Catching Up: How To Deal With Shoeboxes

Response 3

I love that Gropius believes that “art for arts sake” came about from the ideas of cold hard business. That would be like a bookcase giving birth to a unicorn. How funny is that? Why would that come from that. Unless cave men came home from their long day out at the mammoth hunt and proceeded to draw pictures on the wall. You see Grack we need to grab about 37 percent of the mammoth market and I think our chance for that is here, in the tusks.

The issues that Gropius and the Bauhaus were dealing with themselves, during the transition from hand crafts into an age of mass production seems remarkably similar to the one we are going through now. That is the transition from an age without the internet to this fantastic one that does. How the Bauhaus got anything done without it I cannot understand.

There are many things taking place on the internet that seem to invert many of the ideals of the Bauhaus. “Goods and buildings specifically designed for industrial production”. But, these mass produced objects no longer truly have to be capable of being machined into multiples. It takes only a digital camera and, as evidenced by myself, a remarkably small amount of knowledge as to how the internet works. The majority of those who experience an object now do it through image and video.
Could it be then that this is the way in which the piece is meant to be viewed? Works responding to it are not built in the same school, but can literally come from anywhere on earth. These works too are presented by way two dimensionality. Many dialogues taking place between artists and makers have nothing to do with the actual object. And it seems to me that there is some sort of amazing freedom in this. It is something of a true democratization of process, you need not be monetarily rich to see an object, or even locational rich and located in a city. You just need the internet.

I always felt that “Information Age” sounded like the stupidest name for anything I had ever heard. Ever. But, in a sense it is right on, data not physical objects is where thing are at. Excluding of course those (lucky?) enough to be in the minority.
This transition has done something though, shifting away from the organization of the Haus and its standard types. Goods conceptualized on an equal playing field are going to be impossible to squeeze into standard types. If a million different people design a chair they will not be able to pick just one for everyone to agree on. And why should they? I see absolutely no reason, when a jpeg requires none of the difficulty of mass production and we have the hands of a million creators to churn out just about anything.