In today's Wall Street Journal, there is a review of a new off-broadway play called "Private Jokes, Public Places". It is a send-up of architecture schools and the very academic way the subject is taught, full of designer-speak phrases and the like.
In one quote, from the very earnest protaganist architecture student, defending her latest work to visiting starchitects, she touches on something that resonates in the world of design in general:
"You ask us to come up with these abstract ideas that aren't even meant to be built, but then before you know it, someone publishes it in some chi-chi poo-poo New York magazine, and then all of a sudden there's a show at MoMA, and then pretty soon after that, it gets built, and then others get built, cheap knock-offs start showing up in office buildings, shopping malls, hospitals....and all from what" Some narcissistic attempt to stand out from the rest as if they're trying to come up with a new craze in designer jeans".
Could this also speak to the way golf design goes round and round in its own cycles? Could it be that, while minimalism is rightfully beginning to take hold in many quarters, that we will, eventually, be back to over-the-top design that departs widely from the essence of the game so eloquently expressed by the Brora's of the world?