The photo on the left is from the June 06 Martha Stewart Living, on the right is the Baldizzi kitchen as recreated to c.1935 in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
The Museum is an imaginarium of immigrant struggle and veers, unfortunately, into quaint nostalgia. Its cleaned-up, prettified tableaux are irritatingly appealing to me. "People suffered social and economic privations in these stifling hell holes," I have to remind myself... and yet...that linoleum is... really cute.
The Martha aesthetic rarefies the commonplace and defamiliarizes it. It takes the everyday and makes it exclusive.
Oh this is very good. You and I should start a Weekend Philosophers Club. Or something. Perhaps I will make myself a business card:
ReplyDeleteAngela Voulangas
designer
weekend philosopher
Yes Martha commodifies, definitely. but on a basic level I was thinking she ("she" being stand-in for editorial voice) defamiliarizes. For instance, say there is an article about making giftboxes out of walnut shells (I am totally making this up). A little history about walnuts, a little background about tiny boxes, a very specific (commodified) list of tools, some ethereal photos... All of a sudden I'm feeling like "Wow, gifts... in a *nutshell*... Brilliant! That unusual surface of the shell...Wow."
Its very interesting, too, how the lower east side itself has become a fashionable place to live. Most residents may not be reading Martha's magazine (probably, they are TOO fashionable for that), but many share the emerging sensibility that it is desirable to live in a tenament. For this to occur, the poverty of tenament culture has to be mythologized out of history. Small apartments on crowded streets must be nostalgized into " a better, simpler, life". The slum associations must be purged and I think the feeling conjured by the tenament museum is part of this mythologizing.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great post--and good comments, too. Articulated some things about MS and about craft blogs/design blogs in general that I've been trying to formulate for a while.
ReplyDelete