The article prompted a letter of protest to the editor, charging that Bustelo was ridiculing women and challenging the right of working-class women to strive for “some loveliness and beauty in their lives.” Bustelo’s response evoked further objections. The excerpt below is from a contribution to the debate by Bustelo entitled “The Fetish of Cosmetics.” Reed contributed articles in defense of Bustelo and a Marxist approach to the question of women’s emancipation. The book is copyright © 1986 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
“There are pressures on our tastes from all sides, pressures that even the most reluctant among us can scarcely ignore. The making of taste in America is, in fact, a major industry. Is there any other place you can think of where there are so many professionals telling so many nonprofessionals what their taste should be? Is there any country which has as many magazines as we have devoted to telling people how they should decorate their homes, clothe their bodies, and deport themselves in company? And so many newspaper columns full of hints about what is good taste and what is bad taste? In the last century and a quarter the purveying of taste in America has become big business, employing hundreds of thousands of people in editorial and advertising offices, in printing plants, in galleries and museums, in shops and consultants’ offices. If the taste industry were to go out of business we would have a major depression, and there would be breadlines of tastemakers as far as the eye could see.”
That strikes me as pretty plain speaking about the source of one of the pressures bearing down on us. However, Lynes puts it still more baldly in the very next paragraph:
“This is not, however, a catastrophe we are likely to encounter, because the taste industry has gradually become essential to the operation of our American brand of capitalism. It is in the nature of our economic system not merely to meet demand but to create it. One of the ways that demand is created is by changing people’s tastes, or at least inviting them to change, and by making the pressures to give up what seemed good yesterday for what should seem inviting today so strong that they are almost impossible to resist.”
How difficult the pressures are to resist we may judge from cases of good revolutionists who succumbed to the prosperity that has endured since the outbreak of World War II. Some of them did it silently, without seeking to find a political difference as excuse or rationalization. The lure of a ranch house in the suburbs with a picture window as laid out in the lush colors of Better Homes and Gardens proved impossible to resist. The overwhelming pressure has a name; it is “bourgeois.” The proletarian became “bourgeoisified.” In other words, he gave up thinking and became an addict of the opium of commodity fetishism.
Lynes describes the days we live in as the days of “the corporate taste.” “The corporation has, in fact,” he says, “become one of the most powerful and conscientious (does he mean “conscious”?) art patrons of our day, and has established itself not only as a purveyor of tasteful objects but as an arbiter of taste as well.” He even dates the beginning of “the corporate taste”: “It was inevitable that sooner or later business, in its efforts to reestablish itself in the confidence of the public would embrace culture. And this it began to do in earnest in the early 1940s while the war was on.”
The imperialist war thus had its reflection in the development of an imperialist taste in culture in America.
“If we are to understand this influence of the corporation on the taste of our time, there are three ways in which the corporation must be looked at—as a consumer of the arts, in its role as patron; as a purveyor of the arts, in its role as the manufacturer or dispenser of the objects with which we surround ourselves; and finally as a new kind of society in which taste has a new kind of significance.” This managing editor of an influential bourgeois magazine obviously knows what it is all about. He even admits that the motive of the corporations in the field of culture “no matter how indirectly expressed, has been profit.”
He cites examples of forays in this field by such corporations as Dole Pineapple, Capehart Phonograph-Radio, the Container Corporation of America, Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Pepsi-Cola Company, and Corning Glass. And he explains in some detail what the calculations of these patrons of the beautiful are:
“To a great many manufacturers the problem is not how to improve taste but how to keep it fluid so that what looked new and attractive last year will seem old-fashioned this year and downright archaic ten years from now.”