superdepressing · 2009-08-29 13:09
I went to Super Contemporary at the Design Museum yesterday. It starts are a great flick through the timeline of British/London Design from the 60s onwards. When you get to the 00s, it takes a turn. You realise that most of the things you thought were “modern” are from the 90s, or early 00s. After 2004, it tails off completely. Nothing feels iconic, different, revolutionary (no disrepect to those whose work is up – it’s all good sound work, but just doesn’t have the same feel as the rest of the show).
Is it that the big ideas of the time are undisplayable? Or that they’re not designed, or specifically undesigned? (the Internet, Wikipedia, craigslist…)
Maybe everything is now consciously designed, meaning that the average quality is increasing, but with less spikes of superior individuality or troughs of outsider design. Or there’s no money in standing out at the moment. There’s a lot of things in the exhibition that I suspect weren’t liked at the time they were created or built, and certainly government-funded design seems to have been a driving force in the 60s and 70s.
It struck me in particular that architecture and retail were both very poorly represented in the last 5 years. Are retail systems (Ikea, Ocado) the 21st century version of Sex, Biba and Habitat?
Anyway. Even though I know the exhibition doesn’t represent the state of design at the moment, I certainly came away with a bad case of nostalgia rather than being excited for the future (the Kaplicky exhibit upstairs helped somewhat).