SB1 - Analysing Sources - BRUNO MUNARI

ANALYSING SOURCES
To further enhance the body of sources I will use in my triangulation essay, I've found this essay 'Pure and Applied', from Bruno Munari's book Design As Art which seems to cover the wider conflict between commercialism and pure arts, and more specifically, the internal conflict in the artist to conform to one or the other.

 The main issue raised by Munari is the error of judging applied arts and designed objects as being of 'lesser' status, rather than appreciating their usefulness and functionality as beauty. Munari seems to suggest that beauty should be judged on utility and coherence, alongside aesthetic qualities. It will be interesting to consider this idea of usefulness in line with pure art examples, like Renaissance paintings and sculptures which seem to be purely for aesthetic value.

KEY QUOTES AND INITIAL ANALYSIS
- the "lesser genius who absorbed Pure Forms and the Style of the Master and attempted to give these some currency by applying them to objects of everyday use"

Here the applied artist is recognised as the 'lesser genius', Munari therefore suggesting that functionality lowers the status of an object or image. Important also is that it seems futile to attempt to achieve status or value through reproduction and commercialization as these seem to be accepted as 'low brow' examples of art.

- "If the form of an object turns out to be 'beautiful' it will be thanks to the logic of its construction and to the precision of the solutions found for its various components."

Munari notes that these objects do not require the justification of having been made by an artist because the beauty of an object now relies on utility. Does this mean that pure arts and applied arts serve a simultaneous purpose in aesthetics, since it relies on the specification of the viewer as to which is most tasteful?

- "A thing is not beautiful because it is beautiful, as the he-frog said to the she-frog, it is beautiful because one likes it. 

SUBJECTIVITY - Essentially any object can be beautiful is it is assigned qualities of beauty in the mind of the viewer.