It’s (not such) a good thing.

I am old enough to remember Martha Stewart’s rise to fame and success. Just as Home Economics was disappearing from our schools, “Martha” emerged with a brand and growing media empire set on inspiring middle class women to live graciously through cooking, entertaining, decorating, and gardening. As Rem Koolhaas’ WIRED Magazine interview exposed, Stewart “edited” an image of the ideal house, garden, and lifestyle, as "it's a good thing" became a widely known tagline. However, while Stewart set unattainable standards for perfection, she made high living seem accessible, appearing on magazine covers in grocery-store checkout lines and marketing cookware, garden tools, furniture, crafts, paint, and more in stores like Kmart.

As I considered this topic further, I found it interesting that Rem Koolhaas interviewed Martha Stewart for this piece. I remembered the article that we read earlier in the semester by Ellen Dunham-Jones. In “The Irrational Exuberance of Rem Koolhaas,” Dunham-Jones (2012) opened with the following paragraph:

The 1990 saw the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, the dot.com boom and the expansion of neoliberalism, globalization, the Internet and the “New Economy.” Capitalism had won, and growing enthusiasm for its ability to raise living standards, promote democracy and advance technology increasingly squelched what little remained of mid-20th-century critiques of its crueler consequences. Instead, corporate ideologies co-opted countercultural revolutionary songs and slogans from the ’60s to cheer on ’90s-style reengineering for the information age, marketing individualism and commodifying dissent. Did architectural discourse similarly morph 1960s radicalism into 1990s icon-making during this period of rising faith in free markets and digital technology? What happened to architectural criticism in an era that saw the end of welfare as we knew it in the U.S. and acceptance of the widening gap between rich and poor as an unfortunate but necessary by-product of modernization and a healthy economy? Was it only in the ’90s that Rem Koolhaas could ride this global socio-economic restructuring and emerge as one of architectural culture’s leading avant-gardists while at the same moment celebrating capitalism?

I found it ironic that Stewart’s rise to success aligned so closely with Dunham-Jones’ portrayal of Koolhaas. In the same time-period, Stewart’s career was propelled by unchecked capitalism, neoliberalism, and the Internet boom, just as Koolhaas has benefited, according to Dunham-Jones, from the “market-driven metropolis.” Conditions were right for both the "starchitect" and the "Domestic Goddess" to find success in the world. 

Disclaimer: Yes, Martha Stewart has edited my life, too.