Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
For a man whose creative life is centered on the value and pleasure of craft, self-taught artist George Kagan seems awfully preoccupied with modern mass production. “Ex-Static,” Kagan’s solo exhibit at Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, features dozens of the fully functional radios he’s built in his kitchen since 1997, working with such eclectic materials as car parts, floor tiles, cosmetic cases, and upholstery. Yet the thoughts he shared during a public discussion held at Intuit on August 16 tended to focus on manufacturing and planned obsolescence.
Kagan, who remembers the period in the 50s when radios started giving way in popularity to television, took mechanical drawing and industrial arts classes in high school and dreamed of a career in the auto industry. But he found himself at the University of Chicago reading psychology instead. He finally ended up in dentistry, a profession he fears has become more focused on management than skill in the past few decades. “We were taught that the goal of every profession is to put itself out of business,” he said. Dentists learned their business from the bottom up, and their education emphasized the importance of understanding the entire process rather than a few parts of it.
