Peter Saville's manifesto

[Worm]

Peter Saville wrote a manifesto for Icon magazine. A great read; I bolded my favorite graf:

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Being a designer used to be like being on a crusade – we were fighters, evangelists. But in the last ten years, since the recession of the early Nineties, the situation has changed. Our establishment has suddenly “got it” and they want “creatives”. Creativity has become part of the business of social manipulation. The problem is that everybody got what they wanted.

Morals
The cultural adventure has been consumed by business. Making things better is a moral issue, but morality and business don’t go together – business is, if not immoral, then amoral. We know we should be keeping people out of stores but we all have to work with business. It can’t really be all about idealism and altruism.

Meaningless design
Much of the work being done now lacks meaning and the designers know it. There’s a reasonable chair design once every five years and that’s usually the result of a new manufacturing or material innovation. We all see what’s happening at Milan – there are countless new chairs and they’re nearly all a waste of space.

Where are the NGOs?
Everyone does their best but you have to pay the rent. Even hospitals have to run to profit. You can’t avoid the issue merely by working for an NGO – even Amnesty and Greenpeace have to be “business facing”. The only bastion of free speech could be the art world, but even that is a preciously engineered marketplace with its own complexities.

Value finding
Creative people have to believe in the value of their work. If you don’t have any belief then you can’t give anything – designing is an act of giving, and a belief in the value of the work fuels the desire to express something. It’s important to know what your values are and to take care of them.

Post-war socio-cultural democratisation
It’s a long term, but broken down it’s simple. Over the last 50 years culture has been disseminated to the wider public rather than being the domain of the privileged. There is an inevitable loss of substance in the process of becoming a culture of entertainment. If it’s not popular, it’s not happening.

Design as drugs
Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Dystopia
In the early 20th century designers envisaged utopia, they were optimistic and visionary people. We now acknowledge the dystopian reality.

The new cause
I was part of a system that wanted to change the look of the everyday world. That ideal, manifest through consumerism, doesn’t sit well with me now. I am not wealthy and completely understand how we all have to pay our way.

 

[Kewpie]

Thank you very much Worm.
It's very thought-provoking and good to know Peter Saville still has punk spirit.

 

[left out]

Quote

“Over the last 50 years culture has been disseminated to the wider public rather than being the domain of the privileged. There is an inevitable loss of substance in the process of becoming a culture of entertainment. If it’s not popular, it’s not happening.”

There was always a division between the elite and the mass culture. The social elite used to look down on the poor who sang bawdy music-hall songs rather than pretty airs at the pianoforte. Who wore cheap imitations of the high fashion, or second-hand clothing.

In popular culture, specifically music, in the past the record companies developed and closely controlled the artists. They also ripped off the customer for years with overpriced products. Now they are losing control both of the means of production and the way the product is disseminated, and so the profits. Yet they continue to churn out sub-standard music anyway, trying to squeeze the pips.

There is not a lack of substance created, but a lack of agreement on what is quality. Now it is much more difficult for a small group to set themselves up as the arbiters of quality, value. The art world is hopelessly adrift. Who will sell their product, (however good or bad it might be) if they are unable to convince people by a commonly accepted standard that their product is superior to the others?

In the past the elite were those who had social status and money. Is it surprising that manufactured celebrities are so heavily used to promote style, consumerism?
I see it on this site where people will rush to buy a perfume because their favourite artist is wearing it. They might never have taken note otherwise.

But on the positive side I see people creating their own art, clothing, music for its own sake, not expecting massive commercial returns, but in order to assert their own independence of spirit and expression.

We have, for the moment artistic and political freedoms. Yet those who protest, politically, are increasingly depicted as radicals intent on criminality, who must be restrained, punished for even attempting to take action.
How can we create a creative atmosphere where talent and innovation excel under the present overheated consumer culture? It’s not sustainable as everything is on credit and some day soon we are going to have to pay the bill, socially, economically and ecologically. It’s a mad world.

 

[Dave]

Thanks Worm. I'm trying to take some pictures before I lose the light or else I'd have something seemingly intelligent to say about this.

 

[Alcoholic Afternoons]

Thanks Worm. I'm trying to take some pictures before I lose the light or else I'd have something seemingly intelligent to say about this.

Okay, then I'll just post my usual rubbish instead. Apologies to Worm for the appearance that I'm quoting him when I'm really quoting the article.

Peter Saville wrote a manifesto for Icon magazine. A great read; I bolded my favorite graf:

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Being a designer used to be like being on a crusade – we were fighters, evangelists.

