The overtly contentious, covertly symbiotic relations of art and design have had a long and complex gestation. Before weighing the merits of this union and its latest manifestations among such willfully unreconciled proponents of the interdisciplinary as, say,Jorge Pardo, Pae White, or Liam Gillick

There is a sequence in René Clair´s Entr´acte (1924) in which the image of a folded- paper boat floating on a deluge of water is superimposed over shots of the rooftops of Paris, so that it seems to be moving through the watery skyline of a mysteriously postdiluvian city

I choose Tropicália not because it is liberal but because it is libertine. With this pithy turn of phrase, poet Torquato Neto put forth two of the Brazilian movement´s most provocative claims: first, that it provided an ideological alternative to defensive nationalism, both Left and Right, in late-´60s Brazil; and second, that this alternative was constructed on an aeshetics of punning and resignification