7o Congresso Brasileiro de Pesquisa &

Desenvolvimento em Design
Curitiba - 9 – 11 août 2006

Bernard Darras
Artists and Designers - Can the
divide be overcome?
Wednesday, August 9th 2006

Artists and Designers - Can the divide be overcome?

By Bernard Darras
Professor at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne
Director of the Research Centre ‘Images, Cultures and Cognitions’

This article has been stimulated by the research project of a design student
who wished to demonstrate that graphic designers and designers were artists
and that they deserved this title. His beliefs were so dependent on the
values, which organize the sacralization of the art and the artist that I have
never truly succeeded in convincing him of the historical, ideological and
systemic motives of his error.
Moreover, this question being frequently asked, I have worked on it in more
depth and I would like to present to you the result of my research, which
belongs to the history of ideas and culture as well. These histories promote
the discovery of alternative solutions to the idealist traditions that are too
often prominent in the field of art and design.

For most Western countries or their neighbours, the essentialist, spiritualist,

anti-utilitarianist and aristocratic values inherited from Mediterranean
Antiquity have nourished and continued to nourish a divide between human
activities while hierarchizing the practices of production and of creation
according to a system of elitist values. Locating and understanding the
ideological motives of this heritage, reviewing the resulting divide and
reconsidering the different potentials of production, creation,
communication and cultural interunderstanding, here are the objectives of a
change of all the cultural and creative practices in democratic societies.
The following study focuses essentially on sets of values that dominate in
Europe, but given the interactions of this region notably with South
America, a large part of the European issues has been transferred there. This
study is essentially dedicated to the world of visual culture and also pertains
to visual arts, graphic arts, visual communication and more generally to all
the practices relating to design today.

Historical evolution
We are going to undertake this critical approach by trying to deconstruct
some of the beliefs, which structure our habitual thinking of organization

1
and action. To do this, we’ll try to gain access to founding metaphysical
entities whose power of action (agency) is always structuring and effective
nowadays.
We will then return to the present day by pinpointing the beliefs that, from
our point of view, impede the development of representations adapted to our
time.
ART ART
CULTURES Culture

This simplistic diagram represents a rather widespread conception of art as

an entity different from culture and superior to it. Here, art is conceived as a
major phenomenon both universal and eternal or at least very ancient, while
the other activities and products are rejected in culture, which is conceived
as the reservoir of all ordinary, banal, inglorious human productions.
A concept that we contest by reversing it.
Art
CULTURES ART CULTURE

Indeed, the history of culture and art is much more complex and deserves to
be presented gradually.
I°
XV

ART Académies Art

VISUAL CULTURE CULTURE

CORPORATIONS

This new map recalls one of the important stages in the history of this area,
an area, which we have voluntarily enlarged to the field of visual culture,
and as I remind you, is limited to the Western world.
In 1563, in Italy, the first Accademia del disegno, was founded in Florence
by Vasari. This academy was constructed in opposition to the system of
corporations, which managed the careers of all artisans and notably that of
imagers who comprised of painters and image engravers. It has been
followed by the creation of similar academies throughout Europe.
This period corresponds to a vast social and cultural movement. On one
hand, the images continued to gain prestige – a prestige passed on to the
best producers1 – on the other hand, this social ascension was accompanied
by a new hierarchization of practices of production and orders, but also by
an intellectualization of these practices on the model of the literary
academies. This intellectualization had for an effect, among other things,
counterbalancing the manuality and materiality of production techniques.
Besides, it has continued in an education divided into two parts, theoretical
and practical, which broke away from the methods of traditional training
used in corporations.

1
The works of Alberti De Pictura and of Vasari Le Vite had a great influence in
the valorisation of painters and sculptors and in their social rise.

2
Although very well spread, this version of history still suffers from a
retrospective bias provoked by a concept of history won over by the thesis
of the necessary superiority of art. As soon as one adopts a more global
perspective which studies the development of visual culture as a whole, one
remarks that the history of other methods of producing cultural objects has
been neglected or that history has been rewritten to the benefit of its artistic
aspect.

