What is De-Art?
A distinct movement between art and design
Originally published in Ben Dreith’s Nothing But Arrival January 2025
A few weeks ago, I published an interview on Dezeen with California-based artist/ designers and fraternal twins Nikolai and Simon Haas.
In the interview, we talked about their participation in Art Basel and Design Miami over the years. We noted how the actual road that runs between the convention center (full of ART) and the tent (full of DESIGN) also represents the (porous) boundary between the two worlds, but a boundary nonetheless.
Beyond the divide, they told me that they believe Design Miami and attendant galleries such as Future Perfect, R&Company, etc, had been the locus of a specific aesthetic movement that Simon called, loosely, design art or De-Art.
De-Art began in earnest around a decade ago. It is decadent and figurative. It takes elements of modern design as a heading and mutates them—just as modernism itself has been mutated with global communications technology.
But to understand this movement, it’s necessary to understand how art and design are designated.
It is more useful to name specific geographical or temporal movements in design, rather than just measuring the purity of design in relationship to art. For example, we talk about Art Nouveau as a movement in itself, without the anxiety of considering it art or design.
It’s almost tragic that we are so preoccupied with these massive categories when society and art have become so diverse and variegated.
DESIGN V ART
Design world people argue endlessly about whether or not something sculptural or decorative should be considered Design with a capital D.
Usually, stuff that doesn’t fit or is a one-off or more arty gets placed under the label of collectible design, which can be confusing too, since this category also includes historical stuff made in the Design tradition.
People argue endlessly about the distinction between Design, art, collectible design, and “functional sculpture.” It’s a big deal in the design world, but art-world people don’t usually care.
Maybe it’s because the design world has less money going around, but many people gatekeep what can be considered Design.
Haters of collectible or decorative design believe that design should follow the tendencies laid down in the mid-century, with accessible designs made for use with industrial materials or techniques.
On the other hand, much of the collectible design is made by designers who are trained in formal ways, and though the designs they make may not always be as ergonomic or engineering-heavy as say an LC4 Chaise, they are usually functional, or at least appear to be.
The conversation can go on endlessly, and it does. Most designers who show in or engage with the collectible design world have a ready-made, if often unconvincing, answer to the question.
However, the strong gatekeeping tendencies around design also make rulebreaking clearer, and sometimes more exciting.
DE-ART IS TEMPORAL
De-Art presents a more stimulating solution to the above problem. We are living, after all, in a time of hyphenation.
At Design Miami 2024, Nikolai and I started talking about his and Simon’s massive Strawberry Tree installation. A blue-painted bronze tree with thousands of Venetian beads woven together as leaves through a biomimetic system devised by Simon and a massive stone base.
It was commissioned for the Nasher Sculpture Museum as a sculpture and was shown in Design Miami as lighting. The Dezeen interview focused on the fact that they had at one point almost been kicked out of Design Miami for having something that was “not design enough”, but that the rest of the fair has now caught up to the boundaries they’d pushed a decade or so ago.
As we began to talk, someone in our vicinity mentioned “functional sculpture” and Nikolai bristled.
“People are getting too hung up on the divide,” he said, and got pulled away by one of the throngs of champagne-wielding VIPs at the fair, so we agreed to meet the next day.
The design/art divide is mainly a commercial one, and the reasons why many talented young designers begin their own studios outside of large-scale commercial outlets like Herman Miller or IKEA deserve their own article.
De-Art believes that function can be thought of beyond just bodily or economic angles like ergonomics or affordability. Cuteness, for example, can be functional, said Simon, who mentioned babies’ cuteness as a function that encourages care.
De-Art can also facilitate cultural synthesis or revival. It can also revive old materials or create new supply chains or labor practices like in the work of Mexican designer Fernando Laposse, who creates whole economies to supply materials for his chairs.
Showcasing new materials can be aesthetic advertisements for possible material futures.
De-Art incorporates a lot of these things but is ultimately an aesthetic movement based on contemporary design’s relationship to taste, style, and the boundaries of design itself.
DE-FINING DE-ART
The “de” in De-Art stands for design but also declines art, signaling a slight movement away as a prefix and pretext. It also stands for “decadence”.
Simon told me that he thought we were in a period of decadence and that art shouldn’t ignore this. The material experimentations born from the post-war necessities of modernism like types of steel or bent wood have bred familiarity and lost the enchanting power they once had.
At the same time, certain materials that were once readily available, like concrete, are becoming more scarce and the products that use them are becoming more and more rare or singular.
Instead of the material itself, technique and global knowledge become the main driver of De-Art. Simon mentioned YouTube as important here, as almost any technique can be learned quickly.
Instead of form vs function, Simon suggested we consider design on the scale of decadence, but cautioned that decadence should not be wasteful.
They mentioned Renaissance Italian buildings as marking a highly decorative period that lasted and was not necessarily wasteful.
Formally, De-Art is sculptural and figurative, surreal and colorful, even ostentatious.
The Haas Brother’s works often take on the appearance of post-post-modern statuary. They once put out a series of sculptural works that appear almost alien because of the bristles created by thousands of porcelain brushstrokes.
Other designers they mentioned include Misha Kahn and, as a forerunner, Wendell Castle.
Chris Wolston, Chris Schanck, Minjae Kim, Ryan Decker, Katie Stout, and Joyce Lin also come to mind.
De-Art gestures towards function but then diverges, into the fanciful or imaginative, making us question what function itself means in our society while acknowledging that, in terms of political economy, we’ve certainly moved too deeply into the industrial to claim craft as a flexible designation.
De-Art flaunts good taste and minimalism. It is also not conceptual art, because its message is de-reality, taking the loose signifiers of society and the unconscious and twisting them together. It is speculative. In this time of decadence and consumption, culture is up for grabs.
The contemporary legacy of the imagination is not so much the cathedral but the millions of hours of content, from science fiction to reality TV, that have been produced since the best of mid-century modernism faded away. The Neo-Decadent writers know this.
DE-MOVEMENT
While I wouldn’t say a lot of De-Art is even to my taste, the appeals to decadence and the shirking from the delusion of Modernism’s continuity appeal to me.
These things are often not affordable and they are often useless. But we also all buy new phones every day (imminently useful) and throw them away. The separation from the art market does avoid the worst excesses of art as an investment.
How useful is it to try and outline aesthetic movements? It always risks being coopted by the market, but it does re-temporalize aesthetic culture, away from the cyclical calendars of fairs and the deluge of content.
Only now after a decade or so can we see the impacts of De-Art but it does, and will continue to, define the fraying of the edges of modern design, the desire for art infused with the feeling that comes from being able to live among something (a chair or teddy bear is more friendly than a statue).
Geography should continue to be a player again as the global art market continues to fray after the decentralizations of Covid, and instead of online “cores” or trends, I think we will find ourselves again cataloging the outgrowths from our decadent artistic moment.
- Ben Dreith
I think the big distinction in the Design to Art spectrum is “use.”
“Use” is a term that does not appear in this piece until the end, where you observe the useless-ness of these works.
Function, of course, you cover - as there are many ways a thing can function, as you mentioned - even just as financial tokens within a given market.
The line is drawn at use.
There are folks who make stuff to be used, and there are folks who make stuff to be not used.
De-Art, it seems, is Image privileging design. The significance of the sign, the signal, the look - in digital spaces and IRL.