Reblog: It takes the everyday and makes it exclusive.
The photo on the left is from the June 06 Martha Stewart Living, on the right is the Baldizzi kitchen as recreated to c.1935 in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
The Museum is an imaginarium of immigrant struggle and veers, unfortunately, into quaint nostalgia. Its cleaned-up, prettified tableaux are irritatingly appealing to me. “People suffered social and economic privations in these stifling hell holes,” I have to remind myself… and yet…that linoleum is… really cute.
The Martha aesthetic rarefies the commonplace and defamiliarizes it. It takes the everyday and makes it exclusive.
[Originally posted by Angela Voulangas at (what is this?): aesthetic laundry: notes]
The comments are interesting too, via things magazine.
September 17th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
Its very interesting, too, how the lower east side itself has become a fashionable place to live. Most residents may not be reading Martha’s magazine (probably, they are TOO fashionable for that), but many share the emerging sensibility that it is desirable to live in a tenament. For this to occur, the poverty of tenament culture has to be mythologized out of history. Small apartments on crowded streets must be nostalgized into ” a better, simpler, life”. The slum associations must be purged and I think the feeling conjured by the tenament museum is part of this mythologizing.