yazadjal.com

Virginia Postrel challenges simplistic interpretations of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs with a strong defence of aethetics as an essential need in itself. (The link leads to a pdf, and might be slow to download)

Human beings do not wait until they have full stomachs and a roof that doesn’t leak before they satisfy their aesthetic needs. Given a modicum of stability and sustenance, people have always enriched the look and feel of their lives through personal adornment and decorated objects. Poor people created the body decoration illustrated in National Geographic. Poor people built cathedrals in Europe and sand paintings in Tibet. Poor people turned baskets and pottery into decorative art. Poor people invented paints and dyes, jewelry and cosmetics.

Five thousand years ago, unimaginably poor Stone Age weavers living in Swiss swamps used fruit pits as beads to work intricate, multicolored patterns into their textiles, work that archeologists have found preserved in the alkaline mud.

These artifacts do not reflect societies focused only on “lower- order” needs. Aesthetics is not a luxury, but a universal human desire. The anti-capitalists who criticize markets for luring consumers into wanting more than meets their basic needs and the capitalists who scoff at aesthetics for detracting from serious work are missing a fundamental fact of human nature.

She looks at how hairdressers were as popular as doctors and nurses in Afghanistan, and how the poorest peoples in places like Laos would make intricate headresses. Everybody likes something special, even at the cost of going a little hungry.

Postrel is the author of The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness and runs her own blog.