Abstract
Looking carefully at a middle-class commodity from the 1950s, we can engage in both an appreciation of applied ornament and sustain institutional critique. The discursive role of decorative art in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Good Design” shows haunts the contemporary exhibitionary complex. In revisiting the work of Eva Zeisel (1906–2011), designer and craftswoman, production can be sorted out in relation to diverse narratives: stories that are self-serving to commercial enterprise and the concept of “museum-quality” design, complexities of production and manufacture in ceramic tableware, and the seemingly constant contradiction between “missionaries” policing design reform and the realities of consumption and our affective relationships to applied ornament.
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