At first sight, all branches of design seem to be prospering. “The obsession with designer brands continues to expand, embracing home products, clothing accessories, and fashions for adults and young people. This became a sort of religion for the consumer society of the nineties, and was deeply embedded in all socio-economic group levels”. This new culture writes about design and fills the sky with bright new stars. Design activities all over the world are increasing exponentially. Design reacts to technology faster than art, and this is very conspicuous as regards the digital developments that have been taking place ever since the mid-seventies.
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‘When I buy art, I want to keep it separate. You don’t want people to think you are doing what you are doing because you want to make your company better.’
(Miuccia Prada quoted by Specter, 2004)
In 2002 a sculpture by artist Tom Sachs entitled Prada Death Camp (1998) caused outrage when shown in the exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art at the Jewish Museum in New York. The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman (2002) reported how he had received ‘anguished emails’ from Holocaust survivors stunned at the inclusion of the model of a concentration camp made from a Prada hatbox. The controversy generated by the exhibition inevitably drew attention to the fashion brand and speculation about its response to an artist who had also created the Prada Toilet (1997). Well the critics needn’t have worried, ‘We really like his work,’ said Pandora Asbaghi from the Fondazione Prada (a contemporary arts foundation owned and managed by Prada), who also confirmed that Prada had given Sachs an unlimited supply of shoeboxes.
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