Criticism
About author, book, and thesis of The Theory of the Leisure Class, the American intellectual H. L. Mencken said::
Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one — or because I delight in being clean? Do I admire Beethoven's Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists — or because I genuinely love music? Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver, because plowhands must put up with the liver — or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose? Do I prefer kissing a pretty girl to kissing a charwoman, because even a janitor may kiss a charwoman — or because the pretty girl looks better, smells better, and kisses better?
— Mencken, Professor Veblen, Prejudices, First Series, 1919
Nonetheless, despite such disagreement, Mencken considered the game of golf to be a conspicuous leisure activity, of no useful function. Attempts at a definitive denotation of the theory of conspicuous consumption have been criticised as “élitist”, most notably the pertinent works of Herbert Marcuse, wherein a group of hyper-educated people is empowered to define what items of consumption become luxury commodities. In The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), Robert Heilbroner said that, although valid for their late 19th-century time (the Gilded Age of the 1890s), the economic and sociologic theories of Thorstein Veblen have limited, contemporary application, because the studies are specific to the societies of the U.S. and the city of Chicago.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)