Study Task 4

The three manifestos seem to all be discussing a similar problem in both recent and modern society. This being, the negative impact of consumerism on creative practitioners. In both the ‘First Things First’ manifestos, there is a call to discourage the support for students and creatives to enter the world of advertising and use their unique, creative abilities to market a product which may be as trivial as cat food. The initial manifesto was created in 1964 by Ken Garland, along with 20 other creatives. This time period was experiencing the first big boom in consumerism. So, it was an initial call from practitioners for design to return to the more humanist approaches in how we utilise creativity. The second manifesto, created in the year 2000, was made in order to address, again, the issue of consumerism and its impact on design. The ideas presented in these two similar manifestos corresponds closely with that addressed in the manifesto, ‘fuck committees’ by Tibor Kalman. He states that, “our culture is corporate culture”, which is evident in his description of the process of creation; which now must go through a tonne of people and corporations before it is agreed acceptable for the public. It’s this notion of the consumerist over-involvement within the creative industry that has appeared in all three of the manifestos, prompting the reader to question the validity of what we understand as art or design today.