Therefore, the following diagram provides an important correction:

I°
XV

ART Académies Art

VISUAL CULTURE Culture

CORPORATIONS Design

Even if it is true that at the beginning of the 16th century the creation of
academies has transformed the field of cultural production, it is false to
think that starting from this date all the artisans of the image have left their
corporations and have chosen to enter into the academies or have been
admitted to them. In fact, the academies have only enrolled a small fraction
of these image producers, 8% at the most. From the 15th to the 19th century,
the whole profession remained largely organized around corporations.
°
I°

XIX
XV

Artistes
ART Académies Art
Enseignement
Educations

CORPORATIONS Artisan Design

APPRENTISSAGE Apprentissage

The teaching that allows systems to reproduce themselves has permitted the
cohabitation of the two devices, the academic type, which is at the origin of
the creation of Fine Art Schools, and the other which has perpetuated the
system of Mastery and apprenticeship in a studio. But this is not all. Indeed,
parallel to the transformations in the professional world, the liberal arts
education, which corresponds today to an aspect of what one calls ‘art
education’, was for a long time included in the training and practice of some
of the privileged population (men of letters and aristocrats).

3
Woman painting her self-portrait
Boccace.
Livre des clercs et nobles femmes
PS. Fr. 12420, f. 101v
France XVe siècle
Paris, BNF

Art education, as we know it today, is not only the inheritor of these

practices, but it is also the custodian of the system of values and social
organization defended by these privileged classes.
Contrary to what one often thinks, artistic education is not a late invention
of modern democracy, but rather an enlargement of former social practices
which still influence its current operation.
Besides, artistic practices were also pursued outside school in specialized
public or private establishments, which most of the time valorise disinterest
and amateurism. (It is true that some of these establishments have
professional vocations). There are therefore, four education and training
systems that co-exist, two that are already old, and to which were added
academic teaching and artistic education at school.

To better understand what distinguishes the professional fields and the four
types of training with which they are associated, we have to again go back
in time and integrate new data allowing us to explain the causes but also the
finalities, of what appears as a divide between two types of social activity
and two types of training.
On this occasion, we will observe the very particular role played by the
opposition between the artisan production of a useful service on one hand
and the ‘noble’ realisation, very orientated by aristocratic processes, on the
other.

The divide
°
VI X°
X XI
Artists
LIBERAL ARTS Art
Teaching
Education

Artisan
MECHANICAL ARTS Art & Craft

APPRENTICESHIP Apprenticeship

4
To this diagram has now been added a division, which shows the divide
between the liberal arts on one hand and mechanical arts on the other2.
These titles which date from Greek and Roman Antiquity (one also finds
some equivalents in ancient Egypt) have undergone numerous modifications
which need some semantic precision to avoid confusion.
The term ‘Liberal’ comes directly from the Latin Liber: Quality which
characterizes the free man and his activity.
The term ‘Mechanical’ comes from the Latin Mechanicus borrowed from
the Greek Mekhanicos, mekhane, which means ‘able to combine’ and which
has been used in the sense of techniques, arts and occupations implying the
use of an instrument and of the action of the hand.

Freedom
In the part that follows, I would particularly like to attract the attention of
the audience/listener/reader on two points. First of all, on the organization of
the antiquarian society and the organization of its values, then on the
persistence of the capacity of action (agency) of these values in our time.
As Moses Finlay (1975) very pertinently reminds us in his work on ancient
economics, ‘at the basis of the positive judgement of the Greeks and the
Romans about wealth, one finds out that among the indispensable conditions
for freedom are independence and personal availability. ‘The condition of
the free man, wrote Aristotle (Rhetoric 1637a 32), is that he does not live
under the constraint of another’ and the context indicates clearly that the
idea of living under the constraint is not limited to slaves, but extends to
salaried workers and others who were economically dependent.’ p. 48

As Christophe Genin says (Text to be published) ‘Are liberal, [the arts] of

the free man, who does not need to practice a trade to make a living, who
does not obey a master but the well-being of the community as decided by
the City, and who defines himself only by his intellect.’
Throughout all Antiquity, the list of arts considered as truly liberal has been
discussed and has never stopped evolving. Music and drawing for example
have been once integrated to the list, then rejected, but as we will see further
on, what was really important, is that it is intention that governs practice.
Practice that had to be accomplished without the free practitioner is
degrading himself, alienating himself, or selling himself.

