Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Planet as Festival: Study for a Large Dispenser of Waltzes, Tangos, Rock and Cha-Cha, project (Perspective)
Ettore Sottsass Italian, born Austria
Not on view
In 1972 Casabella magazine published a series of lithographs and drawings by Sottsass, titled the Planet as Festival, finalized and colored by Tiger Tateishi. The series contributed to a long tradition of "paper architecture," which proposed visionary, utopian ways of life by reimagining the physical structures of society. Sottsass determined that those concerned with architecture and city planning had limited their thinking to what he described as "the insane, sick, dangerous and aggressive idea that men must live only to work and must work to produce and then consume." His disdain for consumerism had not abated since the 1950s, so he imagined a world, filled with art, music, dance, and illicit drugs, in which individuals "come to know by means of their bodies, their psyche, and their sex, that they are living."