I very much believe that whatever special respect exists for people in the design profession comes more from their relationship to the role of art and making things than their service to business. When I was five years old, I decided to become an artist. I had no idea where that decision came from, outside of the pleasure I experienced making things. In teaching, I’ve discovered that many students of design had a similar epiphany at an early moment in their lives. I became a designer, but like many of us, I’ve always struggled with the relationship of Art and Design, and the question of what precisely separated the two activities. “Can Design be Art ?” is a question that has always obsessed me. Not long ago, I reread EH Gomrich’s magisterial Survey of Art History which begins, “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” How liberating, the question is finally answered—if there is no Art, Design cannot be considered Art.”
Then again it is reasonable to imagine that there are many artists living under cover, in a kind of witness protection program, in the realm of design. I’ve carefully called myself a designer all my life in part because I fear being pretentious, and also because I realized I would never surpass Vermeer. But I feel ready for a conversion. I am thinking of changing my self-definition from a designer who occasionally practiced art to an artist who practices design. This is an easy claim to make because being an artist is a case of self-anointment, and there is no entry exam. More than anything else, the designation represents a view of life. History, of course, has its own standard.
If we need a definition of Art, the Roman literary critic Horace provided an elegant one. “The role of art is to inform and delight”. Form and light are hidden in that definition. It’s an idea I enthusiastically embrace. Of course, informing is different than persuading. When one is informed, one is strengthened. Persuasion does not guarantee the same result.
Delight is the non-quantifiable part of the definition that speaks to the role of beauty. What artists make is a gift to humankind; a benign instrument that has the possibility of affecting our consciousness through empathy and shared symbolism. We are affected not through logic but by a direct appeal to our limbic brain, the source of our emotional life. Although we don’t fully understand how it functions, I’m drawn to this mysterious part of our work, which we frequently describe as metaphysical or miraculous. These words may simply mean that we still do not understand what our brain is capable of.
The most important function of art through history has been to work magic, to change the very nature of those who experience the work—in these cases beauty transforms as well as informs. Searching for the miraculous strikes me as being a good way to spend my time. I’ll show you two examples of what I mean.
A woman interested in Buddhism asked me to design stationary for her. In the course of doing the work, I made a discovery. A folded piece of paper could operate like a printing press. There are three faces of the Buddha on the left hand side of the page printed in red yellow and blue. When folded the faces align to create a full color head of the Buddha that smiles at you through the envelope. My client added the line at the bottom of the page, “when discarding please burn.” After all, you don’t want to throw the Buddha in the garbage.
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