Designs too good to waste

Washington Post ^ | June 13, 2010 | Blake Gopnik

[La Lydia]

I still have the same excellent Electrolux vacuum cleaner I got when I first got married.

[The_Reader_David]

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.

[subterfuge]

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.