Battle of Convenience: Essential vs Non-essential Labor and Aesthetic
Late last year, I decided to take a break from working in a psychiatric hospital and attending school and treat myself to a vacation. I escaped to Miami by myself to bury my head in the sand for just a few days. While there, I visited the Institute of Contemporary Art. In its gift shop were some aesthetically pleasing knick-knacks and goods. As you can guess, many were not cheap. The most offensive, I found, was a $290 chess set that utilized the skyscrapers of New York City as its pieces.
Reluctantly, I must admit that it was quite beautiful, with its reflective black and white pieces towering over the matte chess board. Its tallest piece, the World Trade Center, stood an impressive six inches of the board. For fans of chess and/or fans of New York City, this would have been a unique and stylish gift.
For everyone else, it serves as an important discussion piece regarding utility, aesthetic, and conspicuous consumption. What is conspicuous consumption? In 1899’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, author and social critic Thorstein Veblen described it as the practice of spending money on goods and services provide that little to no utility and instead advertise one’s wealth and social status. Let’s circle back to that.
The $290 chess set serves the same practical purpose as a $15 chess set purchased from Walmart. Searching on Amazon and boutique websites, I found a $125 chess set from Anthropologie with mirrored and matte pieces and board. At less than half the price, this could satisfy both one’s aesthetic desire and practical wish to play cheese. Of course, this same store also sells a $399 game set (including chess) that markets itself as an “heirloom”. But let’s not muddy the waters. The same issue at hand persists. Most people buying these sets that are above, say, $50 (for a nice solid wood set that will last a long time) are not purchasing them to play chess. These sets will reside on a coffee or side table in a den, a living room, or an office as a decor piece. It is, at most, an exercise in demonstrating its owner’s intelligence and aesthetic without being overly obnoxious.
Of course, any amount spent (whether $125, $290, or $399) over the bare minimum floating around $15 leaves room for those $15 folks to cry out, “Why on Earth would you spend so much on something you can get for way cheaper?” But there are two different purposes being served by the same concept of a chess board. One is pure utility; it’s the person spending $15 to play chess - the other is aesthetic, or perhaps conspicuous consumption; it’s the person spending $290 (or whatever amount above the bare utilitarian minimum) to not play chess but rather to display wealth.
It’s the same concept for those that will buy a mass-produced, hackneyed print of a barn at the local Hobby Lobby versus those that will by a similar image painted by an artist for exponentially more money. It’s not what is displayed in the image; that’s inconsequential for many, even. The statement is made in the amount of money that a certain class of people (one’s contemporaries, fellow bourgeoisie, et cetera) can suspect was spent on the item.
But again, questions are begged by this discrepancy. What practical and ethical explanation can be cited to rationalize the seemingly inexplicable choice to spend significantly greater amounts of money on aesthetic purpose over that which serves the most obvious and strictest sense of utility? Hell, should it even be a question of ethics at all? I argue, if it’s not already obvious, that it is certainly fair to question the ethics.
I’m not here to shame concepts of beauty and aesthetic, for those of us that appreciate it. And naturally, there exists no absolute set standard for beauty and aesthetic. Perhaps this entire writing is an exercise in futility, as those that spend $10 million on an art piece will never need to stand before a crowd of unhoused or indebted individuals defending their decision using some quantifiable ethical code. There is no answer, no true wisdom that this boils down to, and perhaps that’s what bothers me so, and what brings me here to write about it. I have no measuring stick to bring with me, should I ever find myself in front that person defending their $10 million purchase; I simply find it repulsive, even as I empathize with the appreciation for art and beauty. But that $10 million isn’t even about the art and beauty, I recognize. It’s economic in nature. It’s supply and demand. That $10 million art piece on auction at Sotheby’s is a one-of-a-kind. Meaning, it’s literally the only one, and if therefore more valuable, art and beauty be damned.
Art, and by extension the concept of beauty itself, is sold to the highest bidder. And perhaps that is yet another layer to this, another distinguishable reason that I hate this. Beauty and art is commodified, in our capitalistic culture. It’s not because that art piece or that chess board is worth its price tag for some esoteric, barely definable philosophy of aesthetic; it’s because there exist people willing to pay that price, and the only reward is demonstrating their social standing, all while millions of others suffer under this system.
And so, we return to Veblen. In his seminal work, he argued that, as the leisure class (i.e., bourgeoisie) emerged from the Industrial Revolution, its members began to accumulate vast amounts of wealth; with this excess wealth, there was a need to demonstrate this newly acquired status. This created, what Veblen calls, conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure: that consumption and leisure which exists purely to showcase wealth and standing. The objects of that consumption (for example, the $290 chess set) became known as a Veblen good. The leisure class perpetuates social strife and stratification by making these demonstrations known far and wide. Indeed, the working class participates directly and indirectly in contributing to this stratification through, what Veblen calls, pecuniary emulation. This is the effort to imitate or even surpass those leisure and consumption patterns displayed by the leisure class. Even mass media, whose consumers are mostly middle class, plays its part; the audience gobbles up the media that glorifies the consumption pattern of billionaires. Why does New York Magazine need to cover Jeff Bezos purchasing a $500 million yacht? Because people will read about it, which generates ad revenue, even though the article’s author is indeed within the same tax bracket as many of the readers. This glorification furthers the stratification of class, at our own hands.
The excess wealth of the bourgeoisie would not exist without the labor and consumption of the working class, though. This furthers the stratification more so, creating animosity for those aware of the discrepancy and unconscious, perhaps ignorance, emulation and glorification for those unaware. This creates corresponding types of labor: essential and non-essential. Likewise to the forms of consumption, serving utilitarian needs on the one hand and leisure/aesthetic needs on the other, essential labor is that labor which the working class completes that is necessary for survival and non-essential labor is that which the leisure class completes that is unnecessary but rather performative. It can be the same labor, but the purposes and art behind each differ. Taking an example of working class essential labor: after working an entire day, mom gets home to cook a dinner of spaghetti with meat sauce - this process, straightforward and essential (as food is essential for survival), takes less than 30 minutes. Taking an example of leisure class non-essential labor: a stay-at-home mother and wife to a high-earning executive stays home the entire day working on dinner as a hobby, creating that same spaghetti but instead opting for homemade noodles and homemade sausages, a process that takes the better part of the entire day including the shopping for the ingredients. The end result is the same: a spaghetti dinner for the family. The aesthetic and essentiality of each is wildly different, though. One class, the working class, is participating only in the labor that is essential to their existence (making basic food for sustenance) because they have significantly less leisure time. The leisure class is participating in extravagant, conspicuous, non-essential labor to produce what is in utilitarian terms the same dinner but is essentially and aesthetically very different; this is because the leisure class has significantly more time to perform these activities, so much so that even the basic actions necessary for life (cooking and eating) become conspicuous and an act of social stratification.
Veblen’s argument boils down to one line, more or less: Consumerism is fueled by the concepts of social standing and power dynamics, rather than individual preference or utility. The $15 chess set provides the exact same utilitarian value as the $290 chess set. It’s in the capitalist, consumerist culture where this monetary difference is most obvious and most stratifying. Alternative systems can produce more equitable and sustainable models of consumption and leisure, ideally without sacrificing aesthetic.
“The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.”
Header photo sourced from Unsplash.