You want elegant design that also requires a brain? Try Apple?
What a bunch of moronic idiocy. As if Europe provides any reason at all for us to mimic it.
“Here is a hard truth about 21st-century Americans: “You have no culture. All you guys do is buy things.”
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Think having become Heinz-57 citizens of the globe mighta had anything to do with it?
We never had a culture because we’ve never really been one country.
We have multiple cultures due to the fact and that’s why there can never be one “American culture.”
Well, if consumers don’t buy anything, then WHY DO WE NEED DESIGNERS? What are they designing? Things for people to buy that don’t? I was an art student in the 70’s and we constantly received this garbage message from our elitist profs. They thought their art should be subsidized by the government.
That explains why the world doesn't watch American movies or TV shows, or listen to our music.
American Culture/art to Me:
1) a Remington 870 shotgun sculpture in my garden
2) The beautiful ballet that is college football
3) the painting of Ronald Reagan that hangs in my living room
4) the Obama toilet paper in my bathroom
5) the symphony of sounds coming from my Harley
Fine, maybe we should cut back on our purchases.
I vote we start with fag designer clothes and Hollywood movies.
Recycling? Yes, it’s been done. And for the record, the “new” houses are much more environmentally friendly.
Better idea: Quality over quantity.
Buy well made stuff that lasts a lifetime and doesn’t fall apart or implode 1 day after its warranty date.
But then, they wouldn’t be able to sell us 8 vacum cleaners in one lifetime would they?
My mom still has the first pair of kitchen shears she bought 40 years ago. Same vacum cleaner, same metal cleaning bucket, same ceramic mixing bowls. My dad has the same hammer, saw, screwdriver set he bought 40 years ago. They are only on their second lawn mower ... on and on.
You can’t even buy this stuff anymore. Mostly what is available is cheap crap.
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Our huge new houses eat up energy,...
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And amazingly, a lot of those houses are owned by “environmentally-
concerned” university professors.
E.g., here in our university town of Columbia, MO, there’s no push to
have attic fans which would substantially reduce the use of central air.
(I’m all for central air, but don’t understand why they aren’t augmented
with the low-tech attic fan.)
Or require new homes to have zoysia grass instead of tall fescue grass,
as the former requires about 1/2 to 1/3 of the water
during summer...but even the hippies require tall fescue as it remains
green throughout even into most of fall/winter.
I’m no tree-hugger, but the energy waste of liberal nutburgers is
pretty staggering sometimes.
I'm not talking about the envirowacko concerns that Waxman has. I just find it sad that hardly anyone saves any more, and that so many people have their worth and happiness wrapped up in "stuff".
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.