When everything can be styled

Enough, and then more

In 1998 two American consultants, B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore, published an essay in the Harvard Business Review called “Welcome to the Experience Economy.” It opens with a birthday cake. A mother who bakes one from scratch spends, they said, a few dimes on ingredients. If she buys a box of cake mix, she pays a dollar or two. A cake from a bakery or grocery costs ten or fifteen dollars, ten times as much. And if she hires someone to stage the party, with the games and the characters and the cleaning up, the bill is a hundred dollars or more. The cake is the same cake. What changed is what is being sold, which goes from a commodity to a good, then a service, then an experience. The figures were an illustration, not measured data. But the progression is the thing the essay is remembered for.

The lectures behind this course ask what has to be true of a society for that to work. Their answer has two parts. The first is a shift from what they call hardware to software: from the goods we cannot do without to the goods we could. The second is a shift in what people ask for, from needs to wishes. A need can be filled. You can be full, and warm. A wish cannot: you can always be more beautiful, or newer. There is no such thing as more full, but there is such a thing as more beautiful, and this makes a market with no ceiling.

The need-and-desire frame is Gernot Böhme’s. In “Contribution to the Critique of the Aesthetic Economy” (Thesis Eleven, 2003) and later in Ästhetischer Kapitalismus (2016), the German philosopher argued that an aesthetic economy turns needs into desires: a need is satisfied when it is met, so that thirst goes away, while a desire is increased when it is met, so that wanting to be famous leads to wanting to be more famous. What is sold then is what Böhme calls staging value: a commodity is bought for the life it stages. “Hardware” and “software” are Welsch’s words, from the 1996 essay (Theory, Culture & Society 13, p. 4) that gives this lesson its structure. The lectures blend two German authors and name neither. We have kept them apart.

Be careful with “hardware has become negligible.” It has not. In the United States, food took 9.7 percent of disposable personal income in 2025, according to the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, down from 10.4 percent in 1997. In China in 2023 the National Bureau of Statistics put food, tobacco, and alcohol at 29.8 percent of per-capita consumption. The shares depend on definitions, and the two series do not match: the Chinese one includes tobacco and alcohol. They illustrate Engel’s law, named for the German statistician Ernst Engel (1857): as income rises, the share spent on food falls, even as the amount rises. Necessities do not vanish. They shrink as a share of the whole, and the rest of the money goes elsewhere.

Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” is often drawn as a pyramid with food at the bottom and “self-actualization” at the top. Maslow himself never drew one, and later studies found little support for a strict order. A 2011 study by Louis Tay and Ed Diener across 123 countries found that people everywhere do better when basic needs are met, and also when they feel respected and supported, but that well-being does not wait for each rung to be finished first. The point for this lesson is modest: wishes begin to matter well before needs are fully met, and they matter more as needs are met.

Two words for a big idea

The word for what happens next has two main modern senses. The British sociologist Mike Featherstone, in Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (1991, chapter 5), listed three meanings of “the aestheticization of everyday life.” The first is the work of artistic subcultures, Dada, Surrealism, and the avant-garde, which sought to erase the boundary between art and life. The second is the project of making one’s life a work of art, from the dandy to Foucault. The third is the rapid flow of signs and images that saturates daily life, which is Baudrillard’s subject and most theorists’ worry.

The German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, in “Aestheticization Processes: Phenomena, Distinctions and Prospects” (1996), drew a map of it, in two layers. Surface aestheticization is embellishment, animation, and “experience”: the furnishing of reality with a pleasant look. Deep-seated aestheticization goes further. There is a material kind, in which engineers design new materials, and a world of immaterial media and virtual reality, and finally an epistemological kind: the thought, as old as Kant and Nietzsche, that what we call reality is shaped by the forms and metaphors of knowing. Near the end Welsch adds a warning that this course will keep returning to: where everything becomes beautiful, he writes, nothing more is beautiful, and the result is a numbness he calls anaesthetic.

Three ways to treat a picture

The lectures add a scheme of their own, in three steps, that this course offers as a reading and not as a settled history. In the first, an image is the thing: harming the picture harms the person. In the second, the image is only a picture: you can tear it up and nothing has happened to its subject. In the third, the image is a game of surfaces in which nothing is at stake. The lectures say each step suits a field: the first suits religious life, the second science, and the third art, and that the aestheticization of everyday life belongs to the third.

