Katie’s question about whether the wire versions of human frames or the actual people looking at them better represent the human form intrigues me. For a quite other form of art that approaches this problem, check out the recent video of students’ reactions to Wash. U.’s ranking as number four university in “Quality of Life.” The concept of the videocamera has pretty much made everybody, following Baudrillard‘s exaggeration of Jameson‘s “image world,” representations of themselves. Sincerity dies.
Does art, like Katie’s wire people, do the same thing? Might it have this kind of deleterious function, causing people to wear makeup and work out and keep their elbows off the table and, more harmfully, to project an insincere image of themselves, so that they can be like Michelangelo’s David or (if they’re weird) Matisse’s dancers?
Certainly, all our actions are planned and projected. Ok. But maybe certain art makes us too aware of that projection. We begin to have to represent the representation of ourselves—to project our projection. Does art make us deleteriously more conscious and remove us another step from whatever internal truth we’ve got??
Secondly, Katie is wrong about art being art as long as it works for somebody.
I think this bulletin board is artful. Full of bright colors juxtaposed with wood grain and stone, full of the symmetry of randomness, bottom heavy and tossed by the wind. And certainly there’s art that is random, that uses chance and more or less forgets the artist (e.g. the current Kemper art exhibit) but it is still declared by an artist as art. The definition of art (I propose) is that more than one person thinks it is artful. Art is a social contract. (My favorite kind is the (not-)art that only I appreciate—that’s kind of what I meant last year in a sort of controversial article when I said that maybe some stuff in nature is more beautiful than “art.”)
A few more notes concern mainly how typeface can make or break (mostly break) a design concept.
The juxtaposition of the archaic-looking gargoyles and trim with the really precisely cut and almost kitschy “DUNCKER HALL” type (in perhaps the Comic Sans of ALL CAPS classic-ish fonts) is another articulation (this time in inanimate objects) of the simulcra of which our world has begun to be composed. The thing almost pulls off its imitation of “old” and “historied,” but the tiny serifs on the ends of its “R” and “L”s betray its inauthenticity.
And, this banner sucks. It’s mostly the type. It gets the job done (i.e. you can read it), but in my opinion when as a designer you have a full color 25-foot long canvas to work with, you not only make a cool cut-out of a football player, but you take more than 60 seconds to choose the font that you use. I’m not good enough to know the name of that font, but I’m good enough to know that it’s goofy as hell—i.e. it’s bankrupt, converted by overuse into an image of itself, another function of Jameson’s image world, Baudrillard’s hyperreality.
It’s our duty as designers to find a font that is new and cool and does not succumb to self-representation. It’s our duty to, metaphorically and literally, avoid Comic Sans. (Remember how Cato declared at the end of every speech, “Carthage must be destroyed”? Maybe this should be my eternal battle call. “Comic Sans delenda est!”)
I ain’t no scholar or nothin’, so I can’t really understand most of what you said at the beginning of this post, but I don’t exactly agree with your point about the death of sincerity in the age of the videocamera.
I was going to quote an online dictionary’s definition of sincerity at this point in my argument, but that seems like an infinitely recursive contradiction to me (not to mention the direct opposite of what I’m trying to acheive in this post). The point I’m trying to make is that clearly these people in the linked video don’t really know what they’re talking about (and insincerity seems contingent on this premise), but that doesn’t mean that they do, in fact, lack sincerity.
Let’s be honest here: these students are commenting on a Princeton Review ranking of “Quality of Life”. At a university. I mean, gimme a break… That’s the equivalent of asking a fish how it feels about the ocean being wet.
“Well… Um… It’s, like, pretty cool and stuff. I mean, there’s lots of water everywhere… And that’s good because I need that to breath. And I guess all my food lives in water. So that’s good, too. And I hear that the land is kinda dry. So… yea, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Of course, we have no way to know if the fish secretly hates being wet all the time. Or if, deep down, he really wishes that he was a coatimundi (look it up) so that he could finally crawl onto land and feel the thrill of hunting bird’s eggs and insect larvae in trees. The fact of the matter is we can’t know these things. The only thing we can know is this transcript attained through questionable means by some freakish, underwater reporter with waterproof pens and paper who either found the only talking fish in the ocean or can speak with the denizens of the deep telepathically, a la Aquaman.
But maybe that’s besides the point. What I’m really trying to get across here is that these students (or the fish, take your pick) are no less sincere because they are responding to a bogus question. Anyone would respond in the same way (make up a bunch of BS) because that’s the only way they know how to respond. What we’re seeing as the audience (to this or any video) is an infinitesimally small slice of a person that, just on the basis of it being a incomplete portion, can never be truly sincere. And maybe that’s what you were trying to say, and in that case, I’m really happy for you, I’m gonna let you finish, but Comic Sans is one of the best fonts of all time. OF ALL TIME.
$$$money$maker$booty$slapper$$$ out.
I have missed hearing these philosophical musings/rants in the office, so reading this really took me back. Thanks, Dennis!
And yes, Comic Sans MUST DIE.