China has its own Venice – and I'm not talking about the recreation of the Most Serene Republic at the Venice Casino in Macao. The real canal city is called Zhouzhuang, and sits at the intersection of a river, a small lake, and a canal halfway between Shanghai and Hangzhou. Its whitewashed buildings with their tile roofs string out on half a dozen islands covering about 124 acres, and to go there is to glide into a vision of the past as seductive, if not as grand, as what Venice provides.

Being somewhat smaller than Venice, Zhouzhuang is also a more manageable experience. You arrive at a visitor center; buy tickets and either wait for a waterbus or rent a boat to take you into the preserved village. Constructed starting in the Ming Dynasty around 1400, most of what you see today was constructed during the subsequent Qing Dynasty, which ended in 1911. Fully restored, it now is a warren of tourist shops, restaurants, inns, and attractions.


I loved gliding down the Nabeishi River and Yinzi Creek, underneath the Twin Bridges (dating to the turn of the 17th century; one has a round arch, the other, a square one), and strolling through the gardens of the sprawling Zhang House. A friend of mine stayed in one of the inns, and reported the evening quiet, with mist rising off the river, is as magical as anything you would find off the Gran Canal. Of course, it is all a bit fake, the result of heavy restoration and careful management. But then again, so are most historic attractions –that is what makes them so attractive. So, I was happy to float away among the carved wood and curving roofs to dream of China, as that visitor from Venice, Marco Polo, must have seen it.

It is an iron—or perhaps anodized aluminum—law that any advance in digital technology produces first and foremost more stuff in meatspace. The iPad is no exception: it might get rid of the keyboard and reduce the whole computer to a thin plane, but oh, what an excuse for the production of gadgets and go-withs. The device is barely out and already there are hundreds of accessories to choose from. Let’s just concentrate on the skins and carrying cases.

From left, iPad cases from Hardcandy and M-Edge.

You could go basic, and get what Apple offers you. For $39 you get a fake-leather container with extra places to put a few things, like headphones, and of course that famous Eve-just-took-a-bite Apple logo. Standard pilot fish-retailers like Hardcandy and M-Edge offer more nicely styled options, including bubble-patterned, heavy rubber and rugged-looking skins from Hardcandy ($49.95 and $140), and an elegant, messenger bag-style canvas number in different colors with leather accents from M-Edge (available later this month, not yet priced).

iPad case from gelaskins.com

Then you can go fashion forward, either by moving towards an all recycled material messenger bag (Brenthaven.com, not yet priced, made out of billboards), or by having an actual designer piece like the ones sporting a Kenzo floral pattern, produced by LMVH and marketed by wrappers.typepad.com in the U.K. for $40. The same retailer also offers a more restrained Paul Smith wool cashmere sleeve for $38. I actually like the street-art like offerings from gelaskins.com, which include wrap-around graphics inspired by Japanese comics and graffiti (not yet available).

From left, iPad cases from Substrata and Orbino.

Go up-market, and you can encase your iPad either in wood, in a version by substrata.net (not yet available) with stripes, or plain and clunky (versaudio.com, $80), or in leather—my favorite is the $128 sleeve by absutton.com, available in kid leather dyed in soft colors with either a silk or a felt interior. Top of the line—in price, not design—are the showy sleeves by orbino.com: Ostrich for $569 or crocodile for $689. As a walking design cliché, I am holding out for the Prada version, or maybe something commissioned by Moss in New York. As an Apple slave since 1983, I am also waiting for the second or third generation before getting the latest gadget. Innovation, after all, like a good leather case, takes time to get comfortable.

Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back on Thursday for his next post.

It is great to watch a nicely-dressed somebody meet a nicely-bodied undressed somebody. Standing at the press preview of "The Artist is Present," the Marina Abramovic retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art the other day, I watched people squeeze between two very fit actors, a man and a woman, who stood naked on either side of a narrow doorway. Like most people, my friend John R. Lane, former director of the Dallas Museum of Art, didn't flinch as he passed through the flesh gauntlet, dressed in his usual British bespoke tweeds. I think I pretended not to sneak a look when I took my turn, though I did. I most liked watching a woman visitor, dressed fully in black, giving the naked guy a long and appreciative up-and-down.

