It is a portrait of two women – but it may end up being a landscape.
– Willem De Kooning, when asked the subject of his next painting
Often in discussion when design is distinguished from art, the line is drawn at intention. Things that are designed have a purpose; an ad campaign is designed to sell more widgets, a better mousetrap is designed to etc. etc. That purpose is frequently defined by someone who is not the designer – the client, for example, has goals for whatever it is. The end-user helps define the product also; many parameters for any project are set by the user’s comfort level with accessing whatever it is. Useability is paramount in many design decisions.
"Excavation," Willem de Kooning, 1950
ART may adhere to some or all of the above restrictions, but it is not bound to it. The intent of an artistic product is fluid; in many cases is it subject to interpretation by the viewer, the “meaning” left shrouded by the artist, who merely presents the work.
Many of us, myself included, consider our work artistic, or as having an artistic bend to it. But where IS the art? What defines and separates the design process from the artistic process? Where are those two processes parallel?
I find it in discovery. Work, work, work, put the pieces in place, move things around, and suddenly – pop, there is something there that was not there before. Something fell into place, and a new facet was created. Something new appeared; the project has changed, grown, moved, become something more than it was.
I face difficulty sometimes in that new direction; not internally, but externally. Internally, I am at my most ebullient; externally the reaction might be quite different. If I am part of a team, or beholden to a client, the new direction may not be what they expected, or need, or want. For those people out there who consider design to be an engineering process, whereby a plan is set to make something that is a known quantity, this kind of artistic evolution can be a disturbing turn of events. “But I thought we were going to do this,” or “didn’t we agree that we would be producing this?”
As much as I would like to encourage these people to put aside their misgivings and join in the artistic process with me, I have to give them credence; they have expectations, it is part of their jobs, and they have a right to expect that those design goals be met. If my changes cause them to question the direction of the project then I have to reassess whether my process has shifted the product away from the design goals or whether it is still on track.
So it is a tricky dance; managing the balance between fulfilling client expectations, meeting the needs of the end user, and allowing a little of that evolution that de Kooning was talking about into every process.
I have questions about this, and I bring them to the collective: where is the line between art and design? Where do you find art in your work, and how much of that do you let in? Have any of you had experiences where you set out to make a portrait of two women, ended up with a landscape, and didn’t end up getting fired? I’m sure that these stories depend entirely on the people around you; in theater, for example, one is liable to find that sort of thing more well received than in the boardroom of SAP, most likely. But I’d like to hear about your thoughts on this line between art and design, process and product. It’s something that I – and I suspect we all – wrestle with on a daily basis.
More to come. Thanks for listening.
Fascinating topic-starter. I wonder if there isn’t some semantics at play in all this, the semantics of genre explored in Kirk Varnedoe’s & Adam Gopnik’s “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture.”
I’ve always found the blurry lines separating the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt from its Hirshhorn and American Art museums left me a bit groggy. Is it meaningful to distinguish “art” from “design?” As communication, I would think that each can be assessed on the effectiveness of its translation to a given audience. For art, I think this means evaluating the quality of works solely in terms of their aesthetic appeal, craft, and personal resonance (and not just from any interpretive, accompanying essay, but that would leads to a lengthy rant on my part about music vs. musicology, “art” vs. “art fraud”)… in any case, from this standpoint art gets a much broader pass than design, since it is an overbroad category that arguably includes design and virtually all human endeavor as subsets.
I believe context is everything. Do you like Zappa’s (or Prince’s) music for its eclecticism and deviation from mainstream convention within the expectations established for doowop, rock, R&B, jazz, bebop, hip-hop, funk, etc. or condemn it for the same (or for some other reason, like the consistent, deliberate, and sometimes (deliberately?) offensive violation of sexual taboos)? Is a well-engineered, sleek Oxo teapot art any more or less than an example of the same object from the Edo period? What’s the quality of design attendant in the monochromatic wall-size painting of a Mark Rothko or one of his followers? I like to cite my friend Johanna’s joke about the inappropriateness of movie reviews by “Field and Stream,” to wit, “Citizen Kane: thumbs down, no fish.”
Look, I don’t mean to be relativistic here, just subjective. I’m all for transcendent experiences, but get real. Some things suck in every context.
I didn’t comment on this at the time of posting and I do not know why. “High and Low” was one of my favorite exhibitions; it played at MOMA, I believe. I have a poster from it.
Yes yes, aesthetic appeal, personal resonance, I agree there. I don’t know if art gets a much “broader pass” as you put it because the judgment of art’s effectiveness is much more subjective than the teapots you mention later. And I also don’t know if I agree that “virtually all human endeavor” is a subset of art. I think it’s actually quite the reverse. Art is a small, small subset of most of what goes on. Many things can be said to be “artistic” or “artful” but I would not say that design is art.
I think what you’re talking about in the paragraph mentioning Zappa, Prince, teapots, Rothko, and Citizen Kane (!) is subjectivity and it’s validity in deciding value. At the risk of launching a sizable philosophical rant/debate I would say that there is a balance between “need” and “subjectivity.” The more people share a common interest in a thing’s contribution to daily living, the less subjective judgments regarding its quality become. A teapot, for instance, must fulfill certain basic functions that we all roughly agree on (holds tea, sits firmly on table/counter, etc). In these qualities of usability we find criteria for judgment. The closer something gets to art, the less we are able to agree on a set of qualities upon which to judge its value.
In this way, I think design is set apart from art. Things that are designed have to fulfill certain goals; we can judge good design upon these goals, as a baseline, before we get into more esoteric and personal criteria.