Reading Owen Hatherley‘s enjoyable and timely polemic Militant Modernism, I came across this critique of the work of Alain de Botton:
Perhaps the most irksome of Ikea Modernism’s products was Channel 4’s The Perfect Home, presented by Alain de Botton, promoting his The Architecture of Happiness. Perambulating about the place with an expression of casual intellectuality and immense self-satisfaction, he encapsulates all that is malign in British intellectual life. De Botton personifies the faux-naïve stance of the televisual idiot-expert, who ventriloquises thinkers from Proust to Boethius to Le Corbusier, emphasising how they can enhance (but certainly never truly change, or question the purpose of) the lives of the administrative classes of terminal capital.
Leah Radisson
May 13, 2009 at 5:35 pm
What a low blow against one of the better intellectual figures out there. I wish that Owen would admit to what he admits to in private: namely, that he’d chop off his left hand to be de Botton. Come on Owen, stop trying to find reasons to hate other people and start to do the work that will actually put your name in lights, where you feel it deserves to be.