Reading “Who’s Affraid of Visual Culture?”, a text by Johanna Drucker, made me question the identity and differences between Fine Art and Graphic Design.
When studying Art History and Design History, I was told that both disciplines were very distinctive, mainly because of their objectives and approaches in the creation process. What I realised while reading Drucker’s text is how incomplete and outmoded my previous perception of visual culture was: Fine Art and Graphic Design have much more similarities than differences, to a level in which it is difficult to clearly distinct between what is Art or what isn’t. Graphic Design has the status of “a dangerous interloper”, in the words of Drucker, because of its inherent relation to mass culture and commercial purposes. But how can this define the division between the former and Fine Art’s privileged status, when contemporary Fine Art also appropriates commercial imagery and design? In the words of Johanna Drucker: “The use of fine art imagery for commercial purposes already had an established track record, and the movement of images back and forth across the borders of fine and commercial art established a precedent for a similar migration of forms of composition, layout, and communicative rhetoric. The appropriations of commercial imagery and design that populate Pop art and then postmodern art, are simply part of a long history of such exchanges, each with its own historical character and charge.” These exchanges between fine art and commercial imagery are the main reason why it is so difficult to precisely define the border line between what is art and what is design. To exemplify this stance, Drucker introduces and analyses an exhibition, “Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age”, Merrill C. Berman's private collection of 20th-century posters, adverts, photomontages and graphic ephemera. It is through exhibitions likewise that one understands how “all the visual forms of contemporary life, fine art and commercial alike, have been shaped by the history of graphic design”. I found the text very interesting, even though I'm not so absorbed by Drucker's position on the other subject she expresses, how undervalued is American modern art history. Her perception of Visual Culture is what most captivates me, seeing all visual forms and disciplines at once and finding connections between them.
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