Where does the Design Museum go from here, assuming it will never again merge with the V&A (historical note: the museum sprang from a 1980s experiment, the Boilerhouse Project, at Sir Roy Strong’s V&A, but everyone involved - Conran, Strong, Stephen Bayley - fell out with everyone else)? The designer/industrialist James Dyson has now settled in as chairman, replacing Conran who, as ever, keeps a beady eye on things. Both these men have cautiously channeled some of their personal wealth into the enterprise. So it has some more money than it used to, even a small slice of public funding as well.
It wants to expand. It is making the first significant changes to its permanent displays in its existence, with decade-old exhibits making way for a series of “Design Now” exhibitions on hip young designers. In November these will give way to a new Contemporary Design Gallery. The Museum will soon move tentatively out into the public realm with a glass-box, frequently changing display called “The Tank” out on the riverside from July 20. It’s intended to act as a teaser for what’s inside the Museum and thus lure people in.
But perhaps the most significant instance of new thinking will come in September, when the “Memphis Remembered” exhibition opens. Memphis was the kooky name for the postmodern Milan-based early 1980s design collective that revelled in kitsch iconography and cheap materials. It gave the finger to rational, modernist design and went right round the world. The original Design Museum was very much a post-Memphis modernist reaction. And now, the wheel has come full circle. Memphis is historic, so it’s not a threat, so it’s OK. Or perhaps everyone has just grown up and stopped squabbling at last.
Details: www.designmuseum.org
How design is sold to the British.
The 19th century was when the modern phenomenon of the “design pundit” emerged. The uber-tastemaker of the day was civil servant and designer William Cole, who masterminded the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace and founded what was to become the Victoria and Albert Museum. Cole set up a “Chamber of Horrors” in the nascent V&A pillorying things like bad-taste wallpaper.
“Utility furniture” made during the Second World War and after was an excuse to foist ornament-free “good design” on the public, which mostly hated it. After the war the Design Council was set up. In the 1960s it even became fashionable with its public Design Centres and its triangular seal on approved goods.
Internationalism arrived in the 1980s with the V&A’s Boilerhouse Project, which later mutated into the Design Museum. Meanwhile, the confused contents of the Millennium Dome finally marked the end of British state paternalism over design. Or did it? History tells us that there will always be people telling us what to like - and that we will usually ignore them.
