Notes & Major Points

take notes as a personal guide for responding to the writing prompts, the journal summary, and topics/questions for the group discussion. Submit these notes as a simple bulleted list that follows the content and your thought process as you read through it.

Skilling Saws and Absorbent Catalogs
Kenneth FitzGerald

Originally published in Emigre Magazine

Included in the collection Volume: Writings on
Graphic Design, Music, Art, and Culture

ISBN: 9781568989648

Emigre Magazine:
https://www.emigre.com/Essays/Magazine/SkillingSawsandAbsorbentCatalogs

FitzGerald, Kenneth. “Skilling Saws and Absorbent Catalogs.” Emigre, no. 48, 1998, pp. 29-39.

CSULB Library Permalink:
https://csu-lb.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01CALS_ULB/d7ul0l/alma991053822269702901

FitzGerald, Kenneth. Volume: Writings on Graphic Design, Music, Art, and Culture. 1st ed.,
Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.

discussion of our visual culture.
More than conceiving new theory, we need to identify and disassemble the many ill-constructed conceptions

between and within art and design. Ultimately, consilience is a radical action for both fields. For art,
consilience challenges a position at the top of the cultural food-chain. A major threat for design is to the
stature of designers whose regard within the field depends upon peer ignorance of art.

The paradox of design is that the more it tries to distance itself from art and assert independence, the more
art-like it becomes. Conversely, prominent efforts to (re)connect design to art have only served to devalue
design and produce a legion of irascible practitioners.

Articulating a substantive difference between art and design is impracticable. In terms of forms, process,
intent, causality, or response, the activities are identical. Difference lies in the sector of consumer culture one
wishes to operate in, and the cultural role we feel most comfortable playing.

IT IS CLEAR THAT ART IS USELESS, THAT PERCEIVER AND ARTIST ARE ARROGANT AND
INDIFFERENT. … ART TELLS US NOTHING ABOUT THE WORLD THAT WE CANNOT FIND
ELSEWHERE AND MORE RELIABLY. ART DOES NOT MAKE US BETTER CITIZENS, OR MORE
MORAL, OR MORE HONEST. IT MAY CONCEIVABLY MAKE US WORSE

Morse Peckham

THE PRESUMPTION OF ART’S ESSENTIAL “GOODNESS” IS A CONVENTIONAL TROPE. IT
DESCRIBES NOTHING. ART EDUCATION IS NOT REDEEMING FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF
STUDENTS, NOR IS ART PRACTICE REDEEMING FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF ARTISTS. THE
“GOOD” WORKS OF ART THAT RESIDE IN OUR MUSEUMS RESIDE THERE NOT BECAUSE
THEY ARE “GOOD,” BUT BECAUSE WE LOVE THEM…(THIS) IS THE ARGUMENT: ART IS
GOOD, SORT OF, IN A VAGUE, GENERAL WAY. SEDUCING ONESELF INTO BELIEVING IN
ART’S INTRINSIC “GOODNESS,” HOWEVER, IS SIMPLY BAD RELIGION, NO MATTER WHAT
THE REWARDS.’

Dave Hickey

THE CAP A, DROPPED
The immediate obstacle in talking about art is locating which one you’re talking about. Is it the personal, the
pop cultural, or academic definition? The calling or the art culture industry? As described by art historian
Donald Preziosi, the academic meaning is constantly in flux. “The broad amalgam of complementary fields in

which the modern discipline of art history is positioned never achieved fixed or uniform institutional

integration. Nevertheless, in the long run its looseness…proved particularly effective in naturalizing and

validating the very idea of art as a ‘universal’ human phenomenon.”

Transition is the requisite state. A conditional answer is all that is possible. (Want design to be art? Wait a
few minutes.) With the expansion of what art history considers its field of study, excluding anything – not
simply design – is problematic. Selecting out design becomes a matter of personal taste or prejudice. These
motivations continue to be the most powerful influences on discourse.

