I think there is a stereotype associated with artists, that they are stupid, air-headed, and incapable of meeting demands and living on a schedule. I know a lot of people who feel like designers are out of touch with time.
I think though, that many designers develop a tainted distrust for time. Possibly this distrust is grounded in the fact that few design projects ever do what they are designed to do; to obtain harmony. Harmony is when nothing can be added or subtracted to or from a piece of artistic work.
First, often the language of visual work is debatable. For example, in a piece consisting of pure geometric forms, things can fit together to be 'harmonious', but generally people find perfect forms, ugly, or offensive, machine like, or inhumane.
More common is the debate about what visual harmony means, within the above language. The most beautiful arrangement of geometric blocks is debatable to say the least. Between these two difficulties, that of defining a visual language and that of finding the harmonies within this language, creates a near impossible goal of creating visual harmony.
Its impossible for the vast majority of master artists to ever even find original harmony. Projects have no obvious stopping point, if any at all. Is it any surprise then, that artists struggle with finding stopping points and meeting demands? They live in a world where nothing is sufficient, so maybe this apparently non-functional behavior isn't based around carelessness, but around an honest love in giving everyone and everything 100%.
1 comments:
Well, for starters Harmony is really the equally balanced relationship between two differing elements (albeit can debatabley be said that the artist adds and subtracts elements to work toward that goal): the problem being the subjectivity of the critique of a work. Individual critique bases itself on personal tastes which themselves are attributed to base experience in a particular art medium and cultural developments. Art is more based on social repertoire and public acceptance than anything else. Take, for example, the Venus de Milo, which was promoted by the French government after they had lost a similar statue of Aphrodite to the Greek government (If I remember correctly...). Similarly, the renaissanceical praise for the bleach white Greek statues is unfounded since they were originally painted with what would now be called gaudy colors.
As to the artist's disability to work within constraints: this has often been the case. As is evident even in Hollywood, where directors/writers and producers often run at odds. Artists are only concerned with the truth to their own work. However just as easily as the non-artist is to not understand the Artist's motivations, the Artist can lose touch with his own limitations and constrains. An artist should recognize that a work can only be realistically taken so far, as it is within human nature to make mistakes. Anybody who takes their profession to an extreme ('Losing themselves in their work') loses touch with the general populous, and I think it's their own alienation that disheartens the public, who deal primarily with the 'real world.' At the same time, it is only this that love their profession with such passion that anything miraculous gets done.
But I think the populous' particular distaste for the stereotypical artist isn't for the extremist, who loves his work too earnestly, as much as it is for those who love the IDEA of producing good work: the 'posers' so to speak. They're the ones who take things out of perspective and lose themselves in their own up-tight academics, judgments and narcissism, ultimately producing nothing of substantial worth. They either discredit true talent and originality to forward their own careers or water-down the work base with derivatives and mediocraty.
The real question you should ask yourself, when being hounded on a project's deadline, is your motivation. Are you doing it for the work itself or for yourself, your grade, your narcissism, the money, the prestige... Every artist has experience in both, but it's the latter taken to its extreme which really pisses me off.
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