You can get Charles Rennie Macintosh coffee mugs. There are T-shirts too, and key rings. These are objects whose only function is to be given to somebody else, somebody who probably already has the T-shirt, coffee mug and key ring.
In the West of Scotland and Glasgow in particular Mackintosh is everywhere. In the way that some Dubliners know more than usual about illustrated medieval manuscripts because of the Book of Kells, so you can find Glaswegians expert in fin de siecle European design.
Undoubtedly Mackintosh was a great designer. He had a complete vision which borrowed from Japanese influences but was entirely his own. In architecture, his Glasgow School of Art still stands as a beautiful testament to a brilliant mind. He was not to know that the age of mass production and marketing would take his originality and make it commonplace.
Irish audiences will be lucky in approaching Charles Rennie Mackintosh without the baggage of media overload that obscures appreciation of his work for Scots. He was born in 1868 in Glasgow. The city was one of the richest on the planet at the time, as industrialists profited from supplying the British Empire with ships, trains and machinery. Wealth brought confidence and creativity.
At the age of 21 he was signed up by the leading firm of architects, Honeyman and Keppie, where he began to develop his unique style. Seven years later he won the competition to design Glasgow's new art school. In a career that deliberately spanned all aspects of design, the building remains his finest achievement. His attention to detail is apparent in every fitting.
Yet tastes rapidly changed at the beginning of the 20th century. Though Glasgow clients recognised Mackintosh as an exceptional talent, they wanted the new sharp lines of American classical architecture rather than the organic forms so loved by Mackintosh. Glasgow had given Chicago the grid system of streets, and now the American city was repaying the compliment with steel-framed office blocks. There are only three other buildings in Scotland and one in England that reveal his genius.
"When he died he had a reputation known only in professional circles," says Pamela Robertson, the senior curator at Glasgow University's Hunterian Museum. "Certain aspects of his work do foreshadow modernism but on the whole he is very difficult to categorise. He is something of a shooting star," she says.
Historians have argued that he influenced the Viennese Secession and designers such as Hoffman, but the critical view now is that the other European movements contemporary to Mackintosh would have occurred with or without him. A journal at the time described his rooms as being like "Hobgoblin's closets", and it seems that Mackintosh's reputation is also compartmentalised into an odd space all its own.
Yet it is from the limited body of work that a money-spinning web of paraphernalia has been spread across Scotland and beyond. The first serious biography of Mackintosh came in 1952 but his reputation didn't really take off again until 1968. That year, the first major retrospective of his work was exhibited at the Edinburgh Festival and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It prompted a rise in scholarship on the Glaswegian designer throughout the 1970s. The Italian furniture manufacturer Cassina also decided to reproduce classics of 20th-century design. Their first project was the Le Corbusier chair, but Mackintosh was next.
The next great fillip to his reputation came in 1981. Glasgow University had been donated the entire contents of Mackintosh's Glasgow home by a benefactor. They decided to house the furniture collection in a special museum where the interiors matched Mackintosh's design.
"It fitted in with Glasgow's post-industrial renaissance. The city needed a figurehead to market itself as a revitalised cultural place, and Mackintosh fitted the bill," says Pamela Robertson. As the grime from 100 years of industry was wiped from the city's streets, it was Mackintosh who was adopted as a symbol for what Glasgow could become.
The process culminated in Glasgow becoming the City of Design and Architecture 1999, as part of the UK's build up to the millennial celebrations. Glasgow's signature architecture is in fact the brash, confident monuments to commerce built by the Victorians and Edwardians, lending the city the feel of Chicago in miniature. Mackintosh may now be omnipresent, but it is still only as a whimsical dressing on a tough city.
There are those who hate the marketing. Architects have banded together and sworn to never indulge in "Mockintoshery" as it is called. They regret that one man has overshadowed the other notable architects that Glasgow has produced. A society has been formed to promote the buildings of Alexander "Greek" Thomson, who produced amazing fusions of classical and Egyptian forms. Yet this slightly misses the point.
The status of Mackintosh as Glasgow's "best" architect has less to do with his actual work than the need for a modern city to be branded. While New York has its apple and Paris its Eiffel tower, Glasgow has Mackintosh. The designer who only ever designed one mass-produced item, his high-backed chairs, has now been reproduced to cover a city.
An exhibition entitled The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Architectural Sketches opens on Saturday and runs until September 3rd at the National Gallery. A series of lectures on Mackintosh at the Gallery begins on Sunday at 3 p.m. with Pamela Robertson, curator at the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, lecturing on "Mackintosh: Celebrated Scottish Architect, Artist and Designer"
