'Home of the Future' at LACMA explores dark side of American dream

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred The slogan of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, which plays a prominent role in the new LACMA exhibition “Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias,” was blunt: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”Those words capture a central tension in the sprawling show, which occupies interconnected galleries at the far end of the museum’s Resnick Pavilion.Many of the beautiful, sometimes ingenious products and technologies developed with the rise of the modern era gripped the popular imagination and made life easier, healthier and more connected.

But they didn’t free people from domestic labor or deliver the prosperity and security heralded by their promoters.They instead often raised expectations, forced dependency and gave rise to a vision of progress that reinforced social exclusion, bred anxieties about status, and concealed the environmental costs of a culture built on consumption.Sound familiar? Entertainment & Arts Our critic picks 17 unmissable works of art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries.

The list is eclectic and unexpected, composed of some of the museum’s greatest hits as well as quieter pieces susceptible to being overlooked.The desire for these transformative products was never innate, and LACMA’s exhibition zeroes in on that idea from the start.“Good design is seldom accepted.

It has to be sold,” Midcentury photographer Julius Shulman is quoted as saying in the catalog.The show traces the hard sell of a domestic utopia via world’s fair posters, model home catalogs, magazine advertisements, television specials and science-fiction imagery — along with close to 200 physical objects of every sort, including kitchen appliances, electronics and furniture.In each of its four documented eras — pre- and post-Depression, post-World War II, the height of the Cold War, and the counterculture ’60s and ...