Imponderabilia, photo by Scott Rudd

The nasty thing about a lot of art is that it seduces you into beauty and then reminds you of death. It's called memento mori--remember that you, too, will die--and those kinds of artful reminders are on full display at the Abramovic show. Naked people display themselves as if they were mounted on a cross, or they lie below skeletons, or throw themselves at elastic bands time after fruitless time.

Luminosity, photo by Scott Rudd

Skeletons, blood and gore abound. Not all the actors are so fit, and their aging flesh becomes a gentle and familiar reminder of our own time-bound nature posed between the harsh realities of beautiful youth and death on display.

Nude with Skeleton, photo by Scott Rudd

What is even more remarkable is how the performers just sit, or stand. Even those who are clothed are eerie: their living, breathing bodies have become as if of stone, almost dead artifacts in this great tomb of modern art. After a while, all I could do to stay sane was to run out into the Manhattan streets, where everything happens in fast motion and the only nearly naked, motionless bodies are the ones guarding the entrance to the Abercrombie & Fitch store around the corner.

Abramovic, photo by Scott Rudd


Read our interview with Marina Abramovic from the January 2010 issue.

I just leased a new car. Now when I drive to work I feel as if I'm in a spaceship facing so many dials, knobs and buttons that I'll need a couple of years of NASA training to pilot my craft. It's actually an Acura (seen above), and Honda has done a pretty decent job of organizing all the many controls into a manageable array, but still, there are a lot of choices. That's the basic problem with car interiors today: their design is driven by the desire to make technology available. But, of course, they have to do so without distracting you from the real world you're driving through while listening to Car Talk, making phone calls or getting the climate just right. The rest of the car's space doesn't really matter, because you don't notice it. That means the designers have to get the controls right: they have to be attractive and functional, easy to understand and to use.

Mercedes-Benz E Class

I like the German cars. Their designers are the most rigorous at controlling all the machine madness, organizing them into simple, reductive arrays with strong, horizontal lines that sweep across the front of the dashboard. If you rent a European car, like a Renault or an Alfa Romeo, you get expressive technology: lots of knobs and dials with elaborate casings and sweeps and curves slung across the dashboard. Whenever I rent an American car, I feel as if I just get slabs of controls pasted together in front of me. But they're getting better, though. The latest Fords have a pretty clean central console. In the soon-to-be-released Chevrolet Volt, the whole dashboard will be a clean expanse of controls reduced to a minimum—and reminds me of one of the latest cell phones.

Chevrolet Volt

In the future, all these dials and buttons are supposed to go away, at least as real things. If we can believe the concept cars now on view at auto shows, we are moving towards designs that look like three-dimensional television screens molded into dashboards. This way there will no separate controls at all. At the furthest horizon, companies such as Chrysler are imagining the car cockpit as a cocoon in which information melts and melds together into a limpid bulb surrounding the steering wheel. But even that science-fiction vision of information spreading around me like a virtual cloud doesn't go far enough for me. I don't want to fiddle with any dials, even if they are projections. I just want the car to read my mind and drive.

Chrysler 200C

Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back on Thursday for his next post.

Follow W magazine on Facebook and join the discussion.

Walking through Hong Kong's Happy Valley last week, a billboard caught my eye: "Delay No More," it said in large type next to a photograph of a guy undoing his belt buckle. A friend enlightened me: Delay No More is the fashion brand of Goods of Desire, a chain of design-y stores that since its founding in 1996 has spread from Hong Kong to Singapore and beyond. I had to inspect for myself.

I came away from the crammed, Hollywood Road branch only with Pacman-like t-shirt ($16). Oh, and a "double happiness" keychain ($14), though I could have bought the same striking Chinese characters in three dimensions as candles ($18), trivets, napkin rings or any other number of applications. The store's trick is to use traditional Chinese images for their graphic punch as well as their connotations in creating accoutrements for the modern home. Even the store's abbreviated name, G.O.D., is a pun not only on the religion of shopping, but also on the Cantonese phonetic sound of the word, which means, "to live better."

