So Zap sends me this wonderful Rich Gold talk The Coast Guard and its Borders and tells me to read it. And I do. And I find this gem (as well as many others)
“I had gone to a college with both an art school and a design school. And the artists and designers always sat at separate tables and didn’t like each other much. These guys had sold out according to these guys and these guys were kind of flaky and didn’t really want to make a living according to those guys.
And the way I think about it, the difference between the art and the design is that an artist paints a painting, and he goes, “Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s me. It expresses myself. There I am. There’s my vision.” A designer paints a painting and in the end, turns it around and asks: “Do you like it? No? I’ll change it.” ”
Zap actually sent me the second part of the quote, but I wanted to include the first part, but there exists this art/design cultural uneasiness in schools, and later we pay for it no matter what side were on. As artists we are taught arrogance and starvation mentality, as designers we are taught to be pliant to the power of the buck. And we constantly suspect the other side might be having a better time of it, but we don’t dare cross because we are holding on to our dream/sense what-have-you.
As designers we ought to be strong but not arrogant, and be willing to do the right thing isince we are here to help our clients, and “help” and “obey” are not synonyms; and as artists we need to stop being bellybutton gazing sycophants and say something some one can hear.