BOOK
The language of things - How we are seduced by the objects around us.
Language
With regards to his father’s portable typewriter
“From a practical point of vies it is entirely useless. But I stills can’t bear to throw it out, even though I know that someday whoever clears out my house will have to face the same dilemma that I did. To discard even a useless object that I don’t look at from one year to the next is somehow to discard part of a life. But to keep it unused is to experience silent reproach every time you open the cupboard door. The same reproach is projected by a wall full of unread books. And once read they ask, quietly at first, but then more and more insistently, will we ever read them again?”
Page 20 + 21
“Just a few of these useless objects re-enter the economic cycle as part of the curious ecology of collecting. But collecting is in itself a very special kind of fetish, perhaps one that is best understood as an attempt to roll back the passing of time. It might also be an attempt to defy the threat of mortality. To collect a sequence of objects is, for at least, to have imposed some sense of order on a universe that doesn’t have any.”
Page 21
Luxury
Image caption
“The carefully documented clutter on Freud’s desk testifies to a lifetime’s contemplation of the psychological resonance of accumulating objects.”
Page 106
“...If luxury is based on scarcity or difficulty then, once the effort has been stripped away, so is the luxury”
Page 118
“Design presented a chance to exercise the ego in a way that craft did not.”
Page 112
“Contemporary luxury depends on finding new things to do that are difficult.”
Page 120
“There are still people who bind books, but bookbinding has turned from a practical skill into a means of self-expression.”
Page 120
Art
“It is a curious paradox that even the most materialistic of us tend to value what might be called useless above the useful.”
Page 167
“Some designs are less useful than others, and they are the ones that enjoy a higher status than the rest.”
Page 167
“Art, supposedly, is about a whole category of entirely different things. One activity is about the material, commercial, useful world of mass-produced objects, and the other is about a more intangible, slippery world of ideas, and the aura of the unique and the useless.
In Britain, design used to be called commercial art, to distinguish it from the real thing. When designers first began to organise professionally, in 1930, they called themselves the Society of Industrial Artsists. That was when design came to be recognised in its modern sense, after a bitter divorce from craftsmanship. Mainstream commercial design now is treated as the idiot child of the branding industry. And the entire category of objects that can be considered as art is regarded by some cultural gatekeepers as superior to the category of objects that are designed precisely because of the usefulness of the latter.”
Page 168
“Yet there are good reasons to understand the design of objects at a deeper level. If you consider what it was that informed much of Marcel Duchamp’s thinking, and Andy Warhol’s too, there was certainly an intimate concern with many of the same issues that underpin the more reflective aspects of design. In particular, both Duchamp and Warhol explored the significance of mass production. The ready-made urinal and the multiple Mao screenprint suggest something important about our relationship with industrial objects and the impact of mass production on culture. They are, among other things, telling us about the power that art has to make base materials into priceless objects. But that is what design is about too - not usually as a critical tool, but rather by offering a step-by-step how-to guide.”
Page 169
“ Whether consciously or not, it is doing its best to suggest that deign is just as useless as art, and therefore almost as important.”
Page 173
“ Donald Judd got around the problem of defining where art stops and design begins with the aplomb you would expect of a conceptual artist. He simply declared that the two were entirely different, and that they never even get close. When he was making furniture he was a designer, and when he was making art he was an artist, no matter how superficially similar the products of the two categories might look, or how similar the process involved might be.”
Pages 195 + 197
“But a design museum is less interested in the idea of the original. And in the world of mass production, how can there be such a thing as a fake? The inescapable conclusion is that objects that can be categorised as works of design really do carry the burden of utility, and are therefore valued less highly in the cultural hierarchy than the essentially useless category of art.”
Page 203
“When they became valuable, dealers started to tear them out of the places they were designed for, and transformed into precious showroom antiques. Art creates a language that design responds to. Design also plays its part in creating a visual vocabulary that shapes what artists do. But in the last analysis it is the ability of an artist to question and to be critical that justifies what he does. For a designer to make a critical object is to bite the hand that feeds him. Without commerce, industrial design cannot exist. And yet we now have a generation that produces not just design that pairs to be art, but even industrial objects that also suggest a certain detachment from materialistic considerations.”
Page 213
“Uselessness is, it seems, the most valued quality. So designers aspire to be artists.”
Page 214
