From 2004. Published elsewhere:

No one is impressed now by the Eiffel Tower or the first Macintosh the way people were when either first appeared. History describes the past, it doesn’t relive it. An expression of love is not love. All communication is mediated, by language, time, or both. The Eiffel Tower is still impressive as a piece of engineering and as a representative of a sort of 19th Century imagination, the first Mac is impressive to computer techs and software designers, and a charming relic to the rest of us. What was once a fascinating little box is now quaint.

Things age well that are semiotically complex, both flexible and resilient, they both change their shape -their meaning- and refuse to (here I’ll ignore those things that become complex by accident, like a lost fountain pen rediscovered after 20 years.) The cast iron tower that rises above Paris, rather than merely exhibiting or documenting a kind of imagination, manages to describe it in a way that someone who is not an engineer or a student of 19th century social history may find fascinating. It is still beautiful, and therefore contemporary: a thing too complex to be called either a relic from or a symptom of its time.

One of the many mistakes of the 20th century was to imagine it might be possible to know without doubt which of our creations would avoid obsolescence. An art or society of ideas, a dream of scientific socialism or of the morality of technological progress, all are predicated on the same assumption, that modernity could mean infallibility, as if a cursory reading of Freud could render one immune to the effects of the unconscious. Such confidence doesn’t work now any more than it did 80 years ago. It doesn’t work for Donald Rumsfeld, or Steve Jobs, any more than it did for Lenin or Le Corbusier. Apple only makes a single button mouse even though the software supports two, for reasons that a salesman admitted to me were “basically ideological.” Why not have a pinhole release for the data drive? Because in theory if not in fact CD’s never get stuck. To learn about Rumsfeld’s failures today all you have to do is read the paper. Conceptual idealism is popular now in art and politics, and in design, which unlike the others needs to be an optimistic effort. But what about the supposed opposite of an art of ideas? What is Taste?

Walking through the Neue Gallery, New York’s new temple of Viennese culture at the turn of the 20th century, I'm struck as always by a sense of thinness, of attenuation; the designs have that as their subject as much or more than skill, and everything in the place is marvellously crafted. But one form of decadence is defined by the sense that articulation and detail no longer heighten awareness but numb it. The theme here is not so much emptiness but inadequacy: the inadequacy of the beautiful in the face of the intelligent. The works in the Neu Gallery therefore are proudly, self-consciously, gratuitous and minor.

The first time I was in Barcelona I was amazed at the the rigor and precision of Gaudi’s Catalan Modernism. I had expected simple decadence, but the buildings, like tubs of melting ice cream, are neither decadent nor lazy but curious and open. And in a strange and beautiful way they aren’t mannered at all.

August Sander, Young Farmers, 1914
Yohji Yamamoto, in Wim Wenders’ Notebook on Cities and Clothes, is seen poring over a book of August Sander photographs, describing his envy of the subjects and their clothes. In Sander's photographs every figure wears a uniform, even if it’s only the tilt of his hat, and the uniform describes the person as the person describes the suit. Yamamoto the fashion designer is envious of purpose, of the space for expression it allows, of the weight of information carried by the fabrics and cuts, a weight that has accumulated over time by a commingling of tastes, free invention and necessity. It’s hard to predict which of our constructions will be remembered in this way, but there’s a lot to be said for at least understanding what has succeeded in the past, and why.