Hairdressers Will Inherit the Economy

Former Reason editor–and author of the forthcoming The Substance of Style—Virginia Postrel explains "The Aesthetic Imperative" (and why we'd rather be hairdressers than machinists!) in a nifty piece from the July issue of Wired. A snippet:

Creative individuals no longer need to be isolated, romantic souls who've given up worldly success for the sake of their art.

And all of us must give up the cultural baggage we've inherited from the romantics, who set art against tech, and feeling against reason; from the modernists, who treated ornament as crime and commerce as corruption; and from the efficiency experts, who valued function while disdaining form.

We must abandon our prejudices regarding the sources of economic value. The production of wealth comes not simply from labor or raw materials or even intellectual brilliance. It comes from new ways to give people what they want. By matching creativity and desire, the economy will renew itself.

Read the whole thing here.

And look for an excerpt from The Substance of Style in the October issue of Reason (one more reason to subscribe already, dammit).

[Link via Arts & Letters Daily]