INVESTIGATING ARTISTIC COMMODITY DESIGN THROUGH THE SHIFT BETWEEN ART AND DESIGN
Accompanying the rapid development of cultural and creative industries in recent years, there has been frequent collaboration between art and design fields. Although the dimensions of emphasis vary between these two fields, implying the existence of a divergence, coordination can be achieved by reaching a consensus in communication prior to cooperation, thereby creating an outcome that is beneficial for all involved parties. Based on this concept, we analyzed the divergences between the considerations of artists and designers by examining fundamental art and design concepts. This analysis also considered the differences between these fields. Subsequently, we analyzed the present shifting phenomena between art and design. According to the current trend in which artwork is becoming a design commodity, the following 2 spirit-led models are proposed to describe artistic commodity design: 1) the artist-led model and 2) the designer-led model. These 2 models generate innovative form shifts such as reproduction, decomposition, and innovation. The shifting methods corresponding to these 3 form principles are classified into the “3T” models: transfer, transit, and transform. Therefore, we can achieve a common goal that coordinates varied purposes and styles by determining the sprit-led model, form principle, and 3T method that the artistic commodity should display.
Anxiety, Wonder and Astonishment: The Communion of Art and Design
These remarks originally were presented as a keynote address at the Third International Conference of the Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design (CLTAD) held in Lisbon, Portugal in April 2006. The proceedings of this conference, edited by Felix Lam, are available from the Centre, located in London. In 1966, well-known American art critic Harold Rosenberg published a small collection of essays in The Anxious Object. In the foreword, “Toward an Unanxious Profession,” he argued that a new form of anxiety had entered the art community. It was no longer an anxiety of alienation—the psychological state of anxiety that often characterizes the outsider, struggling with loneliness, in a society and a culture that does not appreciate his or her contribution to human experience. That form of anxiety, he argued, had been overcome by the professionalism that settled over American artists in the 1960s, and by the apparent acceptance of art as a regular part of the daily lives of many people. Instead, the new anxiety was a philosophical anxiety, born of the “lightning speed” with which art is appropriated by commercial media and popular communications. “The anxiety of art,” he argued, “arises not as a reflex to the condition of artists, but from their reflection upon the role of art among other human activities.”1 It is an objective reflection of the indefiniteness of the function of art in present-day society and the possibility of the displacement of art by newer forms of expression, emotional stimulation and communication. It relates to the awareness that art today survives in the intersections between the popular media, handicraft and the applied sciences; and that the term “art” has become useless as a means for setting apart a certain category of fabrications. Given the speed and sophistication with which the formal characteristics of new art modes are appropriated by the artisans of the commercial media and semi-media (archi1 Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 16.
What is Enlightenment
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.