Like him or not...
....his success in the design field is indisputable. I often wonder of the people who belittle him, who of them are designers themselves ? The harshest critics are often collectors, historians or perhaps even self proclaimed stylists but it seems theres a new kid with a glok, excuse me, on the block....the eco-critic.
It's easy to malign Starck from the viewpoint of needless consumption or the perils of mass-production but at least one should applaud his notoriety.
Personally, I think he's suffering from over-exposure. The moment fame and fortune dawns on a designer, songwriter, actor, it seems that the heat is intensified and sometimes that pressure will result in compromise at the hands of peripheral motivational players ie. big design/record companies . When forced to take an interest in pop music, I always think of how prolific artists seem to be, early on in their career ( David Bowie, Elton John maybe even the Beatles and certainly Bob Dylan ) and then it's meltdown.
I'm not a fan of Starck, though I was inspired by his wit really early in his career. If he's so concerned or disgruntled about his past then he should aspire to make amends and not just give up. Theres no doubt that design is a bit flat currently. It's impossible to maintain brilliance as a common denominator. The trouble is that we have been spoilt in the past by truly great designers and we'll just have to be patient to see if theres more in the pipe-line. Will there ever be another true style movement ?
Successful or just prolific? ...
Successful or just prolific? Why applaud notoriety? He was over-exposed a long time ago.
Design is not flat right now, the problem is simply that the volume is too loud and the desire for recognition too strong, young designers are recieving increasingly shallow educations. Years ago ago architects were taught philosophy, physics, art, histroy and politics. It helped make well rounded people who had enough capacity for reflection to ask themselves if what they were planning to produce was right. Now we have designers as seducers, people who want to seduce you with their images or who have been seduced by greed.
Even so very good products are on the market but there is simply too much "materiality" for people too see the wood for the trees.
We tend to look backwards and see movements as monoliths, history is not that simple, the nouveau/jugenstil/ deco/functionalist overlaps all occured within years of each other and there was no unifying design principle.
A true style? What does that mean? If you mean global and unifying, well that rather a frightening thought!
heath
Global style.....not my sentiment heath and yeh...frightening !
I use the word style, firmly chosen before trend. I'm probably being unrealistic or at least quite romantic in the hope for another fresh movement.
Again, I agree that there wasn't much time between those movements you quoted but surely you would agree that each one had it's own unique identity ?
It strikes me that, considering a current thread about the Eileen Gray side-table, when you get it right , it's timeless.
I didn't mean to blanket modern design either. There are some amazing conceptuallists out there and I'm constantly bedazzled by individuals inventiveness. I just shot from the hip regarding the bigger picture.
I share your point.
PS is taking a very time worn path
Like many who have achieved big success, and by success I mean acquiring a big enough pile of dough not to ever have to worry about money again, they then feel free to disparage that which made them their "pile" in the first place. They are suddenly free to speak their mind, it's boring and predictable, the only thing that is more deflating is that the media gives them a platform to spout from.
Recent comparable examples would be Rosie O'Donnels recent implosions,(both post "The View" and the earlier implosion during the demise of her eponymous talk show) but only after she had banked more money then Croesus.
And another example, and I am not singling out gay women here, but Ellen Degenaris came clean with her famous line, "Yep, I'm Gay", only after her series was in it's final contract year and she had banked tens of millions of dollars. I guess that's where the statement; "There's F*** You money and then there's F*** Everybody money", comes from. The honesty quotient seems to increase the closer one gets to the latter half of the above referenced statement.
A Designer Formerly Known As Starck...
Prince tried this--shedding his persona--but gave up giving it up.
Frank Sinatra did it by retiring dozens of times and coming back as an even bigger caricature of himself each time.
Bob Dylan did it and spent his career pretending to be the exact opposite of whatever he sensed expectations for him were. He describes it as a life and death struggle against being enslaved by expectations that doom one. He writes about doing it in Chronicles.
When your celebrity becomes greater than your work, as it almost always does when one becomes a superstar in the media, the artist enters a life and death struggle with his own persona.
For the human being to survive awhile longer, the artist's persona must be killed.
The pitiful thing is, of course, that in the end the artist's persona always surives the human being, like a shell left behind on a beach by a dead crustacean.
Ambitious, talented, often troubled human beings produce these shells of personae and within their confines the human being struggles mightily, often unconsciouly, to dislodge the grain of sand deep in their tissue. In turn, like oysters, they produce a series of pearls, some hugely flawed, and a few magnificient.
There are great master craftsmen, like Koen, who seem to do great work out of combination of deep training and an expansive, generosity of human spirit.
And then there are these celebrity oysters that produce a few extraordinary pearls and a lot of flawed ones. The fascination of their work seems less about excellence of the work than the heroic/insane struggle of flawed human beings with the agony of an acutely self-conscious life that drives them.
This latter group has to kill their personae off, at some point, or else they have to kill themselves.
I for one am grateful Starck killed off his personae in order to avoid killing himself.
He will do some more good work sometime. It may not come for ten years, but it will come.
We need ALL the designers we can get.
The world is very fucked up.
We dare not turn our backs on those knights errant like Starck.
Rather we must hope their journey delivers their talents to a more rational and humane place where they can do some good work that is more cordial to their souls.
RIP persona of Starck.
"In my end is my beginning."--T.S. Eliot
And if the
.
Is LRFs' Nakashima thread broken?
But seeing as DC mentioned price I'll respond here, I'm with Lucifer on this one, some things are overpriced, Eames elephants etc etc but other things like important prototypes, craft like Nakashimas, pieces which are manifestations of theory, peices with historical signifigance are not.
Perhaps its being a slightly over-valued in dollar terms before its time but these objects are all very important manifestations of western culture, no one bats an eyelid about Chinese pottery or Persian rugs fetching high prices. I think we tend to de-value our culture becuase it is so ubiquitous.
In this disposable culture we have lost so much, high prices like this and the price for Makintoshes ebonised cabinet (google it, very interesting) serve to protect them for us.
PS and the slab furniture you get from the enthusiastic amateur is revolting and can't hold a finger to high craft.
Enjoyed considering Starck as Rosie OD - don't know if the comparison is entirely apt (I think Rosie had occasional bursts of faith) but it's funny. I'm thinking dc that the Dylan reference, by way of comparison, may be a bit outlandish, but I admire the optimism - it's just that for reinvention to work at all, it may require a certain amount of invention in the first place. I'm not certain I can see in Starck a negative capability. Blame it on Doris Day. Sometimes when your glass is half empty, it's half empty.
PPS and the problem people ha...
PPS and the problem people have with high prices is very rarely an ethical one, the only reason they find it objectionable is because they can't afford it. No one complains about the price of toasters and microwaves, perhaps they should.
A properly ethical stand on price would be objection to over-abundant and excessively cheap goods, they and there manufacturers do more damage than a few auction houses could ever manage.
Wait wait wait.
Okay. I think we have the definition of design mixed up here. Maybe even PS does too.
I go back to the Eamesian definition of design as solving a problem. That sort of design will never die.
It could be though that PS is talking about "designy". Which I think we already agree is crap. Design for the sake of itself is, by the Eames approach, not design.
I wasn't really comparing
Rosie OD to PS. I was simply pointing out that once a "personality" has banked enough cash never to have to worry about earning a dollar, they then seem magically capable of now dispensing the truth or at least as they see it. If someone will never hire them again because they disagree with the truth they are now speaking it doesn't matter as they now "believe" that they can't out live their money.
The height of hypocrisy as I see it. If they believed what they now say, why not say it when they are struggling, why, because their strength of conviction only seems to come about when it doesn't matter anymore
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