Its not just the Internet, that changing us, its us ourselves, early hominids are on the move. We haven't discovered this Web of images, moving and static, we went looking for it. At the Renaissance the great design houses of French porcelain which ruled high over Art weren't just making pretty drawings, they were the Materials Scientists of their day. In the British Museum there resides the world's first ancient thermo flask that actually kept liquids cool in the desert, awesome ingenuity found that a glazed non-porous body to a clay vase would allow liquids to evaporate if the neck of the jug were left unglazed and therefore porous, reducing the temperature of the liquid. It was an empirical scientific approach that gave us the synthetic spectrum and we adorned all of our goods with it. The Art of Design was born. At the dizzying height of Maths and Science in Islam in the 12th Century they created the full palette of colours that rocked the Western World with glass, pottery and iconography that gave the Church in Rome monopolistic powers of propaganda over the people in the form of Art. At that time people would revere less images in a lifetime than we now do in less than one day. Paper and porcelain from China spawned Reformation in the Church and, respectively, design houses that did their own fabrication too, just like Bentley does today. This is how art used to be before we separated it from the art of making things, which we now sadly refer to as Industry or Manufacturing. Art shouldn't just be about images or the design its so much more than that. Bentley are this nation's Sculptors, fashioning works of art from raw materials and components to create beautiful objects that fulfil a function brilliantly. |
