HTS Paul Davies

The Freedom of Aesthetics

In the Eighteenth Century monarchs and princes in Europe were in competition with each other to acquire a secret. In times before the free availability of knowledge, when techniques migrated over centuries between continents, and even in such events were jealously guarded from country to country, it was normal for nations to be vying with each other to buy the relevant Arcanum and its workings from someone who purported to hold the key to its mysteries. It was normal and had been borne out through countless obsessive and futile attempts in the previous centuries to find potentially transformative (both on a national and a personal level) discoveries. As well as forming an intricate compound philosophy of their own, alchemists were fought over and jealously guarded as valuable assets because a part of their embryonic science was the ‘logical’ deduction that there must be a way to transform base metals into silver and gold, with the only necessary discovery being the amplificatory Philosopher’s Stone; another part of their understanding of science was that they should be able to create a universal Panacea, or Elixir of life which would indefinitely cure all disease and extend the taker’s life infinitely. Like gunpowder and the technique of ‘vaccine’, these pursued goals had concrete, measurable and valuable outcomes: if you discover the Elixir of Life you will be able to remain pursuing pleasure -or whatever your tangent in life maybe- forever, and if you acquire the Philosopher’s Stone you will be able to enrich yourself as much as you desire, and so long as nobody else acquires it –which would lead to the immediate devaluation of that which was previously so precious and would render the Stone worthless- you and your country would be wealthy beyond comparison.

I mention alchemy because it is from this murky world of mixed inference and deduction, and royal pursuit of material benefit and gain that there emerged after the turn of the century a real, unexpected, delightful but ultimately worthless discovery which became a continental obsession. Alchemy had previously been pursuing an impossible goal of substantive material benefit using doubtful and imprecise techniques -which had led nowhere for centuries. With Johann Frederick Bottger, in one of his experiments in the pursuit of the Stone stumbling upon a strong, bright material, alchemy was transformed into a precise and systematic science in the pursuit of something genuinely attainable and utterly value-less.

I am emphasizing the transition from obsession with true and set monetary value based on the certainties of resource-availability, into a drive for something that is traditionally valueless because the Eighteenth Century saw alongside -and because of- the flowering of the enlightenment, a new and entirely fascinating set of values relating to material products. In the time of Alchemy and throughout our long Middle-Ages there were two indexes with which to judge the value of something material: first was the Rarity of the substances from which it was composed –gold and silver and gemstones being the rarest, and hence most valuable, and therefore the pursuit of precisely these in the workshops of the alchemists; secondly there was an item’s Religious significance –if an item was sanctified by the Church and/or had some significance with regard to a saint or was a worshipped icon, then it retained an intangible, but strong, value which was not clearly set and measurable but was related to the vagaries of faith. The Eighteenth Century saw a fast rise in material wealth in Central and Western Europe, with industrial development occurring in the most advanced states –a development which began to change the relationship between wealth and nation. It had been supposed that every country had a set quantity of capital based on its resources, and this could not be altered (hence the belief that one needed to conquer more lands in order to become more prosperous… or find the Philosopher’s Stone), but with the onset of industrial, agricultural and Civil invention countries (without realizing it for the best part of a century) began to multiply the revenue generated from finite resources. What I am trying to say is that by the C18th nations they were effectively discovering the Philosopher’s Stone, only they were achieving the desired results through the rationalization of their governments, the reforming of their land-use and the development of their manufacturing centers. In the same spirit, the writers of the period were blasting the old certainties of religion out of the heavens and were busy proving that there were a whole range of phenomena in the world which held no definite correlation with men tapping rocks and getting water to flow from it, or biblical descriptions of perfect and immobile celestial geometries. So wealth was in the process of transforming into a more complex system of measurement that related not only to a set quantity of material deposits, but also to the creativity and industriousness of a nation’s people –this meant that traditional material value was no longer primary, and at the same time Religious-value as a secondary set of scales was no longer a universally shared or respected system of valuation.

And this takes us back to poor Mr. Bottger. He had actually been locked up in a castle by one of the princes of one of the many German-speaking states which at the time formed the Holy-Roman Empire (an ailing conglomeration of nominally connected nations), and he had been locked up specifically in order to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. This of course never happened, but fortuitously for him his jailer was Prince Augustus the Strong of Saxony, a monarch who was at the head of the wealthiest and structurally most advanced proto-state in the Empire, and a man who was more attuned than any of the other heads of state in Europe at the time to both the new realities of revenue-creation and the possibilities of a new system for the valuation of material objects. In Bottger’s efforts to transmute base materials into pure substances, he mistakenly created out of his kiln a vitreous substance which was uncannily similar to the porcelain in Augustus’s personal collection of Oriental Ceramics. China had for two millennia been a vast Empire with a burgeoning population of hyper-wealthy courtiers for whom wealth was immaterial due to its overabundant presence. These courtiers and their attendant poets valued qualities in objects that were qualities other than that of monetary value, and porcelain had long been prized for its simple elegance, its ethereal transparency combined with its feather-like weight and extreme strength, and the way it made musical notes which came from somewhere inside it when tapped gently –as though its very matter was alive with sound. Chinese poets and even Emperors would gush about such qualities whereas in Europe, in minutes taken during traditional gift-giving ceremonies between monarchs, one rarely comes across a positive description of an object that goes beyond a detailed listing of the precious elements of which it was composed and what they were worth. For instance an exquisite piece of finely crafted goldsmith’s work (Dinglinger) wouldn’t be described as an aesthetically worthwhile creation but would be described as so-and-so ounces of the finest quality New-World Gold etc.