Work and its products

Before treating the question of technê, we will see how it integrates itself in
the activity in general and in work in particular. Let’s remind ourselves first
that in Antiquity work is not thought of in unified terms as it is today, but
according the different activities.3

2
This study is mainly founded on ancient text and on the work of Finley,
Jean Pierre Vernant and Vidal-Naquet.
3
Agriculture or political activity were not considered as pertaining to work.

5
Moreover, all the products of work were not destined for a market where the
product was becoming a neutralized value of exchange as we conceive it
today. In Antiquity, as in all pre-capitalist economies, the product of work
was destined for a use and a user.

‘One does not therefore find, in ancient Greece, a major human function,
work, covering all the trades, but a plurality of different trades, each
constituting a particular type of action producing its own workmanship. [...]
Work therefore finds itself strictly limited to the artisan professions.’
Vernant 1965-1971, 1996, p. 296-297

The work of the artisan was therefore extremely specialized and dedicated,
on one hand, to the perfect execution of the workmanship and on the other
hand, to the recipient of which it was dependent. ‘The artisan and his art
exist ‘in view’ of the product and the product ‘in view’ of the need.’
Vernant, p. 297. It cannot be otherwise in the antiquarian world where the
object is uniquely thought of according to its value of use and not of its
exchange value.
The work of the artisan was entirely geared towards its final purpose which
is the fulfilment of usage or the essence of usage, should we say. The artisan
was only a means to update a ‘shape’ in the material. It was as much
dependent from this fatally pre-existing shape as from the usage for which it
was destined and in fine from the user who was the recipient and the client.
‘By alienating itself in the concrete shape of the product, in its value of
usage, the work of the artisan appears as a service to others, slavery.’
Vernant, p. 300
The artisan is a slave in the sphere of his occupation, ‘one understands that
in this social and mental system, man ‘acts’ when he uses things, not when
he makes them. The ideal of the free man, of the active man, is to be
universally a user, but never a producer.’ p 305

Technê
For the Greeks, the concept of technê therefore varied according to its
finalities and the social status of who implemented it. When it was practiced
by a free man, it had to be aimed at his elevation or at something which was
beyond him, the Gods or the City for example. Moreover, it is an activity,
which he had to accomplish by conceiving it and not only by executing it
mechanically. While the slave, the mercenary and above all the artisan were
supposed to be confined in the reproduction and the execution, dexterous
but slavish, of a production and an order. 4
As we said, for a free man, all activities could be practiced on the condition
that by undertaking them, they did not lead to degrade the values of one’s

4
Let’s note that mimicry results in a dialectic contamination between the order of
the social and economic world (a man of possession versus a slave or a mercenary),
the symbolic order (spiritual versus material), the ethical order (noble versus vile)
and aesthetic (beautiful versus ugly), etc. The whole system is always organized
within the metaphorical space of top and bottom.

6
social status, therefore to derogate. (e.g., Finley, chapter 2, Order and
status.)
That is what Plato claimed in ‘Protagoras’ [312b], Socrates addresses
Hippocrates who wants to follow the teaching of the Sophist Protagoras:
you’ve been taught writing, sitar and gymnastics, ‘not to acquire a technique
– to become a professional –, but for your education, as it is suitable to a
simple individual and a free man.’
A little later, but with the same idea, Aristotle in ‘The Politics’ will add to
the subject of education of free men:
‘All occupations are divided into liberal and illiberal; and to young children
should be imparted only such kinds of knowledge as will be useful to them
without making artisans out of them. One calls artisan occupations any
occupation, art (Technê) or science, which makes the body, soul or mind of
the free man less fit for the practice or exercise of virtue. One gives the
same name to all occupations which tend to deform the body, and likewise
all paid employment, for they absorb and degrade the mind.’5

Obviously, this prescription has deeply marked the whole culture and the
teaching and its influence has lasted for more two thousands years in the
West. Let’s quote for example Plutarch, who notes, five centuries after
Aristotle, ‘No generous and ingenuous young man, at the sight of the statue
of Jupiter in Pisa (Olympia), or on seeing that of Juno in Argos, ever long to
be a Phidias or a Polyclitus […]; because a piece of work can please us for
its gracefulness without having to imitate its maker’ (in Pericles, 2.1-2)

