Image courtesy of Cooper Hewitt

Beauty – Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt

Beauty – Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial  is the fifth installment of the museum’s signature contemporary design exhibition series. With a focus on aesthetic innovation, Beauty celebrates design as a creative endeavor that engages the mind, body, and senses. With more than 250 works by 63 designers and teams from around the globe, it is organized around seven themes: extravagant, intricate, ethereal, transgressive, emergent, elemental, and transformative.

Image courtesy of Cooper Hewitt

The exhibition is installed on the first and third floors of the museum and offers an immersive, multisensory experience that guides the visitor through a dramatic procession of the individual works. With projects ranging from experimental prototypes and interactive games to fashion ensembles and architectural interventions, Beauty presents works of astonishing form and function while examining the essential question: “Why beauty now?”

Image courtesy of Cooper Hewitt

Curated by Andrea Lipps and Ellen Lupton the exhibition explores the concept of beauty across contemporary visual culture, showcasing artefacts, prototypes and installations from a wide range of art and design fields. Beauty encompasses a wide range of exhibits from everyday objects like lamps, furniture and household products, to more specialised endeavours like haute couture, digital illustration and perfumery, all the way to extraordinary pieces.

Image courtesy of Cooper Hewitt

This exhibition seeks out objects, images, places, and materials that touch the body and mind. Nearly everything is more or less stylish, elegant and sensuously attractive. But if you’re looking for a kind of beauty that stuns, that makes your pulse race, gives your stomach butterflies and pushes you to the brink of fainting, you’ll be disappointed. There’s little that you could call mind-bogglingly beautiful in the show because “Beauty” is subjective, then it is reccomended that you see the exhibition as an open-ended inquiry.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, NYC
Beauty – Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial
Until August 21, 2016

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