A crucial element of good product design is not letting the design get in the way.  Look at Karim Rashid’s designs – they’re stunning formally, but so idiosyncratic and expressive, so “Karim,"  that it’s unlikely they’d find a comfortable place in your home.  The best product design is egoless, and the best-designed products, however precious, fall right into your life.

That’s one remarkable aspect of the work of Dieter Rams, the legendary product designer for Braun.  (His SK4 record player is shown above.)  I have a calculator, coffee pot and coffee grinder that are all Rams’ designs.  And while they’re great-looking that doesn’t interfere with how I use them.  They give me pleasure but they aren’t anything particularly special – I stuff them in the mess of my desk drawer and kitchen cabinets along with everything else.  In a review of the new monograph about Rams’ work, ”As Little Design as Possible,“ I make the obvious comparison between Rams’ work at Braun and Jonathan Ive’s work at Apple.  The devices that Ives has created for Apple (the colored iMacs, the iPod, the iPhone) are seductive, innovative things that, like Rams’, somehow, seem unfussy and instantly familiar.  For product designers, it’s an awfully difficult trick.

Is a great subject all that it takes to make a great portrait?  That’s what I wonder after seeing the Malick Sidibe show at Jack Shanmain, which closes today.  The exhibit ranges from small formal portraits to larger, documentary photographs by the celebrated Malian photographer.  The real stunners are the studio portraits of young men and women.  They’re not to commemorate any special occasion but simply to record how fabulous their subjects look, and boy do they look fabulous.  The woman wear crazily patterned robes and cat-eye glasses, and the men wear bell-bottom trousers and panama hats trimmed with feathers.  Sidibe was in the right place (Bamako) at the right time (the 1960’s and 1970’s) to capture this perfect storm of style.

More than any fashion photographer Sidibe reminds me of Nan Goldin, who photographed her clique of hard-living artist friends in New York through the 1980’s.  I don’t think we’re attracted to qualities of these photographs, but to the people inside them, to their style and their spirit, and to the small, brilliant world that they’ve constructed for themselves. (Although Sidibe’s world, full of dancing and music, seems much more fun that Goldin’s, full of bruises and trackmarks.)  Sidibe’s work was appropriated, unsurprisingly, by Janet Jackson in the 1997 video for “Got ‘Til It’s Gone."  The images are easy, Afro-centric, and immensely fashionable.  But there’s something else at work in Sidibe’s portraits too.  These are photographs of people who look great and have the untroubled self-confidence know that they do.

The keffiyeh might be the perfect summertime scarf, large, lightweight and light-colored.  I love mine, purchased at Camden Market for two quid, and carry it with me through the week.  It’s easy to forget that the scarf is part of the traditional Arab headware for men and sometimes associated, negatively, with Yasser Arafat and the PLO.  Balenciaga made a high fashion version in 2007, with enameled metal coins dripping alluringly from the edges, and Keira Knightley wore it in Vogue.  Chain retailers like H&M, Topman and Sears (really) have sold them.  And they’ve been become, along with fake Chanel sunglasses and five dollar umbrellas, a staple for New York street vendors.  Rachel Ray wore a keffiyeh in a Dunkin Donuts commercial a while ago and got into a spot of trouble.  But, largely, like camouflage pants, the keffiyeh has lost its political charge.

Then this summer a cab driver who’d immigrated from Palestine noticed my scarf and asked my pointblank about my political allegiances.  I was spooked and set it aside for a while, but not for terribly long.  I’ve looked at it more closely and know that it’s not a “real,” artisinal, heirloom-quality keffiyeh.  It’s got a very simple pattern, a crooked hem, and huge flaws in the weaving.  I’m not concerned that the scarf is radical or countercultural.  (If it made it’s way into Rachel Ray wardrobe, it’s certainly not.)  But now each time I put it on I remember that it means something different to people who wear it traditionally.  I can’t put mine down, and yet I just can’t shake the feeling that it’s a fashion faux pas.

Just before the explosion and shootings in Oslo, I went to see “North by New York: New Scandinavian Art” at  Scandinavia House.  I went with immense curiosity, wanting to know more about what this part of the world was like, to round out what I’d imagined from watching Ingmar Bergman and reading Henning Mankell.  But the exhibit didn’t really congeal – the paintings and photographs weren’t held together by any principle (formal, thematic, tonal) at all.  The curator, Robert Storr, gave a thoughtful introductory lecture the night I was there.  He said that this was precisely the point, that Scandinavia is no longer “Scandinavia,” and that these countries are increasingly pluralistic ones, plagued by the same troubles (violence, intolerance, drugs) that all other industrialized countries are.  But when the folks at Scandinavia House set out to shape the exhibit, didn’t they have something, anything, in mind?  Surely the Scandinavian landscape, its languages, its socialist governments, its very long summer nights, shape a culture with unique qualities, qualities that find some expression in the art?

There are very fine paintings here, in particular three by Sara Vide Ericson.  She paints figures, and parts of figures, against flattened backdrops, in contorted and strangely affectless poses.  It’s as if she’s drained each image of all particularity, aiming at a higher, symbolic truth that never arrives.  She handles the paint in flat, luminous fields.   Her figures remind me of those by the great 80’s New York City painters Eric Fischl (they’re athletic but not erotic) and Francesco Clemente (they’re interior and dreamy).  Is the quality of light in these paintings Scandinavian?  Is the emotional detachment in these paintings Scandinavian?  Although recent events suggest that Scandinavia is just like the rest of the world, I’d like to believe otherwise.