A copy of Phidias's work Polyclitus. Apollo of Mantua

from Athens (now lost)

By the way, let’s discuss a misunderstanding. In Antiquity, the fact that a

technê requires a manual activity was not degrading in itself. What was
degrading was an activity only limited to production, therefore deprived of
its phase of conception. It is the spiritualist, Platonist then Christian context
and the very clear privilege granted to conception against (re)production
that lead to devaluing the part of the activity which uses the hand, the
instrument and the tool.

5
Politics, Book V (in general the 8th.) About education in the ideal city. Chapter 2.

7
Aristotle added a double explanation concerning sciences but which is also
applicable to the practice of art § 2. ‘Although there is certainly nothing
servile in studying liberal sciences up to a certain point, wanting to study
them too closely, in order to attain perfection in them, the same evil effects
will follow. The great difference here is in the intention which determines
the work or study. One can, without degrading oneself, do for his own sake
or for the sake of his friends, or with a virtuous intention, something that,
done this way, is not below that of a free man but if done for the sake of
others, the very same action will be thought of as menial and servile.’
He condemns here any ‘professional’ derivative that would tend to demean
by the very principle of the too high specialization that expertise confers.
Our society is still profoundly marked by these values. In the liberal
bastions that are the University, fundamental sciences and the world of art
for example, the professional, the occupation and everything related to it are
still discredited by the aristocratic values of purity, elevation, disinterest and
anti-utilitarianism.

The archaeological information which is at our disposal today, tend to show

that all these values were not followed to the letter and that, as always, the
rule had its exceptions, its nuances and its twists. The philosophers, whose
texts have been conserved and valorised, tended to purify and idealize
reality.
That is how, during centuries, the absence of information about the actual
practices of Antiquity has granted the texts of philosophers – and
particularly those of Plato and Aristotle – a true hegemony. Therefore, their
Roman, Arabic or Christian followers have favoured the theses that suited
them and have contributed to the disappearance of opposing theses.
That is how the Sophists’ texts, which were in opposition to all these
idealistic and aristocratic metaphysics, have not been passed on. Even worse
still: the debates of their opposition to the Socratic line were presented by
Plato who was one of their strongest opponents6.
Despite this, their contribution to rhetoric, the science of language, to
grammar, to the psychology of the individual, to strategy and politics was
considerable. As Jacqueline de Romilly wrote (1988), ‘In their hands,
everything became technê; and all these technai, or humanities, which were
new, are the ones the modern age has continued and delved into. (p. 275).
The contribution of the Sophists to the comparative study of societies, to the
relativity of knowledge, critical thinking and absolute doubt were
displeasing to idealistic and religious ideologists who sanctioned them by
forgetting them. […]
Athens had succeeded in creating two most opposed forms of thinking, ‘one
where everything is humanity and the other where everything is
transcendence, one where everything is practical and the other where
everything is idealistic.’ (Romilly, p. 273).
In the domain that concerns us here, even if, for centuries, defenders of the
virtue of experience, practice, usefulness and technique have not been

6
Gorgias and Protagoras, among the most famous, are presented by Plato.

8
lacking, they are always confronted with the dominant spiritualist and
idealistic theses, which are now imposed by the promoters of art and its
values.

If we dwell on this period and on the divide that took place then, it is
because we think that it has deeply marked our social and cultural history
and that our present still depends on it.
Freedom, elevation, ideal, purity, uselessness, disinterest, nobility, virtue,
etc. are the metaphysical entities, which structured the society until now.
Here are some examples among thousands of others:
- The contempt, or even the refusal of work, the rejection of the technique
and the occupation, so-called demeaning, are ideas that have survived until
now via the habits of aristocrats then of ‘grands bourgeois’.
That is how, in the 19th century (and still today in a number of cases), a
liberal habitus dictates ‘the art of having no passion’. It is the same with
knowledge which bears the mark of enslavement if the relationship with its
subject is excessive or exclusive. According to the same habitus, the true
amateur and the connoisseur must never behave like ‘fans’ if they want to
belong to the society of ‘free’ men.

