obsessions make my life _____ and my work _____

I keep going back to looking at the winning design for the commemorative Dutch 5 Euro coin, for which the brief concerned 'the Netherlands and architecture'.

It's clever, but I'm not sure. Architecture represented as a list of names seems more like celebrity culture than relating to the built environment, especially if - as the artist's description mentioned - popularity in Google determined the name order. Sure, someone might be intrigued and go looking into, say, Nathalie de Vries just because they're intrigued by the name, but being interested or affected by the work and then finding out who's responsible seems more interesting than cementing Rem Koolhaas as a star.

The Queen's portrait also seems to suffer the same fate as any image made up of sparse points, which isn't too flattering. I love the idea of the books and their edges forming the outline of the country, but the books as a representation seems even further into celebrity and unrelated, external validation.

(It did remind me how many Dutch architects make work I like, though.)

I wonder whether it's ever possible to make a successful icon - not because architecture is any more special or complex, necessarily, than the other things distilled into a symbol. The architecture of big names and awards is made up of photographs, sometimes rendering, and maybe even drawings, and those images come to represent the buildings for the huge percentage of the world who will not make it to the buildings or spaces themselves. It's a pity that the image would supplant the thing itself, the environment constructed for its users and inhabitants and passers-by and passers-through, and reducing it further in this way loses even the small remaining connection, like band names written on the canvas schoolbags of kids who can't hear, like food as menus that will never be tasted.

The reverse faces of Euro banknotes are just as reductive, though. Styles, periods, names and rules, like a frozen lesson in art appreciation that fails to engage and stays as an aesthetic elite, beauty for highbrow smalltalk's sake.

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Photo by rotkehlchen

Another project involving Euro coins which has been on my mind lately is Sagmeister's obsessions make my life worse and my work better. It's my favourite project in THINGS I HAVE LEARNED IN MY LIFE SO FAR, and its fate is almost as interesting as the piece itself.