Jack Kerouac, as Sal Paradise once said: "I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." And I think that's a rather apt description of my blog over the years, and perhaps the most perfect description of me in general that I've ever read. So that's what this blog is, a collection of the falling stars that are beckoning me at any time.

02 April 2008

Is creating things really so bad?

So I read on Apartment Therapy today that a couple of big name designers, namely Phillip Stark, are running around bemoaning how they're single-handedly destroying the planet through their design careers and their enablement of mass consumerism; claiming they're going to quit and give up and a bunch of other green-frenzied hogwash. Give me a break, seriously. Not only do I find these headline-grabbing, born-again-green chest thumping to be pretty much entirely disingenuous and nauseating, but I'm getting tired of hearing about how anything that's not completely utilitarian and made from bamboo is the root of all evil. Perhaps it's that as an artist it kind of irritates me that somehow art, or things that are created sheerly for aesthetics are bad, and the cause of all the environmental ills in the world. There's nothing wrong with creating things for sheer aesthetics, there's nothing wrong with buying cool, or pretty or decorative things, it's not destroying everything. What the real problems are is people who view everything as disposable and buy everything put in front of them only to toss it when the trends change. The problem is cheap, low-quality crap, not good design. We all love product porn and have hundreds of covets every year in the consumer sphere, but we don't have to buy it all. I admit I quite unashamedly maintain a shopping blog, full of stuff I'd love to buy, but only occasionally will (or rarely can afford.) Perhaps then that jades my perception of consumer goods, but I'd like to think people throughout civilization have always owned consumer goods, the issue is just the way culture views these things as disposable. Maybe it's an issue of things being too affordable.

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