A more fundamental complication in debating art is the origin of the term. The structure of our language
precludes arriving at a functional definition. When Aristotle and Plato carved up reality, art was the Other. Art
is what’s left when you can’t categorize something as useful. To paraphrase Lacan, l’art il n’existe pas. Rather
than being elevating and resplendent, the term is a linguistic black hole. Calling something art effectively
removes it from our universe altogether. The activity collapses into a realm we can only speculate upon.

Those speculations are essentially mystical. Art is venerated for its ability to produce transcendent
experiences. Attributed to art are virtues and verities that are as profound as they are ineffable. While these
art apotheoses are likely very real for their recipients, we may still question their cause. All attempts to locate
“artness” within objects or their producers have proved failures. Describing the art experience is more rightly
the province of perception theory and cultural study.

Morse Peckham describes art in terms of role playing. The purpose of studying art is to instruct us in how to

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 29

THE TEACHER TRIES TO MAKE THE ASPECTS OF GRAPHIC DESIGN INTERESTING BUT HE
REALLY CAN’T BECAUSE THEY ARE BORING.

Art student’s evaluation of Foundation Graphic Design course, Spring 1997, Kenneth FitzGerald, Instructor

THE MATTER WITH TWO MINDS
Designers have an art conflict. When attempting to establish design quality, discussions customarily enter –
some say intrude into – the region of art. Is design an art overall? Is great design art? For the latter question,
the answer’s usually “yes,” no matter what designer you ask. For the former question, the answer seems
invariably to be “no.”

Paul Rand himself couldn’t arrive at a consistent, coherent answer to those questions. Depending upon
where his theorizing wandered, design was or was not art. Neither author nor editor cared (or dared) resolve
the internal inconsistency created by contradictory claims. To Rand’s legacy we may add this art-
schizophrenia. Design desires to be art and not-art simultaneously – and fears it’s nothing.

While it is futile to argue what is and isn’t art or design, we will gain from studying the origin and operation
of the terms. By revealing our need for such terms, we may move to a healthy method of evaluation. The goal is
not to “elevate” design to art’s level but to relocate both. It’s a given that art has a higher cultural station,
however nebulous and undeserved. Establishing this hierarchy is an evaluating function based entirely upon
self-image rather than objective criteria. People want the prestige that derives either from producing art or
knowing it when they see it. This despite the fact that there is not, never has been, and never will be a
consensus on what art is. Art is all aura – wondrous but unable to sustain itself under the spotlight.

Challenging stock convictions may move us toward what Edward O. Wilson calls a “consilience.” This obscure
1840 word derives from William Whewell’s book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Wilson describes the
word as meaning “…literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge as a result of the linking of facts and fact-based

theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.” As art and design are intellectual
constructs, we can never prove any assertions. We may, however, establish a more realistic foundation for

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS
B y K e n n e t h F i t z G e r a l d

T Y P E F A C E S U S E D I N T H I S A R T I C L E :
Running heads and folios set in 7 point Tarzana Narrow Bold Italic. Tracking 20.
Headline set in 18 point Tarzana Narrow Bold Italic. Tracking 20.
By line set in 10 point Tarzana Wide Bold Italic. Tracking 20.
Feature article set in 10/14 point Tarzana Narrow Regular, Bold, and Italic. Tracking 5.
Quotes inside text set in 9/13 Filosofia Regular. Tracking 5.
Quotes set in 14/13 Tarzana Narrow Bold Italic.

discussion of our visual culture.
More than conceiving new theory, we need to identify and disassemble the many ill-constructed conceptions

Morse Peckham

Dave Hickey

which the modern discipline of art history is positioned never achieved fixed or uniform institutional

integration. Nevertheless, in the long run its looseness…proved particularly effective in naturalizing and

validating the very idea of art as a ‘universal’ human phenomenon.”

Morse Peckham describes art in terms of role playing. The purpose of studying art is to instruct us in how to

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 29

THE TEACHER TRIES TO MAKE THE ASPECTS OF GRAPHIC DESIGN INTERESTING BUT HE
REALLY CAN’T BECAUSE THEY ARE BORING.