Since the initiation of his reign, Augustus had been profoundly attracted to Oriental porcelain and was finely attuned to the appreciation of the qualities in the material mentioned above. As well as this collection he was the owner of a great selection of artistic treasures (including works by Giambologna) given to him by the Medicis in Florence with whom he held a strong friendship, and from whom he learned to understand the strengths and possibilities of artistic ‘style’ as a tool of influence and primacy (Italy of the sixteenth century had seen the creation of value based on ‘genius’ and ‘style’, in that patrons would pay exorbitant sums for anything made by a famous artist solely in order to own an example of his ‘virtu’. This was the first time that ‘style’ became valued in-of-itself). His understanding of the ‘connoisseur’ value of the material porcelain, his education in the potential desirability of consciously created ‘style’, and his keen knowledge of the financial gain to be made from transforming existing resources into value-added assets meant that when Bottger reported his discovery Augustus saw its great potential, not only for his personal pleasure, but as a new instrument in his highly innovative state apparatus.

Money flowed into Bottger’s experimentations, and he soon found himself surrounded by legion of staff, to the point where the operation was moved to a larger castle nearer Dresden at Meissen which, with the construction of new buildings became a large factory. Augustus contracted numerous artists and sculptors to work at the factory and after an initial period where they were mostly imitating Chinese Ceramic archetypes, they began producing new artwork, miniaturized sculpture and highly elaborate and stylistically unprecedented table-ware. Europe had watched disbelievingly at Augustus when he had exchanged 600 soldiers of exceptional height with Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia (which were used to set up a new elite unit of guards) for 151 pieces of Oriental porcelain, but only a few year later all the monarchs and titular heads of Europe were willing to pay any conceivable sum to get their hands on the Arcanum of porcelain discovered by Bottger. And the reason that they were all so eager was that Saxony was producing a product which materially cost nothing to obtain (clay and feldspar in small quantities from the mountains, and wood for the kilns from the forests), but which through Augustus’s injection of stylistic creativity and novelty came to be worth as much as many things produced using precious materials. And because their value was not based on anything as unchangeable as material value or religious significance, once a particular design or style of production had been around for a number of years, its value would drop, and Meissen understood this fact very quickly, reeling out an array of different styles ranging from the bizarre vegetal concoctions produced for the English Ambassador’s service, to the effeminate dissolution of form encapsulating Empress Elizabeth’s hunting service, to the bizarrely Baroque spatiality of the Swan service made for count von Brühl. Value came to be based upon novelty, to the point where Augustus was able to use Meissen as a diplomatic tool; he would have services made in a new ‘style’ for state visits and occasions (including the three mentioned above), giving other monarchs and ambassadors porcelain services of no intrinsic value, while receiving gifts of immense value in return, and this was deemed more than acceptable because the receivers would be given something which in its later numerous imitations, would mark them out as ‘the original, and hence become valuable as a mark of prestige. And this was another outcome of the production of porcelain (and which later evolved partially in proportion to industrialization, and massively with the rise of consumerism): yes value would decrease as styles went out of fashion, and the industrial-scale manufacture of the items would mean that there were left in the world countless pieces whose value would be far lower than that paid at-point-of-purchase (revealing the intangibility of initial value), but the very number of copies made of the original pieces (here being the diplomatic sets) became directly proportional to the prestige, and hence the value of the original pieces and those following directly after. The more copies made, the more valuable the originals; a principle which ensured the satisfaction of the royal receptors of Meissen gifts, allowed many more common citizens to share in the glamour of courtly existence and grace, and at the same time ensured the profitability of the factory.

Incessant originality and production volume were the keys to added value.

