Design Exhibit

The Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam recently had an exhibition on the American Streamline design movement of the 1930s. The exhibit drew a connection between improvements in production technologies that allowed a consumer good to be sheathed in a housing unrelated to the device’s function, the evolution of art deco design, and the birth of modern American advertising which aims at creating consumer appetite moreso than promoting a particular product.

All of the exhibit displays were decorated with catchphrases from this confluence of events:

• consumption standardizes people
• brokers in beauty
• culture is the result of more satisfying combinations of consumption
• create a demand
• design sells production
• the happiness machine
• the quest for the new
• democratize desire
• rituals of sumptuousness
• sell them hope and you won’t have to worry about selling them goods
• mass consumption
• the rise of modern ways
• the road of the people’s wants
• satisfying human wants
• all you desire if yours now
• witch directs energy towards fulfillment
• the land of wish
• every new product modifies the direction which culture takes
• produce the necessary illusions
• educate desire
• our store is five miles of golden chain
• society progresses from a simple to a varied consumption
• desire for goods
• be a happiness machine
• aesthetics of waste
• the illimitable power of suggestion
• spending creates new man and woman
• sell them their dreams
• to satisfy customer demand
• the problem is not how to produce the goods, but how to produce the customers
• extravagant waste
• transform luxury into a commonplace
• spend freely, waste creatively
• design for prosperity
• the future is now
• to stir up insatiable appetites
• the cult of beauty
• there is no limit to general consumption possibilities
• the discipline of consumption
• beauty to the masses
• the stores, not churches, are the greatest influencesfor culture and taste that exist today
• to stir up insatiable appetites
• the cult of beauty
• there is no limit to general consumption possibilities
• the fast track towards progress
• color is a business asset
• planned obsolescence
• socialize consumption
• mass leisure
• democracy means material goods
• culture of consumption
• flawless inspired taste
• the indispensable thing
• eliminate the barrier between goods and people
• consumer engineers
• flow of satisfaction

I’m simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the slogans. You can’t argue with how effectively it spawned an entire consumer culture, but the explicit, conscious efforts at manipulation and the open creation of a society of obselescence and waste seems decidedly amoral, at best.

Here’s a closeup of the iron from the picture above; translucent with a metallic red core. Ironic that Apple’s introduction of the iMac in 1998 made this design much more popular and commonplace.