G.O.D., art directed by its architecture-trained founder Douglas Young, mixes mass-market kitsch, Mao-era propaganda and sleek modern design. Chinese letter boxes become card cases ($12), photographs of tenements adorn mouse pads ($7) and ring binders exhort you to "Make Meaningful Content," "Keep Things Organized," and, of course, "Delay No More" ($8) for a set of four in assorted colors.

So jet over to Asia and pack up the goodies, for Young has no plans to open in America and only a few of the items are available online. Luckily, those do include the Panda eyeshades ($14) I somehow overlooked in the store but could have used on the flight back. Those "Delay No More" belt buckles, by the way, are available in a variety of colors for the extravagant sum of $45.

For more information, check out Goods of Desire.

Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back on Thursday for his next post.

At museum stores art meets Mammon. They have a great thing going for them: the whole point of an art museum is that you can’t buy what you’re looking at, though everything the museum does –the lighting, the frames, the publicity—makes you really want it. So after a few hours of foreplay, the store near the exit finally offers gratification by giving you not art, but things as close to it as possible: reproductions, books about the art, or objects that come close to being art.

For me, the last category is what sets art museum stores apart from the other purveyors of either coffee table tomes or tchotckes. The best offerings let you take home the art—the essence of what the museum is about. Herewith, some of my favorites.



Josef Albers Plate, mocastore.org, $19
This is a reproduction of a painting from L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection, Study for Homage to the Square (1954). Albers was a master at combining colors to make unexpected, yet harmonious relations appear. Put a fruit on these at home and you can continue his work –or ruin it.



Marcel Broodthaers Stamp, mocastore.org, $29
“This Is Not Art” might be a great comment you can imprint on a letter or a drawing that comes across your desk, but it also describes this blue stamp. The conceptual artist Broodthaers created it for a 1968 exhibition, and the L.A. based group Art Project reproduced it for sale at MOCA.



Cocoa Espresso Cups and Saucers, sfmoma.stores.yahoo.net, $58
Edith Heath was for many decades one of America’s greatest ceramicists. From her Sausalito studio came countless plates, cups and even ashtrays, all with her saturated colors and simple forms. Since her death two years ago, Heath Ceramics carries on, here with a cup, glazed only on the inside, they developed for SFMOMA’s new rooftop sculpture garden café.



Diaspora Playing Cards, sfmoma.stores.yahoo.net, $88
Martin Venezky shows of his trademark layers of graphic marks on this deck of playing cards he developed for SFMOMA. A graphic designer who surrounds pages with enigmatic clouds of information, Venezky here lets you play your own graphic games.



Painters Cap, sfmoma.stores.yahoo.net, $24
San Francisco designers Rock and Rain designed this new take on the traditional painter’s cap for when you go out there to make your own creations or just repaint the house. The museum’s logo, an abstraction of their building’s central turret, adorns the front.



William Wegman Gray and Scarlet Poster, store.wexnercenterstore.com, $19.99
Wegman became famous for posing his gray Weimaraners (there have been three generations by now) in unlikely poses. Here they look slightly forlorn in Ohio State University (where the Wexner Center is located) hoodies. Has the team just lost?



Jockum Nordstrum Playing Cards, store.wexnercenterstore.com, $19.95
Nordstrum, a local Columbus, Ohio artist, made what look like slightly naïve, perhaps even handmade cards that seem to evoke some melancholy or perhaps even dire circumstances. The images are haunting; shuffle the deck and you can tell your own tale.



Protect Me From What I Want T-Shirt, mcachicagostore.org, $34
The artist Jenny Holzer created these shirts for an exhibition she had at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003. Like all of her Zen koan-like art, they address the tensions of living in a world dominated by commerce. This one seems particularly ironic for a museum store to sell.



Charity Money Boxes, mcachicagostore.org, $15.50
Museums depend on the generous gifts of donors. Perhaps you can save up for your big naming opportunity by putting your pennies into these sad-looking children produced by Suck UK. Like a lot of recent art, they play with kitsch and conventions, making you wonder what good taste is. And how much you can contribute to its display.



Paint Brush Candles, mcachicagostore.org, $15
Art burns brightly with these tools of the painter’s trade turned into candles. It reminds me of the series of paintings by Gerhard Richter, which carefully and delicately depict candles burning. Those are worth millions each, these are on sale.