Art student’s evaluation of Foundation Graphic Design course, Spring 1997, Kenneth FitzGerald, Instructor

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS
B y K e n n e t h F i t z G e r a l d

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 31

backward and archaic. Rather than responding to the critiques of their models – in other words, recognizing
any of the art made in the latter half of this century – Rand and his followers dismiss them. Their neglect of art
begins at about the time when Dwiggins coins the term “graphic design.” It’s almost as if the birth of design
meant the end of art. Or that design is heir to the true, historical art.

“To poke fun at form or formalism is to poke fun at… the philosophy called aesthetics,” Rand wrote in his
essay “From Cassandra to Chaos.” The problem is, art had been debunking aesthetics his entire adult life. In his
books, Rand referenced outdated doctrines, peppered his text with quotes yanked out of context, and
constructed a philosophy ultimately dependent upon his status in his field. Only within design could you find
regard for these declarations.

Of course, Rand’s books were self-promotions. The theory’s ultimate end is creating a noble lineage into
which he inserts his work. Like David Carson’s The End of Print, these books theorize to self-aggrandize. An
objective, critical analysis is nowhere on the agenda. The art interpretations made by design-star
hagiographer Lewis Blackwell in David Carson’s name supervene Rand’s in shallowness and distortion. Both
theorize from surface readings. Carson considers his work as having “similarity” with “Outsider Art/Art Brut” in
2nd Sight. The statement sounds learned but is more empty romanticism. Ignored, as always, are the quite
separate historic, intellectual and cultural circumstances that brought these artistic conceits into fashion.
The former construction, “outsider art,” is a self-negating term (if it’s outside art, it’s not art) which
denigrates, not celebrates, the activity. Carson’s “outsider” stance is similar to a career politician claiming to
be a “Washington outsider.”

Rand was entitled to formulate his own version of art history. For the majority of people, Rand’s claims
sound succinct, sensible and lyrical. This is due to the fact that they are concise bursts of received knowledge.
Everyone knows these things. It is, however, comforting to hear them intoned by the Oracle. If someone with his
stature lives by these beliefs, there must be something to them. Designers forget that design conferred his
stature, creating a self-reinforcing system. It also doesn’t hurt to write your own monograph.

Rand’s theories require review because of how they continue to shape the sensibilities of designers. In a
recent AIGA Journal article, Elizabeth Resnick describes the response of design students to a new film on Rand.
All show enthusiasm and admiration for his insistence that design is art. However, those students will become
even more marginalized and disenchanted with their work and status if they attempt to define themselves by
Rand’s fallacies. Omitted from his theories were the wholly subjective and situational-specific circumstances
surrounding the acceptance of his work. (That corporate America has turned to designers who are formally
antithetical to Rand was seen by him as evidence of a CEO dumb-down. What it actually demonstrates is that
the CEOs are shrewd enough to recognize how to utilize design styles to signal contemporiety. No matter how
aesthetically “correct,” business will junk design that doesn’t signify what consumers respond to.) Rather than
investing in the ideas of their times, the students accept inculcation into an illusory legacy.

Today, it is a common opinion of designers that everything went to hell with art in this century. For many
people, art of the last half-century has been progressively appalling. Art stopped being about the visual and
became ideas – masturbatory and ridiculous ones at that. Once the province of genius practitioners and
unquestioned aesthetics, academics hijacked art and stifled it under incomprehensible jargon. Artist-manqués
were only too happy to join the game.

There is merit in some of these arguments. Unfortunately, designers lack critical substance to expose any
conceit due to their fundamental misinterpretations of past art activity. Art has always been about ideas. It is
designers who focus on the visual nature of the works and assume the surface is what art’s about. As Dave
Hickey says, “Junior professors (!) began explaining to me that non-portable, non-object art had arisen during

the nineteen sixties as a means of ‘conceptualizing’ the practice of art in response to ‘commodification’ and the

‘commercialization’ of the art object during the postwar era. This would have been a wonderful argument if a

painting by Edward Ruscha or Jean-Louis David were any less ‘conceptual’ than a pile of dirt on the museum

floor….”

