Two pictures. The first, on the left, which I took a few hours ago, is of my lemon squeezer. This cost me - what? - about a quid? And on the right is world famous designer Philippe Starck's world famous redesign of the same object.
It's a brilliantly appealing idea, but apparently the thing itself doesn't work very well. I'm guessing that the juice doesn't go quite where it should, that, for example, it goes down the legs as well as down from the point in the middle) and that the pip problem is … a problem. My one may demand a two stage process, but it does the job.
But the price of the Philippe Starck Lemon Squeezer is right, i.e. very high, and lots of people buy the as an art object, confident that lots more will be frightened away by that same price, and presumably also by the fact that as an actual lemon squeezer it is unsatisfactory.
With my Intellectual Property hat on, I ask: is anyone else allowed to take the same basic idea and try to make it work properly, and if not why not? And while they're about it, to lower the price? Do they have to ask Philippe Starck's permission?
In general, what is the fate of brilliant ideas, badly exploited? Great scripts, abominably acted or directed, with hideous camera work? Great concepts for tin openers, that could open tins brilliantly, but which actually don't because that extra bit of work that should have been done wasn't done?
But there is no denying that Starck's Lemon Squeezer is very elegant, in an Invaders from Mars in a fifties film kind of way. But is it really just a piece of sculpture, that merely looks like it could squeeze lemons? (Later in the evening, Robert Hughes made a similar point about that famous Rietveld chair. It may look like a chair, he said. But after carefully sitting on it, he declared it to be sculpture.)
I learned about this Lemon Squeezer because there was a TV show about Starck on BBC4 TV last night.
Good designers, said the Hostile Talking Head talking about Starck on the telly, do ordinary things extraordinarily well. Starck does extraordinary things, but rather badly.
They showed some Starck designed hotels. I hate hotels. Starck's hotels look to me like hotels only more so, so I assume that I would hate his hotels even more. They are like James Bond sets, of the "sophisticated" sort, where gambling takes place and where Bond says things like "Bond. James Bond." Except that they are even more kitschy and decadent and hideous.
The Hostile Talking Head said that these hotels photograph better than they work as hotels. The presenter is called them super-elitist, and ultra fashionable, and added that there's nothing so unfashionable as an ex-fashion.
Hostile Talking Head: the best design is like the best English butler. It's always there, but you don't notice it.
Starck, you notice. What he truly excels at, the Hostile Talking Head had said, in his first sally of the programme, is self promotion. I know this because they're now showing the programme again, and I can inform you that the Hostile Talking Head is Stephen Bayley. He's quite a good self-promoter too.
