Part II: When Did Things Stop Having to Be Beautiful?
A few years ago, after a long day’s work, I was sitting in a well-known cocktail bar in Vienna, trying to unwind over a Whisky Sour. Next to me sat a man who had already made considerably more progress with the unwinding than I had. He had a ballpoint pen with him. Not an ordinary ballpoint pen, as I soon learned, but one that had cost 700 euros. Before long, not only I but probably everyone within a reasonable radius of the bar knew this. The bartender certainly did. “Look. This cost 700 euros. Look how it writes. Seven hundred euros.” He scribbled a few words on a sheet of paper, handed the pen to the bartender and insisted that he try a few strokes himself. He really ought to feel how wonderfully this instrument glided across the paper. The bartender did what good bartenders do in such situations: he remained polite. The man took back his pen, continued writing and, just to be safe, reminded us once again that this extraordinary instrument had cost 700 euros.
Eventually I took a sheet of paper and my brush pen. Long before brush pens existed, brushes had been used to imitate the swelling and tapering strokes familiar from pointed-pen scripts such as Copperplate and related hands; generations of sign and poster painters had rendered such letterforms on posters, shop signs and windows. I wrote the name of the bar in three different styles, pushed the sheet across to my neighbour, briefly held up my felt-tip brush pen and said, “€2.75. Doesn’t write too badly either.” I should have photographed his expression. I didn’t. Nor did I wait for an answer, an argument or, for that matter, praise. I simply returned to my Whisky Sour. At that particular moment it interested me considerably more than a loudmouth showing off with a tool he did not know how to use. I left the sheet on the bar.
I still like that story, and not merely because of the small but satisfying act of malice. Within a few minutes, two very different notions of value had met on that bar counter. One could be quantified beautifully: 700 euros. The price could be stated, repeated and, in case anyone had somehow failed to hear it, stated once again for good measure. My brush pen had cost €2.75. But comparing the two writing instruments was actually beside the point. If necessary, I can write with a used toothbrush and it will probably look reasonably good. Not because I consider myself a great calligrapher. I am a fair distance from the level of a real professional calligrapher. But when the sun is low, even dwarfs cast long shadows. And that evening the sun was apparently very low indeed.
A good tool is no substitute for the skill required to master it. You can buy a 700-euro ballpoint pen, an outrageously expensive fountain pen, the best camera, the finest brush or a magnificent kitchen knife. What does not automatically come with the purchase is the ability to make something good with it. This is not an argument against good tools. I love good tools. They can be more precise, sit better in the hand, work more reliably and make a job considerably easier. The better you know your craft, the more likely you are to appreciate such differences. But the tool cannot replace mastery of the craft itself. Conversely, a practised hand can achieve a surprising amount with an unsuitable tool – a used toothbrush, if necessary. The difference that evening was therefore not between 700 euros and €2.75. It lay in the years that came before. The pen cost €2.75. The stroke cost practice. And practice costs time.
That brings us back to the question raised in Part I. There I was concerned with handwriting and with the way beauty has gradually moved from being an assumed educational expectation to becoming a voluntary extra. But the question can be expanded: when did things stop having to be beautiful? I emphatically do not mean the usual lament that everything used to be more beautiful, better made and more solidly crafted. That is nonsense. Earlier generations produced plenty of hideous buildings, unsuccessful furniture and handwriting that makes one suspect the writer was simultaneously riding a horse and attempting to extinguish a minor house fire. Nor is our own age an aesthetic wasteland. There is outstanding contemporary architecture, excellent product design, wonderful typography and there are people practising crafts at the highest level. Perhaps, then, we have not lost beauty at all. Perhaps what we have lost is the expectation that beauty should be a self-evident component of quality.
An object is, of course, allowed to be beautiful. A house may be beautiful, a chair, a website, a menu, a ballpoint pen and even a tax form. But once the object fulfils its function, its essential justification often seems to have been established. The window admits light, the chair supports a human being, the writing is legible, the website can be used and the tax form presumably serves some purpose that has so far escaped me. Beauty may be added. It is welcome as long as it does not cost too much, complicate production or consume unnecessary time. It has not disappeared. It has moved from being an assumed standard of quality to becoming a possible extra. As with handwriting: from something that should be there to something that may be there.