The complex iconography that makes up so many great paintings was the incomprehensible artspeak of
yesterday. If you hold that art of earlier times was “about” the visual aspect, all painting is ruined.

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 30

play the role of art appreciator. When presented with what we recognize as an art appreciation situation
(almost exclusively the gallery or museum), we know to adopt the art viewer role and anticipate the art ex-
perience. A great work of art is one that best meets our anticipation of what an artwork should be. The rigidity
or flexibility of our expectations determines what we will consider art. The inherent nature of the work is, at
best, secondary.

Our reaction to art is hardly spontaneous – culture instills it. That art exists is a teaching of culture. We
respond as a result of training. The profundity of our reaction depends upon how seriously we take our role.
Everything we today regard as art – whether it be a Renoir or a Koons – was once non-art and was rationalized
into the definition.

Art is also purported to be our vanguard of culture and a vital experience. As prevalent the belief is that art
anticipates culture, little evidence can be found as proof. Art objects may be catalysts for and products of
social change. However, all artifacts of our material culture possess these qualities.

The means by which art enlivens existence are a matter of faith. Billions of people have and continue to live
without exposure to anything considered art and are no worse for it. A better case may be made that the ex-
perience of art is detrimental. It either proposes an unobtainable fantasy or twists the mundane into
distressing phantasmagoria. Assuming, that is, you are able to comprehend the work. And, of course, there’s
always a bottom line. If you get addicted and want to possess some art, the costs are exorbitant. Is it
expensive because it’s art or art because it’s expensive?

Then there’s the disturbance of interacting with artists. Certainly, no one can claim the makers of art are de
facto a saintly breed. The popular conception insists just the opposite. One of the most bizarre and insupport-
able contentions of our culture is that only reprehensible persons have the ability to generate the art ex-
perience. Though possessed of a self-image as exemplary humans, artists are no better than most, likely worse
on average. And in their emulation of artists, designers adopt their most offensive traits. They regularly fuse
aesthetic superciliousness with an arrogance born of considering themselves masters of their profession. In art
as in design, this conceited attitude likely compensates for a bitter realization. Society considers their activity
a marginal, self-indulgent pursuit. Artists receive adoration from the greater public only in the abstract.

BE REGULAR AND ORDERLY IN YOUR LIFE…
SO THAT YOU MAY BE VIOLENT AND ORIGINAL IN YOUR WORK.

Gustave Flaubert

THE DESIGNERS’ ART
Designers consider themselves creatively aware and often study within art programs. However, designers are no
more in touch with art than your average Joan. When designers talk about art they rarely deal with the reality
of contemporary art practice or theory. The art of the past seems a more commodious area to opine in.
However, comfort doesn’t bring clarity. Misinterpretation and misrepresentation are common when designers
engage past activity. Art is rarely looked at rationally. The people, process and product all become
romanticized.

When referring to art, designers usually settle in one of two historical eras. For those of a more traditional
bent, nothing seems to have happened in art – or be worthy of attention – since about 1940. The more
progressive-minded designers will, however, accept up to 1955. What often distinguishes a conservative from a
progressive designer is which outmoded conception of art they prefer. Art after 1960 is largely ignored, even
though conceptually, it’s more interesting for designers.

The former, larger group of designers see art as high aesthetic activity. The lineage that Paul Rand created
in his books were classic demonstrations of this model. Art is artifacts of transcendent genius that stir
profound emotion in the human soul. A masterly manipulation of formal elements moves these artifacts to a
rarefied plane. Only the finest of design may claim this level of achievement, though all should aspire to it. The
requirement is awareness of and strict adherence to aesthetic rules consistent throughout history.

This model is no more arguable than any that has evolved since. However, the fact is that it is historically

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 31

the nineteen sixties as a means of ‘conceptualizing’ the practice of art in response to ‘commodification’ and the

‘commercialization’ of the art object during the postwar era. This would have been a wonderful argument if a

painting by Edward Ruscha or Jean-Louis David were any less ‘conceptual’ than a pile of dirt on the museum

floor….”

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 30

BE REGULAR AND ORDERLY IN YOUR LIFE…
SO THAT YOU MAY BE VIOLENT AND ORIGINAL IN YOUR WORK.

