Desigr.net

I’ve come to a bit of a quandary lately as I have been getting accustomed to my new job working for an art college. The issue:

As best as I can determine, and according to the established writing style of the institution’s Web site, titles of artwork are to be surrounded with quotes. Often, images of artwork provided by the artists for uploading to the Web site do not include titles, often because artwork is provided hastily at the end of a semester or year. In this case, it is appropriate to simply refer to the piece as being untitled.

However, the content management system of the Web site stores a single Title field, and often it is populated by the word “Untitled” if the work has not been provided with a proper title, as I mentioned above. The code which processes this information for output to HTML assumes that all work has had a title bestowed upon it, and so it wraps the title with quotation marks in accordance with the writing style of the institution. This leads to artwork on the site being titled “Untitled,” and it implies that such a title was knowingly bestowed upon the artwork regardless of what unknown title the artist may have actually given it.

While it is certainly meta-amusing to imagine hordes of art students giving their work ironic titles, it is certainly not always the case. The quandary deepens when I take into account that not all of the work is that of an artist. Much of it also belongs to design students and—though occasionally I myself may have felt compelled to give my course work ironic titles from time to time—likely it does not even have a title. Instead, design work is usually given a description or explanation to tell the viewer what it is they are looking at, e.g.:

Identity and Collateral for Client X.

In this case, it is neither a title, nor an absence of title. In this case, it would be appropriate for a Web site’s CMS to provide both Title and Description fields, and construct for display a proper attribution from some combination of both.

“While it is certainly meta-amusing to imagine hordes of art students giving their work ironic titles, it is certainly not always the case.”

So, now I arrive at an even larger issue. How to educate artists about this difference? For that matter... perhaps they don’t even consider this difference to be... significant. By that I mean, if an artist intends for the work to not have a title, yet names it “Untitled” with that goal in mind, do the quotation marks themselves become part of the title? Or, I suppose it is better to ask whether or not the artist-as-auteur has final say on how the title or non-title of the work is to be displayed, or whether a more general grammatical rule set possesses the true trump card.

In discussing this issue with others, I’ve been told that often one needs to approach artwork with the assumption that it possesses meaning by default, which is to say that even the concept of something being untitled has a meaning, regardless of grammatical style. I, on the other hand, feel that meaning should not be inferred where it may not exist, and that grammatical style is essential to identifying when artwork either possesses this meaning, or not.

A coworker pointed out to me recently that art is a practice designed to pose questions to the viewer. Design is a practice with the goal of answering the kinds of questions posed by art. Sometimes, both art and design exist in the same piece. Craft—the skilled execution of an idea—exists in any piece. My case for differentiating between “Untitled” and untitled comes down to whether or not the artist intended there to be a message stored in the title of the piece. If so, then “Untitled” (with the quotes) counts as a perfectly valid title and should be formatted as such. This is the kind of clarification and “answering of the question” that satisfies my designer instincts, and I think provides the proper solution to my quandary.

Thoughts?