There are well-documented parallels. In Byzantium, for about a century, from the mid-720s to 787 and again from 814 to 842, emperors banned holy images, and the argument over whether honor given to an image passes to the person it shows lasted until the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 (the years differ by a year or two from source to source). The historian Hans Belting, in Likeness and Presence (1994), argued that before the “era of art” such images worked as presence, not as pictures. René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929), a painted pipe captioned “this is not a pipe,” is the modern step. And Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), set out four phases of the image: it reflects a profound reality; it masks and distorts it; it masks the absence of one; and finally it has no relation to any reality, being its own pure simulacrum. The fourth fits “nothing at stake.” Welsch’s own phrase for the stance is a “jocund distance toward everything real.”

Skin first

The most visible kind of aestheticization is surface. Welsch’s own examples are plain. German railway stations were relabeled “worlds of experience with rail connection.” In the 1980s cigarette advertisements stopped showing the cigarette or the company and sold only a mood. Buildings are a good test, because a building has a job to do. In 1896 the American architect Louis Sullivan wrote in The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered that form ever follows function. He meant a law of nature, in which a thing’s shape expresses its life, and he loved ornament. In 1966 Robert Venturi answered Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” with “less is a bore,” and in Learning from Las Vegas (1972, with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, after a studio trip in 1968) he sorted buildings into the “duck,” a building that is its own sign, and the “decorated shed,” a plain box with a sign on it.

The poster child for the surface turn is the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, by Frank Gehry, which opened on 18 October 1997 in a northern Spanish city that had lost its shipyards and steel mills. The building cost about 89 to 100 million U.S. dollars. The museum’s director forecast 400,000 visitors a year, and by 2017 it had counted more than 20 million, about two thirds of them from abroad. The economist Beatriz Plaza estimated that the museum paid for itself in about nine years. Even its admirers add caveats: Bilbao also built a metro designed by Norman Foster (1995) and an airport by Santiago Calatrava (2000), and critics scorned “McGuggenheim” franchising. A signature building, Plaza noted, is no guarantee of the same result elsewhere.

Two Beijing buildings come up in the lectures. The National Centre for the Performing Arts, called the Egg, by the French architect Paul Andreu, opened in 2007 under an elliptical titanium-and-glass dome 212 meters long and 46 high, set in an artificial lake with an underwater entrance. It cost 3.07 billion yuan against a budget of 2.69 billion, and critics argued over a modern dome beside the Forbidden City. Not far away, the China Central Television headquarters, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of OMA, is a 234-meter loop of six horizontal and vertical sections, started on 1 June 2004 and completed on 16 May 2012; Beijingers nicknamed it “big boxer shorts” (大裤衩). The lectures claim that most of such a building’s cost goes into its exterior, and give percentages. We could find no source for any of them, so we leave the numbers out. The point does not need them: these were buildings meant above all to be seen.

Bodies are surfaces too. In 2023 the American Society of Plastic Surgeons counted nearly 1.6 million cosmetic surgical procedures in the United States and nearly 25.4 million minimally invasive ones, and the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimated 34.9 million procedures worldwide. (These are survey figures, and we found no clean one for China.) In the lectures’ words, a body becomes something like a sculpture, to which clay can be added or removed. Editing genes for looks or height is not a current practice, and nothing here depends on it.

Signs that sell

In 1899 the American economist Thorstein Veblen named “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class: wealth must be put in evidence, he said, because esteem is awarded only on evidence. Jean Baudrillard took the next step in Le Système des objets (1968) and Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972). A thing has a use value, and it also has a sign value, the social meaning it carries. And in La Distinction (1979) the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued from surveys of the 1960s that taste is a marker of class: “taste classifies,” as he put it, “and it classifies the classifier.”

Does a label really change what we feel? Two experiments are often cited, and both are small. In 2004 Samuel McClure and colleagues published a study in Neuron in which volunteers tasted Coke and Pepsi, with and without the brand revealed, in a brain scanner. Blind, preferences split about evenly and followed the taste itself. With the brand shown, knowing it was Coke changed what people chose, and it engaged brain regions tied to memory and to higher thinking. Press reports put the Coke share at about three in four, and the Baylor release spoke of 67 volunteers, though we could not confirm the number scanned. In 2008 Hilke Plassmann and colleagues, in PNAS, had 20 volunteers taste what they were told were five wines priced from $5 to $90. There were only three wines, and two of them were served twice under different prices. The same wine, said to be dearer, was rated more pleasant, and a region of the brain that registers pleasure responded more. The authors point out that people may not report that the cheap one tastes better. These are small studies on non-experts and not proof of how much of any purchase is a label. An older and larger one is the 1981 British Medical Journal study by Branthwaite and Cooper, of 835 women with headaches: branded tablets beat unbranded ones, even when the tablets were dummies.

