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Like normative rules for rock or highway guidance systems
that drive the car for you,
what fun is that?
There is an unavoidable tension between what the artist
wants to create and what the audience wants to experience.
The artist wants freedom to explore their own emotions and
the audience wants the artist to explore the emotions of
the audience. Between them is the currency of appreciation
but new and completely different is hard to appreciate.
Given that, a mediocre artist can do very well but a
mediocre audience is the death of the art so even if
recognizable styles emerge and prosper, normative rules
kill the evolution of the art. Art does not need rules to be broken,
but styles to be learned, applied, evolved, thrown away,
and to reemerge cyclically when the audience or the
artist tires of an extreme which has become the new norm.
This tension gets a lot worse when rule makers enter the
auditorium, counting beats, checking volumes, sneering
at instruments, commenting authoritatively on the act.
The mediocrity forces the creativity back into the
woodshed where the next generation discovers 'new and
different' that is really the aging impoverished
hiding from the critics until they die of arthritic
thought or a blandness that made themselves uninteresting.
Tufte isn't wrong; he is bland. Style matters. "Won't
get fooled again."
Why do the Outkasts have the Number One hit this season?
len (grateful for the Outkasts)
From: Liam Quin [mailto:liam@w3.org]
On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 02:36:35PM +1100, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> Tufte and others who blanket say (if they actually do) that one display
> form is always bad (or always good) are talking through their hats.
In the three Turfte books I've read, there are no such statements.
Instead, he suggests that people learn how to present information
in a very wide array of formats, but with an emphasis on clarity.
I have a lot of respect for his writing. In typography and graphic
design, as well as i nother forms of communication, one needs to
understand how "the rules" work before one can use them and "break"
them - they are really guidelines, tools for us to use.
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