Re: Typography's Role In Art / Dance or Type?

Warde's assertion reminds a little of literary formalism, where readers of literature are to regard things like authorial intent, cultural context, history and biography as superfluous and irrelevant when they evaluate a text. To most of us, this seems not only a ludicrous way of looking at literature, but unrewarding and ultimately very difficult to accomplish.

The further we progress into our roles as designers, the more difficult I imagine it will be to not notice a well developed typographic logo, nicely kerned store sign-age, and the charm of a deceptively hand-written typeface (remember Jinji chocolate?). The same goes for all the bad examples of these things we encounter everyday. 

There's a parallel metaphor happening in Maryam's Daft Punk video post, a commentary on the value of art and performance in our culture (literally) on a street level. First, we have the dancing and the elaborate manipulation of the sign object through movement, framed by the perplexed and occasionally disapproving stares of passerby; second, we have all that type, a pastiche of fonts on the side of a building and on a flying foamcore arrow pointing both nowhere and everywhere. Would Warde regard this handling of letterforms with equal confusion and skepticism?

Just like history and culture matter in literature, aesthetics matter in type. They MATTER. But is it because the message isn't interesting enough on its own?  Do you just need to dress it up with a snappy collection of typefaces and some fancy footwork? No, I don't think that's the point. Sometimes the message IS the aesthetics.

Image by Amandine Alessandra