I’m tired of reading and looking to design as Art, making people to be confused about it. Some people are just looking for fame, and not really thinking on giving creative answers. The world is about to explode, and we have to fill our heads with more and more warm gadgets. Enough!

User Mike K in response:

Interesting. While I do absolutely agree that the world faces large problems and that the role of design should be forcefully stronger in helping solve them, that in no way illigitimizes the need for conceptual or artistic design. In fact, as in science, many useful discoveries come from this type exploration as much as they do from pointed purposeful problem solving.

found on: Rhizome

This struck me. I suppose I never considered scientists playing around and stumbling upon answers they weren’t looking for. And that as a means of research. Of course could be used as a “get out of jail free card” for any practitioner but I think it’s valid.

Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) out of Livermore, New College in San Francisco and two allied groups filed the bid for the Livermore contract on Oct. 27. At the time, they acknowledged they had little chance of winning it, but said they hoped the bid would encourage public support for phasing out the lab’s nuclear weapons work and diverting its thousands of scientists into research on global warming, alternative energy sources and other peaceful enterprises.

On Friday, Tri-Valley officials said the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons complex for the U.S. Energy Department, had rejected the bid. Officials said the call for phasing out nuclear weapons work was “inconsistent” with Energy Department and Nuclear Security Administration strategic planning.

read more – LIVERMORE / Anti-nuke activists lose out on bid to run weapons lab

This mythology of the lone genius, isolated from society, and relieved of social responsibility, is summed up for me in these comments by the painter Georg Baselitz: “The artist is not responsible to anyone. His social role is asocial; his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does. There is no communication with any public whatsoever… It is the end product which counts, in my case, the picture.”

Recently, when he was asked on the occasion of his Guggenheim retrospective what role he believes art plays in society, Baselitz replied, “The same role as a good shoe, nothing more.” And he has stated elsewhere: “The idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seems ludicrous. Society functions, and always has, without the artist. No artist has ever changed anything for better or worse.”

The Nature of Beauty in Contemporary Art an article by Suzi Gablik