#16 Beautiful and well made

We analyse the balance between beauty and goodness in the contemporary art world with Rosina Gómez Baeza, Director of the International Art Fair ARCO in Madrid. We understand Arco’s values to be the search for quality, internationality and the creation of heritage. Do you believe there is a balance between beauty and goodness in the business ...

Since 1951, when it was established by Achille Maramotti, the House has practically accompanied the unfolding of women’s fashion over the years, acclaimed from the start for the refined style of its apparel and the quality of its textiles. The Group is now present on the market with thirty lines, different in terms of looks and consumer target. T...

Little bodies of Siamese children joined together at the hips and huddled to form a group, arranged so as to appear to be posing: the statues of the Chapman brothers are horrific monstrosities. The statues of very young-looking but already sexually mature adolescents of the Japanese artist Tadashi Murakami are no less unsettling. His manga-looking,...

Paul Goldberger is the Dean of Parsons The New School for Design, and one of the nation’s most eminent critics and writers on architecture and design.  Dean Goldberger has helped shape public understanding of the social and political implications of design for nearly three decades. First, as the architecture critic of The New York Times, where h...

Conversation during a nice afternoon in Milan under a fair, sunny sky and everything else. Players and characters: Michele de Lucchi: the bearded inventor [MdL] Fabio Castelli: the bookshop owner Scrivàno: the chronicler Three preliminary remarks or so exchanged not without good reason. MdL “Nice and well made”. It’s doing thing...

The worn threads of a red Turkish carpet, a woman’s silk jacket, the strong lines of a golden pitcher, a hand-drawn wall map... Beauty as the result of the work and thought of a single craftsman fills Susan Vreeland with wonder. Meeting Art was such a strong experience in her life that she felt  “she wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive ...

I can’t help thinking of Carlo Petrini’s basic contention in his latest book, Good, clean and right. “If,” as he writes, “self-nourishment is an agricultural act, then production must be a gastronomic one.” What better way of expressing the osmotic relationship between the beautiful and the well made, which in gastronomy is tantamount t...

An open space under the sky of Cupertino in California. Software programmers, engineers and industrial designers brainstorming away in a closed room. A clear mission, an important challenge, that of turning an intuition into the reality of a simple and easily useable object. That’s how Apple products are born. It would be hard to consider them...

Beauty is not an end in itself nor is it merely a semantic concept that may translate into French as “jolie” or into Italian as “bello”. Beauty is something of far greater width, breadth and depth; it may refer as much to individuals as to objects, to ways of doing things, to production processes even. It’s only in the eighteenth century,...