We just hit the exhibit today and I found it very engaging. I hate to say it but I think the coolest stuff was when the fascists were on the upswing in Italy. Futurism looks really neat, as do Italian riffs on Art Nouveau. I’m sure that reveals something deeply disturbing about my psyche, but what are blogs for? Basically, the message I got from the exhibit is that Italian design completely went to hell in the 1980s. Though it might also be that the artists depicted there are still alive, and so there’s a certain fawning promotionalism that’s absent from the earlier periods.