I appreciate the nostalgic view of youth, but comments like this from artists often, as here, seem silly. "Crusade"? "Fighters"? "Evangelists"? I also think this, and the whole theme of the article, is a typical perspective from someone in what I assume to be his age bracket. People typically view the world through their own biased lens, and I think this is an example. The whole idea that someone can get wrapped up in the design/fashion world, I think, is evidence of the phenomenal degree of luxury, safety and privilege to which we've become accustomed. What a luxury to be upset about the lack of "reasonable" chair designs from Milan.

The cultural adventure has been consumed by business. Making things better is a moral issue, but morality and business don’t go together – business is, if not immoral, then amoral. We know we should be keeping people out of stores but we all have to work with business. It can’t really be all about idealism and altruism.

I agree "business" as generally defined is amoral, but individual businesses can choose to be otherwise. I disagree that "we should be keeping people out of stores." Why? Where else would they buy music, or any art that anyone might be selling? Does he really want to impose his will on others like that? Why do we "have to work with business"? Why can't it really be all about idealism and altruism?

Much of the work being done now lacks meaning and the designers know it. There’s a reasonable chair design once every five years and that’s usually the result of a new manufacturing or material innovation. We all see what’s happening at Milan – there are countless new chairs and they’re nearly all a waste of space.

Chairs had meaning? Was there a chair crusade and I missed it? Dang, I could have been an evangelical chair fighter. Why are they now a waste of space? Can't you sit on them? Are they not comfortable? Why are only unreasonable chairs being designed except once every five years? Am I sitting in an unreasonable chair right now? Should this upset me?

The only bastion of free speech could be the art world, but even that is a preciously engineered marketplace with its own complexities.

The bastion of free speech is wherever people are free to speak. The art world is as free as any other "world." Any percieved limits (with a few exceptions) are self-imposed for some other purpose (commercial, status, etc.).

It’s important to know what your values are and to take care of them.

This may be the best statement for how to live one's life I've ever read.

Post-war socio-cultural democratisation
It’s a long term, but broken down it’s simple. Over the last 50 years culture has been disseminated to the wider public rather than being the domain of the privileged. There is an inevitable loss of substance in the process of becoming a culture of entertainment. If it’s not popular, it’s not happening.

It's not happening to make money, he means. There's no inevitable loss of substance in the art itself, although there is certainly a general loss of/lack of substance in what is broadly popular in the "culture of entertainment." Crap pop culture doesn't mean that real, true, substantive art can't still exist.

Design as drugs
Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Dangerous to whom? I think this is a classic case of perspective, or at least a question of definition. Gen X's "Your Generation" springs to mind.

I am not wealthy and completely understand how we all have to pay our way.

Welcome to the club. Took you a while, though.

There is not a lack of substance created, but a lack of agreement on what is quality. Now it is much more difficult for a small group to set themselves up as the arbiters of quality, value. The art world is hopelessly adrift. Who will sell their product, (however good or bad it might be) if they are unable to convince people by a commonly accepted standard that their product is superior to the others?

I may be misunderstanding you, but thank God it's more difficult for a small group to get together to be the arbitrators of quality and value. Who will sell their product? Whoever makes the product, to whoever likes the product, has the means and chooses to buy the product. It's pretty simple. If an artist can't convince me by the evidence of my own eyes/ears that I should buy their product, why the heck should I?

But on the positive side I see people creating their own art, clothing, music for its own sake, not expecting massive commercial returns, but in order to assert their own independence of spirit and expression.

Isn't that the point though? Art for art's sake? This is the beginning and end of this for me. These are the artists.

We have, for the moment artistic and political freedoms. Yet those who protest, politically, are increasingly depicted as radicals intent on criminality, who must be restrained, punished for even attempting to take action.

I don't think this is true. Political protestors have nearly always been depicted as such, and have been tortured and killed from the dawn of politics.

It’s a mad world.

You can say that again. No pressure, though. Only if you want to.

 

[Dave]

This is a huge thing and would require time and editing and footnotes to say properly, but there's not really a correlation between thinking that design is an essential part of life and letting people go hungry.

In fact people in an intelligent beautiful environment are more likely to have intelligent beautiful thoughts.

Saville's thoughts that, "if it isn't popular, it isn't happening" are something I would have to give a lot of thought to. Personally, my first reaction is that it has always been this way to some extent. It becomes increasingly this way once we developed written language, then paper, printing press, radio, television, internet.

Yet there has always been an occult, or spiritual/religious groups, or artists with more refined sensibilities, and they have also used these means to communicate or seek/find each other.