- In contemporary arts, the flaunted contempt for the occupation and the
technique coupled with the emphasis on the concept and the discourse in
opposition to the practice has to be interpreted within this framework
directly dependent from antique metaphysics.
In the world of arts and crafts and, today, of design, the creator always wins
over the executor who is confined (but less and less) to a subordinate and
servile role. The contemporary vocabulary testifies perfectly of the
integration of the values and metaphysical entities of Antiquity in the
nomination of individuals and their missions.
It is not by historical chance that the names of ‘designer’, ‘creator’, ‘artistic
director’, ‘creative’ and even more of ‘self-employed’ and ‘freelance’ were
privileged and valorised. Here it is all the attraction of the free man and of
liberal arts that are in action and influence the modern redefinitions of the
former artisan. It is all the weight of a fundamentally unequal aristocratic
society which impacts on the challenges faced by the current democracies.

- When Hannah Arendt studies the opposition between work and artwork, in
Human Condition (1958), she places work in the sphere of biological and
metabolic satisfactions which are alienated because they are dominated by
repetition, automatisms and the ephemeral, while for her, the work of the
creator, and notably that of the artist, contributes to the construction of an
artificial and sustainable world independent from the metabolic and
consumerist vileness of natural condition. According to her, our world
offers an unequal deployment of possibilities for a liberating creation, but
this liberation would be impeded and compromised by the unprecedented
development of an elementary consummation, degrading and demeaning.
This divided discourse is obviously not isolated; it is even repeated by a
large majority of individuals.

9
By slightly radicalizing the discourse, we can say that the distribution of the
different occupations of the antique man depended on his social class, on the
rules and values applicable at the time, but above all, as we said before, on a
fundamentally unequal and very divided society in which a few privileged
people took all the benefits to the detriment of others. The technical, liberal,
servile or mercenary activities have been profoundly and durably marked by
this7.
For the Greeks, the transmission of the technaï was made through a training
system for artisans and through schools – or the equivalent of it – for the
free man.
What we call ‘arts’ today were taught within these two social worlds. An
artisan could practice drawing and teach it to his son or his apprentices for
executing purposes and to respond to orders. A free man could also practice
drawing, if he could master its ‘purpose’ or “design” and if he was doing it
for a noble cause. This divide has lasted for centuries. The artisans
organized themselves into brotherhoods, guilds and corporations, which
perpetuated the divides, while liberal and noble practices continued with
variable intensity according to eras.
Aspired by the desire to climb the social scale and to go beyond the antique
divide, some artisans, in the 16th century, wished to leave the corporations.
By the way, they committed themselves to valorise invention, conception
and theory in their art, to favour the production of ‘elevated' content and to
give up the trade of their work and the most technical aspects of their
activity for the profit of virtuosity.
Leonardo da Vinci had announced this programme in claiming: la pittura e
cosa mentale. He has also said thousands of interesting things on technique
but it is this statement that we have favoured in the field of liberal art.
As Nathalie Heinich noted, (1996), the arrival of professional painters and
sculptors in the liberal arts is the result of a long disputed power struggle,
but that managed to impose itself only because of a change of practice and
the weakening of the distinction between mechanical and liberal arts, as the
values promoted by the liberal arts had finally imposed themselves on
everyone.
Conforming to the values of their new liberal and intellectual position, the
academies promoted a teaching divided into two parts ‘one regarding reason
or theory, the other regarding the hand and practice’ (Batteux 1747, in
Heinich, 1993, p. 93.)
Let’s note that the echoes of these bipartitions still resonate in the 21st
century in most of Western education systems where the legitimacy of a
manual, technical and practical education is still contested by the
‘legitimate’ inheritors of the liberal arts. As if they still had to make
themselves accepted, the influential players of this domain did not cease to
work at raising theoretical approaches (historical, aesthetic, critical, etc.)
and valorising the activities of the spirit (imagination, expression, creation),
to the detriment of technical education. As for so-called applied arts, they

7
In the papers on rhetoric, invention designates the phase of research of arguments
and ideas to present to the recipients of the discourse.

