“What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing: you wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought. I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all being to sense that we are the same, we are one.”
— David Hockney
Gran Fury on issue #7 of COLORS, a magazine overseen by designer and editor-in-chief Tibor Kalman:
“Many of our strategies were incorporated into advertising. An ad campaign, however provocative, still has it’s AIDS message subservient to promoting a company name. In that relation, it loses the power of direct demand or exposure of facts. Bennetton went one step further by producing an issue of COLORS magazine to address AIDS. Many of the strategies they used were borrowed from projects we had done; we had been contacted by a researcher from Bennetton who asked for examples of our work, saying that they would be considered for inclusion in the magazine. That never happened; instead, they reworked our strategies, skewing them in a surreal direction with little or no context in which to interpret the images or statistics.”
— (via)
See also: Marlene McCarty on Gran Fury + M&Co.
“I am amused at the gymnastics the design community is performing as it attempts to write its own definition. We, as designers, are eager to expand and embrace multimedia and animation, but contract into apologies if we get too close to “Art.”
Why? Whose honor are we protecting by denying the natural, frequent and essential crossover? Art or design? I wonder if we fear inadequacy in judging quality and value once the line is crossed.
Even my dear friend David Shields explains that “Design is not art because designers design for the community: for everybody, for the public, for whomever-for an audience. It’s about creating dialogues.” But what does this argument imply about artists?
Some argue that our fields remain separate because, unlike artists, our messages are rarely our own. I doubt that authorship is nearly as important in determining categories as is so insistently claimed. Consider film. Would a filmmaker not consider him or herself an artist if the film told someone else’s story?
We are all working within a visual realm, and shaking out the art from the non-art seems like an empty gesture. I’ve been reading Edmund White’s biography of Jean Genet, and in it he quotes Jean Cocteau: “Fashion must be beautiful first and ugly afterwards. Art must be ugly first, then beautiful afterwards.”
An intriguing thought, given our context. With this definition in mind, and the preceding debates, it should be easy to choose up sides and continue working.”
— Martin Venezky (1994)
“I was increasingly unable to rally myself around design. I didn’t know why, but despite all my clever ideas, I felt strangely immobilized. While the process of tenure stimulated a sure level of production, I felt like I was making stuff up. And worse: making stuff up that didn’t matter. My efforts to secure a sense of community within design also floundered. I just didn’t have much in common with designers anymore. Whatever it was I thought about, read about, looked at, or cared about, seemed increasingly not about design. I grew suspicious of design’s ubiquity, and disenchanted by its alliance with corporate interests, by its seductive power, by its protracted processes. It was getting harder and harder to muster the requisite enthusiasm for a field in which I was on my way to attaining tenure. So I left.”
— Loretta Staples (via)
“I taught three semesters at Pratt in Manhattan. I taught cartooning to illustrators. I broke things down to their simplest components the way a cartoonist would think. I started out with a class of maybe thirty-eight or so and oh my God I knew how to get rid of a lot of them. “Look,” I said, “this is a country of 250 million people and every one of you in this class can probably draw better than me.” Which made them feel very good. I explained that I was basically going to move their talent from their wrist up to their brain. The next week there’d be sixteen people there and a note from the director: “See me after class.” These sixteen people of course know nothing about cartooning. They drew beautifully, but millions of people can draw and paint beautifully. I was trying to give them a mental advantage I have.”
— Sam Gross
“Imagination is a muscle. Exercise it. Use your imagination. And by that I don’t mean just watch and read imaginative fiction or fantasy, because I think that if anything that is actually sapping the imagination. The fact that all of our imaginative needs can be instantly met by one of the streaming services, or the click of the mouse, I think that that makes for weak imaginations. I think that that possibly means if that trend continues, if people continue to be passively entertained, then their imaginations will possibly atrophy.
Get out there and imagine something. Doesn’t matter whether if it’s any good or not. Imagine something, and then try to imagine another thing, and see how that gets you.”
— Alan Moore
“Unlike ‘fine art,’ illustration is accessible. No need to go to a museum or art gallery. It’s in that magazine and newspaper you flip through (pausing for an image), or on that sidewalk poster or subway card. And if you come across The New Yorker‘s Barry Blitt’s illustration, your mind will be informed while your eye is entertained, just as a Roz Chast drawing will please the eye and touch the heart.”
— R.O. Blechman
“In life you’ll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it’s because they’re stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance… Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.”
— Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
“All art is infested by other art.”
— Leo Steinberg
“I believe that, with the rapid advancement of technology, the sense of human scale is often lost. Figures and statistics become more important than people. This can prove disastrous in political life — something we are at present experiencing in the Western world. In this climate of monetarism and the worship of modern technology, where more and more decisions rely upon computers, there is an urgent need for individual voices which speak up for the individual.
The function of graphic artists and designers is similar to that of journalists. They are responsible for informing and educating a large public, using a language which is direct and unambiguous, yet charged with strong beliefs and convictions. Paradoxical? Maybe — but needed in an atmosphere of anonymity, where most graphics can be reduced to mere packaging and empty decoration, perfect in technical execution but nothing beyond that. There are strong traditions in the not-too-distant past to turn to for inspiration: designers of the calibre of Cassandre, for example, whose laconic concepts were executed with tremendous flair. His posters sang out in the streets.
This flair and dynamism in execution accompanied by an intellectual poignancy is sadly missing in much of the graphic design work that we see today. Designers all too often look to fashion and popular trends, re-shaping their bag of graphic tricks accordingly. What is lacking is the weight, both intellectual and spiritual, to the visual messages that designers are communicating to the public.”
— Andrzej Klimowski
