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This post is a review of Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. By W. David Marx. Viking. 368 pp. $30.
Born James Gatz, a nobody, the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic novel makes a fortune in bootlegging and reinvents himself. Obsessed with his status — and winning the love of Daisy Buchanan, whose voice, he said, “was full of money” — Jay Gatsby wears only bespoke silk shirts, lives in a mansion, and hosts lavish parties for everybody who is (or aspires to be) anybody in New York.
Whether or not all people possess evolutionary status instincts, W. David Marx points out, the desire for status is virtually universal. Status provides social approval, esteem, deference, access to scarce resources, and, for some, dominance. Low status, as psychologist Dale Miller has demonstrated, is associated with guilt, shame, and anxiety; higher status with happiness and good health.
In Status and Culture, Marx (a journalist and the author of Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style) claims that status-seeking plays a pivotal role in creating, producing, and disseminating the values, tastes, fashions, art, styles, and sensibilities that dominate our culture — and drives perpetual cultural change.
Marx fills his book with real-life examples, involving clothing, food, music, art, and nightlife, designed to demonstrate that the principles behind the relationship between status-seeking and culture are universal. He draws on concepts drawn from psychology, sociology, linguistics, and media studies — emulation, signaling, semantic drift, conspicuous consumption, the mere exposure effect, authenticity, optimal distinctiveness, and norm breaking — to enrich his analysis. Marx also illuminates the impact on cultural stasis and change of “Old Money” and “New Money”; gatekeepers in the mass media, the arts, and academia; coopting capitalists; once marginalized subcultures; and the Internet.
Marx acknowledges that he may have taken on too many subjects all at once. And the conceptual framework he has identified may have produced a “loss of nuance, neglect of edge cases, and a high potential for oversights.”
In any event, his often informative and provocative book raises some questions for which he does not supply compelling answers.
Marx insists, for example, that status value is the “secret ingredient” that stimulates visual artists and musicians to create avant-garde work and audiences to find beauty in it. But he indicates as well that “the role of status in spurring creativity doesn’t mean humans make art only for status purposes. Artists can create for altruistic reasons, for God, for ‘the people,’ for the sheer joy of self-creation.” Nor does Marx specify what “smooths the path” for gatekeepers to embrace say, Marcel Duchamp’s urinal or John Cage’s “irritating” cluster of acoustic and electronic sounds, instead of equally radical work by some other painter or composer?
Following an episode of Sex in the City, in which Carrie Bradshaw confesses to a crush while eating a Magnolia Bakery cupcake, and glowing coverage in British Vogue, Marx writes, the Magnolia’s signature offering became “a proud part of the New York professional-class identity,” and then produced an “insatiable hunger” among younger, less affluent residents who lived far from the West Village. However, he does not set the cupcake phenomenon in the context of his comment that “for every hit there are thousands of failures,” including for “trends with the right ingredients and industrial support.” Apart from a claim of overexposure, he does not explain why the craze for cupcakes crashed within a few years.
Most important, it seems to me, Marx does not directly confront — or convincingly refute — the assertion of sociologist Duncan Watts, based on mathematical models, that trends take off, not so much because of “influencers,” but from “a complicated mix of individual choices, social constraints and random chance.”
Marx concludes his book with an assessment of the role of the Internet in the relationship between status-seeking and the formation of culture. The net, he suggests, produces less snobbery, more inclusion, and “an endless stream of new content, highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow.” By rejecting taste, and disempowering gatekeepers, it also gives illiberal, nihilistic conspiracy mongering a platform, “weakens cultural and subcultural capital” and makes wealth “the most obvious criterion for status distinction.”
The Internet, Marx insists, “has not dissolved the link between status and culture.” And, as we adjust to its new structural realities, he leaves us wondering how — and whether — “internet content can fulfill our basic human needs for status distinction.”
