Visual Culture: Fine Art vs Graphic Design

For our class with Professor Jiesemfoek, we started the semester asking each other "What is art?" It seemed to me to be a starting point to open our eyes to the vast perceptions that attempt to define art, including the parts of European history that reveals the cultural construct of the concept not found in every culture. Still, a few times opinions of what constitutes art has come up in classes at Brooklyn College.

I got my BFA in graphic design from the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Whether or not people believed it was true, there was the underlying ambiguous battle between fine art and commercial art, with the argument that fine art is useless bullshit (from the designer point of view) and the commercial arts are not art (from the fine artist point of view). In fact, one classmate in my MA program for Art Ed. at Bklyn College even said, "Graphic design is not art." Although I understand that commercial/design art consists of many mediums such as interior design, textile design, film, photography, computer art, etc. I will focused on graphic design for the argument of commercial art in this post.

Recently a friend of mine from SVA came to my apartment and I was happy to show her the work of Luba Lukova, which I didn't know prior to the NAEA conference. My friend knew her because she taught a few classes at SVA, where we graduated from. My friend pointed out a quote from an article on Luba Lukova titled "Railing Against 'The Emptiness of Fine Art', Luba Lukova Fights to give Graphic Design its Due" - http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=3782

"I'm not personally inspired by contemporary fine art," she says. "To me, it has become something for spoiled people, very existential, for people who are in love with themselves. They don't think about the audience, just making something provocative for the sake of being provocative, but without saying something that means something to more people. To me, that's an empty shell, even more empty than the most superficial design. Design is something that people see every day, so why not use that?" Lukova asks in the end. "Replace the emptiness of fine art with meaning, which can be so easily in contact with the audience, using the form of the design."

I was very surprised to read this. It must have offended some people. There are lots of fine artists that are really inspiring for me and I love the work of many fine artists. However, I found her comments amusing because there some truth in what she says. One of the reasons I've loved the recent visual culture classes on outsider art and craft art is because it exists aside the art world and it's just as amazing as much of the celebrated art that we get to know when we are formally trained in institutions. In the art world it seems as though its about who you know, how much cultural capital you have, what school you went to and all of this goes back to class and your background. Rarely does an artist come from a less than privileged background. It does happen, but it's rare.

I can't say I'm passionate about arguing that graphic design is art, especially since I'm far from practicing and left that field a long time ago. I can see the point of view where graphic design is just a marketing tactic with advertising psychology behind it. It's one reason why I could not stay in that field. However, in general I think that lots of graphic design is beautiful artwork. There is such a gradient of what can be considered art that most of it, in my opinion is in the grey area. I've seen fine art in Soho that consisted of a white piece of paper with a staple in it and I've seen graphic design on PowerPoint by someone who has no interest or insight into art. It's all relative and at some points we all agree.

I think that as an art teacher, we should not disillusion aspiring fine artists, but we should not discourage them either. I think it's important to see both sides of the fine art vs. commercial/design art argument as a visual art teacher. I think teaching digital arts and preparing kids for careers is just as important as offering them experiences in the material that foster habits of mind, [therapeutic] self expression and all that traditional art materials/mediums have to offer.

I think that many people are not aware of the great work that has been created in the field of graphic design. Below are just a few examples:

David Carson - Editorial Designer