Design Celebrity

This was a brilliant editorial criticizing the advent of the superstar designer in Blueprint Magazine back in August 2004 and is worth sharing with everyone. It's by Stephen Bayley and is called "Step Out of the Limelight":

Design was most interesting when least understood. And designers were most influential when they were anonymous. Now the glittering but pitiless forces of celebrity bring them into undermining scrutiny. A process once debated in academies, drawing shops and colleges is now a branch of public relations. Designers take their part in our celebrity culture alongside weather forecasters and soapstars. But even celebrities are diminished. Once, the archetypal Englishman was David Niven: now it is David Beckham.

A designer working in a Wes Midlands foundry in 1957, detailing a gas cooker and being inspired by what he had seen on early television, in imported American magazines, or on a rare foreign holiday, would have had a huge influence on popular taste when he surreptitiously slipped American streamlining or Italian sculptural motifs into a hob. He may have been responsible for a small masterpiece of vernacular art. That man is disappeared, and so has his role. Instead name checks are everywhere. In IKEA, a plastic tray is attributed to an autonomous creative genius. At the other end of his chain of status is Philippe Starck, the biggest celebrity designer of them all: visibility maximal, significance minimal.

To paraphrase EJ Gombrich: there is no such thing as design, only designers. If so, this is bad news. How disappointing they are in this our Age of Contrivance - Daniel Boorstin's coinage in his book The Image, an analysis of pseudo-events and their part in shaping our world. In Boorstin's definition, a pseudo-event is one that exists simply to generate media noise. Design promotion was about cultivating aesthetic awareness, instructing practicality. Now it is about publicity.

Hamish Pringle, ex Saatchi marketer and now director general of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, has written a book called Celebrity Sells. Well, yes, but it does a lot of other things too. As John Updike remarked: 'Celebrity is a mask that east the face.' So it corrodes while it sucks. Advertisers are keen on celebrity endorsement, but this device is supported by world of values as fragile and worthless as they are thin: exploiting Hello! Celebrities may temporarily benefit sickly businesses, but at what cost to a larger perception of corporate worth?

When Bekham makes a lemon of himself, ho pleased will Vodafone be? Instead there is evidence celebrity status may be positively damaging to business. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins investigated 1,435 CEO's and founda negative correlation between the boss's media exposure and stock performance.

Quick-fix celebrity damages designers too. It was in the mechanical age that designers were at their most influential, but least recognized. In our information age, the designer is much better known, but also less relevant. Invading the public space abandoned by increasingly preposterous 'artist', or increasingly arty craftspeople, the designer is no longer the anonymous genius toiling in a drawing office, but a high priest of neophila, of gauche novelty. The people who, 40 or 50 years ago, wrote the great histories of design reckoned that the effortful planning of man-made things was of supreme importance. They were right then, but they are wrong now. Today, far greater forces influence our world.

The Design Museum's Designer of the Year pseudo-event featured novelty footwear designed by an ex-footballer. And from football bootees we move to Habitat which, for its 40th anniversary, celebrated Very Important products. The boxer Lennox Lewis designed a clock. Which I think means he specified a sheet of Perspex, rather than he worked on the LCD circuitry. Deepak Chopra designed a yoga mat. How tricky was that? When designers become celebrities, celebrities can become designers. And that exposes that whole game. The American sociologist Herbert Gans said a defining aspect of lowbrow culture was its dependence on 'vicarious contact with stars'.

Charles Eams, a furniture designer who made the last worthwhile addition to the evolution of the office chair, spoke of his disgust on entering a toy store and confronting layers of meretricious excess. He deplored devices whose intention was to stimulate cupidity, only to lead to anguish and long-term disappointment. The purpose of design is (I mean was) to simplify the world, to remove the unnecessary and concentrate on absolutes. Instead, we have the poverty of abundance.

'Nearly everything we do', Boorstin wrote, 'to enlarge our world, to make life more varied more vivid, more fabulous, in the long run has an opposite effect,'

Designer of the Year? Habitat's Very Important products? Design has become a celebrity activity. Champagne or cyanide?