Gustave Flaubert

This model is no more arguable than any that has evolved since. However, the fact is that it is historically

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 33

THE BIG EXPRESS
The ultimate artistic license is personal expression. Designers will be forever distinct from artists because they
must present someone else’s message. To free themselves from corporate/modernist shackles, designers strive
to inject their own personality into their work.

At this year’s Fuse98 conference, Erik Spiekermann received a round of applause for stating he designed to
solve his clients’ problems, not his own. He offered the comment while reviewing presentations by other
designers whose speculative nature he saw as bordering on the artistic. (“Artistic” meaning, in this context,
impractical and useless.)

On the latter side, Lewis Blackwell again imparts David Carson with the legacy of the rebel Americans.
In 2nd Sight, Blackwell explains of Carson, “He doesn’t go to a psychoanalyst to express himself – he designs.”

Here Blackwell attempts to link Carson with Big Art while disparaging critics who have read something other
than The End of Print. Of course, Pollock painted and went to the psychoanalyst.

This idea of self-expressiveness permeates design’s conception of art. Within art, dispute of the rhetoric of
expressionism came soon after its inception. Once more, design seems bent on rearguing constructs art moved
beyond decades ago.

In The Expressive Fallacy, Hal Foster demonstrates expressionism to be just another fabrication.
“(E)xpressionism is a paradox: a type of representation that asserts presence – of the artist, of the real. This

presence is by proxy only (the expressive marks of the artist, the indexical traces of the hand), and yet it is easy

to fall into the fallacy: for example, we commonly say an expressionist like Kandinsky ‘broke through’

representation, when in fact he replaced (or superimposed) one form with another – a representation oriented

not to reality (the coded, realist outer world) but to expression (the coded, symbolist inner world). After all,

formlessness does not dissolve convention or suspend mediation; as the expressionist trope for feeling, it is a

rhetorical form too.”

As examples of the artistic reaction against expressionism, Foster details a succession of painters beginning
with Jasper Johns (Target with Plaster Casts) in 1955, to Roy Lichtenstein (his brushstroke paintings), and,
more recently, Gerhard Richter. In other art media, self-expression acts primarily as a conceit to work against.
As we draw closer to contemporary times, artwork in form and concerns move closer to design, and, finally, art
must coexist with design to have import. Foster cites Jenny Holzer and Peter Nadin’s artist book Eating Friends,
which “debunks” expression with a literal obsession with “inner life”: texts and images (the stuff graphic
design is made of), focusing on internal organs.

Still, designers regularly travel extended rhetorical distances in form to arrive at art. Usually, designers
aspire to painting – the traditional art medium. Frequently, designers express a desire to “paint with type.”
The implication is of scattering letterforms as expressively and directly as Pollock splattered enamel on
canvas. However, as Foster points out above, the process of abstract painters is just as intentional as
representational painters. The gestural, immediate style of painting is merely a point in the artistic continuum.
Deliberate, systematized painting routines – ones that resemble common typographical practice – have been
the dominant method. If you can’t find a painting approach that matches your design process, you haven’t
looked hard enough. The aspiration to type-paint is less a desired working method than another longing for
artistic legitimacy.

Self-expression stands as another attempt to signify truth through formal means alone. For design, however,
the effort is ironic. Expressionism long ago became a language appropriated by consumer culture. As Foster
suggests, “…we must open up (expressionism) to include the expressionist rhetoric of psychology and

consumerist society in general. Express yourself, we are exhorted – but only via the type, only via the

commodity.” Striving to elude “commodification” through self-expression, designers charge headfirst into its
maw. Meanwhile, the expressionist desire to create a public, formal language was likely usurped by design.
Culture has for a time defined itself through mass media: the realm of design.

The point being made here is not that one must be absolutely contemporary in their art metaphors. The past
should be neither venerated nor rejected. The issue is that designers continue to work from a romantic ideal of

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 32

Design can only suffer in comparison to this popular construction of High Art. The ideal is unattainable not
because of a designer’s cupidity, indifference, or hack status. It’s because the artist ideal is wholly fictional.
The closer you examine art activity, the more diverse a behavior it becomes. If it resembles any contemporary
activity, it’s design.

