Current

The Artification of Design

Edo Smitshuijzen | 28 January 2010

On 12 November 2009, the MAXXI museum in Rome opened its doors while completely empty of art. The museum is designed by the London based Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid who is the only female architect ever awarded the Pritzker Prize for Architecture. Hadid is famous for designing visually exuberant structures. So her museum in Rome didn't feel empty even without one piece of art in it. The museum itself could easily be seen as a piece of art; a massive, airconditioned and internally lit sculpture with elevators, stairs, doors and windows.

MAXXI Museum, Photo Designboom.

Museums around the world have become important points of attraction in one of the major economic activities: tourism. When I was an art student, museums were quiet and empty places visited solely by insiders and school children. Now, the insiders have to become 'friends' of the museum to avoid waiting for hours in endless cues. Museums have become places of mass entertainment. And cities are looking desperately for visually stunning buildings to attract the audience and with it the tourists to their cities. The Sydney Opera House had the desired result a while ago for Sydney and the Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry has put the Spanish city of Bilbao on the touristic map. Cities around the world started to imitate these success stories that resulted in a building frenzy by cultural institutions often bringing them to edge of bankruptcy. The housing became more important than the collection or the performance itself. In Amsterdam, two important museum renovations have gone totally out of hand, the National 'Rijks' Museum is likely to be closed for more than 10 years and the once famous 'Stedelijk Museum' of contemporary art is following a comparable disastrous course and discovered recently that the heating costs of its breathtaking new museum entrance hall would surpass the annual new art purchase budget. Not only bankers have gone slightly nuts during the past decade.

Cultural institutions have not only become important clients for architects and designers, the well visited museum design collections and shops have gradually become benchmarks of design quality. Designers seek their work being part of the museum design collections. The influence on design by museum directors and notably by curators have increased considerably. In the process, curators have become stars on their own right in the world of art and design. Soon there will be more famous curators than famous artists. Museums are in global competition with each other, they have to release a number of highly attractive shows per year in order to meet their large budgets. As with all others working in the entertainment industry, the ticket box is the only thing that really counts. Curators have become like film directors, organisers of hopeful visitors magnets, leaving their original academic position behind.

Royal Ontario Museum, Daniel Libeskind. Photo Miller Hare.

Are there disadvantages of the 'artification of design'? I guess not too many, although art is an activity in its own right and design is a tool to serve other purposes as well. And the last aspect can easily become undervalued when judged by the art world. Like art, design may become appreciated mostly for design's sake. By contrast, some designers hold a professional view that design should idealistically be as little noticeable as possible for certain products like books, newspapers, forms, security instructions, signage and user's interfaces to give full priority and maximum support to the verbal content or the intended effect of these products. Design products falling into this category could easily be dismissed by curators as unimportant for lack of spectacularity. This is not to say that spectacularity is by definition an assault on the accessibility of the content or the final purpose of the design, but in practice it often is, and museum shops do provide a rather Lilliputian scope on the professional field of design. In fact, the public appreciation of design has already moved towards being a qualification for products that are extraordinary, somewhat outrageous and bizarrely expensive. It supports the view that designers can help to move products into the premium price range by providing some extra visual thrill and to articulate accurately the latest fads, but one should never ask designers to come close to the design of more serious products like the passengers safety signs and instructions in airplanes for instance. This view is a rather grotesque deformation and limitation of the designer's potential.

The 'artification' of design is understandable because of the important recreational value both art and design have in a wealthy environment. Is there also a reverse influence: a 'designification' of art? I think there is. The art world has become a large industry. One can easily perceive art pieces as luxury products in the top price range, products that can reach into the millions per piece. These products are offered and sold these days not much differently than other industry products. Moreover, artists are inspired by the visual and instrumental vocabulary of designers. Using type and making artists books are popular. Andy Warhol was trained and has worked for a while very successfully as a graphic designer, his collection of art works counts over 10,000 pieces which still have the highest annual turnover in sales compared to any other artist. Obviously, he exploited during his career as an artist the typical tools of the designer. But also artists like Damien Hearst (who completely redesigned a bar he bought), Sigmund Polke or Gerhard Richter have designer's streaks in the way they work. Damien Hearst's studio is like a manufacturing plant for small series. Oversized exhibitions force artists to produce art on a big industrial scale. I remember the gigantic pieces by Anselm Kiefer in the Palais de Tokyo exhibition in Paris as looking much like industrially fabricated art. A category of artists and designers have emerged who serve the same clients and participate in the same field of activities and therefore have become quite similar professionals.

What sets designers apart from artists is maybe the risk of becoming pompous. Design is likelier to become flashier than art because design cannot completely lift the anchor from its functional aspects. How do you use a dinner table designed by Zaha Hadid with a price tag of two hundred thousand dollars? I thought of that aspect also while visiting the extensions of two museums in Toronto, the extension designed by Daniel Libeskind of the Royal Ontario Museum and the extension by Frank Gehry of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Both extensions are impressive and spectacular pieces of architecture, well designed and fabricated. Yet, they left me with an uneasy feeling, I guess this feeling was reinforced by the closeness of the much more modest existing structures built in another era. Suddenly, both new extensions appeared to me so shamefully pretentious. As if the old buildings were revamped into drag queens. What were the museum directors and the architects trying to tell me with these structures? Quite obviously: 'Hold your breath, I'm going to blow you out of your socks!' But aren't these grandiose spacial gestures not slightly overblown in this down to earth Canadian city? Does a museum collection really need such an exuberant outfit; giving the impression of being a sort of art cathedral? Holy places where everything in them is culturally sacred solely by the fact of its presence there? Or was the reason that Toronto wanted to add a few big names to the collection of famous buildings already in the city, acting more like an architectural stamp collector?

Maybe our appetite for this kind of architectural style on a big scale has somewhat diminished in our post-depression era.