A decadent turn and why it matters

Are we witnessing the death knells of the neo-Victorian modernism that has shaped the last fifty or sixty years, and nearly taken over the world in the last twenty? It’s a fine question if you’re concerned about how people choose to live, work, and socialize. Which is to say, most of us.

And if we are, what might be the thing that replaces it? A hundred plus years ago, the twinned movements of aestheticism and decadence were responses to the original Victorian certainty in the instructive and moral purpose of artistic expression (and consumption). Painting, writing, fashion, what we now call lifestyle, as well as design, and entertainment were all areas where its followers found fertile ground to rebel.

I suspect we’re about to witness it all again. The sterility of office cubicles, acres of glass and angled concrete, the eight or ten or sixteen hour work day, the panicked efforts to surveil ourselves, flee into mindfulness, Kondo our spaces, all giving way to what we’ve all learned in the last few months: the world we’ve been living in hasn’t been the one we really wanted. It’s been one we’ve learned, we’ve habituated ourselves, to accept, as a price for…well, for what?

The rallying call of resistance in the late 19C: l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake, will almost certainly find purchase again, but so to will its companions—comfort for comfort’s sake, connection for connection’s sake, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, beauty for beauty’s sake. Lives lived for the sake of living, not as pained responses to the inhumanity of our daily lives.

Many of us have discovered in the last couple of months—often with great surprise—what we’ve suspected all along. We want something very different, something that isn’t a byproduct of a relentless effort to go faster, to streamline, to lean in, to push forward. Instead, we’re discovering that luxuriousness isn’t about the car or the bling, or even the bank account. It’s about things we can control to create environments and lives that we want to live in, on our own terms.

For a certain sort of person, this is the very definition of decadence. For the rest of us, it’s a way forward. Oscar Wilde—the patron saint of the decadent—wrote that ‘to live is the rarest thing in the world.’ Rediscovering this is the great gift of these times.

—Peter