10
have been devalued because of their technicality, their relation with re-
production and their usefulness, and above all because of their allegiance to
the order, (allegiance that has however never stopped evolving.) Most of the
time, they have even been confined to technical education, which, because
of the reasons mentioned above, only have a low cultural value. (In Europe,
only the British and in a way the Germans seem to have been able to
manage the two devices with greater balance.)

The 19th century was that of acceleration. The industrial revolution has at
the same time dissolved corporations, valorised the artisan as an
entrepreneur, but also as a model of integration of practices (On this subject,
see the theses of William Morris for example.) The artists of the Academies
were in competition with the avant-gardes and the autonomists of art for
art’s sake who exacerbated the liberal values originating from Antiquity.
News types of techniques were invented, amongst them photography and
cinema. Imperial states colonized the world, accelerating the processes of
influence between cultures while contributing to the expansion of the model
or European values.
In the area of training and education, the old training methods became
institutionalized and are for the large part managed by the State in many
countries. It is not only the creation of Fine Art Schools, which
accomplished the momentum begun by the academies and by valorising the
vocational aspects, but also the creation of the National Schools of Applied
Arts, which adopted a professional vocation. I oppose here a liberal teaching
founded on the idea that art is an imperative vocation to which one
abandons oneself, to the mechanical teaching of a profession. The whole
history of art valorises the almost mystic dimension of the artistic revelation
and vocation. The vocation is truly considered in its etymological sense of
a ‘response to a calling’. The programmes of Fine Art Schools only
maintain and cultivate this momentum or this inner movement of the future
artist.
Opposing this, and conforming to the tradition of artisan corporations, the
Schools of Applied Arts have focussed on an approach founded on
professions, professional competence and technique.
The education of the elite is still a private affair, but its influence has
infiltrated the school curriculum under the form of drawing and music
courses. In this domain, the debate has raged between those who defend a
practical and useful approach and the liberals who invested in the idealistic
and spiritualist values of art. Besides, the debate is not over.

Here we should detail these upheavals, but we will focus on the impacts of
this ancient divide.

The artisan in the era of creative industries and the avant-garde artist
In the 19th and 20th centuries, while the artisan acceded to creation, freedom
of decision, choice of his clients and of the answers he would give them,
one witnessed an exacerbation of the values of the free artist, which of
course must be understood as ‘liberal’, whose only objective and ambition

11
were invention, change, and casting adrift from everything related to social
constraints, including those of his background, as he believed, when he was
only opposing them. Beyond avant-garde, he aimed at the autonomy of his
art and himself.
Taken away by the profound movements of distribution and assignation of
social roles, his destiny was sealed and he was elected or designated by
society to embody the summit of a new social type: the subject, an
individualist totally liberated from social constraints, entirely dedicated to
the creation of the new… but, we must not forget, completely alienated to
the constraints of the art world, to tyranny of its movements and its leaders,
but also to the economic pressure that society and the art market did not
miss the chance to exert on him.
It is as if two social bodies, artisan and artist, were taken in a parallel
movement towards emancipation for one and total freedom for the other.
The more the artisan frees himself from constraints, the more the artist
pushes the limits of the constraints of his art, including those of technique,
conventions, genres, cultural references, etc. and going as far as criticizing
the idealistic and spiritualist basis of art, rejecting them through practices of
anti-art and post-art, or even by abandoning art. (The complex case of
Marcel Duchamp is in this instance an omen.) One should study the history
of the movement of this couple towards liberation to understand the
movements are acting in each of them. The visual culture of the 20th is
entirely marked by this movement of values and by the incessant coming
together and the crossover between these two neighbours.

