HONORABLE MENTION

After reading about it in the NYT’s on Thursday, Cara and I were down in SoHo today to check out the Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines show at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in Little Italy, a place so casually integrated (disguised) into the environment it’d be easy to miss. The show was fun and inspiring, if not a bit tight with the space and displays, and is a perfect reminder that contemporary design movements borrow so extensively from previous decades (this sample primarily focused on the 60s and 70s) that nobody these days is really saying anything new.

Modern graphic design (and fashion) owes a lot (ok all) of its momentum and subsequent hype from a generally myopic and mnemonically challenged public that continually believes designers are reinventing the wheel whenever someone sits down at a computer and cranks out yet another poster, album cover or illustrative work. Things are happening so quickly in this pluralistic age it’s a good reminder to go to places like this and pay respects to the plethora of talented and often forgotten individuals who paved the way for the unstoppable and necessary appropriation of ideas, that for most appearances (there are of course exceptions) is a conceptual pile up at the end of a very long hallway of visual history.