HE HAD NEVER REALIZED THAT HE HAD PRODUCED QUITE THIS MANY THINGS.
WHY, SOME PEOPLE MIGHT CONSIDER HIM AN ACTUAL ARTIST, BY PROFESSION. WAS
THAT POSSIBLE? HE PICTURED ALL THOSE HOURS SPENT ALONE IN HIS ROOM,
PATIENTLY FITTING TOGETHER TINY SCRAPS, FEVERISHLY HUNTING UP THE PROPER
TEXTURES, POUNDING IN A ROW OF THUMBTACKS UNTIL THE BACK OF HIS NECK ACHED
– ALL THAT DRUDGERY. IT WASN’T THE WAY HE PICTURED THE LIFE OF AN ARTIST.

Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

THE ARCHETYPE-CAST
The artist beau ideal is that of a loner pursuing a personal agenda. Design is said to be different because
of its collaborative nature. Often, a team accomplishes design projects. Credit usually goes to the principal
designer, of course, obscuring the process. The determination to produce under one person’s name
(e.g., Kenneth FitzGerald Design) intends to appropriate the artist’s cultural authority. When a designer
stresses that they are a “one-person shop,” the intimation is one of greater creative distinction – working like,
being, an artist.

The fact is that most artists past and present operated as a firm. For hundreds of years, artists apprenticed
in shops, working under masters. Whether it was painting portraits, frescoes or blacksmithing, you weren’t
working alone. The goal was to set up your own shop then make your underlings do things your way. Rather than
temples of individual attainment, museums are show houses of art direction. The Rembrandt Project – the
ongoing research effort to identify “authentic” paintings by the master – displays the normative situation, not
an aberration. “The Great Masters” was a collection of schools; art firms directed by principals. The
devaluation of works only partially executed by Rembrandt speaks more to our culture’s skewed values than
the paintings’ intrinsic worth.

Social and cultural changes did occasion a more specialized art commodity provider. These individuals
desired a higher social status, as did the purchasers of their wares. From here, the art idea as we know it began
to form. However, the lone genius remains the exception. It’s almost a truism that to find an artist working
alone in a garret was (and is) to find a failure. Today’s major-selling fine artist is still regularly a company in
every way. Assistants fabricate the bulk, if not the entirety, of pieces. They stretch the canvas, paint the
content, then wash the Range Rover. It’s a plum job for aspiring artists, and has been for centuries.

In process, art is like design is like fashion is like scientific research is like most human activity: the labor of
many to the glorification of one. The solitary creator myth, however, still dominates inside and out of the art
world. I remember my disdain when, as an art school undergraduate, I first read of an artist’s assistants. This
pseudo-revelation is regularly roto-tilled up by the popular media as an exposé of contemporary art avarice
and hypocrisy. My naïveté resulted from the reinforcing art school indoctrination and a wholly visual definition
of art activity. The dissimulation lies with our culture. We demand mass commodities with the aura of
exclusivity.

Alternating, and often mixed, with the Great Master model is one inspired by the heroic artists of abstract
expressionism: Pollock, de Kooning. These American (native or adopted) painters wrested the art world from
European dominance in the 1950s. Combined with the lust-for-life archetype of the late 19th century (Van
Gogh, Gaugin, et al.), the artist became a tormented soul. Art now was an intensely personal self-investigation
of the psyche. Artists make art to purge their demons. It is a representation shared widely within our culture,
though the movement was brief and problematic. Designers, for all their claims of practicality, buy into the
romance. They either play against it to assert their creative sobriety, or conjure its spirit to siphon off
artistic aura.

