Re: bayer, moholy-nagy and us

Responding to msg by garry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Garry Stevens) on


>I suspect strongly that you will find that whenever
>some architectural school/style/theory starts off by
>justifying on non-architectural grounds (eg its
>functional, its socially responsible, its socialist,
>whatever), after a couple of years the rationales are
>quietly dropped as the natural tendencies of the field
>to be autonomous assert themselves.


Garry has it right, I think, if he will grant that
extra-architectural motives are merchandising devices to
compete in the non-architectural arena.

Architecture, the arts and well-wishers go up against the
cultural opposition in medicine, finance, law, talk shows,
military hardware, New World Orders, Holy Orders, all yelping:

trust me, buy me, embrace the urgency of my pitch or the Devil
will get you, or you will be deported, or incinerated by
nuclear holocaust, or be ignored, or thrown in jail, or lose
all your wealth, or suffer ovarian / testicular sarcoma.

PR will continue to bray these motives so long as they move the

goods, whether the brand names are political, social, personal
or divine.

The prolongation of brands after the ideas or persons or
beliefs
have died maintains the domination of a media-driven,
advertising-befuddled corporatized culture.

Not even advertisers know if it really works, all
they can do is fund endless polls. Market research, like the
Sci Arc ad, is as treacherous as Deborah Natsios said, in
commerce as well as in academia, where customers are the
same as students and truth-in-advertising is all too lacking.

I also gotta swipe at critics who test the waters for
advertising
pointers, and sometimes try to tell the consumer / student /
professor what to buy and sell through editorial copy inferior
to the ads -- see the recent issues of Metropolis and other
shakey-legged tomes struggling to milk a moribund design market

before they go under.

What to do?

Well I guess that's why we look here, there and over there.
I'm waiting for beloved posters and lurkers to confirm it's
worth
worrying about, that marginal whining can be converted to
better goods than that of the markets of government and
commerce and
education and entertainment and cultish artistic heroism.

My half-baked pitch is this: times are hard and we are guard
being had via our vulnerabilities. We fear media-driven
culture, its
celebrity saps and fork-tongued preachers. Yet we don't have
anything of our own except a kind of enfeebled individualism
which await reward, magically, someday, by this funny
money culture.

I think we gotta take the risk of working in joint-arrays of
our own invention, such as this list and others like it in
brick-space. To begin to build confidence in work outside the
market in ways not yet understood. And, I'm not
talking soppy socialism or narcissitic capitalism -- it's got
to be open to all comers who don't need these crippling
crutches.

Green art has potential but it's trapped in the media right now
and
needs freedom or fertilizer or something coprophilic to get it
dirty and impolite again. It's close to suffering the fate of
historic preservation's New Traditionalism.

Some weird stuff I've gotten into here over the last several
years is not publishable, which innoculates it from media
infection. Maybe I can get it down for the first time here,
maybe it's too sappy for my warped transcription.

Not that anyone cares, but I don't want to waste time getting
the job, getting the job, getting the job. I've tried that for

a quarter of a century and it sucks and works all right.
Except It
alienates me from the people who do the work of art and
architecture,
makes me a toady and ass-kisser and phony and party-goer and
deranged
architect who reads trash magazines and worries about image and

getting my firm's stupid name out there, out there, out there.

There are vast amounts of work waiting outside the market, most

caused by market and ideological over-exploitation of the
human, natural and built landscape. For that same 1/4 century
I've been doing some of it, and getting small reward,
appropriate to
the effort -- no PR or pecuniary inflation needed for my ego or

for my kids' "college education", poor over-exploited chips-off

though they be.

What do you think. I'm so demented that this list is looking
good lately,
and humor -- the best prospect for the culture -- may break to
freedom yet.

The John, in all senses
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