Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds -- The "Aesthetic" of Exoticism

In this passage Rosalind Williams considers the images that were generated for the new department store. She compares them to the palace at Versailles, constructed by Louis XIV at the end of the 17th century and argues that Zola's treatment of the visual aspects of the new mass marketing was inadequate.

The "Aesthetic" of Exoticism To return to a question already posed: this may be impressive, but is it civilization? Is it even art? Like the displays of Versailles-the silver furniture of the palace, its frenzies of gilt, its acres of mirrors  and  entire  rooms swirling  with marble, stucco, and frescoes-department-store  displays  als  are  designed  to impress the spectator. The difference is in the nature of the audience and  the motivation behind the display. At Versailles the audience was the restricted one of the court. The courtiers were impressed mainly by the costliness of the decor, costliness due to the fineness of the materials and to the artistic skill used to work them. These qualities, no matter what motivated them, can be incorporated in objects which have enduring value as decorative art.  In  the  department store,  on the other  hand,  the audience is a large and anonymous public. The stylistic traits of repetition, variety, and exoticism used to seduce it into buying usually  have little enduring aesthetic value. The motivation behind the decor is to lure people into the store  in the first place and  then  to imbue  the store's merchandise with glamor, romance, and, therefore, consumer appeal. There is no aesthetic connection between this decor and the objects it enhances, objects that generally lack any artistic merit.

To criticize the chaotic-exotic style as "bad taste," a frequent condemnation even around the turn of the century, misses the point. As a quality of aesthetic judgment, taste does not apply to transient decor whose purpose is "to attract and to hold" the spectator's attention. Why the reliance on fake mahogany, fake bronze,  fake marble? Because the purpose of the materials is not to express their own character but to convey  a sense of the lavish and foreign. Why the hodgepodge of visual themes? Because the purpose is not to express internal consistency but to bring together anything that expresses distance from the ordinary . Exotic decor is therefore impervious to objections of taste. It is not ladylike but highly seductive. In this aesthetic demi-monde, exotic decor exists as an intermediate form of life between art and commerce. It resembles art, it has recognizable themes and stylistic traits, its commercial purpose is wrapped in elaborate visual trappings; yet it does not participate in traditional artistic goals of creating beauty, harmony, and spiritual significance. This hybrid form is an illusion of art, a "so-called artistic element"12 posing as the genuine article.

Zola, for one, was taken in. He praises Mouret as an aesthetic genius as well as a financial one, for in Zola's mind  the two types of genius are indistinguishable. He lauds the exposition of white, the Oriental salon, and the sea of open umbrellas as artistic successes, because they attract so many customers. His judgment reflects a deep­ seated confusion of commercial and aesthetic values. Talmeyr, on the other hand, clearly distinguishes the type of decoration used by modern business for its own ends from traditional forms of art. According to Talmeyr, in over fifty years universal expositions had not produced any truly artistic constructions at all, but only a "type of frightful plastered and clumsy heaviness, twisting or declamatory, of all those  domes,  balconies,  pediments, columns." True  architecture involves  the construction  of monu­ments, while expositions require only decors, "stage sets" or "scenery." "Why .. .  insist on transferring  to that which is ephemeral in intention, to that which is decor by nature,  the principles and procedures  of that which is durable and permanent in essence, monument by raison d'etre?" Exposition buildings are intended  to "make ... in their fashion a weighty and proud show," the same goal that inspires posters advertising "a new shoe polish or a new brand of champagne in a manner vaguely derived from that of Raphael." The goal is to convey an "industrial image/' not an artistic one, and the search for magnitude or lavishness will never bridge the gulf in intention:

You can imagine the [industrial] image as enormous, as ambitious as you wish, it could be stupefying, it will be no less always and necessarily inept. You can even imagine the facade, the frieze, or the columns pushed to the furthest limits of richness, they will be no less equally stupid.

Talmeyr  concludes  with  the suggestion  that decor might be able to invent an authentic style if it renounced the attempt to imitate art and instead realized its own nature. He notes that the only modern edifice of the 1900 exposition which he is tempted to praise is the Monumental Gateway  surmounted by "La Parisienne." Talmeyr admits  that the gateway is heavy, clumsy , bizarre, and gaudy, and that "La Parisienne" is reminiscent of a peasant girl in a cape. Nonetheless, he remarks, they possess a unique  merit,  that  nothing  like them has been seen anywhere, that they resemble nothing! They are absurd? ... This is also true! But their quality is precisely to be absurd, in an order of ideas where it is logical to be so, and where the only  true absurdity, as a  result,  is to wish to be reasonable.

In environments of mass consumption, the logic of art gives way to the logic of fantasy.