Intent, part II: Going legit.

Yesterday I renewed the lease on my website. It's been a year now that I have been living and working for myself full-time. Throughout the endeavor, my Life/Work credo has been and remains:

Take your life as seriously as your work.

As a functioning workaholic, strict adherence to that thesis resulted in a lot of Life. I made a discipline of loafing.


As summer approached, I appraised my year. I spent a great deal of time with myself, which is harder than it sounds. While learning to love life, I remembered that I love work too. As the year revolved, I guess I did too, going through a season of living, and returning to a season of working. I've come to see the insight of the credo, inverted:

Take your work as seriously as your life.

Indeed. How can I devote myself to leisure if I am not equally devoted to labor?


So I'm beginning to codify and compartmentalize my work, to some extent. At the same time, I find myself on the verge of a large commission, having been fortunate to experience some modest professional success in the past year. So I begin with the establishment of a studio, as a greater entity: Steiner Steiner LLC. The next step is designing the studio's finances. I'm also revising the website, in order to better brand the studio.


As I work through the process of setting up the studio and getting down to work, I hope to keep the dust to a minimum. The ultimate goal is to create a healthy balance between Life and Work. My hypothesis is that Life and leisure should have much greater weight than is currently deemed respectable.

Increasing the written component of the blog, I hope to explore a few other ideas:
Three things
The analogy of design as poetry
Branding, and specifically sustainability branding

One final note: I originally intended this blog to be a purely personal, online repository of my inspirations and thoughts. In the past year, I've come to truly appreciate the input of the people who know me best. So if anyone is reading this, I'd love to hear your thoughts on anything you find here. A thousand thanks!


That all being said:
L'chaim! To life!

Dag Hammarskjold

Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions.

Intent

I'm trying to decipher the place of Art and Design in a post-art, post-design world. I am chronicling my thought process and my explorations here.

The Artist's purpose is to expand her boundaries and struggle against her limits. These are the limits of ability and perception, of communication and understanding. By expanding her own boundaries, she often redefines the boundaries of her society. The Artist is a weaver, creating the raw material of culture.

The Designer takes the culture around him and makes it accessible and usable to society. His (unreachable) goal is to perfect the world around him. The Designer is a taylor, smoothing out the wrinkles, and bringing in the waist, so culture is snug and smart.

The Artist role is often thought to be the sole provenance of the Fine Artist, just as the Designer role is mistakenly assumed as the sole provenance of the Professional Designer. The Fine Artist and Professional Designer identify themselves as Artists or Designers through their profession, the same way a plumber defines himself as a plumber. However, Artist and Designer are simply roles we all can take, in the same way we take the roll of Teacher or Student, Mother or Son. We each fill different roles throughout our days, throughout our lives, even filling multiple roles simultaneously.

Today the number of people self-identifying as Artists and Designers is increasing. The Internet has drastically changed the dynamic of Performer and Audience, Merchant and Customer. More people are taking on the role of Performers and Merchants. This allows them to then perform and sell the fruits of their Art and Design. Thus we see a democratization of Art and Design.

We've been witnessing a decline in the relevance of contemporary fine art and an explosion in the ubiquity of professional design. It would be sensationalist to imply that art is dead, but the point is that the traditional role of Fine Art is being filled in new ways.



I find myself reading a great amount lately, and I want to record my thoughts on these readings. The list will certainly grow, but there are a few things I hope to discuss:

Writings to explore:

Walter Benjamin on "The Work of Art in the the Mechanical Age"
Philip K Dick's "The Man in the High Castle"
The art of Justin Lieberman
Maurice Saatchi "The Death of Advertising"
The Unbundled World
Kevin Kelley on the "World Without Technology"
Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media"
Bob Cringely on "Why Apple Will Buy Adobe"
Doris Lessing's "The Making of the Representative for Planet 8"
Stephen Johnson's "Emergence"
Dyson Freeman (in the NYT)
Josh Klein on the intelligence of crows (TED)

Other topics to explore:

Narrative perception vs sensual perception
Fractal view of culture
Memes (cultural genetics)
Family memes vs family lore