Girard Doll Number 11, cooperhewittshop.org, $160
Alexander Girard was an artist and graphic designer enlivened the decades after the Second World War with bright colors and primitive forms. The Cooper-Hewitt dedicated a major retrospective to his work in 2001, and several years later the Vitra Museum in Basel, Switzerland, found these designs for dolls in the archives they own. I am not sure you want to let your kids play with this beauty.



Floral Plate; Real Plates, cooperhewittshop.org, $85
Constantin Boym has loves reusing cast-off plates and turning them into new designs, and here the Cooper-Hewitt gave him the run of their collections of historic services. He selected a few to make them all new again by encasing the original design in a larger plate. This one is based on a 1825 English design.



Credit Card Cutlery, cooperhewittshop.org, $10
Stuck on a picnic or on the subway without knife and fork? Pull out Dutch designer Ineke Hans’ credit cards, punch them on the dotted line, fold, and dig in. Hans created these ingenious plastic creations that you can carry in your wallet for the Cooper-Hewitt.



Cherry Hawk Coffee Mug, cincinnatiartmuseum.org/store, $8.50
I happen to run an art museum myself, and we pride ourselves on showing the work of local artists.  Charley Harper brought life to science books, travel magazines and paintings by closely observing and then abstracting flora and fauna. After his death two years ago, his estate began putting his designs on towels, prints and ceramics. He married geometry and life into vivid, but simple shapes. This coffee cup wakes you up with what’s on it as well as what’s in it.

Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back on Thursday for his next post.

Follow W magazine on Twitter!

Maybe it's the weather, but headphones that double as earmuffs have made a big comeback. On the subway, in the elevator, on the airplane and just walking down the streets, you see guys (yes, mostly men) not just tuned in, but their heads covered with isolation disks. What's even stranger is that it's a habit shared by businessmen and hipsters alike. The main thing that sets them apart is the graphics on their headphones.

Blame it on snowboarding and noise reduction. In 2003, a company called Skullcandy started making headphones for those who needed rugged, bass-heavy headphones that would actually protect them against the elements. They used the "mix style" headphones DJs had been using as part of their retro equipment (the old fashioned turntables and Rat Pack hats) and gave them the same neon-colored graphics that you can find on snowboards. Pretty soon the look seeped into mainstream (well, perhaps slipstream) culture. My favorites are the Skullcrushers (above), the first of which were designed with a little help from Snoop Dogg. I love their neo-Maori tattoo look, but they're pricey. You can get decent imitations from companies such as Pacific Sun.

At about the same time, Bose released the first semi-affordable noise cancellation headphones, and they started cropping up wherever executives wanted to execute or nap without interruptions. Bose headphones are now ubiquitous, but look towards companies such as Audio-Technica (above right) for a serious look and Sennheiser (above left) for a much more streamlined gadget. I am just waiting for the Executive Traveler model of the Skullcrusher, perhaps with some Mad Men styling.

Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back on Thursday for his next post.

Follow W magazine on Twitter.

Like most people in the arts, my default dress is black, so it is no wonder that my favorite sneaks are all-black Prada and Louis Vuitton pairs. Now there's an even classier alternative: Nike has teamed up with fabric design company Maharam to create a pure abstraction of the sneaker: The Horsehair Collection. These three different black-on-black versions of the basic Air Force Nike 1s (which came out twenty years ago), are covered with hairs clipped from horses' tails (which then grow back). They're like a minimalist dream of footwear. Their density and sensuality take them out of the realm of the smelly sneaker constructed out of some mysterious synthetic material while maintaining the look of the leap that made the Air Force legendary.

CEO Michael Maharam has previously collaborated with designer Hella Jongerius on a Nike shoe, and he says he hopes to continue to put the firms' looms to work on Nike's designs, not only for footwear, but also for clothing. Camel, cashmere, silk, cotton and velvet are all destined to find their way under -or rather over-foot. The idea is to bring sensuality to the sneaker, and dress up the sports shoe for running through airports and swishing through restaurants, rather than basketball courts. Maharam calls it "restrained luxury." At $250 a pair (at selected Nike stores), these shoes do fit into boardrooms better than locker rooms.



Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back on Thursday for his next post.

This week, we asked our design blogger to tell us which design blogs he obsessively reads himself, and why.

