear that the economic system, which delivers so much productive efficiency, simply will not reward our nobler endeavours. There is certainly enough depressing evidence around that this may be the case; that when we try to do good things, we fail, and when we ignore taste, we succeed. In the mid-nineteenth century this issue was addressed head on by an artist who was also an entrepreneur, William Morris (102). Like many of his serious contemporaries, Morris was dismayed by the way in which industrialization was taking more and more people away from craft employment, where they tended to produce beautiful and noble products, and onto the production lines of factories, where they tended to produce sub-standard and ugly ones. He sought to combat this by starting a business dedicated to turning out high-quality, beautiful furniture by hand, in the traditional style, without the use of automated techniques, thereby also creating opportunities for satisfying, well-paid work. The finest achievements of the various arts and crafts would be made available for all, and a workforce would have healthy and meaningful employment.
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Can beauty and goodness lead to moneyf
102. Morris and Company advertisement For Rush-Seated Chairs, 1915
THE SUSSEX RUSH-SEATED CHAIRS
MORRIS AND COMPANY
449 OXFORD STREET. LONDON, W.
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Unfortunately, things didn't work out as planned. The business was moderately successful for a few years, but it never became a major competitor to the mainstream suppliers, it never employed more than a handful of people and in the end it went bankrupt because there was simply not a large enough client base willing to pay a high enough price for the goods on offer. From a distance, Morris seems like the Jesus of good capitalism: he was commercially crucified because he was too good for this world. Meanwhile, the reverse fate seems often to attend those who don't care at all about quality and virtue. 'No one ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the public' is a cynical but alarmingly plausible aphorism.
The fate of Morris and Co. (relative to the financial triumphs of Caesars Palace and the Gladstone Shopping Centre) may seem like proof that the market is evil and that the only salvation lies in censorship and the provision of artificial incentives to the most noble producers. Caesars Palace should be closed down by the taste police, while the government should subsidize the production of artisanal goats' cheese. Though charming as a daydream, radical, large-scale intervention of this kind would lead to catastrophe: the value of the currency would collapse on the global money markets, taxation revenue would decline and governments would be unable to service their debts. In any case, democratic political parties are themselves competitors for attention in the marketplace, and the major parties are necessarily more attuned to the values of Las Vegas than of William Morris and Co. We should accept without further nostalgic regret that it is simply unfeasible to do away with the market. We need ways of improving it without the promise of any enlightened intervention.
Courage to undertake such a task begins with a focus on some of the more cheerful instances in capitalism's history. It doesn't take long to come across examples of businesses that have successfully reconciled an idea of the Good with capitalist strictures, and that have used the resources of profit-driven businesses to improve the world in their own area by caring about creating a high-quality product as much as they do about profit. In children's toys, one thinks of Lego: in aviation, of All Nippon Airways; in fruit juice, of Innocent Smoothies; in office construction, of Urban Splash; in taps, of Hansgrohe; in potato crisps, of Zweifeclass="underline" in animation, of Aardman; and in pencils, of Caran d'Ache.
Pessimistic attitudes as to the chances of reconciling the Good with the market are often a distant echo of nineteenth-century Romantic theses about the relationship between noble art and financial and critical
success. It is because one too many a nineteenth-century artist died in his garret unrecognized, because Edouard Manet's Le dejeuner sur Therbe was initially ridiculed by the artistic establishment and James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No.l was cast out of the official Salon, that an idea persists to this day that quality is fated to be ignored in a vulgar world. We all have enough failure in our lives to find such a tale seductive, but we should acknowledge that in art at least, the idea of such blindness to beauty has been much exaggerated. Manet died a wealthy and celebrated man, and Whistlers misfortunes (like Van Gogh's) owed more to personality than an inherent bias in the established order. Furthermore, the art market has been atoning for its nineteenth-century mistakes ever since, ensuring that a lot of work that is deeply challenging and lacking in ready charm has gained a surprisingly large and steady audience. That one of the most lauded and economically successful artists of the twentieth century should have been a taciturn Swiss-Italian who depicted the human body as a series of tortured, elongated metal stalagmites suggests that taste cannot be as averse to depth and quality as one might assume (103).