I Don't Owe You Anything
- Alex Cameron
- Apr 5
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 9
re-pub #03 April 2025
A curated collection of articles on creative matters from a ‘design essentialist’ perspective. With contributions by the late, great Arlene Croce, Michael Bierut, Heather Mac Donald, Rick Poynor & Michael Rock and Terry Eagleton. At re-pub we thought an antidote was in order to counter the seemingly all-pervasive shoe-horning of political ideology into design practice, discourse and criticism.
To that effect, gathered here are writers whose work puts their belief in design as a positive social and cultural activity at the centre of their thinking.
As the title of this collection suggests, these articles are being given a deserved and necessary ‘second wind’ because all imply a call for writing about design to focus first on the craft of design as a necessary precondition to understanding the role of design and the designer, and more broadly the transformative potential and impact of design as we know it, on culture and society.
My introduction to re-pub #03
In my essay in ‘Five Critical Essays on the Crit’ for the Future Cities Project’s ‘Five Critical Essays’ series, I tried to highlight the importance of the link between the ‘private’ employment of the Crit and the ‘public’ practice of Criticism – to clarify intent and assess the quality and propriety of designed matter and creative endevours.
‘... both are grounded in an exploratory set of considerations and judgements, based on a shared, design-centred language. Both the crit and critique are attempts to define, understand and clarify the designer’s intent and to refine and confront the efficacy of a particular approach. Both are processes in which the depth to which the designer understands and applies the fundamental principles of the craft of design is assessed. They amplify what a particular design or approach might contribute to the craft, as well as to culture and society.’
It is this question of ‘design-centred language’, and its apparent erosion that is particularly relevant today as ‘outside forces’ (political/ideological) is having a profoundly detrimental effect on how the role and function of design and the designer is understood.
The wholly positive and instructive contribution that criticism can have on creative endeavours is, I believe, evident in the essays republished here.
The dangers we face, while apparent, need further investigation and critique, something we hope to return to in future publications. The ease by which design history and the canon is blithely cast aside is perhaps the most urgent question we need to contend with when thinking about design. At the fore of this chronic disdain for history is the ‘campaign’ to decolonise design.
The crisis in criticism – which has been decades in the making – has reached something of a high-point (low-point?) particularly in academia/education. The design essentialist approach – where considerations and judgements are made through the application of ‘the best which has been thought and said’ about design as a craft and an approach to solving problems is being upended by ‘design activism’ in the form of the ideology of Decolonisation. This design activism only makes sense when both design history and the craft of design are rejected.
The philistinism and dripping contempt of the Decolonisers was perfectly illustrated recently in a conversation between Cheryl D. Holmes Miller a designer and co-author of Decolonizing Graphic Design: a black perspective, and educator and Decolonising supplicant, Kristina Lamour Sansone in a video on LinkedIn. The brilliantly studious, Graphic Design: a concise history by Richard Hollis it held aloft by Lamour Sansone like a piece of trash, her disgust towards this excellent historical document is evident. I doubt anyone with such a philistine, Veruca Salt attitude to history will ever write anything that could come close to Hollis’s contribution to our understanding of design and design history.
In this short video, the lie of the Decoloniser – that it is merely an attempt to expand design history or is righting a wrong – is evident. Pehaps a ‘be kind’ approach to design Decolonisers is to say that they misunderstand how a purposful history of design is ‘written’. Impact, on and beyond the field is fundamental. It not merely the uncoverning of more ‘facts’. At its worst Decolonising design is a willful dismantling of ‘The best which has been thought and said’. It is not a critique, in any meaningful sense, but a ‘cancellation’ by the new ‘anti-racists’ in designland.
The current moment doesn’t mean that there is no good criticism being written, more the problem is that the ascendent ideas throughout the design landscape is about the ideology of Social Justice, an ideology that refuses to engage with an essentialistic design criticism, having consigned craft – and the historic role and function of design and criticism – to the dustbin of history.
The essays featured here are, I think, some of the best examples of the art of criticism – from this essentialistic approach.
_ _ _ _
If any writer is responsible for reinvigorating my interest in criticism and making me think about it more keenly, it was the late, great US dance critic Arlene Croce and, in particular her essay ‘Discussing the undiscussable’, published in The New Yorker in 1994. It is an exocet of an intervention. Croce refused to go and see a production by Bill T. Jones, ‘Still/Here’, because, as she said, ‘By working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism. I think of him as literally undiscussable – the most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as artists but as victims and martyrs.
Similarly, the essay by Heather Mac Donald is an exploration of the new ‘anti-racism’ in cultural life as a ‘racial attack on classical music’, or ‘the cancellation of classical music’. Mac Donald’s writting is always challenging and always exacting in her analysis of culture.
Designer, critic, educator and partner at Pentagram, Michael Bierut, offers a critique of the work of ‘design superstar’ David Carson who quite literally, if somewhat bewilderingly, dominated much discussion in design magazines. Bierut was one of too few critics who dared to expose that the Emperor’s new clothes were anything but.
Alex Cameron, April 2025
If you have any suggestions or would like to submit your own work for republication, email alexcamerondesign@gmail.com
. . . . . . . . . .
I Don't Owe You Anything
Comments