Over at Design Observer, Michael Bierut gives us his impressions of two exhibitions he saw at the Cooper Hewitt Museum. (I missed them both, drat.) In Homage to the Squares, Bierut is surprised by the Design is not Art exhibition, the one he'd been most looking forward to seeing:

The work of the artists left me surprisingly unmoved. It wasn't just that most of the furniture on display (and design according to artists mostly means furniture) looked almost sadistically uncomfortable... Instead, what I sensed was the chilly insularity of the fine art world.

He continued on to the Josef and Anni Albers exhibition with low expectations, soon exceeded:

What a delightful surprise to find room after room filled with rich, sensual objects, addressing an almost promiscuously wide range of problem types, from furniture to record covers. I felt like I was discovering an oasis after a parched desert trek.

His description of the exhibition catalog makes me want to order one right now (and regret, again, missing the show):

The most startling images in Designs for Living were the pictures of the modest suburban raised ranch... that Josef and Anni Albers lived in from 1970, so prosaic compared to the iconic Masters' Houses at the Dessau Bauhaus that was their home at the beginning of their marriage. While the photographs of the interiors betray the extraordinary taste of the of occupants, there is no mistaking that this is where everyday life happened, from the Sears furniture to the Formica tabletops, from the blender on the kitchen counter to the potted palm on the coffee table. Clearly, these artists delighted in the world around them. They were not afraid to be uncool.