Warning: this is a very long blog post, but it’s worth reading:) I wrote this originally as my Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis paper when I was at BYU, but the subject matter is timeless, and I think it will be useful to everyone, not just other artists and designers. Conformity vs. Revolution is a subject that had interested me throughout my lifelong education in art. The concept of completely new ideas and ways of doing things was what drove the art world forward. So it was only appropriate that I focus most of my senior year in BYU’s graphic design program studying it and writing about it. As I said it’s long, so get a snack and make yourself comfortable, enjoy:
Prologue
I was studying Art at BYU Hawaii. While taking a contemporary art history class, I experienced one of the highest points of my educational career. The course followed the movements of modernism and postmodernism, from the works of Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, to Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Marcel Duchamp.
It was then I began to internalize this concept of the Avant Garde; the idea of those who pushed the limits of art and thought. I dug deeper into this realm of thought and applied these concepts to my day to day thought process. I looked at everything different from that point on. Each piece of architecture I passed on the street, every song I listened to, every t-shirt graphic I saw someone wearing, I thought to myself, “Is this modern? Is that post modern? Is this cutting edge? Is this innovative?” I began to wonder at every piece of culture I experienced, “Is this original? Is this the “next thing”?, Is this what comes after post modernism?”
The class went through the history of the 20th century, through each sequential art movement in chronological order, and when we came to the end of the semester we had a discussion of all we had covered up to that point. Our teacher posed the very question that had been on my mind the entire time, “Whats next?” He offered a few examples of current artists who were currently doing interesting work, but then he offered us a possibility of the next major direction the world of art and style could take. From the book, A Theory of Everything: “The Physical Universe actually has an inherent tendency to create order, just as when water chaotically washing down the drain in your bathroom sink suddenly organizes itself into a beautiful swirling whirlpool.”
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