The Third Realm of Luxury: Connecting Real Places and Imaginary Spaces

摘要

Luxury is a complicated, personal, and problematic category of design. As I explain to my students each semester while teaching my course Theorizing Luxury, luxury does the following in our neoliberal epoch: it fetishizes value, it defines aspects of group and personal identity, it devises the bifurcation of classes, it facilitates the global economy, and it alters our understanding of labour. Luxury can be that beautiful thing, that ideal designed object that we save for or that we go into debt for, but beyond its sybaritic allure are machinations that make the commodity, in the words of Marx, into 'grotesque ideas'.