Found · 31 October 2001

I happened upon something, which gave me pause:

“Typography1 has lost2 it3 usefulness4 as a significant5 communication6 paradigm7...and has redefined itself8 as a meaningful9 artform10.”

  1. It’s large, this word: it holds much; it is flexible. The shapes of letters – their arrangement into text – means more than design or linguistics or semantics; indeed it offers a broad arena for new ideas. I’m bristling, but fair is fair and no one owns the word. Go nuts.
  2. Whoa, wait. I said go nuts, not assume the voice of god.
  3. If ever there was a place for a typo, this would be it.
  4. Long ago I did a poster, aping Wyndham Lewis: Architects! Where is Your Cortex? It was a lame attempt to dun builders for flouting the practicalities of living and working in the things they make. At the time it felt like a question of usefulness, but in fact I was just pissed that these men in Italian suits squiring dishy women to dinner made so much money doing such shoddy work. Still the question of what is useful never quite goes away, hmmm?
  5. Easy to think of Propaganda 101 here: if you say significant long enough, significance will emerge.
  6. Whodat?
  7. Not a means, you see, a conduit, a route, a method, or a tool. A paradigm.
  8. I see this guy named Typography in the shower one morning, the lightning bolt of epiphany striking as he rubs the suds from his eyes, That’s It! I’ll redefine myself – she’ll have to notice me!
  9. One risks shooting fish in a barrel: meaningful. Yes. Having doffed the winded clothing of unmeaningful language and ideas, of those dusty thousands of years evolving nuance, striding the trenches between the visual and the spoken, borne along by commerce and religion, these squidgy 2-D marks are free at last to act as lapel buttons for the deep thinkers who tart up crap to make it more saleable. Jesus wept.
  10. Such longing to rend art from roads and bridges. I wonder which is worse, the I Move Things Around with My Mouse and That is Art school, or the I Quote Gayatri Spivak and Hegel and Can’t Form a Lucid Sentence and That is Art school.

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