aRT And dESIGN = Confusing

Like most lines that we draw to delineate between categories, the line between design and art gets harder and harder to place the longer you look at it. The tools that we might use to determine if something is a product of art or design don’t always give us clear answers. A good example of this for me is the Droog Do Hit Chair. The Do Hit Chair looks like it is simple and cheap to manufacture, a cube made of sheet metal presents no immediate challenges to a modern factory and in volume this chair should be dirt cheap. This seems to point towards it being a design object. The price, however, is 3.800 Euros. This seems to point to it being art. Like a sculpture or painting which derives its value primarily from the reputation and skill of the artist who made it and not from the materials it was made with. Everything else about the chair seems to point to the design side of things, it is not one of a kind like a piece of studio furniture, it is not custom made for the buyer and it does not have the signature of the maker on the bottom. It just seems to be an over-priced product of design, it should just be something on a sale rack at Design Within Reach marked 95% percent off so that some farmer can just buy it and drill a hole in it and funnel rain water into it for the chickens to drink. What about this chair keeps it off the sale rack, why do hip people everywhere dream of buying and smashing and then finally sitting on these polished steel cubes? Why would someone ever pay 3800 hundred Euros for a sheet metal box?

The Reason is that it is a piece of Art. At least it derives its value in the same way that a piece of art does. When someone buys a painting or a sculpture or a photo they are buying the object and they are buying a piece of the artist’s viewpoint, a physical manifestation of the feelings and opinions and beliefs of one person. If this person is important enough the value they add to an object can be immense. The Do Hit Chair gets its value through this process, the viewpoint or concept of the designer is what is valuable, not the object. The object is still important because it is the factual proof that you have participated in Marijn van der Poll’s vision.

The primary difference between this type of value and the way that we value more traditional design objects can be subtle but I think that it is definable. If we use an Eames LCW plywood chair as an example of traditional values it will help. Eames chairs are comfortable, producible and affordable*. They were mostly designed as contract furniture for office buildings or other large scale projects and as such needed to be functional, affordable and durable. If someone is waiting for an appointment they do not care about the designers idea of what chair should be, at least not as much as they care about the comfort of their butt. Eames did have and use their own viewpoint to find solutions for each project they worked on, but unlike Marijn van der Poll, they had to temper their concepts with good old functionalism. If they did not their work would not be produced and we would not know who they were and we would not have the joy of relaxing on an Eames Lounge or Chaise or shell chair.

I don’t know if there is much of a point in having an opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of all this. But I can say that some art/design just seems like a stupid waste of time and resources, like glittery poop and ugly toxic foam chairs and sharp smashed metal do hit yourself box chairs and original zig zag chairs set on fire, but there are a lot of things I don’t understand so it doesn’t seem like a good basis to judge right and wrong by. I do think that we should probably keep these art/design people around because even if all they ever do is make a bunch of crap that is silly it is still more crap to think about and the more we have to think about the better.

*I thought that I was making a little bit of sense here but then I was scrolling down the Design Within Reach page and I saw the Eames Le Chaise priced at 9,500 hundred dollars. That seemed a little high to me and then I realized that the art/design system of value was working in reverse. Is it that the Eames story has become so powerful that it is now adding value into these objects that they did not originally have or is that they are just classics now. Maybe they cost that much because somewhere there has to be a huge 200 ton injection molding machine pumping those things out at a snail’s pace burning a big hole in the Knoll furniture companies bottom line.