Virgil Abloh's thought experiment: the same mug at a garage sale versus on a pedestal in a spotlit Beverly Hills room. Context, not the object itself, determines what counts as art. Designers should focus on crafting the room around the thing, not perfecting the thing.
There was a famous designer, his name's Virgil Abloh. He was the creative director at Louis Vuitton for a while, and he was the founder of a brand called Off-White. Passed away a couple years ago. He has this really great interview where he said, "If I take this mug and I put this mug inside of a garage sale, is it art?" The average person would say, "Well, no, if I found this on the table at a garage sale, I would just be like, 'Yeah, it's a mug and you're charging me 50 cents for it.'" But if I take this mug and I put it inside of an all-white room on Beverly Hills Boulevard, and there's nothing else in the entire room except except this mug, and it's sitting on a pedestal, and there's a spotlight coming down on it. The same exact mug. Is it art? And all of a sudden everyone goes, "Yes, and I will pay tens of thousands of dollars for this mug." It's the same mug. What changed is context. He has this iconic point of view in this interview, and I think about it all the time, where he goes, "I could spend a lot of time trying to make the perfect mug, or I could just change the room that the mug sits in. I could spend more time designing the room rather than the object itself." Fun fact, he ended up doing a lot of collaboration with Kanye, and I think about that a lot when I look at someone like Kanye's set design, for example. That is the epitome of designing the room, because if I design the room, it changes my perception of everything inside of it.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