Freed from their strangleholds, the ancient mechanical arts have occupied,
aesthetically and socially, the places forsaken by Art, while preserving their
attachment to utilitarianist values.
Simultaneously, and from the end of the 19th century, a new player arrived
on the scene. Originating from the industrial revolution, some entrepreneurs
made their entrance in the sectors of life space. They are going to change
considerably the position of not only artisans but also artists. That is how
the family was enlarged to industrial designers, major producers of images
and objects in series whose functional, formal and aesthetic qualities were
valorised by the taste for the new, the technique and its products and
maintained by publicity and the media, also conceived and realized by them.
But does this mean that the divide between liberal and mechanical arts been
displaced?
The criticisms made by John Ruskin then by William Morris about industry
have supported the middle way of artisans inscribed in the historical
continuity and the defence of a unique object’s beauty. For many creators,
the noble way (that is to say liberal) was preferred to industrial production
destined for the masses and for metabolic consummation, as Hannah Arendt
wrote. But, in the end, as it is often the case, the two ways maintained
themselves, a mass production on one hand and a production of limited
series, custom made or unique, on the other. The latter started flirting with
works duplicated in ‘multiples’ produced by the art world. Here, differences

12
are extra fine and confusion is maintained, as Yves Michaud remarks in his
essay: ‘l’art à l’état gazeux’. (‘Art as a gas’ - 2004?)

Cup created by the French group 5.5

An example of design which practices the values of anti-art.

The history of art, as well as that of applied arts or design continues to

largely valorise any proximity, as long as it is made in respect of the liberal
values henceforth embodied by the art world and its representative: the
artist.

Gerrit Rietveld 1917-18

That is how, in Europe, one has largely valorised Constructivists, De Stijl,

the Bauhaus, and Union of Modern Artists and that historians are not always
very clear with Pop Art. Indeed, for a long time, the life space has inspired
artists and they never missed out on an occasion to borrow new techniques.
On the other hand, in the area of art, and apart from a few exceptions – not
really sustainable – utilitarianist and functionalist values have never crossed
the frontier of the world of liberal values. It is therefore interesting to study
Andy Warhol and his Factory again.
One must not forget that North Americans, facing less regularly the pressure
of metaphysical entities originating from the antique divide, have invented
industrial aesthetics as a dynamic agent for consumer capitalism. By doing
so, they have deliberately given up direct references to artistic avant-gardes
and have valorised engineering and technical aesthetics.

13
Raymond Loewy in front of the K4S steam locomotive (1933)

In the proper sense this time, it is the mechanical arts that inspired the
stream line and functional aesthetics which carried along design into the
promotion of the values of the industrial and consumer society.
Functionality, ergonomics, usefulness, renewal, change, acceleration of life
cycles, quick obsolescence of shapes, usages and objects, fast trivialization,
accelerated destruction of products, marketing, fabrication of taste,
neophilia, etc.
In parallel, the context of the consumer society and its industrial fierceness
was in opposition to high-tech. It is on this occasion that popular and
oppositional culture arrived on the scene. (1968). It was the beginnings of
anti-design, which is the counterpart of anti-art, but also the emergence of
new design and its identity, ethnic and ecological varieties.

Conclusion
In conclusion, we would like to begin to try to answer the question we asked
in the title of this article: ‘Artist and designer: can the divide be overcome?’
If our historical statement is right, for almost 2.500 years the production of
cultural goods remained organized on the basis of the divide initially
implemented to assure the operation and justification of a society both
aristocratic and pro-slavery.
The system of values created at that time continued to structure and
hierarchize our conceptions of knowledge, science, technique and arts. This
is particularly visible in the area of cultural and artistic production where the
symbolic, economical and professional divides have maintained themselves
and have been reinforced at the end of the 19th century. We think here of the
mechanisms of reverse economics as described by Pierre Bourdieu (1992) in
‘the rules of art’. Economics according to which the higher the symbolic
capital, the lower the material capital should be, and contrariwise. All this
organization is maintained and continued by the players of the system and
notably by teachers who are the guardians of these structuring sets of values.
Artists are placed at the top of the liberal social hierarchy and of the
symbolic capital, while artisans, graphic designers and other designers are
downgraded to the side of the material and mechanical capital and its
biological functions: accommodation, clothing, food, transport,
communication, etc. The hierarchical apparatus imposes a dynamic of
elevation (social and spiritual), which makes artists desirable and transforms
artisans and designers into followers.

