ART & ARCHITECTURE INTERVIEWS for FIVE BOOKS, ESSAYS, FIELD NOTES

INTERVIEW | In Conversation with Linda Secondari| 19.10.21

Graphic Design

What does it take to be a good graphic designer in our media-saturated age? Linda Secondari, member of the Executive Board of the Graphic Artists Guild, gives us a glimpse of her reference library, five must-have volumes for every design aspirant and those whose work relies on effective visual communication. That she is a book designer by trade is, of course, grist to our mill at Five Books.

“Sometimes I had to have ‘that conversation’ with [designers]”, says Linda, “that graphic design is not a fine art. It’s a craft, it’s a trade, it’s a skill. Hence we have The Graphic Artists Guild, and not, for example, a salon.” A central concern of the hers is helping designers to make a living. Which ultimately comes down to commercial negotiations around price.

What determines price in the marketplace for cultural goods? And what currency is it best denominated in? In this issue of Appel, we talk trade.

WHAT’S CAUGHT MY EYE & CROSSED MY SCREEN

A Kind Word for Commercial Art… & Rockwell

Commercial art like design and illustration fall afoul of high-minded art talk. Art and advertizing are seen as mutually exclusive. This is odd, as the distinction between fine and commercial art gets blurrier with every passing year. What is the contemporary art fair – think Frieze, Art Basel – if not a glorified supermarket of Veblen goods made to be marketed or made to order? And what are big ticket artists if not first and foremost makers of coin, increasingly so in our era of digital transactions? More on that below.

Ever since Clement Greenberg’s all too influential 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” the Art World has been at best ambivalent, and at worst hysterically hostile to ‘commercial’ art and popular culture. High-minded attitudes towards the work of Normal Rockwell, a contemporary of Greenberg’s, exemplify this ambivalence. Although Willem de Kooning, another contemporary of his, was unambiguously admiring of Rockwell’s work. It’s a mind bend to consider Abstract Expressionism even coexisting with Rockwelliana, but de Kooning admired Rockwell’s work.

“Our greatest modern painter quite adored Rockwell” writes Peter Schjeldahl, “as he did most things about the United States since arriving here, as a twenty-two-year-old Dutch stowaway, in 1926.… Rockwell was no mere illustrator, though—modest to a fault, he staked no larger claim. He invented as well as limned his stories and, in the process, created a grand, rolling fiction of Americanness. The pictures dramatize comic or poignant episodes of harmless strain in the day-to-day of democracy…. And he drew and painted angelically, with subtle technical ingenuity, involving layered colors, that is still underappreciated. I took instruction on this point from de Kooning, who opened a book to a reproduction, handed me a magnifying glass, and made me peruse Rockwell’s minuscule but almost fiercely animated painterly touch. ‘See?’ said de Kooning. ‘Abstract Expressionism!’ “

Minting It

Picasso would famously mint his own currency, paying for restaurant meals with a doodle on a dinner napkin. Circulation was limited to his social circle.

Artists like Damien Hirst have deployed similar minting tactics, though on an altogether grander scale. In 2008, he was the principal bidder for a lot of his own work at auction, so he has come to represent both printing press and marketplace for his own brand of luxury good. Damien Hirst has produced something to the tune of 1500 spot paintings that have sold, in some cases, in the millions. The fact of their ubiquity is actually perversely one of the things that makes them more valuable, not less valuable, turning the old supply-and-demand dictum of classical economics on its head.

Big name artists and their factories—for that’s effectively what they are—have become sites of commodity production. In this way, artists have arguably become almost like forgers of themselves, an ersatz version of their own original ideas in order to supply this market, so desperately hungry for the big ticket names that will burnish the credentials of this or that private collection. Hirst, single handedly, or with his apprentices, has effectively become something along the lines of central banker, minting his own currency. Perhaps the brazenness and cynicism are themselves the artistic gesture. His latest venture would suggest as much: 

‘It involves 10,000 original works of art on paper, which I call “The Currency”.  I made them all five years ago, and they are in a vault but about to come to life through their launch on the blockchain. They also exist as NFTs and a related cryptocurrency. The whole project is an artwork, and anyone who buys “The Currency” will participate in this work, it’s not just about owning it. It is the most exciting project I have ever worked on by far.’

‘The Currency’ is the ultimate conflation of art and wealth, value and meaning. Value, or more precisely price, stands in for meaning. Artistic endeavor becomes entirely self-referential as a marketing exercise for the sale of one’s own production. Such artifacts as are produced derive their value overwhelmingly from the intersection of supply and demand in the marketplace, rather than some other cultural or social criteria.

The Culture and the Marketplace are one. And the cryptocurrency is the perfect cipher for this cultural singularity. Of which, more below.

Here, an Art World Banker meets a Financial World Banker, and they talk shop: Damien Hirst in conversation with former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney.  

Should I buy Cryptocurrency?

