Bad taste?

I only recently got hip to the Museum of Things, in Berlin. I’d heard of it, but a chance encounter with Garth Johnson, an incredibly nice (and smart) guy, included him really setting me straight on the Museum of Things, and the fact that I really need to go.

But while I wait for the checks to materialize that will make it possible for me to travel to Berlin, I’ve at least been able to check out the site. And then I saw this Core77 item with the above image.

from the “Bad Taste Exhibition” at the Museum of Things in Berlin. 100 years ago, Gustav E. Pazaurek started a so called “Cabinet of Bad Taste” featuring the worst of the worst items ever made. The Museum of Things recently decided to give new life to Pazaurek’s historical and extremely complex efforts in documenting material mistakes, design mistakes, decorative mistakes and pure kitsch. Aart van Bezooyen brings us this great (and terrible!) gallery of over a century of bad taste!

But wait — look at those things. Bad taste? Those look like Significant Objects to me! Couldn’t any of them, or other similar objects in the MoT’s collection, be turned into valuable signifiers of very discriminating taste? I think so. Even this one. (Um, NSFW? Sorry.)