We see this happening with music. It's becoming decentralized. And yet you could look at what's happening and see just the opposite. The large companies are all merging and they are creating product more than ever before with no real care about the art, only the success. But smaller labels and unknown artists are finding a way to reach an audience that the large companies would think was not worth the trouble.

I am not up on the designs of chairs from Milan. Maybe there is a real lapse in the quality of design, and maybe it is because it's being led by the public, rather than leading. If that's true though, it means that a lot of people are paying attention to chair designs from Milan. Otherwise it would just be the same old rich people that always bought them that are either tuned in to design, because they have an education, and because they have always been around fine design, or because they hire people to decorate for them. If we've reached a point where the masses are trying to buy fine design but don't know how, that sounds like it's the marketer's fault.

 

[Busy Clippers]

Peter Saville wrote a manifesto for Icon magazine. A great read; I bolded my favorite graf:

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Being a designer used to be like being on a crusade – we were fighters, evangelists. But in the last ten years, since the recession of the early Nineties, the situation has changed. Our establishment has suddenly “got it” and they want “creatives”. Creativity has become part of the business of social manipulation. The problem is that everybody got what they wanted.

Morals
The cultural adventure has been consumed by business. Making things better is a moral issue, but morality and business don’t go together – business is, if not immoral, then amoral. We know we should be keeping people out of stores but we all have to work with business. It can’t really be all about idealism and altruism.

Meaningless design
Much of the work being done now lacks meaning and the designers know it. There’s a reasonable chair design once every five years and that’s usually the result of a new manufacturing or material innovation. We all see what’s happening at Milan – there are countless new chairs and they’re nearly all a waste of space.

Where are the NGOs?
Everyone does their best but you have to pay the rent. Even hospitals have to run to profit. You can’t avoid the issue merely by working for an NGO – even Amnesty and Greenpeace have to be “business facing”. The only bastion of free speech could be the art world, but even that is a preciously engineered marketplace with its own complexities.

Value finding
Creative people have to believe in the value of their work. If you don’t have any belief then you can’t give anything – designing is an act of giving, and a belief in the value of the work fuels the desire to express something. It’s important to know what your values are and to take care of them.

Post-war socio-cultural democratisation
It’s a long term, but broken down it’s simple. Over the last 50 years culture has been disseminated to the wider public rather than being the domain of the privileged. There is an inevitable loss of substance in the process of becoming a culture of entertainment. If it’s not popular, it’s not happening.

Design as drugs
Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Dystopia
In the early 20th century designers envisaged utopia, they were optimistic and visionary people. We now acknowledge the dystopian reality.

The new cause
I was part of a system that wanted to change the look of the everyday world. That ideal, manifest through consumerism, doesn’t sit well with me now. I am not wealthy and completely understand how we all have to pay our way.

Oh, Peter. Old and bitter. Good thing the folks who built the Gothic cathedrals had longer attention spans.

 

[Worm]

there's not really a correlation between thinking that design is an essential part of life and letting people go hungry. In fact people in an intelligent beautiful environment are more likely to have intelligent beautiful thoughts.

Oscar Wilde, channeling Ruskin, agreed with that. (He just moved the glass on my ouija board.)

We see this happening with music. It's becoming decentralized. And yet you could look at what's happening and see just the opposite. The large companies are all merging and they are creating product more than ever before with no real care about the art, only the success. But smaller labels and unknown artists are finding a way to reach an audience that the large companies would think was not worth the trouble.

This is really the central paradox in pop culture right now. Culture is being frighteningly homogenized by an increasingly smaller number of corporations and yet computers and the Internet have made it easier for people to express themselves and put out their own product. The trouble is that the corporations are in league with not only the creative talent but the technological apparatuses used to reproduce and sell their product. (The easiest and best example I can think of is my cable company, Time Warner.)

Look at the iPhone, with its controversial contract with AT & T. Content and content delivery are linked now, and that I think is what Saville was talking about. He may even have had Apple in mind, Apple being the apex of design and functionality but also a company that bottlenecks what you can put on their devices. 99% of my MP3s are songs I've ripped off my CD collection, but just that "other" 1% of iTunes songs I download means I have to go through iTunes/Apple's online store, and that store has many, many holes in its catalog, most notably The Smiths. I'm fairly tech savvy and know where to find music when I want it, but like most consumers I go with what's easiest. I go to iTunes first.

