Today everything is treated as design, a life-style choice and a career opportunity, with the post-industrial designer reigning supreme. The one thing that seems clear is that design abets a near-perfect circuit of production and consumption. In these diatribes on the marketing of culture and the branding of identity, Hal Foster explores the history of a design-led culture and, in an attempt to illuminate the conditions for critical culture in the present, asks if the new 'political economy of design' is a cultural crime.