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cimoreneSometimes you're innocently on the Internet taking in random trivia and you learn about Italian appliance manufacturer Smeg, well-known for their retro 50s-style fridges, collaborating some years ago with Dolce & Gabbana to make a line of hand-painted thirty-four thousand euro refrigerators, and you fall down a spiral of ranting about how much you hate rich people.
But then sometimes a reference or a caption leads you to google another phrase and learn for the first time about the origin of the Sicilian cart, el carretto siciliano, a centuries-old tradition of elaborate artistry and skilled craftwork and the stylistic inspiration for the D&G Smeg appliances. (There are smaller, hence less outrageous ones, like coffee makers and toasters, that they still continue to make, and they are still looking like hand-painted folk art and the key thing is that all D&G did was hire the actual folk artists who really do this painting to paint the things, giving them a salary, when the artists are still responsible for both the labor and the design, so D&G are essentially like... interior designers, here, except they aren't even designing an interior, they're just suggesting artisans to decorate one specific object that the artisans could be decorating themselves except Smeg wouldn't have hired them to do it without intervention.) ... But anyway, Sicilian carts are fantastic and knowing about them has added to my quality of life considerably.
But then sometimes a reference or a caption leads you to google another phrase and learn for the first time about the origin of the Sicilian cart, el carretto siciliano, a centuries-old tradition of elaborate artistry and skilled craftwork and the stylistic inspiration for the D&G Smeg appliances. (There are smaller, hence less outrageous ones, like coffee makers and toasters, that they still continue to make, and they are still looking like hand-painted folk art and the key thing is that all D&G did was hire the actual folk artists who really do this painting to paint the things, giving them a salary, when the artists are still responsible for both the labor and the design, so D&G are essentially like... interior designers, here, except they aren't even designing an interior, they're just suggesting artisans to decorate one specific object that the artisans could be decorating themselves except Smeg wouldn't have hired them to do it without intervention.) ... But anyway, Sicilian carts are fantastic and knowing about them has added to my quality of life considerably.
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Date: 4 Apr 2020 05:54 pm (UTC)