what's in a vase

Finally, regarding Ryans parting dig at Jonathan's vases, here are a few points I'd make.


First let me parse what it seemed like Ryan was saying about the vase when was so dismissive of it:

The vase is a symbol for the things in life that are trivial, the things that we don't need. We can live without a vase. The vase is decorative. The vase is not art it is craft. The vase is delicate, too easy to smash. it represents this whole endeavor.

That vase matters because crappy design is part of the consumer culture, disposible culture, a culture that doesn't think about where our products come from and who made them and how they were made.



That vase represents a resistance to all of that. It is about thinking about where things are made and who made them. And about having things that we want to keep.

Why should we have things around us that are ugly when it costs the same to design something This is the reason why high-end designers have moved into developing lines for Target and K-Mart.

If we are to think about things we have ather than just accumulate them then we need to consider the importance of the things we have around us. When I have a barbeque I would rather serve my friends on bright polka dot melanine than on paper plates.


I like to decorate the table and put flowers in vases. (I would especially like to put them in a JA vase . . . )

pretty colors.

Is this a trivial act? The answer to this question is actually far from simple.

Virginia Woolf wrote an entire novel about it (and a few other things as well). If you are an interior designer and you have not read Mrs. Dalloway then hie thee to a bookstore and start reading it now and don't stop until you are finished. (The Hours is a wonderful novel but it isn't the same and the movie is supposed to be fine but Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway are too real to me to see on film and the idea that a nitwit like Nicole Kidman portrayed Virginia Woolf and won an Oscar because she wore a fake nose is scandalous even for the Academy. But I digress ...

The set table is about hospitality and hospitality is about culture. It is about the idea of home. What nourishes us.

yummy. like spumante

Are these statements not radical enough? Not overtly political enough? When the reason we are creating art is to spread one's message or when we must label art with a message or when we decide whether we like art based on our politics we are creating propaganda not art.

The aesthetics of the vase is in itself about so many things -- first of all it is a vessel. It is the shape of a woman's body.


It is the source.

The more I think about someone who calls themself an artist acting this way about an artist's vase the more lightheaded I start to feel.

abacus, beaded
very contemporary, very mod, and
very art nouveau as well with its organic shapes and japonisme

It seems ironic that Ryan's snobbery about being an artist would place him in the art versus craft hierarchy (intentionally or not) looking down at the person who actually gets his hands dirty.


Ryan -- who was all about making political statements his work -- assumed that Jonathan had nothing to say about ecology and design. Of course someone whose art is about working with the earth has probably never thought about that.

igneous in jade
(some of my personal favorites, esp in sand)

As for the idea that they are mainly used for decorative purposes.

vidalia (gasp! to die for),

If that were true, and whatever that does mean, I, for one, do not want to live in a world that only values the utilitarian. That is George Bush's world.

anemone -- has a bit of a zeisel feel to it

That is the world that sees no value in poetry because there is no use in it.

igneous in sand
a harsh beauty

Then there are the people who dismiss a certain work of art a field of art because its purpose is considered trivial or its meaning is not immediately apparent or it doesn't have a high enough status (too feminine?) in the hierarchy of the arts.

chica
(reminds me of stones --
his works on paper),

The idea that something is trivial, small, inconsequential is never a reason not to cherish it. The idea that something has no value in the world is never a reason not to say it isn't essential to one's life.

artard

NOTE: I apologize for the typos -- I'm in a rush and a small wire fox terrier is trying to bite my sleeves as I type -- I'll try to fix them as soon as I can.

Ryan is such a bore that when I've thought about writing something about him this past week it just made me so tired that I would have to go and take a nap.

My favorite description of him comes from Jonathan Adler: "he is a person who thinks he is an artist." I have come up with a name for this: an artard.

ARTARD, n: an ill-informed, often comical or foolish person who believes they are an artist and who publicly acts out the role of the tormented artist in order to get attention (artardary, artardesque):


Ryan's silly hackneyed speeches only evoked derision in the judges. For the record his "art" was hardly original. Ooooh black walls! broken glass!). Avant Garde artists have been reclaiming and reworking interiors for well over a century. I won't even get started on this because if I think too much about the fact that he doesn't know this does know this I might perish of grief. You know how I get when people have not done their homework. I'm not sure whether his ignorance is the fault of Ryan since he is clearly the kind of person who is determined not to learn anything or his teachers who have not taught him but given him passing grades.

As for being an artist in your napalm slum, uh, Ryan:

1. Words are attached to meanings -- they aren't just sounds, right? You do know that?
2. Napalm is something other than a band name; it has some associations (The Kim Foundation) that are not really apt comparisons for your creative expressions although listening to you one does start to feel ones skin crawl. (That said, Ryan's whole speech is so laughable that it is hard to be offended.)
3. If you want to go to a napalm slum, you're in luck because it turns out we are using napalm in Iraq even though it is banned

At any rate, Top Design missed an opportunity to inform the viewers about the profession by letting Ryan's stupidity stand unchallenged.

Interior design is full of people doing extraordinarily innovative work bringing together aesthetics, conservation, recycling, and the built environment. (Not for nothing but Todd Oldham has something to offer in this area.) Here's a house build from freeway salvage that I just read about yesterday. There are a many amazing furniture designers who only work with recycled and sustainable materials. There is incredible work being done with land and landscape reclamation in former industrial sites in Eastern Germany . . .

Where I live in the Bay Area land is so expensive and the small house movement is very popular. I have a friend, also a metalworking artist, who helped create a mobile grocery store for fresh organic food in Oakland (People's Grocery, which is now a model for a project in New Orleans).

There is a world of people thinking about living spaces and the made environment that is recycled, restored, sustainable, small, transformable, and mobile.

What I'm saying is that there is so much Indy and DIY stuff that is really cool. Frankly, it pisses me off that for six weeks this artard has had a national television platform to spout his bullshit and meanwhile the people who are doing all of this fantastic work don't get the attention they deserve.