Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A provocative, compelling, and entertaining look at how the power of images dominates every aspect of our lives.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

For prosperous townfolk of 15th century Europe, the ability to purchase an illuminated Book of Hours was a sign that one had ``arrived.'' Today, buying a Picasso print or a Porsche might fulfill a similar function for the status-conscious. According to Ewen ( Captains of Consciousness ), the main difference is that, for us, style has come to dominate substance. We are a society in love with surfacea look, a sound, a pose; style is a tool to construct selfhood, a vehicle to sell things. Ewen sees the apex of this trend in the elevation of a mediocre Hollywood actor to the U.S. presidency. Illustrated with photos of industrial designs and advertisements, this devastating, incisive essay explores the ways modernist aesthetics meshes with the needs of an efficient workplace, the invention of celebrityhood, the cult of the body beautiful and the creation of ``style industries'' devoted to sustaining perpetual novelty. (October) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

This brilliant book discloses the process by which style-- in dress, architecture, packaging, furnishings-- has replaced substance. Style is the ``symbolic leap away from the constraints of mere subsistence,'' according to Ewen. That impulse, he believes, is not necessarily negative, but it lays the consumer open to the siren call of image without value. Ewen discusses the way that a movie star's style, by its ubiquity, becomes a standard commodity. This means that local values in dress and fashion vanish. Nearly all of us have accepted, to some extent, the idea that a visual change in an object is a refinement or advancement and that novelty itself is desirable. As this craving for novelty is exploited, symbols become detached from the values they once represented: we live in Cape Cod houses in Iowa or, worse, according to Ewen, in skyscrapers, which he quotes Frank Lloyd Wright as being ``filing cabinets for humans.'' It is this bleak vision that informs Ewen's witty meditation on the way style is used as a tool to structure society and, ultimately, to yield a steady profit. To be indexed. PM.

Kirkus Book Review

As in his earlier study of advertising and consumer culture, Captains of Consciousness (1976), CUNY Communications prof. Ewen manages both to entertain and inform as he documents here the ascendance of style over substance in modern and postmodern culture. Ambitious in scope, informed by theory, this often brilliant work of social history never bogs down in jargon nor loses sight of its political and psychological dimension. Acutely aware of advertising's role in the creation of contemporary notions of style, Ewen here broadens his purview to include the other grounds where art and public meet: in architecture, fashion, appliance and product design, and movies and photography. Ewen's extensive quotations from primary sources--whether high-minded designers like Peter Behrens or simple-minded admen--speak for themselves, forming a damning indictment of those who offer a democracy of images, not a real share in decision-making, nor even in the creation of durable objects. Historically, mass-produced goods, and workers willing to buy them, created the illusion of classlessness. But along with the putative democracy came an appeal to privilege--just about anyone could purchase furnishings that imitated luxury. At the same time, as the individual lost his unique role in the workplace, he was encouraged to exercise his individuality in the marketplace. The not surprising result was the beginnings of status anxiety--a psychic state best relieved by fashioning a new self. How style shapes these selves, and our relations to power, takes up the latter half of Ewen's pointed survey. Just as space replaced matter in architectural design, so too did abstract systems of credit and exchange triumph over cold cash. Style, as Ewen persuasively argues, not only becomes a means of social control--maintaining hierarchy under its different guises--but also appropriates and absorbs political discontent. Written from a thoughtful, radical perspective, this engaging work of cultural critique will also console those it implicitly condemns--they'll see how good a job they've done at manipulating our imaginations. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.