So, yes, there's more freedom and creativity but the means of distribution aren't there. It's too hard to make money for artists. A few will find ways to profit from the freedom the web offers, but usually they're just going to use it as a springboard to signing to a major label or other corporate entity. This happened a year or two ago with YouTube and lonelygirl15. There's a case where a couple of people created a phenomenon with nothing more than a videocamera and some editing software on their home computer. They could have made some money, but when they had a chance they signed on with those homogenizing corporations to make even more money.

The result is going to be a cultural landscape-- rather like the economic landscape as a whole-- in which the division between the haves and have nots is going to keep widening. "Indie"/Internet forms of art (music, movies, books) are going to be permanently ghettoized. This doesn't cheapen their intrinsic worth but it does beg the question, why should we expect forms of art which are pop culture down to their very DNA-- pop music, let's say-- to thrive in a golden age of grassroots expression when the very identity of that art is rooted in mass culture?

We like to think that indie rock, stemming as it does from the anti-corporate punk ideals of the late Seventies, is a sign that, yes, in fact great music does flourish outside the mainstream. But that isn't exactly true because the dream of all but the most perverse indie rock bands is to sign to a major-- as Tony Wilson said in the interview someone posted the other day. The best groups hit the ceiling of indie labels and want more. R.E.M. left IRS for Warners, The Smiths signed to EMI, etc.

Ultimately we love pop culture because by its nature it is popular. I think all of us here probably like offshoots or "alternatives" to the mainstream of pop culture, but it's pop culture nonetheless. Morrissey's ambition wasn't to thrive outside the pop charts, it was to reinvent the pop charts so that he and his band could be #1. Most people have similar ambitions, I think. Therefore, I think if you ghettoize these kinds of pop art you're not just pushing them out of the mainstream, you're actually changing what they are fundamentally. This is true in music, but especially true in an area like cinema. I think everyone would agree that Francis Ford Coppola is a true artist, but films like "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now" are unthinkable on indie budgets.

The other, even more terrifying remark to make about all this, is that as corporations continue homogenizing culture they are also getting much better at reducing the individual's horizon of expectation not simply by limiting choices (the old way) but creating and sustaining the illusion that many other choices do exist. The innovation we've seen in the last twenty years is that culture takes on the appearance of diversity and richness. Again, going back to iTunes, the illusion when you visit the iTunes store is that you've got the entire universe of music at your fingertips. It's not entirely a facade; the store is impressively large and varied. But what if you want to download "The Queen Is Dead?"

Really, across the entire social spectrum, the illusion of diversity is the cruellest and most devastating way the disciples of democracy and freedom have been betrayed. I think Saville was speaking to that when he led off with "Our establishment has suddenly 'got it' and they want 'creatives'. Creativity has become part of the business of social manipulation".

 

[Worm]

Regarding the chairs in Milan, I laughed at that too. It does sound bitter and you wonder if Saville's losing it a little.

But his point is well taken if you think of it this way. Every year in Milan there are new chairs designed whether or not the designs are meaningful. They can be totally uninspired designs but out they go, shown as great new pieces. He defines a "meaningful" new design as being (usually) the result of some "manufacturing or material innovation", not just a flash of inspiration in the mind of a designer or two. The industry demands new chairs, so new chairs are designed, but in reality the innovations are not really in the hands of the designer but the wood suppliers or techniques of metal sculpting.

If you think about it, the same principle is true of every single industry across the board. Windows must have a new operating system every few years whether it's useful or not, and it must ape features on the Mac (and vice versa). In the automobile industry, the annual roll-out of "new lines" is a big deal. Fashion has its runway collections to show off in the major capitals. TV news shows spiff up their graphics and music. Books use new typefaces. On and on. Novelty takes precedence over substance.

Nowhere is it more true than in pop music. Take The Smiths, for instance. The Smiths brought a new innovation to rock music from 1983-1987, but when they ended the music industry-- both the major labels looking for new indie rock bands to sign, and the related industry of music magazines like the NME-- insisted on finding "the new Smiths" or "the next Smiths". For years all we got were bad chairs, as it were: Gene, Suede, Echobelly, Kingmaker and others, as good as they may have been in places, were pretenders to throne Morrissey and Marr had vacated. Other innovations like Madchester, Grunge, and Britpop meant more explosions of talent followed by "meaningless design". Like the chair manufacturers, the music industry absolutely must keep telling the public that new, great bands are coming along, just as people in book publishing hail new writers as "the next Faulkner" and people in moviemaking hail new directors as "the next Scorsese".