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 33

Here Blackwell attempts to link Carson with Big Art while disparaging critics who have read something other
than The End of Print. Of course, Pollock painted and went to the psychoanalyst.

presence is by proxy only (the expressive marks of the artist, the indexical traces of the hand), and yet it is easy

to fall into the fallacy: for example, we commonly say an expressionist like Kandinsky ‘broke through’

representation, when in fact he replaced (or superimposed) one form with another – a representation oriented

not to reality (the coded, realist outer world) but to expression (the coded, symbolist inner world). After all,

formlessness does not dissolve convention or suspend mediation; as the expressionist trope for feeling, it is a

rhetorical form too.”

consumerist society in general. Express yourself, we are exhorted – but only via the type, only via the

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 32

Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

E M I G R E # 7 0 : T H E L O O K B A C K I S S U E | 8 | 1 9 9 8E M I G R E # 7 0 : T H E L O O K B A C K I S S U E | 7 | 1 9 9 8

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 35

neutral grid, the gallery is an ideological space – and receptive to commerce. Willingly complicit is the artist.
O’Doherty writes, “The economic model in place for a hundred years…is product, filtered through galleries,

offered to collectors and public institutions, written about in magazines partially supported by the galleries,

and drifting towards the academic apparatus that stabilizes ‘history’ – certifying much as banks do, the holding

of its major repository, the museum. History in art is, ultimately, worth money. Thus do we get not the art we

deserve but the art we pay for. This comfortable system went virtually unquestioned by the key figure it is based

upon: the artist.” All art is in the marketplace. It must be to be considered art; its validating establishment
resides there.

The fiction of the artist as victim of these forces – and not devoted accessory – is a component of the
modernist construction of the avant-garde. To command authority, artists must claim a privileged status in
society. They must be above crass commercialism and defend culture. Art must be kept pure. But someone must
take the fall. That would be designers.

Nevertheless, a look at the most prominent art stars shows individuals responding to markets and making no
(or little) pretense to making commodities. To afford his epic Cremaster videos, Matthew Barney has to up-
front please people with money. Damien Hirst conceived floating a shark in a tank of formaldehyde but it took
the financing of a Saatchi to do it. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is as much
a brochure for its patron as was the Mona Lisa for whoever commissioned that vanity item. Commissioning a
work of art has historically been a public declaration of virtue and wealth. Why is it different if your claimed
virtue is the making of a beverage?

AN ARTIST’S DESIGN
It isn’t necessary to detail the scorn most artists have for designers. In an interview in Emigre #46, the
designers of Orangeflux relate a typical story of artists dismissing their work: “…when we show Rust Belt with-

in the art community they tell us it’s not art, it’s design. They can’t see beyond the type.” The ongoing
marginalization of fine artists in our culture drives their determination to keep designers in a lower status.

These are attitudes within the arts deserving mention. They relate to the way design dispels certain works as
not being design but art. In keeping with its art schizophrenia, design can’t decide if having your work called
art is condemnation or acclaim. It depends, of course, if you respect the designer or not.

As Orangeflux learned, the art world is not a commodious place for daring designers. The work condemned
as art by designers is a non-starter for artists. Art industrialists who champion the most difficult, challenging
art become obstinate conventionalists in their design concerns. For every Walker Art Center, there’s one
hundred museums that can’t get enough 12 pt. Helvetica. The preferred exhibition announcement is a template
design: color photo of the art piece on the front (always white bordered, like a frame, so you know it isn’t just a
design) and easy to read centered type (Helvetica, Gill, Garamond) on the back. To violate this design space is
like stepping outside the gallery, which the card emulates. You risk not being taken seriously.

At a presentation to fine art graduate students, I garnered the expected response to contemporary
“cutting-edge” design. The reaction to the art school publications I brought for the students’ appraisal –
P. Scott Makela’s Minnesota College of Art & Design catalogs, ReVerb’s Otis and CalArts works – was almost
uniform. They regarded the publications as incomprehensible indulgences that failed to meet their
fundamental purpose. Students expressed their opinions with a startling passion. They recoiled from a repre-
sentational disturbance they assiduously cultivated in their own work.

It’s only slightly ironic that artists are the most vehement defenders of conservative design. Design is
different, they’ll say, it’s about relaying facts, information. It’s about communication. Though this would seem
to be a harsh judgment on art – that it is uncommunicative – it certainly proves true. Arguably, art isn’t about
communication – at least, no more than design is.

