Design as Art, Bruno Munari (1966)

pg. 12 - 'The artist wants the viewer to participate at all costs. He is looking for a point of contact, and he wants to sell his works of art in the chain stores just like any other commercial article, stripped of its mystery and at a reasonable price'

'...the desire to get back into society, to re-establish contact with their neighbours, to create an art for everyone and not just for the chosen few with bags of money'

'Artists want to recover the public that has long ago deserted the art galleries, and to break the closed circle of Artist - Dealer - Critic - Gallery - Collector'

DESIGN AS ART

pg. 25 - 'Culture today is becoming a mass affair'

'The artist must cast off the last rags of romanticism and become active as a man among men, well up in present-day techniques, materials and working methods'

'The designer today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the public'

'There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use. If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall having nothing to hide'

pg. 26 - 'When we give a place of honour in the drawing room to an ancient Etruscan vase which we consider beautiful, well proportioned and made with precision and economy, we must also remember that the vase once had an extremely common use. Most probably it was used for cooking oil'

pg. 27 - 'Design came into being in 1919, when Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar'

'The first school of design did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society because he helps society to recover its balance'

'When the objects we use every day and the surroundings we live in have become in themselves a work of art, then we shall be able to say that we have achieved a balanced life'

DESIGNERS AND STYLISTS
What is a Designer?

pg. 30 - 'In the early days of rationalism it used to be said that an object was beautiful in so far as it was functional'

pg. 31 - 'A leaf is beautiful not because it is stylish but because it is natural, created in its exact form by its exact function'

'Art is once more becoming a trade'

'...As it was in ancient times when the artist was summoned by society to make certain works of visual communication (called frescoes) to inform the public of a certain religious event'

'Today the designer (in this case the graphic designer) is called upon to make a communication (called a poster) to inform the public of some new development'

pg. 32 - 'The designer is therefore the artist of today, not because he is a genius but because he works in such a way as to re-establish contact between art and the public, because he has the humility and ability to respond to whatever demand is made of him by the society in which he lives....'

'...because he responds to the human needs of the time, and helps people to solve certain problems without stylistic preconceptions or false notions of artistic dignity derived from the schism of the arts'

Pure and Applied

pg. 35 - 'When then is this thing called Design if it is neither style nor applied art? It is planning: the planning as objectively as possible of everything that goes to make up the surroundings and atmosphere in which men live today'

'An object should now be judged by whether it has a form consistent with its use'

pg. 36 - It is 'beautiful' because it is just right. An exact project produces a beautiful object, beautiful not because it is like a piece of sculpture, even modern sculpture, but because it is only like itself'

'A thing is not beautiful because it is beautiful, as the he-frog said to the she-frog, it is beautiful because one likes it'

A Living Language

pg. 37 - 'It is a well-known fact that to get a message across we can use not only words, but in many cases also images, forms and colours, symbols, signs and signals'

pg. 39 - 'Visual language changes according to the needs of the day'