Chuck, do you have a citation for this quote? I'm working on an idea for my students that might turn into a paper, if I find the area in question to be lightly charted territory....
"In response to the question "Is design an expression
of art?" Charles Eames famously replied, "I would
rather say it's an expression of purpose. It may, if
it is good enough, later be judged as art." To me the
judgment regarding creativity is similar and more
immediate."
Here's my thought process: I teach an Art and Ideas class for undergraduate design students in the areas of Apparel, Graphic, Digital Media (film), multimedia (web), apparel, game, animation, and interior design. This is supposed to be their art history class from modernism to the present. I start in the Rococo to show the transition in the relationship between the institution of art and the individual work as Western History moves from royal patronage to bourgeois culture, modernism (industrialization, aestheticism, avant-garde etc.), 20th c. government sponsorship, postmodern revolt, fall of (US) government sponsorship in 1980's through cultural conflict to today.
So, (let me mop my brow for a second) I want my design students to understand how design parallels this development of the institution of art. My thesis, though I have little support for it as yet, is the following.
In the Rococo art and design are very close - almost the same thing, as a royal house was to physically represent the power and importance of the owner through aesthetic production. This includes the architecture, furniture, apparel, and even performance of the individuals through courtly life. This production exists in a linear patronage format that allows funds to flow down from the patron to artist/artisan and products to flow up from the artist to the patron.
Once the bourgeois culture is developed no one has the same funds as the royalty had to support a patron/artist relationship, so we have the fall of the salon system and the development of the gallery system between the time of Manet and Monet in France. (I use Peter Buerger's "Theory of the Avant-garde" as support in this transition as well as a pile of standard art history texts.)
However, Buerger does not chart the role of design once we move to the bourgeois culture. I postulate that design maintains the patron/artist or artisan relationship, only they must diversify their clientele because the new money does not function the way the old money did.
Art and design become a nonlinear system. Art uses a gallery system to diversify collectors while giving the artist freedom to develop work along his or her concept or technique. Design maintains the patronage relationship, meeting the particular needs of clients, but diversifies the number of clients. Rather than working for a royal family to develop the aesthetics of a palace with paintings, ballroom, gardens, etc. The designer develops relationships with many businesses.
I've been thinking and writing about whether or not design has an "institution" as such, and I think, as the Charles Eames quote above points out, design does not need a historicizing institution of its own because art institutions step in and do the work when (and this is more of my thesis) the aesthetic of an object connects enough with a meaning that is culturally relevant enough to posit the work as art. Also, because of the designer/client relationship an institution is not required to validate the work. Increased sales on the part of the company or business validate the use of design.
I would also contend that this does not contradict with Stephen Heller's concept that fine art and design should be and are merged. I think what Heller is arguing against is a form of cultural elitism that came out of the modernist separation of design and art that says artists can't cross the design boundary and vs. versa. I believe the division was for the sole purpose of artificially separating aesthetics from design and handing it to art even though aesthetics are democratic, being possessed by everyone. This does not conflict with an assessment of the functional systems art and design created upon and after their separation.
Resources: I've been looking at a lot of aesthetic and cultural theory from Adorno to Peter Buerger or Burger (with an umlaut), early modernist aesthetics, Greenberg from 30's to 50's, Hans Belting, Stephen C. Foster, Foucault and friends, Stephen Heller and Raymond Williams.
Any thoughts or additions? Is this well charted territory and I'm just swimming behind the boat?
Best,
Alan
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