March 26th, 2008
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Working on projects for designhotels means staying at places like this…
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…And this. But not always. See, design is a highly addictive thing. It is a drug. Uninterrupted exposure to design screws you up in the head big time. You mutate on it to a degree that you lose whatever faculties of mind required for appreciation of forms and ultimately your touch with reality. You always need some distance from design so you can see it, so you can notice it. Otherwise, design becomes a commonplace, if it does not disappear altogether. In extreme cases, you are fed up with design; it makes you sick. And this is not a positive relation to the object from the point of view of persons for whom design is a profession.
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Therefore, working on projects for designhotels just as well means staying at places like this…sort of.
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With an address like this…
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In the neighbourhood like this.
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Dieting on something like this.
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At designhotels, we have a mental rehab program called designgulags. Or maybe we don’t – which is to say, we should. Anyway, I am the one who undergoes the treatment from time to time. Whenever there is a chance, I implant my perverted mentality into the zero-design environments where I cleanse my mind of all preconceived notions, re-energize my perceptions and from where I emerge revitalized and inspired to deal with more designs.
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That was my rationale for escaping from Thailand going for a week to Penang, an island in Malaysia. For the purpose of this discourse, let’s bracket the truth for a while. And the truth is that I would have been kicked out from Thailand, if I had not moved myself – on account that my visa had expired. I had to renew it. This is normally done by exiting the country in any direction and entering it again. I could re-enter Thailand immediately, making a u-turn hundred meters into Malaysia, but I thought that my unavoidable presence in Malaysia was a practical opportunity to explore something else of what Southeast Asia had to offer on the top of $800/night villas. Or, properly speaking, on the bottom.
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CONTINUE READING THE STORY: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Design & Art | No Comments »
March 12th, 2008
The second part of the photo series on our design trip from Koh Tao to Koh Samui island in the Gulf of Thailand. Here is a link to the first part.
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This one has some Jackson Pollack quality - though desaturated.
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Another one that looks like a complete abstract painting.
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Can’t stop adding them on.
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FOLLOW THE LINK TO SEE THE REST: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Hospitality & Travel | No Comments »
March 4th, 2008
“With changes in technology and rapidly altering notions of what culture actually is, including ideas about making the arts a less elitist affair, architects were encouraged to ask fundamental questions”
There in London they from time to time pose right questions. I’ll do some deconstruction: It seems like the whole bunch of full-fledgling aesthetes (freethinkers who think on topics most people would not bother thinking about for a second) have grown up into the light of understanding that searching for art in the art museums or art galleries is as silly a pursuit as looking for seafood in the fish market, aspirin in the drugstore, or sand in the sandpit — silly for reasons that it is most definitely and inevitably there. Indeed, what’s the challenge? It cannot fail to be there by the power of classification found in the yellow pages. You simply cannot wander past, if you are smart enough to follow directions in the city guidebook. Otherwise, take a cab to the doors. That is why heroic art-hunters, I presume, find it beneath their dignity to look for art in such tautologically prompting places. What sort of hunt and, consequently, discovery is it? Spotting art in the space specifically set up for art to be spotted is tantamount in significance to discovery of America flying American Airlines on the Thanksgiving Day discount rate — a feat a bit too easily accomplishable. There is nothing in these places for an ambitious aesthete to unearth; all discoveries have already been explicitly made for him/her by other aesthetes — primarily to their own pride and joy. What you see on display is what they think art is — not you. You either subscribe to their thinking or not. Art museums, galleries and all other traditional venues give themselves up as the last resorts for non-too-clever and non-too-brave types — for pseudo-aesthetes.
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Art space of the Future: Not too distant, not too elitist…
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Now this seems to be a hot issue in London. Or may be not. May be it is just me. Well, at least some begin to wonder: If not the galleries and museums, what kind of arts space will be relevant to future generations? How can art space better reflect the nature of the arts? Good and timely questions. Yet, there is something fundmentally wrong with this sort of curiosity. In the manner these questions are addressed, they still smack of a possibility of and actually a universal need for a space that is “better” than other spaces — a callous conservative idea, if you think about it. Posing these right questions in an attempt to transcend the current notion of art space, the forward-thinking theorists from London still exhibit the mind-set of stock-keepers. While effecting a conceptual shift, they preserve in their problematics the notion of the most adequate space per se. The art space of the future is not just any space.
Ok, let it be a non-space, then. The global non-space is where art is unrestrained by location, not defined by its absolute situation (art is whatever there is in the museum, gallery or some new locale to be found most appropriate for it); where it is perfectly everywhere. In the public toilet, for instance…
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