Design has more often defined by what it is not than by what it is. More than anything else, what design is not is art. Deep down, design is understood as being useful, and therefore to be taken as having lesser significance than a work of art, which is unburdened by utility.
Like two magnetized needles impaled on pivots, simultaneously poised between attraction and repulsion, artists and architects warily circle each other. They are intrigued and suspicious, jealous and dismissive of each other. It’s a phenomenon reflected in the confrontation between the artist Rober Irwin and the architect Richard Meier over the Getty Museum’s garden, about which one of their mutually exclusive conceptions would predominate.
The relationship between art and design can be equally tense. The continuing doubts in the art world about Isamu Noguchi can be traced to questions about his success as a designer of paper lampshades, coffee tables and even a mass produced Bakelite case for the Radio Nurse baby alarm. These were not the kind of things that an artist could take on before the age of irony and still retain his or her credibility. But when Pharmacy, the restaurant designed by Damien Hirst, closed, the furniture, the fittings and tableware were auctioned off as they were artworks, even though they were mostly the work of Jasper Morrison.
