Core77

Hot off the server! On Design Observer this hour, design entrepreneur and impresario Murray Moss responds to last Sunday's NYTimes "Design Loves a Depression" essay by Michael Cannell we told you about here. If you haven't already, go ahead and read it before you take Moss's Design Observer essay. The whole thing is compelling, but here's the warm up:

Design loves a depression? I can assure you that design, along with painting, sculpture, photography, music, dance, fashion, the culinary arts, architecture, and theatre, loves a depression no more than it loves a war, a flood, or a plague. Michael Cannell's article is regressive and mean-spirited, and it demands a response.

And here's the knock-out punch:

This is not a celebratory moment for design. Design-related businesses, including my own, are suffering, and will most likely continue to face very difficult times in the coming year, at the very least. That said, I deeply resent the tone of comeuppance in Mr. Cannell's article, his condescending, parochial-school-matronly, Calvinistic reproach of the design that flourished during what he refers to as the "economic boom." (I would use the term Renaissance). None of us--gallerists, collectors, architects, interior designers, and especially journalists--who love and respect the designers and the industrialists who have grown design during the past fifteen years should be smugly waving our fingers at those unruly designers who dared to speak without raising their hands, who fluidly transverse the terrain between art and design and lead us--some of us, evidently, resisting all the way--to new possibilities, way beyond those imagined by their counterparts in the mid-20th century.