I am more than persuaded by his analysis of graphic Book Reviews designer Bruce Mau’s book Life Style, which Foster calls “a massive manifesto-for-myself.” Mau aims to “wrap Leslie Atzmon intelligence and culture around the product” but this process is doomed to failure—intelligence and culture are Design and Crime and Other Diatribes by Hal Foster not value-added commodities. Foster doesn’t elaborate (London: Verso, 2002), ISBN 1-85984-453-7: 143 pages, on Mau’s tedious blend of hip graphic design writing excluding notes and index; 170 with notes; 176 with peppered with the lingo of visual culture studies. Mau is index. for the most part an ineffective cultural critic, I suggest, precisely because he is so entrenched in Mau’s “Little When a new ideology trumps an old one, the intel- Red Book”—the facile rhetoric of his own field of design lectual baby frequently gets thrown out with the bath writing. Mau’s design-o-centric attitude is rampant in water. The new philosophies are embraced as messianic much graphic design discourse. truth and self-congratulatory conclusions are allowed to The next two chapters examine design discourse in eclipse real analysis. In Design and Crime, Foster makes the work of Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas respectively. way for the sort of critical analysis that dumps the bath Foster’s analysis encouraged me to reconsider Gehry’s water while rescuing the baby. He focuses on the need to work. Although at times Foster may be too hard on revisit and revamp the “political situatedness of artistic Gehry, Foster perceptively suggests that the architect’s economy... the historical dialectic of critical disciplinarity current design thinking is subservient to the “magic” of and its transgression”(xiv). computer-aided design technology. The result, according The title suggests that the book is about design’s to Foster, is that Gehry’s work is “all structure and all relationship to aspects of criminal behavior. It is some- surface with no functional interior”(35). Foster reveals what misleading until one understands the reasons the blobby underbelly of Gehry’s work—a disconnect behind Foster’s choice (the subtitle, and Other Diatribes, between building and site and between interior and is helpful). Foster’s “Crime” is metaphorical. The title exterior that passes for creative freedom. Koolhaas fares is based on an essay by architect Adolph Loos entitled better as a creative tour de force. Foster explains that “Ornament and Crime” in which Loos attacks “the although Koolhaas is not completely immune to “glib indiscriminant spread of ornament in all things,” but in conflations” of public spaces and commercial icons, his reality the overarching theme of Loos’ essay is the need authenticity is bolstered by his multimodal thinking and for the kind of frank analysis that allows a discipline to insightful analysis. develop a critical dialogue of the sort that will “provide In “Archives of Modern Art,” Foster offers as back- culture with running room”(xiv). Design and Crime shoots ground three historical shifts in the discourse of art prac- down the circuitous rhetoric tossed out by purveyors of tice, art museum, and art history. He poses interesting, cultural schtick and replaces it with a range of critical open-ended questions about the “dialectics of seeing” in possibilities. our present era of electronic information and finally asks, The book is divided into two halves, with four “What cultural epistemology might a digital reordering essays each. In the first half of the book, Foster focuses underwrite for art practice, art museum, and art history on “the branding of identity... [and] the advance of spec- alike?”(80) His answer is that he has “no conclusions at tacle” in design and architecture (xiii). The first essay, this point,” but in fact he does. He continues: “Design “Brow Beaten,” is a piercing analysis of The New Yorker and display in the service of exhibition and exchange critic-at-large John Seabrook’s book Nobrow: The Culture values are foregrounded as never before: today what of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture. Seabrook trumpets the museum exhibits above all else is its own spectacle the ways in which class identity has been supplanted value”(81). by a personalized, mix ‘n’ match identity fabricated at This astute observation is inevitably colored by the the cultural “Megastore.” According to Foster, Seabrook thesis he presents in the first half of the book—the nega- first pilfers and then glibly recoups notions of identity tive view that contemporary design is more often than and class from contemporary cultural studies to pitch not mere spectacle. He demonstrates in his wonderful his Nobrow “whatever-is-hot rules” thesis. essay on Koolhaas that he understands the complexity of “Hot” also rules in graphic design. “Design and effective design. However, in Design and Crime he never Crime,” the next essay, has particular resonance for extrapolates from the intricacies of Koolhaas’ design me as a graphic designer. Foster proposes that our thinking to design as a discipline. I am impressed by “hey, that’s me” design culture has become bloated the way that Foster examines multiple aspects of issues. with all-consuming brand images and hyper-mediated For some reason design as a discipline doesn’t merit information. Although my first reaction is to come to the same multifaceted treatment in his discussion. my discipline’s defense—even though I know Foster Even though Foster ends the chapter on a semi-neutral has a valid point—I will save that for later in the review. note—he explains that spectacle may be the primary © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 