Technology, Novelty, and Luxury ed. by Artemis Yagou (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Technology, Novelty, and Luxury ed. by Artemis Yagou
• Peter McNeil (bio)

Technology, Novelty, and Luxury Edited by Artemis Yagou. Munich: Deutsches Museum Verlag, 2022. Pp. 118.

This elegant and useful book takes luxury studies as its subject, and as its object a range of material culture goods that are not commonly associated with luxury per se. An introduction and four chapters are provided by a design historian, an organologist, a historian of science and culture, and a historian of decorative arts. Their research springs from a symposium conducted by the editor, Artemis Yagou, at an annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Milan (2019). Yagou is an Athens-born historian who, in her capacity as research associate of the Deutsches Museum, gathered these chapters and directed their focus to artifacts housed in the museum. Richly illustrated in tonal and revealing color and printed on high-quality paper, the study looks and feels like a little luxury object in and of itself, representing the best type of museum-collection, academic-inflected writing.

Yagou provides a brief but also concise and useful introduction that sets out the main contours of the field. Luxury studies in her view is less about the marketing, branding, or image-making aspect of an industry and more closely connected to studies of consumption; the "hierarchy of values" (citing Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods, 2021); the politeness and sociability associated with eighteenth-century studies of the Enlightenment; novelty; and also technology. Yagou argues for the necessary interdisciplinarity of successful luxury studies and the imbrication of design with technological innovations.

Panagiotis Poulupoulos is correct to note, in "Aspects of Technology in Populuxe Musical Instruments of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," that "musical instruments have rarely been examined within the context of luxury in scholarly studies." Using the figure of the entrepreneur Sébastien Erard, famed maker of pedal harps, Poulupoulos argues that the combination of new technologies (design of metal mechanisms), new materials (molded "composition"), and new aesthetic forms (neoclassical and other [End Page 358] motifs redolent of the ancien régime) combined to create new instruments. This new range of "populuxe," or more affordable, formats opened up music to new middle-class groups around the world. The focus in this chapter is on French- and German-made musical instrument artifacts in the museum collection.

Joseph Wachelder, in "Instructive Toys," considers a category of objects also not commonly considered in luxury studies, that of childhood toys. Wachelder charts the rise of new "educational toys," such as the cup and ball, yo-yo, diabolo, and kaleidoscope. He focuses on German Anglophilia and its relationship with the English consumer revolution as represented in the pages of Bertuch's Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786–1827). Once again, interdependencies between "consumption, educational innovations and science as popular culture" are fruitfully explored, indicating the overall coherence of this collected volume. The focus here is on very interesting German toys and the better-known German periodicals in the museum collection.

Artemis Yagou writes on the important populuxe category of timepieces in "Mechanical and Precious." She makes a very useful microstudy of one particular item in the Deutsches Museum collection, an English-made early nineteenth-century watch created for the Ottoman market. Yagou makes a careful study of every part of the case and the workings, discovering spurious English marks to suggest the material was sterling silver and the maker an imitator of the well-known London manufacturer William Prior. The case connects this Ottoman import as an example of a "technological popular luxury."

Camille Mestdagh, in "The Luxury Furniture Industry in Nineteenth-Century Paris," explores the heady production of luxury furniture in historicizing styles in the last third of the nineteenth century. French luxury furniture, she argues, made less use of the new and expensive steam-powered technology to craft wood and veneers being pioneered by the English. French workshops tended to remain small. Yet the production was significant, furniture being the fourth-largest economic sector in Paris, after food, clothing, and building. Wealthy global luxury consumers enjoyed the artistic references, complex woodworking, and techniques including ormolu (mercury-gilded bronze), enamel, hardstone, and...