There was however a great bond that was formed at this time between a newly mobile –both socially and economically- class of people, and the items with which they chose to adorn themselves and their interiors. Without this class of people and their democratic method of voting with their wallets, industries like Meissen could never have accrued the requisite value to their products in order for them to be profitable; these were people who fashioned their environments and lifestyles as aspirational constructs; these were the new Lower-Aristocracy, a foetal Bourgeois in all but name who were upwardly mobile and creating wealth from areas other than feudal estates. Here was a group of people for whom reinvention was normal, and they used all the stage-set items at their disposal in order to complete their transitions; porcelain products became vital elements in the dramatic concoctions that were Eighteenth Century dinners. These dinners were where fashions were set, family’s were judged and novelties tested; in fact they cannot quite be called meals because they evolved into highly organized, sequentially stylized events where each course (there were up to five of these) would be brought in with a whole new set of dishes, all in their own style, often with the servants being specially dressed to match the cutlery. In-between courses music would be played, new dresses and garments admired, Whist played, and the courses would become progressively more stupendous until the dessert was reached, a course which towards the mid-century had reached an apogee of eccentric complexity. Because of its fragile and complicated nature the table for dessert would be prepared in a separate room over the passing of the evening and would be presented in full to the guests as they assembled on one side of a pair of double-doors and waited for them to be opened to reveal, well, to reveal the personally constructed Utopia of the family hosting the evening.

This was no Thomas More, no complex intellectual construct, but rather an aesthetic implosion of everything that a person would want to achieve in the way he or she (and the “she” is important because woman were a most important guiding factor in the aesthetic innovations of this time) was seen: architecture, art, landscape, fashion and decorum were all compressed into frozen scenes of delicate drama. The food was neither here nor there, what was important was the impression conveyed, and whether light-hearted elegance or allegorical allusion and hence erudition, the impression was explicit and pointfully discussed by the admirers gathered around the table –these vignettes were the summing-up conclusions in the essays of taste which masqueraded as dinners at that time; desires, aspirations, personal positions, personalities, even knowledge were transfigured into an aesthetic language by a newly sensitized class of Europeans who were the intrepid explorers into a world with no fixed values.

Where Meissen had combined novelty, style and mass production as a successful method for creating value beyond the dead-hands of religion and quantativity, the Lower Aristocracy used the shifting and flexible tools of style, fashion and novelty offered them by companies like Meissen in order to maintain social positions which did not have the traditional foundations of peerage, lineage, land and title. In sum: money was created from desire and aspiration, desire and aspiration were fed by art, and ultimately everything became transmuted into pure style, into a value-system whose units were style itself, an aestheticizing tendency beautifully encapsulated and passed down to us by the surviving desert services of that ornate century.

Looking back at this time one can see the germination, the birth-cries of a beautiful aspect of our culture, a facet which too often becomes entangled with more problematic outcomes of the system in which we live. In the great corporate desert of the high-street there is a compulsion to buy in order to keep up, but the choices are minimal and illusory –there is no real active participation occurring, there is no aesthetic creativity occurring, there is no complex transmutation of personality into style beyond the choice between the few currently advertised formulas of alternative and depressed = black on black; peppy, pretty and young = baby colours and short tops; middle-aged but confident woman = fem-suit and baggy linen trousers, if one ever needs any variations on the same theme one only need turn on the telly and listen to Gok or Trinny and Susannah. This fearful blandness could be mistaken for the genetic descendant of those eighteenth century dinners, but it is rather a descendant of the fixed status-quo which they replaced: the juggernauts of mainstream consumerism maintain a system of values which no longer operates within the delicate complexity of the individual and his or her desires, instead they function within an international flow of wealth and capital which determines from another scale entirely what happens on the ground, in the cities, in the shops. Porcelain and dinners were a true alliance of the money-maker and the client, an arrangement which replaced that of the serf giving tax -out of compulsion- each year to his feudal monarch; The High Street has the same relationship with its customers as the feudal lord had with his serfs, and the need to pay that tax, I mean buy those objects is perpetually hammered into everyone’s heads by profit reports on the news, and terrifying warnings of recession if High Street sales drop by 0.5%.

But just as there was an alternative then, so today there is. It is a democratic imperative that we be able to create our own positions in society, that we be able to voice what we believe to be important about that position, and that we be able to form an outward expression, an aestheticization of that position. This can seem to be a difficult proposition for those in my generation who have been brought up in the incredible flatness of Prêt A Manger, Boots, Starbucks and H&M; but sitting in a café with irritatingly organic-sounding “world” music blaring out at you becomes bearable when you begin to treat it as your tundra, your heath. It is the environment through which my generation moves like nomads; and though we may have lost, or almost completely lost the physical context of individuality whose past existence is evidenced in so middle-aged reminiscences, we are in the process of gaining something else. Whole economies of people-to-people transactions are emerging through the internet where there is the infinite space necessary for the proliferation of singularity and difference. And as good as blogs are for people to vent their thoughts and FaceBook for people to socialize, I believe it is the power of tools like PayPal (a universal, safe, online payment service which tiny businesses can use to help keep accounts etc as well) and LinkedIn (a site for linking professionals who give recommendations), to allow people to once again begin creating value, and hence an platform for independence- out of the sometimes bizarre and always intangible complexities of individuality. We will pass through Starbucks, but hopefully our aspirations will once again be able to go far beyond it.