2011.25.2
Quote Plate from White Modernism
Artist
Josiah McElheny
(Boston, MA, 1966 - )
Title
Quote Plate from White Modernism
Creation Date
2008
Century
early 21st century
Dimensions
17 1/2 in. x 14 in. (44.45 cm x 35.56 cm)
Object Type
print
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
Silkscreen and aquatint etching on Somerset Satin and Surface Gampi
Credit Line
Museum Purchase, Barbara Cooney Porter Fund
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
2011.25.2
The following quote is from Ornament and Crime, a 1908 treatise by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos and one of the defining texts of modern design: The urge to decorate one’s face and anything else within reach is the origin of the fine arts. It is the childish babble of painting. But all art is erotic. A person of our times who gives way to the urge to daub the walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate. What is natural in the Papuan or the child is a sign of degeneracy in a modern adult. I made the following discovery, which I passed on to the world: The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornamentation from objects of everyday use. Reading Loos’s “discovery” with a century of critical distance, McElheny questions what happens to human difference amid the promise of minimal, pure form: “If you actually read Adolf Loos’s ‘Ornament and Crime’,” he says, “It’s about making the world white in some way. It says, really directly, that primitive people are the people who decorate, and that the natural course of progress in man is to remove this decorative impulse from our psyche...I think all of it is very colonialist and racist and sexist and fascistic.”
Object Description
THE QUOTE ON THE PAGE SAYS:
The urge to decorate one’s face and
anything else within reach is the origin
of the fine arts. It is the childish babble
of painting. But all art is erotic.
A person of our times who gives way
to the urge to daub the walls with erotic
symbols is a criminal or a degenerate.
What is natural in the Papuan or the child
is a sign of degeneracy in a modern adult,
I made the following discovery, which
I passed on to the world:
The evolution of culture is synonymous
with the removal of ornamentation from
objects of everyday use.
“Ornament and Crime”
-Adolf Loos, 1908
