nota
Flux,Opus
I happened to have the privilege meeting a particularly excellent design student and had grilled him with pop questions about the importance of typography and proper punctuation. Much to our shock and dismay typography is simply omitted from the curriculum due to its perceived minor importance. Maybe they weren’t aware of the existence of Chinese typography just like some people ditched “Chinese grammar”.
We both agree that it equals to future career security but, whether moot or not, an imminent bad omen also.
Aaron Nieh, the acclaimed #1 Taiwanese fashion designer who (despite many recurring cliches in his work) mainly deals with book covers, posters and CDs, is going to publish another portfolio book and had decided to give away fake book covers that passes any comic or tabloid magazine as a classical reader with the book. That surely means something: design as the selling of the fashionable and perishable is at its all-time high here in Taiwan now (while the economy plummets and the government continues on its deterioration heading nowhere) and however, as said in previous email messages, what pays sustains life and the continuation of life is crucial to any serious creation or the preparation thereof.
This is an era of constant self-reassurance and massive anxiety. While geniuses and creators may have a knack at producing fine products from material, the mediocre have to drool on their own reflections in the mirror. The mirror should be adorned like a fine pair of glasses to fit their vision.
I deem most Taiwanese design curricula inferior for they lack serendipity (although my definition of the word may be way too ferocious, just like Roland Young’s extreme measures might be thought as abuse to a first-timer). But if schools from their very origin were simply built to support ideas, and mass-schooling was ensured only to support an intellectually superior labor task, our design schools are surely losing the ability to gauge the future and are shifting towards a school of the trade, where by the preposition “of” I really meant “being subordinate to”. The very fact here is that people do not crave fine art if it isn’t advertised, and the motto “by the people, of the people, for the people” has huge potential of being transformed to “by the idiots, of the idiots, for the idiots”.
I do think that swarms will overtake the rest but still they would have a leader who sees it all, and the idiocy theory was just abstracting individual prowess out from the picture. We are losing faith in ourselves, therefore losing faith in our own prowess and our own capability, ability and ambition to cooperate and create the next great thing. We lose faith in ourselves by not learning and not listening, and by constantly bragging loud.
And life is short. Despite the overwhelming positiveness of humans attaining life beyond their average 120 years’ lives, a person’s useful life usually ends within his/her thirties and before his/her forties. The baggage we carry are graven and would continue to grow day by day, while our brains and bodies deteriorating cell by cell, tissue by tissue till the next day after we die. The perceived impeccable responsibility of a well-established citizen is killing creativity, while creativity and the effort in keeping it itself is killing the creators. Life is short and there is no way back. Rejuvenation is likely a myth which should exist only in mythologies for good riddance and reference.
And every time you breath a word I die a little more inside.
