culture
Cupcakes and froyo
A squeezable nugget of comfort
I was waiting for the perfect image to start blogging the idea, and last week supplied one: the Celestial Buddies plush toy that rode on the Crew Dragon test flight. The symbolism is perfect: an oddly satisfying little squeezable nugget of comfort within the disorienting, weird domesticity of a spaceship.
Domestic cozy is in an attitude, emerging socioeconomic posture, and aesthetic, that is in many ways the antithesis of premium mediocrity. Unsurprisingly, it takes its cues from the marginal shadow behaviors of premium mediocrity.
The Big Lie
“We only give them what they want.”
This is The Big Lie of mass culture and of debased art, and also it is the weak excuse for the cultural default of many designers.
Millennials and Gen. Z
I made a prediction on Twitter on February 6th: If Millennials (b. 1980 – 2000) were the premium mediocre generation, Gen Z (b. 2000 – 2020) is going to be the domestic cozy generation.
Cultural relevance
More than ever, people are choosing how to spend their time based on the amount of attention they can garner—and you and I are no exception. Everyone is susceptible to this logic. But what I want to argue in this piece is that tech startup founders are particularly susceptible to this tendency.
Working at and around startups for several years, I’ve noticed many founders prioritizing culture, visibility, and perception over product, customer development, and strategy. Maybe this is to be expected in a time where culture moves faster and is perceived as more important than ever. But I find it unusual that the tech industry seems unaware of a whole class of typical mistakes founders make in pursuit of cultural relevance.
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
An Essay by Clement GreenbergCapitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence.
The Third Way
An Article by Kevin KellyBut all the civilized cities of the world were also filled with third places that people loved. Not quite private, not quite public, these third places were intimate but open to anyone. Like settling down at a table at a cafe. It felt like your space, but you were not the landlord. They were public, open spaces that you could “own” for a while.
…We need a new third category of work — something between “employee” and “not an employee”—that encompasses digital gig laborers. AirBnB is neither a hotel, nor a private resident. It is a third thing, and we need to create a new category to deal with it…This is the era of the third way.
You Don't Need To Do The Farmhouse Home Aesthetic When You Decorate
An Article by Kate WagnerIt took two decades for HGTV and its ilk to streamline the process of creating design hegemony — to perfect the concept of having multiple shows congeal around the same aesthetic rather than let them exist at the whims of their individual hosts, as was more the case in the 2000s. While previous eras of design (think midcentury modernism) were spearheaded by architects, interior designers, and other tastemakers, in the late ’90s, capital-A Architecture lost interest in the home — deconstructivist ideas and new, high-tech forms were better suited to museums and universities — and a coalition of real estate developers, home improvement and furniture stores, and TV decorators stepped in to take their place. The worlds of high culture and popular consumption in residential design have never been more separate, and, in this critic’s opinion, both suffer as a result.
Class 1 / Class 2 Problems
An Article by Kevin KellyThere are two classes of problems caused by new technology. Class 1 problems are due to it not working perfectly. Class 2 problems are due to it working perfectly.
...Class 1 problems arise early and they are easy to imagine. Usually market forces will solve them. You could say, most Class 1 problems are solved along the way as they rush to become Class 2 problems. Class 2 problems are much harder to solve because they require more than just the invisible hand of the market to overcome them.
...Class 1 problems are caused by technology that is not perfect, and are solved by the marketplace. Class 2 problems are caused by technology that is perfect, and must be solved by extra-market forces such as cultural norms, regulation, and social imagination.
Monoskop
A WebsiteMonoskop is a wiki for the arts, media and humanities.
Scenius
Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.
Premium Mediocre
An Article from Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh Rao
The Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts
The meaning of objects
The meaning of objects is harder to grasp than that of words.
Something akin to style
My own attitude toward the microstructure of metals is not unlike that of an art historian regarding a painting or sculpture. There is something akin to style even in a photomicrograph. There are aspects of structure that are not immediately apparent to the untrained eye, and quite minor features may be clues to a deep meaning.
From the head of Jove
A complex structure is a result of, and to a large extent a record of, its past. Though a proton and an electron may, as a pair, be able to spring full-panoplied from the head of Jove, more complex things cannot, or at least do not.
Everything complicated must have had a history, and its internal structural features arise from its history and provide a specific record of it. One might call these structural details of memory “funeous,” after the unfortunate character in Borge’s story “Funes the Memorious” who remembered everything.
The objects themselves speak loudly
The written record is very little help in determining the techniques used by ancient metalworkers, though the objects themselves speak loudly to an educated ear.
The way it has been made
The internal structure of a work of art in metal can often throw as much, or more, light on its origin as can be derived from stylistic analysis. Moreover, the techniques employed can provide clues to the habits of mind of the people who originated them.
…Perhaps the most important reason for structural studies of museum objects is that the intimate knowledge so derived as to the way in which an object has been made adds so greatly to the aesthetic enjoyment of it. Very often some detail and sometimes the whole of an effective design arises directly in the exploitation of the merits and the overcoming of the difficulties of a specific technique, in the reaction between the artist’s fingers and his material.
Aesthetically motivated curiosity
It seems that the first and most imaginative use of practically every material was, before quite modern times, in making something decorative. People are experimentally minded when looking for decorative effects, but they can’t experiment with the established techniques on which their livelihood depends.
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It is of basic significance for human history that, from the cave paintings on, almost all inorganic materials and treatments of them to modify their structure appear first in decorative objects rather than in tools or weapons necessary for survival. Aesthetically motivated curiosity, or perhaps just play, seems to have been the most important stimulus to discovery.