Defeating Deconstruction

(TIME FOR RECONSTRUCTION?)
Essentially deconstruction as a movement in fashion/ art/ design is based around frivolous skepticism, decoration and wit. Sometimes savage, sometimes bold it is still facetious.

It is tinkering around the metaphorical edges for the purpose of standing-out in the marketplace usually underpinned by flimsy if heartfelt philosophical or artistic justification.

It emerges from an historically romanticised idea of the value of the artist. And increasing fragmentation and refinement of tastes between seller and purchaser.

A deconstructive approach is one of individual idiosyncrisy where each auteur must protect their motifs.

In a culture where celebrity is constantly marketed, this is the means for individual designers to be recognised, get known, and 'become a brand'.

But if history rhymes, just as Victorian decoration now appears to be mostly folly, when people look back, the era of Deconstructive Decoration may be viewed as intellectuals vainly staring in the mirror while the house burnt down. Or maybe that is the point.

"Derrida's scepticism was directed inwardly, calling into question even the possibility of a questioning subject. This was the core of Derrida's contribution. He expressed not just the collapse of political ideologies at the end of the twentieth century, but the way that this collapse made meaning, and even the subjective agent himself, collapse into confusion."

"There is little doubt that Derrida was an erudite and learned philosopher, but his erudition was bent towards a destructive aim. In him the unreason of the age found its cunning articulator. The pernicious influence of Derrida's philosophy, underpinned by the confusion of the times, persists after him."