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Indeed, these ‘followers’ have never stopped producing intermediate objects
and images, midway between the art world and that of usual objects.
‘Applied arts’, ‘art and craft’, ‘decorative arts’, ‘industrial aesthetics’, the
labels tell everything. Only the name ‘design’ succeeds in escaping this
logic, which explains its success with those who refuse to be assigned to a
subordinate position.
Today, certain objects and images of applied arts and even of design operate
as substitutes for a work of art for the middle class who can therefore afford,
at a moderate cost, more or less unique objects in limited series. But this
‘Art & Design’ niche is still situated at the bottom of the hierarchy of
artwork and at the top of that of design. These ‘works’ and their creators
enter the art market and museums while the value of art is becoming diluted,
and that the creator acquires a role and a social status close that of the artist,
that the middle class contributes to the formation of taste and judgement of
taste and that the processes of ‘museification’ complete the trajectory of
semiophores: these objects that acquire a value of sign while losing their
value of usage (Pomian, 1978, 1987 and Danto, 1996).
In parallel to this sector supporting the liberal and divided values of the
artistic domain, the corporation of creators, engineers and designers in the
life space area has developed itself. Their system of values a priori more
industrial and functionalist than artistic, shares nevertheless an aesthetic
dimension with the domain of art. It is this aesthetic dimension, although
industrial, that causes some confusion, this confusion being reinforced by
the relationships with creation and the search for the new which excite the
avant-garde on both sides. Despite them, aesthetics and industrial design
have been pushed toward and attracted by the domain of art, its values, its
public and its elitist market.

Are designers therefore only destined to remain second division artists?

This question remains sensitive but has evolved considerably.
- The issue of the order therefore does no more constitute a barrier in itself.
First, some artists respond to different calls for tender and public and private
orders8, secondly, the notions of project, environment, device and event
have gained prestige.
- The question of the oneness of the work is complex but secondary, and in
both cases, art and design have learnt to play with developing multiples,
prototypes, limited series, customisations, etc.)
- Professionally, many designers and artists have one foot in art and the
other in design. Each of them living this duality in modes more or less guilty
(money job) or liberated (realization of projects, freedom of creation,
participation in collective projects, etc.)
- Only the specific finalities of production, that is to say the practices of
daily life, on one hand, and the practices of art on the other, continue to
make the difference.

8
An art of museums has even appeared, with its mix of orders and freedom.

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Can we overcome this ultimate divide?
The answer is yes, but at the cost of a radical ideological and philosophical
review initiated a long time ago.
Luckily, although it pretends to be universal, the divided model inherited
from Antiquity then adapted by Christianity, is not the only one available.
Any individual (notably in Western countries) who has not yet opened his
thoughts to that of Epicurus – the precursor of utilitarianism and pragmatism
– would really benefit from doing so; and any student in design who aspires
to deal with human life space and welfare should be initiated into it.

The well-balanced hedonist and materialist humanism of Epicurus is

founded on the idea that any action simultaneously provokes pleasant or
positive effects at one level, and unpleasant and negative effects at another
level. Any human should therefore search for actions minimizing pain and
sufferance without depriving oneself from what is really pleasant and
therefore reach ataraxia or well-balanced happiness, therefore sustainable,
as we would say today.
The initiator of the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment and of cognitive
science, the French sensualist and materialist philosopher, Julien Offray de
La Mettrie (1709-1751) is one of the modern disciples of Epicurus and of
his ethics presented in books with evocative titles: Discours sur le bonheur,
La Volupté, and L'Art de jouir, show that the finality of life lies in the
pleasures of the senses and that the true virtue lies in self-love.
English utilitarianist philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and their numerous successors, have
continued and conceived this calculation of pleasure and pain, and widened
it to the issue of the consequences of the action. Their utilitarianist concepts,
destined to maximize the welfare of the majority and to diminish pain as
much as possible, constitute both a way of life and a social programme
aiming at a shared welfare. The whole Epicurean, hedonist, sensualist,
materialist, empiricist, utilitarianist and pragmatist tradition breaks with the
programme of elevation of elite and with the ascetic spirituality still
promoted in art.
By placing happiness and its quest at the centre of human activities, the
Epicurean way constitutes the bases of a humanist, utilitarianist, pragmatist
and ecological programme that should inspire the designers whose work
will finally be assessed fairly and squarely on the scale of pleasure and pain
and of their local, global and sustainable consequences.

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