‘When I buy art, I want to keep it separate. You don’t want people to think you are doing what you are doing because you want to make your company better.’
(Miuccia Prada quoted by Specter, 2004)
In 2002 a sculpture by artist Tom Sachs entitled Prada Death Camp (1998) caused outrage when shown in the exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art at the Jewish Museum in New York. The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman (2002) reported how he had received ‘anguished emails’ from Holocaust survivors stunned at the inclusion of the model of a concentration camp made from a Prada hatbox. The controversy generated by the exhibition inevitably drew attention to the fashion brand and speculation about its response to an artist who had also created the Prada Toilet (1997). Well the critics needn’t have worried, ‘We really like his work,’ said Pandora Asbaghi from the Fondazione Prada (a contemporary arts foundation owned and managed by Prada), who also confirmed that Prada had given Sachs an unlimited supply of shoeboxes.
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As we know, the very purpose of graphic design is shifting heavily towards a future defined as a vocal medium of personal expression and authorship. The designer as author and master of his or her content has become a realistic and sustainable economic model for the graphic designer who wants to work free from commercial restraint. Seemingly, graphic design has the monopoly on the capacity to entertainingly say anything it chooses to an audience who, at the continuing behest of industry, are educated in all its nuances and references, and who are willing to play its visual games.
Therefore, as design has begun to shift its focus towards autonomous self-expression, and as graphic designers are now free of the clients commercial agendas and can literally say anything within their ‘work’ without fear of economic impact, the question must be asked, why within this work do designers consistently and obsessively invoke the visual political language systems of their former censors, their former oppressors, their former inhibitors? In the retention of their image, their language and their techniques, have designers learnt to love their metaphorical captors, these political and industrial kidnappers of creativity?
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Ten years ago the nation’s computers were full to bursting with typefaces, in complete contrast to an earlier period where you would have been fortunate to gain access to one of them. To have a typewriter was a luxury and the world of typesetting was as distant an option as a weekend in Prague. People discuss the ins-and-outs of the Microsoft operating system and the “Comic Sans” font and rarely speak about how our perception of words has been modified. The power of print is not what it was, and we blame journalists for that. What about design?… Taking care of text before it gets to be printed matter - have words become children? Typography mostly consists of deciding which flavour of crisps you fancy and thereby the flavour that other people get to eat.
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