We went to the Bruce Mau show on Massive Change: The Future of Global Design at the Art Gallery of Ontario. After being disspointed in the web site (see Massive Change and Overrated Sight) I was more favorably impressed by the show. The first thing my wife noticed standing in line was how young the people coming were – it seems to have reached a demographic that doesn’t come to galleries. The show itself is didactic – there is lots of text to read and to listen to and most of it is earnest in an improving way. What is impressive is how they have taken what is essentially an essay and turned it into an exhibit that seemed to work for the 20-something crowd. The points are illustrated and exhibited in interesting ways like the room of images showing the ways we visualize our world.
One side of me wished I could afford to turn a course into an exhibit like this. Imagine if you could exhibit a class and then assign the show as a field-trip alternative to the lecture. Hmmmm….
Another annoying feature of the show was that it treated everything as design. In many ways it was about politics and the environment. To think that design in anything other than the weak sense of creative solutions is the key is hubris. In a sense everthing human is designed, that is what we call intentional behavior aimed at a new outcome. In a stronger sense design is a subset of such practices and politicians are not designers.
Here is a photo from outside the AGO.
