Slurp / Campbell’s Soup Cans Andy Warhol

‘G + G’ uses special effects to manifest the emotional reaction of the viewer in front of a work of art. At the same time, neon lights recall and celebrate the contemporary conceptual art of masters such as Dan Flavin and Joseph Kosuth.

If the world keeps telling you that you’re not good enough, healthy, smooth, fit, productive, positive or zen, it’s time to ask yourself what the hell is wrong with the world’!

not smoke does not last longer (but in some cases yes, I add), it just seems to last longer. According to Denys, people expect too much from life, the philosophy of the moldability of the world has won, people think they can control everything and therefore can no longer accept defeat. (the obsession with happiness)…

The Ironic Objects,

trigger a relationship of complicity between those who thought and designed them and those who understand the meaning and intelligence. They give an intense and deep pleasure that lasts over time, like a friendship or a love. They are magical, because they trigger a relationship, a recognition between those who thought and designed them and those who see them use them touch them alive. There are codes and languages to be deciphered and interpreted, and the more subtle these are intelligent acute sought after, the greater the satisfaction and pleasure of the user of the object.

Irony is defined etymologically speaking, as a fiction concealing reality. David Foster Wallace considered it one of the founding characters in the postmodern culture, underlining how the continuous and excessive recourse to irony and sarcasm, destabilizes society, deteriorating a key element of collective life: empathy.

Perhaps in design it can be the opposite: an act of sabotage of the real, necessary to the maintenance of vital characters in our environment, and to the generation of new space of freedom of thought. Logically, reverse the custom but with extreme rigor. Bring lightness without losing sight of the need to give meaning and meaning to things. As in the work of innovation and sympathy that Munari designed in 1945: the Chair for very short visits. Perfect for elevators, visits of new daughters-in-law, mothers-in-law and former lovers, the Zanotta Singer 5000 is equipped with a high back and short seat for a thickness of only twenty centimeters.

‘It is in one’s craft that one reveals his way of seeing things… ‘ Isay Weinfeld. There is good taste or bad taste, but a personal taste. And of course, the work gets better if the architect and the client tend to have the same tastes and values.

Taste is the means by which we know beauty and enjoy beautiful things. Matter dealt with, especially in reference to the ‘sense’ linked to the body, in Agamben’s essay: the knowledge that you do not know and the pleasure that you do not enjoy’… but the knowledge, etymologically derives from the taste, through the taste we distinguish the taste of foods, as well as the scholar has the ability to know things and their causes’… It’s with sight and hearing that we generally enjoy works of art, but when it comes to discussing their value and especially the ability to appreciate it, the taste comes in. ‘You cannot taste a work of art as such, because taste does not leave the object free for itself, but has to do with it in a really practical way, dissolves it and consumes it’, wrote Hegel.

With bad taste, my idea starts from listening to the most obvious aspect that interests me, linked to my knowledge-training-sensitivity of ‘good taste’ that is what for visual sensation concerns a fundamental element of the personality: the image of being and appearing linked to the behaviour-education-reactions of the conscious and current aesthetic concept with the sense of dignity’. In the first place of the ‘no taste’ I put vulgarity in all its forms!

The bad taste, as Gillo Dorfles recalled in his Kitsch. An anthology of bad taste’ (1968) is also a question of lack of culture, of lack of knowledge. Except in those cases in which it is aware and rises to artistic category, frequented and explored starting from ‘900, from Dali to Warhol, Ontani and Jeff Koons, up to the many collectors that the junk, for the simple fact of collecting it, they give dignity, extending an invisible coat of paint on it, but of incalculable value ‘is the paint of conscious choice’.

