March 27, 2012

Horse 1307 - At a museum – 10 points (Total: 446)

- China Pot and Hong Kong Chest of drawers. c.1898 at the Australian Museum.

This is one thing that really bugs me about modern... stuff. If in the 21st Century we can make a keyboard sound like instruments that don't even exist and with modern printing methods we have the potential to make really nice stuff, then why don't we have nice things?

A lot of the furniture in my house is made from wood which has been stained and gives a really earthy and warm look to the place. Presumably with modern production methods it would be even easier to make a chest of drawers like the one in this picture but I've never seen one even remotely like it on sale.
I find it odd that to find a lot of furniture, small appliances etc. that look this nice you need to go to antiquey sort of shops and probably pay more than what you would have paid at the time new.

Modern buildings, motor cars, fridges, toasters, radio sets... whilst all of these things are entirely functional, they all look sleek and cold.
It was weird this morning because I saw in the Law Courts a chap who had an iPod2 in a cover that made it look like a battered and well-loved book. In other words, someone had made a thing look like a) something you want to use and b) like a thing worth keeping.

All of the above encompasses why good stuff eventually ends up in museums. Partly it's because we want to remember the past and how much nicer it looked and partly so we can be inspired to create new stuff in the future.
I just wonder how much stuff post 1990 is going to end up in museums of the future. We seem to remember TV Shows, the way applications and operating systems looked - things that were on things but not the things themselves.

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