MURKETING

In The New York Times Magazine: Digital Antiquing

BRILLIANT MISTAKES
Band handwriting, warped vinyl, flawed images: Digital tools ape them all

Progress toward perfection has genuine skeptics, who insist on sticking with marginalized tools. The newer thing may seem less flawed or simply easier, such traditionalists insist, but it sacrifices warmth, soul, depth, personality, chance and the human touch. They must have a point, because practically every antiquated creative process ends up inspiring some kind of digital filter, effect or add-on designed explicitly to mimic its singular properties. The upshot is a form of progress toward perfecting flaws.

Read the column in the July 25, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Semiotics of Abandonment

ART WITH ABANDON
Adding color to the visual language of unused property

This isn’t utopian-future optimism but a kind of joyful celebration right in the midst of challenging reality. More to the point: In the lingering hangover of the real estate bust, unoccupied housing has become a much more familiar feature of neighborhoods, urban and suburban, that is hardly limited to Detroit.

Read the column in the July 11, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Fate of a new global tchotchke

HAVING A BLAST:
Why a plastic commodity became a cultural signifier.

The meaning(s) of the souvenir that tourists carry home will ultimately be shaped by the nature of the surprisingly heated disagreement.

Read the column in the July 4, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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— > By the way: MKTG Tumblr vuvuzela-stuff tracked here.

In The New York Times Magazine: True gadget transparency

OPEN SECRETS:
Technology has made the consumer marketplace transparent – sometimes.

We’re accustomed to finding what we want with a simple click, but a lot remains murky until bad news pushes it into the open. … What if finding out where and how our stuff was made was as easy as finding the lowest price or peer opinions? What impact would it have on consumer choices? Wouldn’t that be a more meaningful form of transparency in a global economy?

Read the column in the June 27, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Merit badges

LIFELONG EARNING
The appeal of the (sort of) grown-up, geeky merit badge

Much about the function of the merit badge actually fits pretty neatly with the spirit of the time. The nagging sense of needing to acquire new skills, all the time, is palpable. That anxiety dovetails with a self-improvement ethos that fills whole sections of bookstores, cross-matched with the various ways technology prods us to tabulate parodic amounts of personal-behavior data. If we rack up badges for our online “achievements,” we may as well do the same for our offline victories, too. And if we use a form associated with preadulthood, it makes sense, since all of the above comes with a chaser of nostalgia and widespread reluctance to completely put away childish things.

Churlish? To the contrary, I can’t think of a more sweetly upbeat response to a turbulent culture than an actual grown-up sporting a merit badge.

Read the column in the June 13, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Bumper-sticker meanings

STUCK ON YOU:
Analyzing what bumper stickers say about drivers — and to whom.

Who cares what strangers in other cars think about you? One answer is that a lot of people must care or there would be no such thing as bumper stickers.

Read the column in the June 6, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: “Five Finger” Shoes

BARE NECESSITY:
Rejecting baroque shoe technology — for minimalist technology.

When such rationalist techno-complexity piles up, it inevitably attracts a naturalist and human-centric reaction. In this case: What if the athletic shoe is a dumbed-up version of the human foot? How about, in other words, running with no shoes at all?

Read the column in the May 30, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In the New York Times Magazine: What’s a gift worth?

VALUING $0
Measuring creative gifts, from worthless to priceless

Think not just of written words but of images, artworks, videos, songs, craft how-to pages and on and on. Surely it’s the case that never before have so many creators offered so much to so many for $0. A result, in effect, is a gift glut.

Read the column in the May 16, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: A thing that sells itself

JUST PRICELESS:
Assessing the value of an art object that sells itself.

…. Even if [he] won the object, created by a young artist named Caleb Larsen, his ownership would be tentative: the technical innards of “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter” carried a program that would relist the thing on eBay every week, forever.

Read the column in the May 9, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In the NYT Magazine: Burton’s Olympic pants go retail

UNIFORMITY
The retailing of a representation of a faux-authentic uniform

In March, Burton Snowboards announced that later this year it would begin selling pants similar to those worn by the U.S. Olympic snowboarding team. There is a logic to this move, because the most notable thing about the team’s uniform was how much it looked like a trendy retail product….

Read the column in the May 2, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: The idea of the cassette

HIT REWIND
There is little to be nostalgic for about the cassette tape — except nostalgia itself.

Over the last couple of years, sales of vinyl records increased; the numbers aren’t huge, but they sparked a lot of public musing about the format’s qualities. Cassette sales, meanwhile, steadily dwindled to a mere 34,000 last year through the retail venues tracked by SoundScan. Considering this not long ago, I concluded that the romance associated with vinyl doesn’t apply to its longtime analog rival. I was wrong about that. In looking (and asking) around online, I realize now that there is extensive evidence of ongoing appreciation for the cassette — or at least the idea of the cassette.

Read the column in the April 25, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

And YES, this column is the result of my earlier post on this site, The Idea of The Cassette: THANKS to all who responded to that and alerted me to excellent examples. I am sorry I couldn’t include everything in the column. (Also, for the record: I have zero control over what gets hotlinked on The Times site.)

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In The New York Times Magazine: Early adopter = sucker move?

IPAD ENVY
Giving early adopters what they want.

What these people are likely to get for their consumption daring is a chance to experience every single glitch or flaw that will be tweaked and patched in the months ahead. Also the guarantee that they’re paying full price (just like the early adopters who paid $600 for an iPhone in June 2007; the price was cut to $400 two months later, and angry adopters were mollified by a $100 store credit ). And how surprised will they be if a year from now Apple introduces a new, cheaper and decisively better iPad? Sure, they get first-on-the-block bragging rights — assuming that it turns out iPad adoption proves worth bragging about. Somebody was first to buy the Newton, the Edsel and any number of other products that we don’t even remember the names of anymore, because later adopters never materialized….

Read the column in the April 11, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Slightly Used

SLIGHTLY USED
What can we learn from our (seemingly) pointless tools?

A predictable thought crossed my mind: how funny, how absurd, that the cutting tool, the ur-thing of functionality, has evolved into a premium-priced stylish object that seems more suitable for display than for use. But after listening to the first 30 episodes of the radio series (it starts up again in May), which bring the story up to about 300 B.C., I’ve had second thoughts about that glib analysis.

Read the column in the April 4, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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In The New York Times Magazine: Why Starbucks can’t duck the gun controversy

–> Hey! Consumed is back! It’s in tomorrow’s issue of The New York Times Magazine, so go buy the paper, even though you can read the column below.

CROSSFIRE
Starbucks would prefer to be left out of the latest gun-rights debate. Here’s why it can’t.

Drawing a line between official institutions of lawmaking and the daily sphere where citizens move about is not so easy. And one thing the pistols-and-Frappuccino moment has demonstrated is that this is acutely true for a business with an image carefully devised to blur the line between public space and commercial space.

Read the column in the March 28, 2010, New York Times Magazine, or here.

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Time out!

The truly brilliant among you noticed that last week’s column included a note specifying that Consumed is on hiatus until late March (thus: no column in today’s magazine, you see).

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to post links of note at the Consumed Facebook page. Also of course the action will continue unabated at Significant Objects, where I sometimes contribute actual writing in additional to my, uh, curatorial skills.

And there’s always the fascinating MKTG Tumblr, and the scandalously underrated Things That Look Like Other Things, and all the other stuff hyped in the sidebars on this very site, all for your entertainment and edification. Oh, and here’s something I wrote for The Awl. Enjoy it all, why don’t you.