At this point one could put Adolf Loos, the Bauhaus and the whole of Modernism in the dock and claim that this is where the trouble began. That would be convenient and historically rather unfair. Modernism did not simply decide to abolish beauty. Instead, it asked what beauty might arise from once inherited ornament was removed. An unornamented building in Loos is not automatically a carelessly designed building; once the decorative garland disappears, proportion, material, surface and space become all the more important. Something similar applies to the Bauhaus. Colour, typography, proportion, material and construction did not become less important; they became subjects of intense design. Perhaps the insight that beauty does not require ornament was later too easily transformed into the much more convenient notion that beauty itself is unnecessary as long as something works. One does not follow from the other. You can remove the decoration and then spend a very long time deciding what the three remaining lines ought to look like.
Michael Thonet’s famous Viennese coffeehouse chair No. 14 demonstrates this even before classical Modernism. Introduced in 1859, it consisted of only six principal wooden components and was designed for rational serial production. Its construction also offered a remarkable logistical advantage: 36 disassembled chairs, including their connecting parts, could be packed into a shipping crate measuring one cubic metre and assembled only at their destination. Rationalisation therefore concerned material, manufacture and transport, not the abandonment of design. Its curved back and reduced form are precisely what have made it instantly recognisable ever since. Functionality, industrial production and aesthetic ambition did not oppose one another. Gerrit Rietveld later pushed reduction much further with his Zig-Zag Chair: a few planes, a few angles, no conventional chair legs. One may debate how long one would actually like to sit on it. It is harder to argue that nobody thought about its form. Precisely because so little remains, every line matters. Reduction is not the absence of design. It can even intensify it.
Perhaps, then, we do not have too much functionality. Perhaps we merely confuse two statements that sound similar but mean very different things. The first is: an object should work. There is little to object to in that. The second is: if an object works, it is good enough. That is where my unease begins. “Good enough” saves time, money, effort and probably, on occasion, nerves. For many things in everyday life it is indeed perfectly sufficient. We should perhaps just avoid confusing it with quality.
For me, the natural enemy of beauty is therefore not function but effort. Beauty does not necessarily require more material or more expensive material. What it often requires is attention, skill and time. A calligraphically written sentence contains no more semantic information than the same sentence in a standard typeface. A carefully proportioned door handle opens the same door as an ugly one. If function is defined narrowly enough, the additional effort is difficult to justify in functional terms. And yet people notice the difference. Perhaps not always consciously and perhaps not everyone to the same degree. But clearly often enough for us to preserve, look at and sometimes even protect objects whose original practical value has long since disappeared.
I experience this repeatedly with something thoroughly mundane: paper napkins. When I have eaten particularly well in a restaurant and the kitchen or service has given me special pleasure, I occasionally write a few words on a napkin. Not simply with a ballpoint pen, but calligraphically. A paper napkin is a fairly uncooperative material for this purpose. It is absorbent and was not designed to provide a civilised home for a nib or brush pen. Press too hard and it tears; linger too long in one spot and it absorbs the ink and rewards you with a blot. You have to negotiate with the material. It would obviously be easier simply to write “Thank you, excellent” with a ballpoint pen. It would convey exactly the same information.
Oddly enough, however, such a napkin does not always end up where paper napkins usually go after a meal. More than once I have returned to a restaurant years later and had the owner produce an old napkin: “That was you, wasn’t it?” Some had been laminated or otherwise protected; others had spent years in a drawer and looked accordingly. At one of our favourite Chinese restaurants, Asia Garten, one of my handwritten napkins even appeared among the photographs on its website. The material is almost worthless, its original purpose has long since been fulfilled and the informational content of those few words is modest. Yet the thing is kept.
If a restaurant has been particularly good, I occasionally even write on a plate. Should my esteemed female readers and equally esteemed male reader now be wondering how I acquire other people’s clean, unused plates: in a hotel with a breakfast buffet this is not a major logistical challenge. In restaurants I simply ask for one. “I’m not that hungry any more. Please just bring me an empty plate.” This reliably produces puzzled looks but, surprisingly, very few questions. Then I write on it. I naturally point out that the writing can easily be washed off again. Surprisingly often, it is not. The plate is kept or put on display somewhere. Materially, I have added almost nothing to it: a little ink, a few minutes of work and a few movements of the hand. Apparently its new value arises somewhere else.
Perhaps it is the attention made visible. I could simply have said thank you. I do that anyway. But when I smooth out a napkin, or obtain an empty plate by mildly misrepresenting the state of my appetite, and try to turn a few words into something beautiful, something else happens. The additional beauty conveys no additional factual information. It shows that somebody spent time on something although there was no need to do so. Perhaps that is part of what we perceive as appreciation: value lies not only in the result but also in the attention voluntarily invested in it.
