11 Utterly Useless Things You'll Want To Own

11 Utterly Useless Things You'll Want To Own
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British artist Jeremy Hutchison collaborated with factory workers from around the world to create a series of dysfunctional luxury products.

‘Why’, you might ask. And so did we.

“I read an article about a factory in Shenzhen where they assemble Apple Mac products,” Hutchison replied.

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“Consumer hunger for iPads had reached such dizzying heights that life on the Chinese assembly line had become devastating. People were throwing themselves off the roof. One worker said: 'sometimes he would deliberately drop something on the ground so that he could have a few seconds of rest while picking it up.'”

Right…

“That's a pretty extraordinary idea,” he goes on.

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“An intentional error is completely illogical. Which is perhaps what makes it fundamentally human. I wanted to know what would happen if you extended this illogical gesture, and commissioned deliberate errors into the smooth mechanism of a hyper-efficient globalised machine.

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“So I emailed this absurd commission to factories all over the world. I received hundreds of confused emails, and - eventually - some very peculiar objects.”

The project is, Hutchison claims, a logic extension of the concept of ‘luxury’ itself.

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“Dysfunctionality is the endgame of the luxury market.

“I think a holeless cheesegrater encapsulates consumerism. Consumers don't spend thousands of pounds on a handbag in order to have somewhere to put their keys. True luxury dispenses of function and slips into absurd, luxurious obsolescence.”

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Despite showing at the V&A and Saatchi New Sensations and striking a note with "people from design and fashion, to economic, anticapitalist and hacking communities”, Hutchison says his favourite reaction to the work came from the factories themselves:

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