on Art/Design
Learning to let go of boxes
Many years ago I attended a conference. During the Q&A, an attendee made the observation that art can be design and design can be art. The speaker, who had spent a good part of his talk jabbing at a celebrity designer who made lamps he described as "ugly as hell" and unworthy of the word design, replied: "Mdm, you're either pregnant or not pregnant. You can't be half-pregnant."
The room laughed. The attendee sat down. That reply probably wouldn’t survive a conference today, but this isn’t about that.
The need to sort things into categories isn’t new… it art or design? Fiction or non-fiction? Drama or comedy? Tourist or traveller? Pop or indie? And at some point, is a hot dog a sandwich, a tomato a fruit, or cereal a soup? It keeps coming up because it feels like there should be an answer. Someone needs to know which box to put you in.
Categories are useful, sometimes. Nobody wants to walk into a library and find books piled randomly on the floor. You need a shelf.. a section... a box. The problem is when the box becomes the point and when the box becomes more important than the thing inside it.
What the debate assumes is that naming a thing correctly changes what it is. That the “ugly as hell” lamp is somehow less of a lamp because a few people won’t call it design. It doesn’t matter to the lamp. But it matters enormously to the people standing around it.
The category is administrative. It’s useful for critics, curators, grant applications, and conference speakers with strong opinions about lamps. For the person making the thing, it’s mostly noise.
When we started A Design Film Festival more than a decade and a half ago, we applied for a grant from the government’s design department. They said it was a film event, not design. So we went to the film department, who said it was art, not film. Then to the art department, who said, not surprisingly, it was design, not art. The event ran anyway for a good ten years.
The question isn’t what category something belongs to, but whether it was made well. Not is it this or that. The category is not the thing, and the name is not the thing, and the box is not the thing.
Make the thing well. Everything else is someone else’s problem.
—
Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous