Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“I first saw the Bourse de Commerce, really saw it, in April of this year, but by that point I had been living in Paris for more than six years. I’d visited the Louvre of course, a minute or so stroll towards the river, and the Musée des Arts Decoratifs just down the street. I had seen shows at the Centre Pompidou, a few minutes to the east, and I had been, grudgingly, to the vast mall at Les Halles right next door many times when a trip to Muji was unavoidable. I’d even met friends after work at Iovine’s pizzeria one bitingly cold winter’s evening, almost directly opposite the Bourse’s grand entrance, but still, I’d never seen it. It was just one more pile of haughtily beautiful pale Parisian stonework that my eyes slid over and my brain failed to register.”

“Filling personal spaces with purely decorative, cheaply made trinkets—or tchotchkes, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, junk—is as American as apple pie. ‘Over time, Americans have decided—as individuals, as members of groups, and as a society—to embrace not just materialism itself but materials with a certain shoddy complexion,’ writes author Wendy A. Woloson in her book Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America.”

“Dance is associated with the emotional pinnacles of the human experience—love, joy, lust, art, insanity. Watching someone dance, or doing it ourselves, inspires emotions we struggle to access otherwise. This complicated relationship between movement and feeling is part of what makes us human. It makes sense, then, that artists and researchers working with robotics view the creation of a dancing robot as a meaningful tech frontier: How better to prove the skillful yet fundamentally unthreatening potential of humanoids than getting them to do the Mashed Potato?”

“While some art forms seem well suited to be experienced in a digital format, furniture is a more challenging proposition—to state the obvious, its key function is to be physically used. The chairs we sit on, the desks we work at, the cupboards we store things in, the lamps we read by: while this transactional relationship is far from the only function furniture fulfils, it is the most common, even when furniture is sold at high prices at auction or via design galleries. Even Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge (the current record holder for the most expensive furniture object sold by a living designer at £2.4m) can be used for reclining—however tentatively one might choose to do so.”