Schwarz
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move over julian, tom sach is designing too. from the new nyt sunday mag fall design issue. this (also see the non linkable art + commerce slide show) is a loathsome trend my friends and rather speaks to the design-y forwardness of these artists work. and dont lets not throw in (out) hirsts pill-bar while we're at it. whats that... sorry i cant hear you... for the sound of all these artists cashing in. once youve sold out your critical edge you cant buy back a radical position and without radical ground, your dead to me as an artist.
What’s the difference between design and art? The question has cropped up again and again since a Marc Newson chaise longue sold for just under $1 million at Sotheby’s this past summer.
The short answer is: Who cares? And that isn’t meant to sound brusque, but I don’t care as much about whether something is labeled “design” or “art” as I do about the thing itself and the objectives of whoever created it. Nor have I met a designer or artist who cares, at least not one whom I admire. Yet some people do care, and not all of them work for the auction houses and design galleries with a commercial interest in selling design — or “design art,” as it is now branded. What’s more, the process whereby the distinction between design and art has become so fuzzy as to be almost invisible tells us a lot about the changing role of design in our lives.
In ye olden days the distinction between art and design boiled down to the beaux-arts prejudice: art = good, design = bad. Art, or so the argument went, was superior to design, because artists were free to express whatever they wished — which, back then, was likely to be beauty — in work they made themselves. Designers, on the other hand, faced numerous creative constraints, from meeting their clients’ needs and ensuring that whatever they designed would fulfill its intended function to delegating production to someone else.
In the last century, those distinctions eroded. Artists became less inclined to express ideals of beauty, in favor of using art to explore political and emotional concerns. The conception and process of producing art became as important as the work itself, which was increasingly made by someone else, not the artist.
The technology of design, meanwhile, became so sophisticated that designers could assume the artist’s role of creating beauty. Can you think of a contemporary painting or sculpture that is lovelier in the old-fashioned aesthetic sense than an iMac? Technology has also enabled designers to exercise greater control over the production of their work by using their computers to execute tasks once delegated to engineers or typesetters.
Designers still have to meet a client’s brief and to ensure that their work fulfills its function. Some, like the graphic designers Stefan Sagmeister and M/M, counter these necessities by producing experimental work alongside their commercial projects. Others, like the product designers Marc Newson and Jasper Morrison, argue that those very constraints make design more challenging and rewarding than art.
Doubtless there are artists who disagree. Why else would Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Richard Artschwager, Dieter Roth, Barbara Kruger and so many others who emerged between the late 1950’s and early 70’s have started out in design and switched to art? Today’s young designers are less likely to switch, partly because technology gives them greater creative control over their work, but also because they’re now licensed to exercise it.
Just as artists are increasingly preoccupied by design — take Thomas Demand, Liam Gillick, Jorge Pardo, Tobias Rehberger and Andrea Zittel, for starters — designers are venturing onto artistic turf by addressing emotional and political concerns. Whether Zittel’s replicas of domestic spaces tell you more about our relationship with our homes than the (I’d say) equally eloquent, functional objects designed by Hella Jongerius is entirely subjective.
Personally I still find that art is more adept than design at confronting the messy, troubling and sinister things I don’t understand, and that’s why I love it. Though design can do that, too. Take two pieces introduced at this year’s Milan furniture fair. Just as the W.M.D. and Red Cross trucks carved into Studio Job’s Biscuit ceramics for Royal Tichelaar Makkum are a damning indictment of the Iraq war, Maarten Baas’s burnt chairs for Moooi (he calls them Smoke) speak volumes of a post-industrial culture heaving with too much stuff.
Ironically, the examples of design that are least likely to address such issues are branded “design art.” It’s not that the flamboyantly sculptural chairs auctioned at Sotheby’s and Phillips de Pury & Company are pointless. At their best, they’re intriguing exercises in form and materials, just as haute couture is to fashion. (Newson’s forthcoming show at the Gagosian Gallery will feature pieces in Carrara marble. It is too expensive to use in industrial production, but he will apply the experience to projects like Qantas Airways cabins and Nike sneakers.) But at its worst, design art is flamboyant, sculptural and not much else — design without discipline, art without the bite. As Donald Judd, who practiced both design and art, wrote: “If a chair ... is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous. ... A work of art exists as itself; a chair exists as a chair itself.”