ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 will consider the relation between art and graphic design and, even if it is the case that only graphic design students worry about this question (see Wild 1997: 92), the question addressed here will be whether graphic design is art or not. The answer proposed will be that graphic design and art are different from each other, but not in the ways that they are popularly or commonly thought to be. Although the chapter is toward the end of the book, the issues it raises are in fact central to all that has gone before: it will touch on issues surrounding the very identity of graphic design, the nature of communication and the character of the activities that graphic designers undertake. It must also question the nature of art. For, as Benjamin (1992: 220) says, while nineteenth-century thinkers devoted much ‘futile thought’ to the question whether photography, a form of mechanical image reproduction, was or could be art; the ‘primary question’ was, rather, whether mechanical reproduction had not ‘transformed the very nature of art’.