The lectures give vivid stories about identical goods that sell for very different prices with and without a label, such as a luxury item and an unbranded twin made in the same factory. Most such stories are folklore. The documented example is modest: Costco has said that its Kirkland Signature batteries are made by Duracell, though they are not identical. Viral videos claiming that Chinese factories make Hermès or Louis Vuitton bags and sell them cheap without labels were examined by fact-checkers in 2025 and found to rest on no contracts or proof. A claim that “seventy percent of consumption is sign value” has no source we could find, and we do not repeat it. A more careful version is Böhme’s: goods are bought for the life they stage.

A story that has to end

News is where the lectures see the deepest change: reality arrives as a story, and a story has to end. They use the United States election of November 2000, and the real night is more instructive than the lecture’s version, in which the networks announced one winner and then the other and everyone went to bed.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2000, the television networks called Florida for Al Gore shortly before eight in the evening, Eastern time, before the polls had closed in the state’s western Panhandle. About two hours later they took the call back. At about 2:15 in the morning the Fox network, whose election-night consultant was a cousin of George W. Bush, gave Florida and the presidency to Bush, and the other networks followed within minutes. Gore telephoned to concede. About forty-five minutes later he called again and withdrew the concession, and at about four o’clock the networks retracted a second time. The anchor Tom Brokaw said that the networks had more than egg on their faces: they had an omelet on their suits. The causes included flawed exit polls around Tampa and a data-entry error in one county.

The count then ran on until 13 December, 36 days after election day. A machine recount cut Bush’s lead in Florida to 327 votes on 10 November, and certified it at 537 on 26 November. The Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide hand recount on 8 December, and the United States Supreme Court stopped it the next day and decided Bush v. Gore on 12 December by five votes to four. Gore conceded on 13 December. Bush won the electoral vote 271 to 266, with one District of Columbia elector casting a blank, though Gore led the national popular vote by 543,895. A review that CBS commissioned, published in January 2001, examined the night’s failures, and the consortium that supplied the networks’ data was dissolved in 2003. A story needs an ending by bedtime. This event did not have one.

Others had seen it coming. In Public Opinion (1922) Walter Lippmann wrote that we respond not to the world but to “the pictures in our heads.” In The Image (1961) the historian Daniel Boorstin coined the “pseudo-event,” which comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) Neil Postman, an American media critic, argued that television turns public talk into entertainment. For the attacks of 11 September 2001, a first plane struck at 8:46 in the morning and a second at 9:03, live on television, and many viewers said it looked like a film. Jean Baudrillard called it “the absolute event” in a Le Monde essay dated 3 November 2001, and Slavoj Žižek wrote that Hollywood disaster movies had prepared the imagination for it. Neither denied the dead, but Baudrillard was accused of nihilism.

We also copy the stories. “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde wrote in “The Decay of Lying” (1889), adding that London’s brown fogs came “from the Impressionists.” The strong form of the claim, that television makes people act like television, is hard to prove: the best-known test, the supposed “CSI effect,” was checked on 1,027 jurors in Ann Arbor in 2006. There was little evidence that viewers of crime dramas acquit more often, though they did expect more forensic evidence. A subtler case is the wedding. From the 1990s, staged studio wedding portraits with many costume changes spread through mainland Chinese cities, with Taiwan’s bridal industry an early model, and a story about how a wedding should look came to shape how weddings are done.

The lectures add a twist. In the old order a life is lived and then perhaps turned into a story. Now it can be the other way round: a person invents a persona first and then becomes it. Erving Goffman had described the everyday version in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956, American edition 1959). The extreme version is the Fyre Festival, a music event advertised on 12 December 2016 by paid influencers posting an identical orange square. When guests reached Great Exuma in the Bahamas on 27 April 2017 they found relief tents and cheese sandwiches. The founder, Billy McFarland, pleaded guilty to fraud in 2018 and was sentenced to six years. The story came first, and reality failed to catch up.

Welsch’s deepest level says this is not new in kind. Reality was always shaped by the forms we know it through. The lectures add that social reality is no longer something independent of human will, as Marx put it. This stretches Marx, whose 1859 phrase, “independent of their will,” referred to relations of production. A more careful version is Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966): what we call society is made of habits, institutions, and the stories that justify them. All of this is constructed, and constructed things can be built better or worse.