88 Design Issues: Volume 22, Number 2 Spring 2006 form of public art today—his bias is clear. I suspect this Norman Crowe bias prevents him from examining design or design history in the provocative discussion of criticism and The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human visual culture that follows. Intention by David W. Orr (Oxford and New York: This failure to consider design history extends to Oxford University Press, 2002), ISBN 0-19-514855-X, the next chapter, “Antinomies in Art History.” Foster 231pages, $25.00 hardcover, $16.95 paperback. analyzes modern art historical methodology followed by an insightful discussion of visual culture studies. He The Nature of Design is an anthology of essays by the observes that the discipline’s unrelenting anti-historical author that reflects the interrelationship of ideas, design, and pro-image credo—in which the viewed and the and the environment. Most of the essays were written viewer become fetishistic commodities conflated by expressly for this book while others are repeated and desire—deletes the notion of autonomy in art with one re-worked here, having been drawn from David Orr’s (silent) click. Reconsidering autonomy in conjunction earlier works. with and in resistance to this credo, Foster suggests, Although the title may suggest to some a combi- could refresh this stalled discipline. Foster also calls for a nation of case studies and prescriptive approaches re-energizing of historical analysis. For the record, some to design, it is instead a broad-brush background for emerging design historical analysis—which analyzes the environmental responsibility on behalf of designers—in formal qualities of designed artifacts in their historical effect, a mind-set and ethos for approaching design. and cultural contexts—already moves in this direction. David Orr has written extensively on environmental The penultimate chapter, “Art Critics in Extremis” issues prior to The Nature of Design, but this time his focus outlines the rise and fall of the modernist (a lá Artforum) was driven by the experience of working with architects, and postmodernist art critic. Foster concludes that engineers, scientists, faculty and college administrators the “essential subjects of Art” today are “Shock and on the design of a new science building at Oberlin Sensation held over as fun standbys or sideshows to feed College in Ohio, where he is a professor in Oberlin’s the mass media”(122). He develops this idea in the final Environmental Studies Program. The science building chapter, “This Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse.” After project, he explains, “began as a fairly straightforward a brief review of postmodernist “end of art” ideologies design and construction project” but soon became “a of the 1980s, Foster sketches several provocative direc- crash course in architecture, engineering, materials tions for contemporary art, for which he coins the term analysis, ecological engineering, landscape ecology, “living on.” Such art, Foster says, manifests a complex energy analysis, philosophy, institutional politics, and mix of “traumatic,” “spectral,” “nonsynchronous,” and fund-raising” (p. vii). “incongruent” aspects. Foster claims that although these Orr’s arguments for a foundational ethos rest on practices what he regards as a “natural” foundation. For instance, often treat given genres or mediums as some- he asserts the authority of evolution: biological evolution how completed, they do not pastiche them in a as a model for environmentally conscious design—in his posthistorical manner...they are committed to words, “the foundation for ecological enlightenment is formal transformations—as long as these trans- the 3.8 million years of evolution” (p. 4)—and traditional formations also speak to extrinsic concerns. In design methodologies—that is, the way designs for this way these practices point to a semi-auton- useful artifacts progressed before the advent of modern omy of genre or medium, but in a reflexive way science and technology, thereby avoiding most unin- that opens up to social issues. (130) tended and unpredictable consequences that would have been catastrophic in scope. Some now familiar examples The examples he sites are fascinating, but they leave of unintended and unpredictable consequences are: the me wanting more—they remind me of the thought- long term effects on biological systems of synthesized provoking contemporary design that is conspicuously chemicals; the use of chlorofluorocarbons as refrigerants missing from this discussion. Foster next returns to and subsequent damage to the ozone layer; the damming his narrow, one-sided view of design in our culture: of waterways and draining of wetlands for flood control “Through formal transformation that is also social and crop irrigation resulting in the long term salinization engagement...such work helps to restore a mnemonic of soils as well as causing immediate damage to ecosys- dimension to contemporary art, and to resist the presen- tems; our reliance on a petroleum based economy and tist totality of design in culture today”(130). The vision its the effects of global warming; and the introduction in this exciting book has one obvious blind spot—the of electronic communication along with the ubiquity of failure to see the full range of developments in contem- automobiles, super highways, and automobile owner- porary design. ship and the sociological impact of these inventions. These are examples of now recognized and especially broad negative consequences of historically recent inven- tion and design. In addition, there are countless every- Design Issues: Volume 22, Number 2 Spring 2006 89