the spurious article
alone betrays it, this identity of form and color will scarcely add
to the value of the machine-made spoon, nor appreciably enhance the
gratification of the user's "sense of beauty" in contemplating it, so
long as the cheaper spoon is not a novelty, ad so long as it can be
procured at a nominal cost. The case of the spoons is typical. The
superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly
and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a
gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name
of beauty. Our higher appreciation of the superior article is an
appreciation of its superior honorific character, much more frequently
than it is an unsophisticated appreciation of its beauty. The
requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not commonly present,
consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is none the less present as
a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what
is beautiful, and guiding our discrimination with respect to what may
legitimately be approved as beautiful and what may not.

It is at this point, where the beautiful and the honorific meet and
blend, that a discrimination between serviceability and wastefulness
is most difficult in any concrete case. It frequently happens that an
article which serves the honorific purpose of conspicuous waste is at
the same time a beautiful object; and the same application of labor to
which it owes its utility for the former purpose may, and often does,
give beauty of form and color to the article. The question is further
complicated by the fact that many objects, as, for instance, the
precious stones and the metals and some other materials used for
adornment and decoration, owe their utility as items of conspicuous
waste to an antecedent utility as objects of beauty. Gold, for instance,
has a high degree of sensuous beauty very many if not most of the highly
prized works of art are intrinsically beautiful, though often with
material qualification; the like is true of some stuffs used for
clothing, of some landscapes, and of many other things in less degree.
Except for this intrinsic beauty which they possess, these objects
would scarcely have been coveted as they are, or have become monopolized
objects of pride to their possessors and users. But the utility of these
things to the possessor is commonly due less to their intrinsic beauty
than to the honor which their possessio