So to continue in my random thinking of the previous post, I pose this question to myself.

If process is art then what exactly is hanging in Art Museums?

For we cannot physically frame the blue feelings Picasso felt, or the rare moments of sanity Van Gogh may have experienced while painting in the fields, or the painful light-headedness as Michelangelo painted and admired his ceiling.

We are admiring, in an art museum, works of art. Not the art itself. Surely we’ve all heard the term “work of art.” But have we ever really dissected what it meant? For art is the process, the method… not the result. It is a personal thing. Art is the private relationship between the artist and the work, not the result. Unless you are the artist, or viewing the work as it is being created, you are never actually looking at art.

So how does this apply to design? For me, this idea began to hit home when recently I lost several hours of design work when my computer crashed and I had neglected to save. As I painfully relaunched Photoshop, muttering under my breath that painful mantra “Jesus saves. So should you! (CTRL+S)” I began to think over my design process. I realized that, not only will I be able to recreate more quickly the work which I had lost, but the end result – the WORK – will most certainly be better because it will be more thought out the second time around.

The recreation of my lost work was the art. The final design was my work of art.

Aside: Man, I really need to spend more time wording these posts better. The inner ramblings of my brain is a scary, mixed-up place sometimes.