As a former investment banker, I get this question a lot from friends and associates.

My answer is typically to say that you should invest in parallel currencies of a non-digital variety.

Most discussions of financial innovation revolve around digital developments in money and exchange. This is the wrong point of departure, and situates the discussion in the realm of financial markets, that of mediated exchanges, and not in the realm of our everyday lives, where the most meaningful exchanges are not those mediated by markets or technology (or both), but unmediated, human exchanges.

"You don't just go online and use the Berkshare. You go down to Main Street stores, have a conversation with a shopkeeper, hear what it's like to do business in the community," says founder Susan Witt. "It's a conversation. It's the building of citizenship. We're out of that habit."

Blockchain, and by extension Bitcoin, were digital technologies designed to solve a problem that digital technology created, namely that trust is incredibly hard to enforce in the digital age.

What we need perhaps is a widely accepted currency that, rather than obviating the need for interpersonal trust, actually enshrines it as a central tenet of our material relations with one another. κρύπτω/ ἀποκαλύπτω – Crypto/ Apocalypto. Concealment or Revelation. They hide rather than reveal. Cryptocurrencies may be used for exchanges, but they are in no meaningful way a conversation between two parties to a transaction.

The fully anonymous, frictionless exchanges crypto facilitates are symptomatic of a socioeconomic system that is alienating, and for which alienation serves as an impetus. In other words, cryptocurrencies are designed to accentuate the bad habits that we have developed in our exchanges with one another over the last half century or more, habits that are intertwined with developments in both finance and technology, of which cryptocurrency may be the apotheosis.

Maybe what we need is not more technology, but more trust.

Empire of Signs, Empire of Numbers

For many years my work in financial markets involved numbers – statistics, ratios, multiples. ‘The Numbers Don’t Lie’ is taken for a truism on the trading floor. And while that may be true, Numbers – like Statistics, Damned Lies and Statistics – can be presented more or less lucidly, with degrees of competence and honesty in the way that they are visualised. If you’re a writer, you might use Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, or the Economist Style Guide for your prose. Typographers and designers will call on Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, which Linda and I discuss in detail above. This beautiful book by Edward Tufte is a style guide for anyone who uses numbers to make an argument or convey a message. 

We will remember where we were during the Pandemic Lockdown of 2020. Maybe what we were reading. We might even recall, for years to come, the pictures that conveyed critical information to us at this precarious time. The flattening of the curve. The billiard-balls of contagion. 

How data is visualised can help with the task of problem solving. It can also be alluring and, dare I say it? beautiful.

Money Is The One True God

What’s your favorite paper currency? I’m partial, but my vote would be the 8th edition of the Swiss Franc (now superseded by a more abstract, gestural 9th edition). Le Corbusier with a ground plan of the Indian city of Chandigar, Arthur Honegger, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Alberto Giacometti and Jacob Burckhardt: a formidable roll call, brilliantly presented. Like public statues, currencies are like miniature manifestos, a statement of shared civic values. What kind of declaration do we make when we go digital with our money?

Dazzling visuals and a great tune by Blake Mills, as well as food for thought in this splendid music video.

seigniorage /ˈseɪnjərɪdʒ/ noun - 1. profit made by a government by issuing currency, especially the difference between the face value of coins and their production costs. 2. (historical) a thing claimed by a sovereign or feudal superior as a prerogative.

Money. You can doubt it, but you can’t live without it. It has been years since I worked on Wall Street, but that does not stop people asking me for investment advice. Artists are the ultimate bankers, as I try to explain in my essay above. So maybe we should be asking them the serious questions about finance, as Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England seems to ask of Damien Hirst.

Should I buy cryptocurrency? My short answer is, ‘I don’t know’, but I do believe we need more trust and less technology in our money.

Economics are not the reason I collected coins as a boy. Weight, purity and refinement of their minerals were secondary to me. As were purchasing power, to be honest. That’s quite an indictment for a future investment banker. Standard economic definitions identify the functions of money as a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account. A functional definition captures none of the alchemical magic money involves, nor the pageantry of coinage. It reflects none of the wonder of divining what it means to have worth.

As a kid I collected coins for their beauty, each one hinting at stories of how it came to be, who had carried it and what it had been exchanged for. I would marvel at the superb designs, the skilful positioning of type and ancillary devices within the confines of the planchet, the winged goddesses and mythical beasts. Designs are the innovation that turned bits of metal into currency, imbued them with value, and gave them meaning. It is the symbols inscribed on the face of a coin that describe what it is that we pledge allegiance to.

I am possibly the last person to speak to about the investment virtues of Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies are entirely devoid of symbols, cultural association or meaning. They are markers of transactions, but obviate the need for true exchange, of meaningful intercourse. To my mind, David Graeber’s definition of money is more faithful to its true purpose than Bitcoin’s mission statement: “The value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.”

Thank you for taking the time to read this issue.

Romas Tauras