Art appears when what is made feels as if there is a profound misunderstanding at the hear of what it is, as if it were made with the wrong use in mind, or the wrong idea about what it is capable of, or simply the wrong set of assumptions about what it means to fully function in the world. A work works by not working at all. By not obeying the law of any systems or authority external to the process of its own making, a work enphatically expresses its own right to exist for itself and in itself, and questions — by merely existing — the rule of law that works to bind all to a semblance of the common good.
Chan writes about the art object as the thing which exists in defiance of external rules, following instead the inner tendencies and intuitions of the artist. An art object seems to arise from a misunderstanding of what it means to fully function in the world. I'm curious what this means for a website.
Websites have function, and they function according to laws more rigid than any made to govern the behavior of citizens. The constraints of the web, HTML, the browser, the screen create a strict box around what is and isn't possible within the context of a website. Beyond technical constraints there are the user constraints of convention. All digital natives have instincts and expectations for websites, and a website is functional by its adherance to these expectaionts. Out of the “by the book” conventions which govern art in the internet age, the specific genre of the artist’s website too has a function. An artist’s website exists to chronicle and communicate an artist’s work. If an artist makes art and there is no record of it online, did they ever make art? Gat argues for the artist’s website as an art object itself. By Chan’s definition, this can never succeed. Function and art-iness are inversely correlated. A website which succeeds as art cannot succeed in the convention-dictated function of the artist’s website.
Balkin and Michaelson discuss some of the same themes as Chan but from the perspective of design. Michaelson pushes his students not just to create static designs but to create platforms which allow others to produce designs (or to populate designs with their own content). These platforms allow some creative decisions and close off others. These aren't always the decisions that the author of the platform intended, or the decisions that the social context of the platform would prefer, and here becomes visible the different governances on a website. As previously discussed, a website exists under technical (and artistic) constraints. Balkin adds social constraints and constraints of authority.
What does this mean for the artist's website? An artist’s website doesn't have to be used by multiple people. Platform need not be developed separately from content. A lot of interesting things can be said by making an artist website publicly-editable, but it can be perfectly successful without that. When one person owns completely a website there may not even be an advantage to a platform. In fact unless the platform is essential to some artistic gesture, the making of the platform almost certainly marks the work as design and not art; the difference between a magazine layout and a painting.
Warde uses wine and the wine glass as a metaphor for writing and typography. The wine glass is designed to facilitate the truest experience of its contents: the stem ensures view of the wine is not cloudied and the base is designed in perfect proportion to be neither unstable nor cumbersome. Similarly margins keep thumbs off printed ink, and linelengths and letter spacing are chosen in stable, readable ratios.
The principle job of design is to be invisible, to communicate clearly and without opinion. Design which distracts from the voice of the speaker is art, like listening to muzic sung in an unknown language. The well-designed book (and the well-designed ad) is not remembered for its design, only for its story. “[T]he mental eye focuses through type not upon it.”
Warde's ideas likely rang truer in an age when people read. They are from a time when novels were common entertainment and ads had multiple paragraphs of copy. Now all things designed compete for attention with the supercomputer in every person's pocket. Now to be read something must first be noticed. Things are made readable by their obeservation of precedent, by their resemblence to the other things a reader has before read. The same makes them anonymous and unnoticeable.
Rock provides a critique of Warde's crystal goblet. To say design only exists to be the invisible vessel in which content is contained denies design's equally complex, referential, and culturally embedded ability to communicate. Design can say things without it's content being about things.
Warde and Rock appear to be taking different stances on the role of design, but I think actually at the root of their disagreement is their membership in different audiences. They each say that either writing or design has the power to communicate, but they never consider to whom. Warde cites the power of complex concepts laid down on beautifully typeset pages, but that power is only held over the intellectuals who read those books. Rock cites the influence of beautiful advertisements for mundane products and the inclusion of self-initiated posters in design museum collections, but these are only really influential for designers and visual artists. Communication is only half about the content or design the sender transmits. The other half is about that which the receiver interprets. A minimalist poster on a bulletin board is at once thought exquisite, thought boring, and completely unnoticed by three different people. The illustrations in a story book are vitally important for a child and mind-numbingly redundant for an educated adult. Form communicates to those interested in form. Content communicates to those interested in content. Both communicate to those interested in both.
The crystal goblet is only the best design for its audience: the connoisseur of wine.
Velden writes about design as the refinement of invention. Invention meets needs. Design meets wants. Historically “important“ graphic design was done for large corporate clients. Now such clients are “stifling” and their designers can only produce boring work. The “important” design is that happening on the self-driven fringes. Their design problems are not defined by a client, but produced in the designer's own authorship. As design becomes commodified, the client more and more dictates the whatever creative form the design takes; the designer only executes. “A pioneering designer does more than just design—and it is precisely this that gives design meaning.
Velden astutely observes that design is becoming increasingly commodified, client-driven, and exportable, but he forgets another side-effect of globalization: style. Today designers are rewarded for developing a personal brand, for developing a specific signature style that they can become the “best” at. Designers feel pressure to develop a signature style earlier and earlier, to forgo generalism, to do something difficult, time-consuming, or proprietary to raise barriers to imitation, to carefully curate their work to tell a cohesive story about themselves as a designer. Clients exert their control not in shaping a designer's work to their own preferences, but in choosing the one designer of thousands whose signature style needs no shaping. Designers who enjoy working in a variety of styles might find this unpleasant, but it is at least a safeguard against being replaceable. Some of the cultural acumin necessary to build a signature style relevant to a country's clients can't be exported. Design exported for cost, not style, will always be the cheap imitation of something else.