Kitsch:is an expression of bad taste and an integral part of art itself, manifesting itself everywhere. Usually, a phenomenon that becomes fashionable distorts mortification and trivializes extends a style, amplifies a thought until losing its origin. It becomes kitsch, which is more an aesthetic category than existential, which can involve personal sensitivity, from the point of view of choices and judgments’… ‘kitsch is an exhibition of conformity’ … There must always be play, in any kind of creation. In a lot of modern art I don’t see any fun. The lack of a common denominator in the art of today allows such a freedom of action that the transgression is almost no longer possible . While pop culture has undoubtedly been a positive moment, in which the mix between industrialization and beat positions has given appreciable results, postmodern has given negative results both in architecture and in its other forms. Today we are at the level of find’.

A provocation also treated by Marco Belpoliti (from the newspaper ‘Espresso’), Kitsch is today, social accomplices and new media, the only aesthetic able to work globally… Marx argued that in history events repeat themselves: the first time in the form of tragedy, the second time in a farce… We are immersed in a farce that can evolve into tragedy and in all this taste seems to play an important role, or at least act as an indicator and symptom. For Hermann Broch, the essence of kitsch consisted in the exchange between an ethical category and an aesthetic, while today it is no longer so. The word itself has an equally uncertain origin. ‘It expresses a sensibility, which has its form in excess, in unnatural, in artificial’. According to some, the word kitsch derives from ‘sketch’, with the custom that in the nineteenth century English tourists had to buy cheap paintings and reproductions in markets; for others it would come from the German verb kitschen: I’ll collect mud on the street or even sell new furniture for antique’… kitsch, however, has always existed since ancient times and is not just a modern reality.

Oscar Wilde, prophet of the nineteenth-century dandy, expresses a taste that has pervaded many aspects of contemporary aesthetics. Industrial development (8oo’- 900′) has transformed this niche phenomenon into a mass experience. In the second half of the 20th century, it was transformed into the ‘cultural grammar of the middle class’, described in Andrea Mecacci’s essay Il kitsch. Bad taste has become an autonomous aesthetic language that can no longer be ignored’. At the end of the sixties, with the beginning of the Post-modern, it hybridizes and turns into pop-kitsch. The falsification becomes the authenticity and the copy becomes the model. Abrahm Moles (seventies) wrote that there were three phenomena that produced kitsch at the end of the nineteenth century: the predominance of objects, the cult of beauty and consumerism.

A blend that deflects traditional aesthetic categories. At the beginning of the Eighties it became a real working method; the designer Alessandro Mendini called it an ‘amoral project‘. Emerging from the petty-bourgeois limbo, from the limiting definition of ‘bad taste’, it imposes itself through the Memphis movement of Ettore Sottsass as the aesthetic style of the decade.

Another form of aestheticism, which focuses not on beauty or bad taste but on artifice and stylization, are the films of Almodóvar… Milan Kundera in the ‘Unbearable lightness of being‘ argues that this kitsch is what allows to eliminate from the field of vision, all that is intolerable and unacceptable. It would be nothing but the denial of shit. He speaks of the ‘dictatorship of the heart’ and expounds the theory of the ‘second tear’: he dispels the feeling of feeling that causes emotion. A false liberation from the burdens of daily life transferred to the level of taste’.

From Kitsch to Trash:

Labranca summarized the five characteristics of trash: absolute freedom of taste, contamination, incongruity, maximalism, and failed emulation. The new aesthetic doesn’t care about high culture. Using the parody category, the whole traditional cultural universe is turned upside down. Trash takes substance in its appearance, in its transversal taste, in its face saying things… The trash is undoubtedly infected with kitsch, which seems to possess a superior aesthetic and pervasive force.

Fulvio Carmagnola argues that what dominates today is performance, the transition from ‘counterfeiting to ‘compulsion’. The great media systems force contemporary users into the straitjacket of Art: everything is aesthetic and everything is kitsch at the same time. In the last twenty years, enjoyment has dominated, a category that Kant had excluded from aesthetic pleasure…

You no longer want a ‘thing’, object or gadget. But the how to wish…

Bad taste retains its primary and basic recognizability, which irresistibly attracts us, with aesthetic spite…