Designs too good to waste

Here is a hard truth about 21st-century Americans: "You have no culture. All you guys do is buy things." That was the constant complaint that Sarah Waxman, a design student at Pratt Institute, heard during her junior year abroad. Contemplating those charges put her in a quandary: Her field was all about promoting a culture of buying.

The designs Waxman submitted for class tried to lock horns with the problem. She made a cast-ceramic wallet that asks you to consider "the things that you're consuming in the act of being a purchaser." Its strange heft in your pocket, its fragility, the unease in its use (you have to pull off a rubber strap to get at your money) makes the act of buying feel vexed...Waxman is selling a radical new credo for design: An object built on truly novel, conscientious principles ought to reject the old consumerist ones...In fact, ambitious designers may need to come up with objects that convince us that not buying them might be the best thing we could do....

Our deadliest problems -- environmental, economic and political -- come out of the goods we cherish. Our huge new houses eat up energy, then throw it back into the air as wasted heat and light...The people who designed those goods helped get us into this mess, and now a few are keen to get us out...

A Dutch designer named Jetske de Groot designs chairs made from usable scraps of other chairs that have broken. She mates a chromed bottom with a turned-wood top, the base of a bar stool with the back of a task chair. But rather than covering up the awkward moments where two chairs meet, de Groot emphasizes them, by fixing the joints with huge wads of colored epoxy...

Of course we have “no culture”: we made the mistake of giving the arts to academe, where doing something new is the standard (a Ph.D. dissertation has to be original research), and as a result our artist stopped producing beautiful things in an incessant quest for novelty. The blame lies with the very sort of people who are complaining in the article, and their “work” is just more of the reason we have “no culture”.

By and large “serious” art stopped being beautiful around the time of Rodin (who was a great sculptor, but whose contorted tortured figures are hardly beautiful). The last gasps of making beauty were the consumer-oriented movements of art nouveau and art deco. “Serious” music died a similar death with Stravinsky—again a great—being the boundary between beauty and ugliness.

One reason we like “buying things” is that the urge to make beauty, suppressed in the novelty-mad world of “serious” art, expresses itself in consumer design—the elegance of an iPod Touch or a Nissan 370Z leaves the tripe that today’s “artists” produce in the dust.

The real reason I’ve truncated my responses is that those people are obviously too ignorant to understand a reasonable answer. If they were smart enough, they would know already : the United States has invented, developed, improved, concocted and designed more than any nation in the history of the world. And we continue to do so. I don’t give a rat’s ass about some euro-trashes repugnant little bar stool made from garbage. I hope he chokes on it.

I understand completely. And I got it from your first post. Sometimes FU is the best response.

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