A metropolitan irony gap
In an irony-drenched piece for Vanity Fair, James Wolcott laments that devices like the Kindle and iPod have cut into one's opportunities to display cultural snobbery. ("What's a Culture Snob to Do?") After all, if you read "Netherland" on the subway but no one sees you, what have you really accomplished?
In response, Conor Clarke, filling in for Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish, earnestly asks: why would anyone mourn the death of the conspicuous consumption of cultural goods? "The original concept of conspicuous consumption," he didactically writes, "introduced by Thorstein Veblen, was all about envy and status. [emphasis in original] You had a generation of rich individuals whose basic consumption demands were easily met, so they turned to forms [of] consumption that made them appear wealthier or smarter or savvier in the eyes of others. But there were, and are, two big problems with this. …" And so on. Wolcott's cultural snobbery is similarly a bad thing, we are led to understand.
How could Wolcott have missed this essential point?
New York 1, wonky Washington 0.
UPDATE: Or should that be "Boston 1, New York 0"? I've been reminded that the Globe's Mark Pothier beat Wolcott to the punch by four years, writing about the iPod's effects on cultural snobbery back in 2005, for Ideas.