Design Observer
The most eloquent, erudite and witty design site of them all. Watch especially for essays by co-founders Michael Bierut and Bill Drenttel (both graphic designers), and avoid the ones headlined "Places," which come out of the site's assimilation of a conservative urban design organization.

Designboom
The mothership of design online, Designboom is a sprawling compendium of products, ideas and gossip in all aspects of design. It even has its own online courses and a shop. Most pieces are short and this is not a place for criticism—just for browsing design delights around the world.

Dezeen
This is the other major online source for new products, buildings and ideas in design. Slightly more focused than Designboom, it also offers good news and gossip links and a cleaner look.

Tropolism
Architect Chad Smith loves New York and all dense cities, and always finds something there to write about, with the goal of "making the hidden city visible." Criticizing windmills and showing people playing Urban Golf, he alerts us to urban delights and dangers.

Architizer
This is the Facebook for architecture. Just a few months old, it has already attracted thousands of architects and designers looking for what is hot and who is hiring. Can skyscraper-induced love be far behind? For the rest of us, the site shows new buildings around the world, complete with location and photographs.

Rhizome
"Dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging practices that engage technology," Rhizome is the last bastion of pure computer-based weirdness. Now housed at New York's New Museum, it combines heavy intellectual debate with an amazing archive of digital experiments.

Bldg blog
Despite its name, this site rarely shows buildings. Geoff Manaugh is fascinated with things like the design of science fiction movies, the history of quarantine sites, tunnels, maps and everything else that makes for strange space. At times and eerie and informative, his blog posts are lengthy and well-written enough to even read well in a book of his work that was published this fall.

Triple Canopy
Triple Canopy is more a magazine than a website; it's a periodic collection of themed projects and texts that draws on art, architecture and literature to get at the deeper meaning of things like planning and borders.  A recent article on what urban design means started by showing city plans and then meandered into a Woody Allen joke: "If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans."

Archidose
"Author, architect and critic" John Hill shows off buildings he thinks are particularly cool.  They are are almost always modern, rather austere, and a little warped.  An added bonus is that he finds things from all over the world—recently it was a department store in Leicester, England, and as I write this he is highlighting a rather sparse visitor center in Egypt.

Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back on Thursday for his next post.

Our design blogger, the ever-discerning Aaron Betsky, shares his holiday short list with us.

Porsche Panamera, $80,000
As an art museum director, I have to drive a sedan, and finally there is one as curvaceous, streamlined and fluid as the best coupes or racing cars. That's because it is a Porsche, and if they can make an SUV (the Cayenne) look good, they can make anything with four wheels seem sexy. The Panamera is one continuous teardrop that promises to let you go with the flow, only faster. The only problem is that it is a Porsche, which means I can't afford it.

Anatomical cow model, $35
I love cows. There is something very comforting about their ruminations and their big eyes. I also love anatomical models, which remind me of those moments in dusty science museums when it still seemed to me as if the world could be explained clearly and decisively. This season, I'm giving these little models—along with the horse and pig versions—to friends, depending on what I think their character calls for. But I also want one all for myself.

Zaha Hadid boots for Lacoste
If I ever wanted to dress up as the fleet-footed god Mercury, this is what I would wear: a leather strip imprinted with digital dimples that wraps around your feet, then unfurls all the way up your shin, and is held at the top with a metal clasp. These boots are the essence of British architect Zaha Hadid's designs turned into cladding for a foot, not a building. Only 850 of them were made (retail price was $525), but you can try to beg one from Lacoste or find them on Ebay.

First class seat between JFK and Zurich, Swiss Airlines, about $10,700 round trip
For once I would like to sit in an airline seat that was not either a straightjacket or a glorified Barcalounger. Just because planes are ovoid do the seats have to be? Not if you fly Swiss Airlines between JFK and Zurich, and can afford the front of the plane. The chair turns into a full bed sheltered behind straight walls accented in blond wood. I can just imagine myself in one of those minimalist modern Alpine huts, floating to sleep high above it all.

Critic, curator and museum director Aaron Betsky curated the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, ran Rotterdam's Netherlands Architecture Institute from 2001-2006 and these days, helms the Cincinnati Art Museum. See his previous blogs HERE and check back on Thursday for his next post.