I haven’t written a What I Want Now post for a long while: this one is another expression of earnest materialism but also of a desire to return to a world and a nation in which “corporate art” was not a contradiction in terms and could also possess civic goals, there was no AI, and renderings of regional views could still capture something regional. What I want now is a portfolio, or prints (or even just torn-out magazine pages) of compositions commissioned by the Container Corporation of America in the 1940s of every US state and territory as part of its United States series. I’m obsessed. The Container Corporation was a national manufacturer of paper boxes founded in the 1920s which developed a reputation for artistic and modernist advertising quite early on. For a quarter of a century, from 1950 to 1975, the Corporation published nearly 200 advertisements featuring quotes from historical figures in scenes depicted by very notable avant-garde artists under the title Great Ideas of Western Man, following its post-war series the United Nations and the United States. You can see a range of all the Container Corporation art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. During our current climate of frenzied commemoration and Trumpstopian farce, the images of the latter series seem so appealing, even therepeutic. And I love that the Corporation chose artists who were natives of the state (or territory) in question—like Jacob Lawrence of New Jersey. The end results seem both simultaneously national and regional, which is truly American to me.