This is one of my favourite David Hickey quotes, it's from this talk (Link., which is part 2 of 5.) An editorial in Salon today about the viability of the Creative Class and its place in management culture reminded me of it. (Link.)
These resonate with me because I have one foot in the applied arts and the other in the fine arts. My role in the applied arts is that of a technician, which makes me more of an observer than a participant in design decisions. One of the things that's bothered me about the design process is the extent to which excellence is not a goal. I've kind of decided that excellence can't be the primary goal in a commercial context because the foundation of excellence is failure, and the foundation of a business is repeatable success. Anyway, in design you end up in a situation where being honest will ensure you don't get work. This is when I thank my lucky stars I am a lowly technician.
A couple weeks ago I tied up my home and work machines rendering sixty colors, eight views each for a color selection on a building facade. Beige was chosen unanimously. Did I waste my time? Yes. It wasn't arduous to make the renders, and I didn't mind making them; it just involved writing a small script to swap out the colors and change views. I made them because I would have wanted to see my options in context, if I were the decision maker. This is the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect.
1 comment:
Great quote!
A common theme here as everyone asks out loud if "Kreativ Wirtschaft" actually means anything tangible. The political marketing slogan of the city for the last couple of years has been, "be creative, be berlin".
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