Two excerpts as tidbit primers:

“Dear Theo,

Will life never treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding! Mrs. Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth!

That’s right! I can’t work to order like a common tradesman! I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing, with wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won’t fit in her mouth!

She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her! I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful. She claims she can’t chew! What do I care whether she can chew or not! Theo, I can’t go on like this much longer! (…)

- Vincent”

Woody Allen’s “If the Impressionists Had Been Dentists: A fantasy exploring the transposition of temperament”, 1975

“Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple blossom the toiling work horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling.

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.”

Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”, 1896

***

Is what the artist has freedom or excuses?

Is what the designer has constraints or challenges?

What did the Gutenberg press and the camera obscura do to the socio-political world?

Is it with empowerment or via enslavement that we navigate the computer and the internet?

If Warhol had not coined “15 minutes of fame”, would there be reality TV?

If Sullivan had not said “Form follows function”, would ornamentation still be evil? (And how ironic that a man positing this utilitarian concept embellishes his writing on the matter with such superfluous, flowery language.)

Can/can’t you be true, sincere and caring in your commercial practicality?

Can/can’t you be hypocritical and a sell-out in your bohemian independence?

Is there nothing authentic in the world anymore?

Is originality over-rated?

Has Modernism lost its mind? Or at least its –ism? To become merely, Modern? (It used to be concerned with aesthetic introspection, and the re-examination of existence, with the goal of finding that which was holding back progress, but who would believe that now?)

Is there room for a New Wave Romanticism which prizes intuition and emotion over scientific rationalism, or has the human race walked too far down the hallway to turn that knob?

Are there still starving artists? What do they say to their stomachs in the middle of the night? Do acidic gastric juices corrode creative fluids?

Place your bets: how many minutes (or seconds) will the sheltered design school student who says loftily whilst in school, “I shall only do conceptual work in the industry”, last in the real world, out of the academic cocoon? (R.I.P.)

Precisely how much lesser of a man was Han van Meegeren than Vermeer?

Can we trust Sagmeister to still say “Money does not make me happy” if he were poorer?

Does art answer to no one but its artist?

Is design art prostitution? (If yes, do you recognize the difference between the streetwalker after a quick buck and the callgirl who models herself after the 18th century courtesan and are you willing to pay the difference for the pleasure differential?)

Is art purer than design because it exists for nothing but itself?

Is this selfish?

Or is design the purer because it exists single-mindedly for the specificities of a purpose?

Is this selfless?

Can good art change your life?

Can good design change the world?

Is aesthetic pleasure empirically calculable under the Processing Fluency Theory?

Will you catch me if I am overcome by the Stendhal syndrome as we view Florentine art in the Uffizi?