creativematch: Art vs Design

Friday, 8 June 2007

Art vs Design

Last week I was at the Danish Design Centre in Copenhagen. There were a couple of temporary exhibitions, Magic Design which looked at the design of thing that have changed our lives over the last 50 years, broken down ito the 9 categories: alarm clocks, electric shavers, sports shoes, coffee makers, bicycles, typewriters, vacuum cleaners, music players and electronic games. The other was the the Danish Design Prize 2007 winning entries.

Both had plenty of interesting things to look at, but the thing that most grabbed my attention was the permanent design lab, FlowMarket, a shop selling Consumer Awareness. It claims to be a shop designed to inspire consumers to think, live and consume more holistic.

What does it sell?

The shop is full of empty containers, in the shape of regular supermarket product, with product names such as clean air, lack of exercise killers. But these are real products, and they are all for sale, for around £5 to £20.

There are also lots of interesting statistics printed on the walls, such as:

The air inside the typical home is on average 2-5 times more polluted than the air just outside - largely because of household cleaners and pesticides?

The exhibition really made me think about the way we live now, which I guess is the intention, so it works, but it also made me think of the age old Art vs Design question, where's the line between the two. By Art vs Design what I really mean is Fine Art vs Commercial Art.

If FlowMarket had been at the ICA then I would have quite happily accepted it as a work of art. I went off to check out what Wikipedia had to say on the definition of art and found that:

Art is that which is made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind and/or spirit.

Which I would have said FlowMarket did, so that really didn't help.

In the end I concluded, as I had always suspected anyway, that there is a grey area where fine art and commercial art overlap.

Post a Comment

Posted By Adrian Marshall at 12:42 AM in Category:Design

Link directly to this article.

Replies

Michael Leahy
It reminds of a client that was looking to hire a journalist for some copywriting, and asked me what is the difference between journalism and copywriting. My reply was a bit off-the-cuff: journalists have opinions, copywriters have clients. It's not entirely that simple, of course, as artists sometimes have clients too.

www.thewritestuff.be/

26 Jun 2007

Nigel Clark
I note that the clear majority of respondents to your recent related watercooler vote gave the wrong answer. Hardly surprising I guess, given a survey population dominated by design professionals.

19 Jun 2007

Philip Searle
Yes there is a clear diffrence...
Fine art is not constrained and is free form - often without a brief or any prior reference to anything at all. It can follow a theme or a style. On the other hand we have a 'design brief' which really is in 'box' of considered constraints.

A cross over design process, (as illustrated in the article), does not make it 'Art' just because it's on show. But the thought is. Because of these constraints is why we make money in the Design and Advertsing fields, its not that easy to do, but you can become inspired by 'fine arts' and this influences mainstream 'Design'.

18 Jun 2007

Nigel Clark

Art is art.

There is no ambiguity.

Art: could be design: if it was designed so.

It would still be art; design wouldn’t.

The difficulty in defining it is irrelevant.

8 Jun 2007

paul winter

Reminds me of when I was a kid holidaying in the Scottish Western Isles, you could buy tine of 'Scotch Mist' - perhaps this was for the Americans.

Isn't the difference between 'fine' and 'commercial' exactly that. One of for the 'fine art' the other is for the 'money'.

But you're right - it is a grey area. Look at Dali, not a great 'artist', but very surely the best salesman of his trade - bit like Damien (let's shock them with something dead) Hirst.

8 Jun 2007