Design = Life

Over the past couple of weeks I have had some experiences that have gotten me to think about the roll of masterpieces and the classics in our creative culture. Last week while I was in NYC I visited the New Museum to see the inaugural show called Unmonumental at its new building on Bowery around the Nolita area of downtown.

While the exhibition had no shortage of artworks by contemporary artistic geniuses, identifying which artist was associated with each piece was a difficult task. I found myself ignoring identification tags all together, since matching them with their respective artwork was next to impossible. I wondered why a museum, an institution traditionally with a mission of educating, might place such a low importance on the title and artist being associated with a piece of art.

Rachel Harrison, Huffy Howler, 2004

I reached the resource center on the 5th floor (which was beautiful, by the way) and decided to see what information I could dig up on the museum’s curatorial staff. What I found intrigued me…

In an article by Richard Flood (Chief Curator of the New Museum) he quoted Antonin Artaud’s, Theater and It’s Double (1938).

“Masterpieces of the past are good for the past; they are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling and understandable to everyone.”

I wondered…Have we placed such a high value on masterpieces and the classics in our creative culture that we have forgotten to look for new solutions?

I had let the idea of the masterpiece rest until I heard John Maeda speak at RIT on Wednesday. He was talking about learning design from one of his professors who had told him, “The classics will always be there”, that he should be exploring new solutions…this is when things started to come together for me.

John Maeda, Infinity, 1993

Masterpieces and the classics are great, and they hold stature in our culture because they are examples of solutions and communication that made a difference in their own time. So while we value them for accomplishments, for us and for our culture they exist only as a memory and as an artifact of the past. They are worth studying and knowing about and even exploring further solutions, but should we really allow those solutions to be the ones we consider first?

Has the fact that there is a certain amount of safety associated with previous solutions kept us from executing newer and riskier solutions, possibly even better solutions?

When I went to the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA I was overwhelmed by the innovation and creativity on display. What was even more exiting was seeing ever day people (people who aren’t in the New Media industry) getting excited about what they saw.

The exhibition was packed, people of all ages were coming together and were genuinely enthusiastic about the future. While some of the solutions presented may be risky, possibly even taboo, they were something new and extremely refreshing.

Sketch Furniture. 2005. By Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken, Anna Lindgren , and Katja Sävström of Front Design

Obviously reinvention is necessary sometimes, and even the best solution on occasion. That being said, I would like to believe there are still some new and innovative ideas out there. Those are the ideas we should be pushing towards.

As part of the New Media industry (an industry where art, science and technology converge), I feel as though we should be part of a movement aiming towards innovative solutions that push boundaries, make people uncomfortable and change our world in the same way the creators of museum masterpieces and the classics did.

This entry was posted Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.