Arts + Culture

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Disaster Relief 101: No Door Hanger Left Behind

Door hangers seem the perfect metaphor for FEMA’s failure: they’re one-dimensional, unnecessarily complicated, and basically useless.

Willis Regier|Essays

In Remembrance of Richard Eckersley

Design by Richard Eckersley. (Detail from copyright page of Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, 1989)Richard Eckersley died on April 16, having given the best years of his life to establishing …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Art of Thinking Through Making

I am at heart an irrepressible classicist who likes my type justified and prefers Merchant Ivory to Miramax. I'm an incorrigible Anglophile, a devoted Francophile and I am utterly convinced that my DNA is heavily weighted toward the first …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Propensity for Density

T-Shirt Detail, 2006. Designer unknown.On a recent trip to Los Angeles, we stayed with a friend whose remarkable art collection included work by Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin and the painter Squeak Carnwath, prompting more than a …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

A Sequence in Time

Euripedes, the Greek playwright, once observed that time would explain it all. It was a poetic suggestion, yet to date, remains somewhat inconclusive. True, the passage of time might be said to characterize everything from the Mexican …

William Drenttel|Essays

Meet Me in St. Louis: The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts

Exterior view, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Photograph by Robert Pettus, 2004.Nine months ago I went to St. Louis and had a memorable art experience. In and of itself, such an event should not seem so special. This is, after all, …

Lawrence Weschler|Essays

Languorous Bodyscapes

Mysterious Cloud Over Los Angeles, Photographer Unknown, November 1976.So I was visiting my friends Pepe and Dionora in Santiago, Chile, a while back — they're great art lovers and their apartment nests a collection of marvelous …

Dmitri Siegel|Essays

Broadcast vs. Broadband

Remember the early 1990s, when techno-evangelists promised that television as we know it would soon be replaced by a searchable database of streaming video available at any time on your computer? Today, with the near-ubiquity of …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Give Me Privacy or Give Me an ID Card

Illustration by Paula Scher for Subjective Reasoning, issue entitled "Useless Information," published by Champion Paper, 1992.When I was 11 years old, I saw my mother's passport for the first time. This seemingly inconsequential event was, …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

What We Talk About When We Talk About Design History

From the packaging of our belongings to the presentation of our surroundings, most of us recognize that design has, over the course of the past century, become a ubiquitous component in everyday life. Design is signage and graffiti and …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Freedom of Speech or Filching of Style? The New Law of Eminent Lo-Mein

Fonts found at The Dollar Store, December, 2005.There has been a considerable amount of debate recently about the impact of DIY on the design disciplines, and nowhere has this issue seemed more unresolved than in discussions of …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The D Word

Online promo for House Hunters, HGTV, 2006.People who own homes understand the true meaning of the phrase "money pit." Expenses are constant, upkeep unstoppable, and the most vexing decisions are often dominated by things you never see: …