Comment by abathur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abathur | Hacker News Reader

I think Lisa's post may be conflating the task of the critic with the task of the artist or designer. I don't think we'd try to argue that a band is responsible for making clear to a critic whether they're trying to be punk-pop or power-pop or whatever.

It's the critic's "job" to determine what sort of axes or factors are important to the work at hand, define categories, and make cases for membership.

"I can't tell whether this is data vis or data art" is a perfectly fine response to someone's work, and if the artist/designer was trying to accomplish or convey something that didn't come through, they'll probably take that feedback to heart and work on it.

I suppose "Please make this clearly either data vis or data art so I can comfortably evaluate/interpret it" is a fine response as well, but it's one that seems to ignore the fact that the work can (and may deserve to) be interpreted or criticized based on its own merits, and not how well it fits into one category or another.

It doesn't seem like you read her article. Or you don't understand the distinction between fine art and design.

Lisa is stating that art and design serve different functions. "Design needs to be functional" she sates. Art has different constraints and responsibilities.

The artist or designer should know their intention, and audience. They are producing a piece for either PS1 or the NYT.

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

> It doesn't seem like you read her article. Or you don't understand the distinction between fine art and design.

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.

We obviously draw distinctions between art (whether fine or folk) and design, but these are largely descriptive distinctions that have little bearing on what someone else ought to make or not. The absence of a definition codifying the functions, constraints and responsibilities of art (or design) didn't stop people from creating 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.

There's a lot of gray in the requirement that design be "functional". The helix in Gates hall at CMU is a great example. Technically it allows people to traverse from the bottom to top of the building, but it's a really shitty way that happens to look pretty.

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