"The law of conspicuous waste... acts selectively to eliminate any canon of taste that does not conform to its demands. ...The product, if it is beautiful, must also at the same time be costly and ill adapted to its ostensible use. This mandatory canon of taste... is not shaped entirely by the law of waste in its first form; the canon is to some extent shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the predatory temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete, which in one of its special developments is called classicism."
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p.164-165
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class
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The Theory of the Leisure Class
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