Artists thrive on the avant-garde notion that it is their role to critique and experiment with cultural forms.
A designer investigating these ideas is an offense against sensibility, against the cultural order. Artists don’t
like this view contested as it leads to prying apart desperately held illusions of relevance.

SKILLING SAWS AND ABSORBENT CATALOGS 34

art. Rather than construct a relevant model for their activity, designers orbit a hoary salon.
Unfortunately, when art isn’t romanticized, design treats it as visual supermarket. Designers unashamedly

investigate art because it offers many graphic ideas to purloin. Design becomes a process of raising movie-set
facades behind which business is conducted.

FILTHY LUCRATIVE
What are the essential, irrefutable particulars separating design from art? People go into design to make
money. Designers prostitute art for business. Designers work for clients, artists work for themselves.

These clichés hold up as well as the other aspects of the art myth. It is a delusion that the activity of fine
artists is divorced from commercial considerations. It isn’t even a matter of degree. All that separates art and
design is the kind of marketplace one chooses to operate in. The direct evidence of this is the art world’s
obsession with sales. No matter how “conceptual” or “non-object” oriented, art can and must be sold.
Economic viability is the preeminent determinant.

The traditional estimation holds that designers are dependent upon having clients and are subservient to
their will. Artists, however, are self-starters who answer only to their muse. To believe this, you must disregard
admissions committees, art faculty, review boards, competition jurors, selection committees, gallery owners,
curators, critics, grant committees, opening attendees, et al. Each of these groups has a profound and often
direct influence on how and what art is made. For artists, these encounters are client meetings. Artists
frequently modify how they make and present their work in the wake of feedback from these groups. The input
of knowledgeable art insiders is craved, not scorned.

The notion that art is an “anything-goes” zone is misinformed. Straying too far from well-delineated
boundaries is hazardous for artists. The field is broad, but often shallow. To gain recognition as an artist, it is
incumbent to exhibit regularly in approved forums. Critical recognition requires first being seen. This means
you must please people, particularly, gallery owners. If they are to be at all successful, gallery owners must
make a basic economic decision about art. Will it sell?

Sales are evidently not a requirement to be an artist. If it was, we must remove the majority of practitioners
from the canon. The large number of artists successful in their time but ignored in contemporary estimation
complicates the situation. Unless we are ready to accept that unseen creations are artworks (just as anything
done in type and image can be design), we must acknowledge that art is mediated by forces exterior to the
artist. Every artist must face the reality that the surest way for their labor to be considered art is to attach a
high price tag to it.

Historically, artworks have always functioned as commodities. Finding clients has concerned artists
throughout history. Jacques-Louis David resented having to accept portrait commissions. The historic epics he
preferred to paint, however, couldn’t find a clientele. Art was born of the marketplace, as was design. Design
was merely a new product line.

Brian O’Doherty takes a scathing look at the “art industry” in Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the
Gallery Space. The gallery is a showroom floor, displaying manufacturers’ latest models. “For many of us, the

gallery space still gives off negative vibrations when we wander in. Esthetics is turned into a kind of social

elitism – the gallery space is exclusive. Isolated in plots of space, what is on display looks a bit like valuable

scarce goods, jewelry, or silver: esthetics are turned into commerce – the gallery space is expensive. What it

contains is, without mediation, well-nigh incomprehensible – art is difficult. Exclusive audience, rare objects

difficult to comprehend – here we have a social, financial, and intellectual snobbery which models (and at its

worst parodies) our system of limited production, our modes of assigning values, our social habits at large.

Never was a space, designed to accommodate the prejudices and enhance the self-image of the upper middle

classes, so efficiently codified.

“The classic modernist gallery is the limbo between studio and living room, where the conventions of both

meet on a carefully neutralized ground. There the artist’s respect for what he has invented is perfectly super-

imposed on the bourgeois desire for possession. For a gallery is, in the end, a place to sell things – which is O.K.”

The modernist gallery didn’t transform art into commodity. It was always in that state. Like the illusory