This became particularly clear to me once in Berlin. I was there on business and having breakfast in my hotel. The breakfast service was exceptionally good: friendly, attentive and at the same time so precisely organised that the whole operation ran like a well-oiled machine. On a napkin I wrote, roughly, a note thanking the breakfast team for their excellent work. Nothing earth-shattering in terms of content. Then I returned to my newspaper and happened to notice a member of staff clearing the table and discovering the napkin. Her face lit up. She showed it to a colleague, then to someone else. Suddenly several people were standing there smiling over a piece of paper that, only a few minutes earlier, had been intended for wiping one’s mouth.
I left before it could turn into a conversation. Not out of rudeness, but because I do not write such things in order to be praised afterwards for having offered praise. I wanted to thank them. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. Later, while I was getting ready in my room for a business appointment, there was a knock at the door. A member of the service team stood outside with a tray: some fruit and a bottle of Prosecco. Everything on it was simply left over from the breakfast buffet. Nothing expensive, nothing specially bought for me, nothing extraordinary. They had simply taken what was still there, arranged it on a tray and brought it up to my room. The team wanted to thank me.
And that was precisely what touched me. Not the Prosecco and not the fruit. I had left them a written-on piece of paper napkin whose material value was practically zero. They brought me things from the breakfast buffet that were left over anyway. Their material value was equally modest. And yet, on both sides, almost worthless things had suddenly become carriers of appreciation. I had thanked them, and they thanked me for thanking them. If appreciation is judged solely according to functional or material criteria, that is a rather nonsensical cycle. To me, it was a very beautiful one.
Perhaps craftsmanship had simply recognised craftsmanship. Time had recognised time. I had noticed that these people did not merely do their work; they did it well. And they had noticed that I had not merely discharged the obligation of saying thank you. Nobody had to do any of it. Breakfast would have happened just the same without my napkin, the leftovers from the buffet would presumably have gone somewhere else without their tray, and I would have gone to my appointment just as well without the Prosecco. It was all completely unnecessary. That was precisely why it meant something.
The same applies to the writing in my photographic work. I repeatedly write directly on bodies. From a calligraphic point of view, the human body is a remarkably uncooperative surface. It is not flat; it breathes and moves, has pores, folds and varying degrees of tension, and occasionally has the audacity to change shape precisely where I am trying to draw a line. With a good pointed nib on suitable paper I could write with much greater control. On a computer I could set the lettering perfectly cleanly, place it over the body afterwards, distort it and keep correcting it until every stroke sat exactly where it was supposed to. It would be more perfect. It simply would not be the same.
When I write on a body, the writing becomes part of that body and part of the process from which the photograph emerges. The line has to negotiate with anatomy. It runs across a curve, disappears from the plane, changes with movement and at some point ceases to be merely text and becomes form. The slight imperfection belongs there. I am not trying to simulate typographic perfection. What interests me is the trace of an action. Of course it could be done without it. That is precisely why I do it.
And although I have been writing historical scripts for years, working with pointed nibs, broad-edged nibs, brushes and brush pens, and could if necessary actually use a second-hand toothbrush, I am currently taking lessons from a calligrapher. Not because my handwriting fails to perform its function, but because I want to become better. Nobody needs archaeological methods to decipher my notes, and my calligraphic skills have long been sufficient for my photographic work. They have also proved sufficient for the occasional demonstration that the purchase price of a tool and mastery of it are two different things. By purely functional standards, therefore, there is no urgent need for improvement. But function is not the same thing as quality.
Perhaps this is where the two parts of this reflection finally meet. We have not lost beauty. We are still capable of recognising it, and we respond when we encounter a beautiful object, well-executed work or even just a few carefully written words. What may have changed is the expectation. We ask first whether something works, and only afterwards whether it can do anything beyond that. Beauty has to justify itself. Time has to justify itself. Craftsmanship has to justify itself. And if the functional alternative is faster and cheaper, the question suddenly arises as to why anyone should bother making the extra effort.
My answer is not particularly complicated. Because “it works” and “it is good” are not the same thing. Because people can develop abilities that have no immediate practical use and nevertheless enrich our lives. Because attention can reveal itself precisely in what did not need to be done. Because a paper napkin is sometimes kept for years even though its material value is practically zero. Because an industrially produced chair can be both rational and beautiful. Because a few carefully written words can make people smile. And because sometimes we should do something well not because it is strictly necessary, but because we are capable of doing so.
Of course, it would work without it. But “it would work without it” is not a particularly interesting definition of quality.