”The endless conflicts between the spiritual and material, between ends and means, form and content, form and function, form and facture, form and purpose, form and meaning, form and idea, form and expression, form and illusion, form and habit, form and skill, form and style need to be resolved.
It is the merging of these conflicts that determines the aesthetic quality of a painting, a design, a building, a sculpture, or a printed piece.
A work of art, then, is the resolution of conflicting relations. It is a unity of opposites, a series of steps reflecting Hegel’s dialectics: thesis, the subject; antithesis, the conflict; and synthesis, the resolution.
Whatever one’s beliefs, art is commentary, art is revelation, art is the culmination of the creative process. It is a by-product, not a goal, a point of view about a particular object that rises above its topical source. It is not just a facsimile but an opinion expressed visually in a distinctive way.
Art is reality enhanced.”
Paul Rand – From Lascaux to Brooklyn
(via graphicdesigngate)