G'day Kai Wee.
Well mate, you've just given a very easily understood proof that we do indeed always buy the story.
You've said that you don't think its purely "the story", but most especially in the Josh Bell comment you have demonstrated admirably that it is.
When I'm talking about the "the story", I'm thinking of it in the broadest possible terms, and most often that story has been composed by ourselves, and the material that has been drawn upon for its composition is all of our previous experience.
Diamonds.
Wonderful as a store of wealth, inseparable from the idea of romantic love, indestructible, uncorrupted by time, the ultimate prestige signal.
Was it always so?
Nope.
The relative value and popularity of diamonds has increased along with increased supply. The reverse of what we might expect.
It is really only since the late 19th century that diamonds have moved into the prestigious position they now occupy, and this has been due almost solely to the magnificent management of the diamond trade by De Beers.
De Beers have managed to invent and manage the entire diamond mystique and its associated values.
In fact, they have sold a story to the world.
So, if we consider a diamond, any diamond, we cannot but consider it against our lifetime exposure to the position of the diamond in our modern culture.
We simply cannot escape our past, and it is our past that creates for us the measure against which we appreciate anything.
When we get down to the level where we are actually engaged in the appreciation of something, what we know about that something undoubtedly influences our feelings of appreciation. As Laowang has said:-
"Anything meant to be appreciated for its aesthetic content is received subjectively; we've been socialized since birth in the ways in which we respond to things."
We see an unknown painting in Salvation Army Store. Its unsigned. A childlike representation of badly proportioned sunflowers. Is it maybe OK for the guestroom? No, I don't think so. A bit on the crude side.
Headline in the following week's Sydney Morning Herald:-
"Lost Van Gogh Discovered in Suburban Salvation Army Store"
Well --- you win some, you lose some.
Maybe if we'd been exposed to the right story at some time in our past, we would have recognized it as Van Gogh too.
That story, or if you wish, experience, and the knowledge or opinion that it generates influences everything in our lives that follows.
|