The end result of "meaningless chairs" is that everything becomes vapid, and the public grows bored. I can attest to this myself-- every time a new band like Bloc Party or Franz Ferdinand comes along I find myself really liking a few tunes but they don't really mean anything to me. I know that every few months a new band will spring up in New York or London to reinterpret the postpunk indie scene of '78-'82 in sophisticated, fluent ways that will sound passably good but remain hopelessly second-rate. Mostly I feel bored with "this year's model". I alread knew what the Arcade Fire album was going to sound like before I bought it. None of this is really the fault of the artists. The industry they're a part of recycles and rehypes its own continuity and they're caught in the middle. Pop music's future is the Starbucks model-- white noise.

Business depends on churning out new models, new designs, and that's all Saville meant by the chair example. Greatness comes along too infrequently to sustain megabillion industries, and mass culture, to keep itself going, must never break its production lines and it continually celebrates the myth of its own continuity. Hence we are inundated with "Top XXX" lists, awards shows, retrospectives in all media, Halls of Fame, and so forth. Consumers must never know the truth, which they'd very easily recognize if they gave it any thought, which is that the majority of new bands, writers, and filmmakers they buy each year are total rubbish. This puts me in mind of Daniel Waters' "Heathers":

"Can anybody tell me why I keep reading these stupid spy novels?"

"Because you're an idiot."

"Oh yeah, that's right."

 

[Dave]

About those chairs from Milan, this is a site that might be of some interest. My friend uses it more than I do. She sells furniture and home decor in her shop and on ebay. This site lists a lot of examples of what's happening in design in the top markets. It's helpful to look at this to get keywords. Also, you can find emerging trends, and we have found things selling very cheap in our area that are very hot in the right market.

Things on that site, 1stdibs, are overpriced, but they are also top examples of the hottest trends.

This is an example. It's selling for $7,500. It might not be that easy to find this exact set by this designer, but we've all seen things that look like this, and probably thought it was tacky. But I can just picture Liza and Baryshnikov sitting there making googly eyes at each other. That's worth at least a couple grand, huh?

Jere Chrome Table with Four Lucite L.I.F. Chairs
USA
1970's
Table by Jere and Chairs by Lion in the Frost. All signed.
Bronze silk upholstery

Price
$7,500

Condition
Excellent

 

[Alcoholic Afternoons]

Jere Chrome Table with Four Lucite L.I.F. Chairs
USA
1970's
Table by Jere and Chairs by Lion in the Frost. All signed.
Bronze silk upholstery

Price
$7,500

Condition
Excellent

$7,500? Now I know what he means about unreasonable chairs.

 

[Dave]

well, I kind of accidentally misrepresented. That site is more about decorating than design. You never see new things there.

I googled "milan chair" and Macy's offers this one for $999.

Target has this one for $109.

$179 at http://www.domicilefurniture.com/

I doubt any of those are what he's talking about though. They're all "in the style of" and I don't know the names of the designers to look at the real deal.

 

[Alcoholic Afternoons]

The Macy's one is pretty sweet, actually.

 

[Dave]

Target's reminds me of those old cars with the covered wheelwells, which is sort of cool because I think they're all trying to go for a "Mid Century Modern" look. I'm not sure about the sloping back, though. Seems more form than function.

 

[bogdana]

dave, is this true? You're a GINGER? oh heaven help us! EEEK!

 

[Busy Clippers]

The coveted Italian chairs of which you speak are usually available through an interior designer who gets them from one of those lovely and mysterious showrooms who sell to the trade only. Some won't even allow civilians unaccompanied by an interior designer to enter the premises. I work near a design district and know their ways so I've infiltrated a number of these temples of taste in order to situate my plebeian hind quarters on or near the sacred Italian chairs. Once you're in there nobody seems to mind what you do. As a matter of fact the more disdainful of their furniture you appear to be, the sooner they offer you expresso.

It's all this sort of thing.

 

[Dave]

Thanks, Clippy! I want the "Club". I also like the sofa called "Alone". Maybe if you start your Christmas savings now... They do seem to lean heavily on reinterpretation and I don't see the "meaning", exactly, except that they seem to be about function and classic design. That's what I like. But then I've always beem one of the masses.

 

[Busy Clippers]

I also like the sofa called "Alone"

We are Morrissey fans for a reason, Dave! On a related note, the design competitions are always good for a wheeze. Here are links to a few. There's a ridiculous white toast rack that I'd like to kick.

There's a great design museum in South Beach, the Wolfsonian, which you will see has the worst designed web site possible. Click on the little boxes to the bottom left of the logo and you can see the collections.