Why Objects Enthrall Us
Why is it that a piece of decorative art sells for 10 times less than a painting from the same period, and of the same quality and intensity as the artwork? “One of them,” Deyan Sudjic said to the packed crowd at the Getty Museum, “is cursed with the burden of utility, and the other is not.” Sudjic, director of the Design Museum London and author of The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects, went on to explain that, as the sociologist Thorstein Veblen said, societies tend …
