Something I wrote in an email to my brother a second ago:
I’m over Australian design culture. There’s this cliche now that we’re pretty up there in terms of global design culture, which is true, but fuck, it’s all about street art and the illustrative, which (in the hands of Eastern suburbs design-yuppies) becomes such an individualist, artwank kind of discourse. It’s all about stylistic mannerisms — there’s almost zero critical methodology that it’s almost criminal.
That’s the thing — there’s so much rhetoric about collaboration and collectives and shit in contemporary designy circles, but basically it’s a cover for free-floating mini-entrepeneurs on the make, regurgitating the markers of street culture to ape sound-system and posse-based subculturality for the interests of global capital, or at least to fund your stupid club night for the faux-hawk/trucker-crap crowd. At least we should be fucking honest about it.
We can came out with all sorts of rhetoric about how the “street-culture-isation” of design somehow de-institutionalises it, but that’s just a superficial evasion of the actual exercise of power. I’m not talking about how “evil advertising appropriates subcultures”, which is banal, but the actual ethics of how one contributes to a culture of design practice. As a relatively non-ethical design practitioner myself who occasionally flirts with street art aesthetics, I don’t have answers, but I’ve had it up to here with the smug celebrations of Australian designers being “in front”. Designers? Fucking hate them.
[ technorati tags: design, culture, power, subcultures, institutionality, australia ]
