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Can a mass-produced object become like an artwork? Die Welt's Uta Baier considers the question by looking at the recent legal battle over Marcel Breuer's B9 table, first made in 1925-26. As Baier reports, two German firms—Tecta and Knoll International—asked a Dusseldorf court to decide which company has the right to reproduce the table for the contemporary market. B9 has become a cult object because it is the first piece of furniture that Breuer made with steel tubes. (After experimenting with Duralumin pipes, a material used in the ‘20s in Dessau for aircraft construction, the Bauhaus architect decided upon steel tubing because it was cheaper.)
"The table's cult status means that a mass product became an expensive piece of design, a work of art that has stories to tell, justifying its high price," writes Baier. For the courts, the only story that counts is the contract that gives a firm the right to reproduce a design. While Breuer himself signed the contract with Knoll International in 1968, Tecta earned the right to reproduce B9 from Berlin's Bauhaus archive, which cooperated with Breuer's widow. As Baier notes, a lower court has decided in favor of Knoll because the company's contract is older. A higher court will decide the case on January 24.
“Entertainment is part of our culture, and as consumers of music we need to continue to support artists. Go out to a concert; on payday, go to your favourite music store and if you like that song that you burned off the Net, buy the album. As a creative city, let’s demonstrate our cultural values.”
What Galera’s letter to the editor underscores is a new reality for music lovers and the music industry: Buying an album is now a political act.
As with many contemporary thinkers, Eisenman rejects the redemptive notion of collective memory and its unexamined links to the sacred, which unite its celebrants in a reassuring cult of remembrance. Memorials, Eisenman has noted, are not about memory but about nostalgia. In this case, architecture becomes a hermeneutic, probing, questioning, withholding solace and thus closure. However challenged or troubled by the work, visitors are never overwhelmed nor reduced to anxious impotence. Nothing affects them without their active, willed participation. By avoiding an iconic design, Eisenman has ensured that the whole cannot be apprehended from any single vantage point. There is no center, no resting spot for the eye or the body, no therapeutic catharsis. The tight weave of the project never loosens its grip on visitors, or allows them to yield attention to apperception. They have to negotiate the narrow fissures between the somber stelae virtually in single file. Anamnesis becomes a personal rather than a collective endeavor, and the injunction to remember is left the responsibility of each individual spectator.
The Hurricane Katrina crisis began for Bruneau on Monday, August 29th, shortly after the storm had passed through. A young woman lay dead in the middle of the 1900 block of Jackson Avenue. Her skull was crushed, and a fallen street light, blown down by the ninety-five-mile-an-hour winds, lay beside her. Along Jackson Avenue, people were emerging from shotgun shacks into a world of smashed oak trees and downed power lines. Some of them knew the woman. She had gone out during the storm to buy drugs.
plastic fantastic
albini desk from retromodern
Television producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson came up with the idea of casting a rock-and-roll band that could star in its own televison series on NBC. They ran an ad in Variety and selected four young men to serve as members of the band: Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, Davy Jones, and Micky Dolenz. They produced a pilot and called the group the Monkees. It was Boyce and Hart who did the songs for the pilot in 1966, including the singing. When rock impressario Don Kirschner was brought in to handle the music for the show, he told Boyce and Hart they didn't have a proven track record as producers and they were off the project, except as songwriters. As the show's first air date loomed, one music producer after another was acquired and then rejected for the project, while Tommy Boyce kept telling Kirschner that he and Bobby could handle it. Kirschner finally gave them a chance, Boyce and Hart recorded vocals and backing tracks for the first album, and then the Monkees recorded lead vocals.