The Line Between Data Vis and Data Art

Is this just a very convoluted way of saying that you disagree? The parent post addresses a point made in the article, and I don't see anything in it tackling the distinction between art and design in such a way that you could possibly infer the parent's grasp of it.

> Its not for the critic to work out the intentions of the artist / designer.

Yes it is, if the critic thinks that it is an important merit in judging the work. Sometimes in galleries the artist will write a blurb about their ideas and motivations or general background, and most designers work under circumstances where they have to justify their design choices to someone else, and if not, the critic might ask the artist/designer what they intended or suppose an intention. In both cases the intentions may as well be irrelevant if the work produces the desired effect.

The point that the parent post is making is that letting the intentions be knows is purely for the benefit of those interested in judging a work on other merits than those conveyed by the work itself. In design, that is usually totally beside the point. The purpose of a visual design is to convey some sort of information, and that information usually isn't the intention itself (a classic counter-example is that of a button that says "Click here!"). As a designer I might produce a cluttered, ugly looking chart to convey the idea that the underlying data is really complex. As a work to be judged, that might be interesting to know, but as a design it might as well have fulfilled its purpose perfectly without ever explicitly mentioning it.

It is ideal that an artist or designer know their intention (and perhaps audience), but our inability to force the work to fit in a descriptive box has relatively little bearing on whether the artist or designer knows their intent and audience. Likewise, intent is something we interpret in the work; if critics didn't interpret intent, I don't know how much they could possibly say that would be of interest. The frame of their interpretation is furthermore part of how we interpret and evaluate the critic's thoughts; not all critics of the same work have the same frames, nor do they all read the same intent.

Even when an artist or critic states their intentions or frames explicitly: we aren't any more obligated to trust them than they are obliged to tell the truth (or, if you prefer, to fully understand their own intent.) Neither, for example, is likely to be forthcoming about biases in their work. I could give differing statements of intent every time I read the same poem to a different audience, all of which are fairly useless unless critically interpreted alongside the work of art.