Enten-Würgespielzeug für Kinder ab 3 Jahre. Out of the blue KG, Lilienthal, Deutschland, “Choke a Duck“ 2009.
I don’t know what this means, but if you are in Berlin you absolutely must go to this exhibition:
“If we want to discern what good taste is, we must first eliminate bad taste.”
With this purpose in mind, the art historian and museum director Gustav E. Pazaurek opened his “Cabinet of Bad Taste” in the Stuttgart state crafts museum in 1909. Pazaurek developed a complex system to categorize all kinds of design mistakes, demonstrating them with actual examples.
In keeping with the philosophy of the Deutscher Werkbund, Pazaurek assumes that things have a great influence on people, both aesthetically and morally. Consequently, his catalogue of design mistakes presents a drastic nomenclature which we naturally find disconcerting today. The rubrics with which Pazaurek labelled the objects read like an aesthetic penal code, a vocabulary of evil. The evil nature of the objects derives not from their purpose — from acts that could be performed with them — nor from their symbolism, but from the evil or badness that is manifested in their production, design and functional quality. via…
So this show, Evil Things: An Exhibition of Bad Taste is at the Museum der Dinge in Berlin. The press release is hilarious, and I am using every ounce of restraint not to post the entire thing. Here’s a taste:
In the last part of the exhibition, the visitor is invited to add to the Encyclopaedia by classifying and situating his own “evil things” in the field of playful and moral dimensions.
BAD TASTE, Systematized by Gustav E. Pazaurek
I. Material Mistakes
Bad and Spoiled Materials
Inferior materials such as knotty wood, poor alloys, or toxic substances; products that are poorly or cheaply processed or manipulated to conceal flaws; distorted moulds, heat checks, spotted or bubbled glaze, colour flaws, glazing flaws, reams.
Bizarre Materials
Objects of human bone, skin, fingernails or hair; rhinoceros horns, ostrich eggs, shed antlers, animal teeth, vertebrae, feathers, fish scales; lizards, lobster claws, butterfly wings, beetle wings, live fireflies, egg membrane, cherry stones, spices, hazelnuts, straw, pine cones, mosses, tree fungus, cork, coloured sand, vegetables, sugar, butter, ice, bread, etc.
Read the rest here.
