“Memories are hunting horns whose sound dies on the wind.” So wrote Guillaume Apollinaire in 1912, in an effort to capture the transient quality of a remembered past. It is this same effort that nostalgia art serves today, making its presence felt by fulfilling our collective need to remember.
Earlier this year, the Brigham Young University Museum of Art in Utah held an exhibition called Nostalgia & Technology: Embracing the New through Art and Design that showcased both historical and more recent inventions, most of which have now become commonplace. One of the marketing strategies that the exhibition clearly revealed was the design of new inventions to resemble already familiar objects, so that the public would more easily accept them.
