Bela Lugosi is Alive and Well
While typing a reply message to Dan K.’s comment from yesterday’s post, I realized that I had enough to say to justify a whole blog post, but before I get into it I’d like to let everyone know that I fixed the problem with my links in the sidebar. Our long national nightmare is over.
No offense to Dan’s brother (who is a very nice fellow), but I think I’m going to have to disagree with his position that design is not art. (I’m going to assume that what Dan’s brother is asserting is that design is never art, which is more extreme than the other possibility, that design is not necessarily art, which seems so obvious as to not be worth arguing about. Of course, many rational people will claim that nothing art is worth arguing about, but I ain’t one of ‘em.)
At first blush, we’re inclined to agree with Dan’s brother. The designer who sits in an office cubicle and designs a showerhead according to a set of specifications given to him by an engineer and the marketing people is a lot different than the disheveled artist who suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night and rushes to her canvas to paint the haunting image from her dream before it fades. The showerhead designer is creating something primarily to fulfill a purpose or function, with aesthetics a secondary consideration. The insomniac artist, on the other hand, seems to be only interested with capturing the aesthetic experience of her dream for it’s own sake, and may never consider whether her painting might be of use to anyone.
The problem for me is that between these two extremes there’s an awful lot of grey area. It seems pretty clear to me that at least some architecture is art, especially things like the Washington Monument or perhaps Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (even if you think it’s bad art, you have to admit that it’s basically a sculpture that houses a museum), and there’s no question that all architecture is also design.
And if it’s intention rather than quality that makes the difference between art and design, what about all those cultures that don’t really have a ‘pure art’ tradition. It seems like a lot of pre-industrial (both contemporary and historical) cultures spend most of their creative energy on pottery, arms and armor, religious paraphernalia, clothing rather than painting or sculpture, yet it seems a bit snobby to say that they don’t create art.
After discussing things a bit with a friend today, it seems to me that even a lot of so-called art is actually design. Bob Ross painted some very nice paintings, but the way he created them – to fulfill the goal of teaching and with very strict parameters of what would be most appealing to the most people – had more in common with our showerhead designer than the inspired painter (paintress? Paintrix? Yeah, definitely paintrix.) It seems to me that design and art are really two ends of a spectrum that includes a lot of creative endeavor, yet are still fundamentally the same sort of thing.
The art movement associated with the Weimar Republic's Bauhaus sought to blur the lines between design and art, and I think that in the long run they were enormously successful. In our world, it seems that people create art out of all sorts of stuff (like scrolling LED signs, fer instance), and people who design things are increasingly taking cues from the art world. The boundaries are becoming increasinly less clear, I think.
No offense to Dan’s brother (who is a very nice fellow), but I think I’m going to have to disagree with his position that design is not art. (I’m going to assume that what Dan’s brother is asserting is that design is never art, which is more extreme than the other possibility, that design is not necessarily art, which seems so obvious as to not be worth arguing about. Of course, many rational people will claim that nothing art is worth arguing about, but I ain’t one of ‘em.)
At first blush, we’re inclined to agree with Dan’s brother. The designer who sits in an office cubicle and designs a showerhead according to a set of specifications given to him by an engineer and the marketing people is a lot different than the disheveled artist who suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night and rushes to her canvas to paint the haunting image from her dream before it fades. The showerhead designer is creating something primarily to fulfill a purpose or function, with aesthetics a secondary consideration. The insomniac artist, on the other hand, seems to be only interested with capturing the aesthetic experience of her dream for it’s own sake, and may never consider whether her painting might be of use to anyone.
The problem for me is that between these two extremes there’s an awful lot of grey area. It seems pretty clear to me that at least some architecture is art, especially things like the Washington Monument or perhaps Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (even if you think it’s bad art, you have to admit that it’s basically a sculpture that houses a museum), and there’s no question that all architecture is also design.
And if it’s intention rather than quality that makes the difference between art and design, what about all those cultures that don’t really have a ‘pure art’ tradition. It seems like a lot of pre-industrial (both contemporary and historical) cultures spend most of their creative energy on pottery, arms and armor, religious paraphernalia, clothing rather than painting or sculpture, yet it seems a bit snobby to say that they don’t create art.
After discussing things a bit with a friend today, it seems to me that even a lot of so-called art is actually design. Bob Ross painted some very nice paintings, but the way he created them – to fulfill the goal of teaching and with very strict parameters of what would be most appealing to the most people – had more in common with our showerhead designer than the inspired painter (paintress? Paintrix? Yeah, definitely paintrix.) It seems to me that design and art are really two ends of a spectrum that includes a lot of creative endeavor, yet are still fundamentally the same sort of thing.
The art movement associated with the Weimar Republic's Bauhaus sought to blur the lines between design and art, and I think that in the long run they were enormously successful. In our world, it seems that people create art out of all sorts of stuff (like scrolling LED signs, fer instance), and people who design things are increasingly taking cues from the art world. The boundaries are becoming increasinly less clear, I think.
posted by Arazu at
7:59 PM
4 Comments:
My brother is gonna beat you up.
I don't think anyone can disagree that architecture is art; I think my brother specifically was talking about graphic design. Or maybe not.
However, it should be clear to all of us that basketball -- basketball IS art.
By
Anonymous, at 9:24 AM
That's awesome Flaxman! He always seemed like such a laid-back hippie that I assumed he would be all blissed-out and spacey in person.
And to clarify, I have nothing against Mr. Ross (or at least I didn't before finding out he had more in common with Stalin than Jerry Garcia.) I definitely think that he was an artist and he certainly made a lot of people think happy little thoughts (except for the poisonous ire he saved for negotiating with your dad.)
By
Arazu, at 11:36 AM
Perhaps one day, Arazu, you can be the next Bob Ross, teaching your television viewers how to create happy little shower faucets and bright shiny office buildings in AutoCAD.
"We don't make mistakes, we just make new ideas."
Thanks for reworking the bench in two-point perspective. That post really took me back to my art school classes.
By
Anonymous, at 12:44 PM
As a sidenote to your art & design thread, Le Corbusier's Pavillion de L'Esprit Nouveau was painted in ten colors in order to achieve the freakish white he wanted. Grey area indeed.
By
Anonymous, at 3:03 PM
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