When Bad Art Is Good

Bad design is good design. And tasteful good design, likewise, is bad. Not good-bad, just bad-bad. Now that “perfect” design is possible with the click of a mouse, the industrialized world has become nostalgic for “imperfect” design. As computer-aided everything takes over our lives we begin to realize, little by little, what is missing from the high-tech world. We realize that a crooked line sometimes has more soul than a perfectly straight one and that a recording that has just the right amount of distortion is often preferable to a perfect copy. Woe unto us when the medical profession perfects their newest genetic and cloning techniques! We might actually realize that our imperfections are what makes us human.

The easier it becomes to produce perfection, in design, grammar, rhythm, and pitch, the more those who have the earliest and easiest access to that perfection want to abandon it. In a kind of reverse snobbism, Web designers and trendy magazine editors use the latest software programs to imitate the work of anonymous designers and artists. They use high-end computers to imitate the work of people who can’t even afford a computer. These unsung artists are the sources of inspiration for programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, or Pro Tools, but never in their lives have they had access to, or even dreamed of, these tools.

As true perfection appears on the horizon, as the fruits of the enlightenment and of centuries of scientific progress appear within grasp, we take a bite of the perfected tomato or a huge flawless strawberry and realize that something has been lost. Flava. Soul. Humor. Funk.

The nostalgia for design that originates on the streets is a pathetic attempt by sophisticates like myself to recapture that lost soul. We think that by imitating the look of something “real” we might actually become more real ourselves. But for most, the Faustian bargain has already been made. We can never actually be the man or woman who draws the shoes or the tacos on the kiosk walls, but we have certainly learned to appreciate the person who draws them. We can experience that weird but typical 21st-century sensation—loving something and laughing at it at the same time.

In the 19th century, as the technology of photography became more and more ubiquitous, artists quickly abandoned “realistic” portrait and landscape painting in droves. Why compete with a machine that can do it more quickly, easily, and inexpensively than you? In short order, they had to unlearn their drawing lessons and abandon their technique. They learned to draw like a child, like a “primitive.” They wanted to capture the soul, the feeling, the sensation that the camera missed. They made virtual African art, virtual primitive art—basically, high art that looked like it was made by people who didn’t know what they were doing. In time, “good” design became so easy even your software could do it! “Bad” design took soul. Or at least virtual soul. Artists and designers began collecting examples of this “authentic” design as items of inspiration. Little icons. Little shrines to those less schooled than they. Their studio walls would be filled with photographs and clippings of signs and buildings like these. Their own work was good, but this was the “real” thing. Unschooled, uncorrupted, and mostly unpaid.