art vs. design: my take.
The other day on the B train, a thought popped into my head after reading over a hipster wall street worker, and seeing an article in the New York Times about some art exhibition going on in one of the millions of galleries in the city. The accompanying image was bold, reminding me of design work. Then on some trendy girl’s purse, there were beautiful and elaborate patterns and characters in a lush variety of colors.
As a graphic designer, I think it’s always been easy to think ethnocentrically. From the perspective of someone creating the visuals, you tend to focus the inputs coming in and what you produced from them. It’s difficult to step away and perhaps look at this from the edge of the circle, from the outside-in, and the inside-out.
Working in the real world for a little bit now, I have a bit more understanding of how design fits. What differentiates art and design isn’t the process, the purpose, the inspiration, money, your emotions, the function, the use, the audience, the outcome, or even what you think. What determines whether something is art or whether it is design is power.
This is what I wrote on the subway train, unedited:
Both are a representation of something (feelings, emotion, ideas, thoughts, things, etc). In the pure essence, as forms of communication, there is both good and bad art as there is good and bad design. Goodness or badness at what it is “supposed to do” doesn’t determine what it is. Taking it out of a producer (artist or designer)- focused context, it is not about “the process” if you are talking about it with the rest of the world; it is about power. However, it is not about this process, the consequences, the individual. It is not about the intentions, whether they are intentional or not. Simply, the question is, when someone connects with the work, be it words, pictures, tools or sound, does the power transfer to the buyer/viewer or does it remain with the creator (does the controller of the power remain with the artist/designer (Picasso) or does the power now lie in the consumer (girl’s purse). In music: pop stars may be corporate machines, but they are still artists - that is, until their brand overpowers the music and others’ opinions of a person owning the music becomes more powerful than the music is valued in itself: the medium is the massage.
I’m not sure if all of that makes sense, but I think: It doesn’t seem to matter what you call yourself. Most people are wrong most of the time anyways, and certainly about something they can’t even observe (themselves). The determining factor is whether the consumer of your piece takes the power from you (in a societal sense/status-wise/being cool… whatever) or whether you provide the power to the work (if you were Mr. Versace (artist) versus if you were one of his hired design goons (designer)). Note this has nothing to do with originality but with branding and reputation.
This casts a dark light on design, but I think it is neither positive or negative. Or if it’s negative, being an artist is no more noble.
