How to do things with style
A conference on the history of the concept
This is the edited transcript, alongside some of the slides, of a talk I gave last week in St Louis at the Blind Spots, Illustration Research conference. This is a brief version of a longer paper on the topic. Note that the tone is more academic than my usual writing, this might not be for everyone, but what is? If you do give it a read, I hope it’ll provide a useful background to think about the current moment in the illustration industry. Hope you’ll enjoy it!
Intro
This question may have everyone here roll their eyes. We’ve heard it time and time again from students and aspiring illustrators. I certainly have asked it many times myself. Maybe more perceptive and lucid than established illustrators, those asking this question see as evident something we too often ignore. The creative industry runs on style. Illustrators spend their lives cultivating what is perceived as a unique style, art directors hire us based on said style, and recently, style has been the thing that machine learning models have become proficient at extracting from our work to generate it at lower costs. Yet it’s rarely something to define. In all corners of this cultural field of production, style is something to find, to develop, to avoid, to change, to match, to curate, to purchase, to identify with. It is a central object of discourse and perception, of desire and avoidance, of possibilities and limitations.
Since the XIXth century, art historians have dealt extensively with the concept of style, trying to define it and refine it as analytical tool (Arnheim 1981; Gombrich 1968; Panofsky and Heckscher 1995; Schapiro 1994). This approach to style gets rid of its nuances and pragmatic use, to make it productive for the typological project of classifying past artistic production, an approach best exemplified by George Kubler’s Toward a reductive theory of style:
“Style is a word of which the everyday use has deteriorated in our time to the level of banality. […] The first step is to restore limits and shape to the shapeless objects of verbal abuse; to rediscover the purposes to which the word in question was appropriate; and to demonstrate its present unacceptable uses.”
Instead of this reductive approach, I suggest that a more interesting way to think about style needs to tend exactly to the limitlessness and shapelessness of the concept and question the social practices that style enables. To do this, I look at 3 moments in history during which concerns around key values of creative labor crystalized around debates regarding style and styles. Rather than providing with a semantic definition of style, these stories highlight the pragmatic value of the concept, and its role in the creative industry.
Moment 1. XVIII century England
Our first stop is XVIIIth century Great Britain and the debates surrounding one of the first copyright law.
Started as a guild of illuminators, book binders and other manuscript professionals, the Stationer’s Company had been a trade union in charge of regulating the publishing industry since 1403. By the end of the seventeenth century (in the context of the collapse of the patronage system), it held a monopoly on ownership, censorship and publishing of every book written in Great Britain, to many intellectuals’ frustration (Rose 1993) who saw their work circulate more than ever without ripping any of the benefits. In 1710 the Statute of Anne finally passed, often considered the first modern copyright law, granting writers (or as they now came to be known, authors) and the printers they chose to work with, the rights to control their work for 14 years (renewable for another 14 years). But the passage of the law wasn’t an easy, clearcut solution. The nature of what had been protected by this act was the topic of numerous disputes regarding the relation between artist, artworks, and public domain.
Anchored in the Cartesian individual idea and the blossoming romantic ideologies of artistic self, proponents of the copyright law (i.e. bourgeois writers and later artists) framed intellectual work as highly individual and personal using organic metaphors of growth. Edward Young suggested in 1759 that an original artwork “rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made.” (quoted in Woodmansee 1984). Young’s metaphor provides a striking conceptualization of the artwork as indexically attached to the inner self of the artist, like a flower stems from its seed and conceptualizes the work of authors/artists as radically different in nature than the commodity produced by laborers (Coombe 1998, 254). Fichte, in a 1793 essay, mobilizes this budding artist-artwork relationship to craft his argument of what should be protected by copyright laws by clarifying the relationship between ideas/public domain and material vehicles/commodities.
“each individual has his own thought processes, his own way of forming concepts and connecting them. […] All that we think we must think according to the analogy of our other habits of thought; and solely through reworking new thoughts after the analogy of our habitual thought processes do we make them our own. Without this they remain something foreign in our minds, which connects with nothing and affects nothing. […] Now, since pure ideas without sensible images cannot be thought, much less are they capable of representation to others. Hence, each writer must give his thoughts a certain form, and he can give them no other form than his own because he has no other. But neither can he be willing to hand over this form in making his thoughts public, for no one can appropriate his thoughts without thereby altering their form. This latter thus remains forever his exclusive property.”(Fichte quoted Woodmansee 1984; see also Wilf 2014)
I suggest that Fichte’s conception of form enabled our modern understanding of style. By identifying inside the work something that looks, inherently, like its maker, the concept creates, not only an inalienable link between the two, but a visible, consistently recognizable one. Making creative labour productive for authors instead of merely owners required the semiotic apparatus described above and was achieved by creating a sort of proto-concept of style that would be the blueprint of how we think of the relationship between artist and their work to this day.
Moment 2. XX century US
In the early twentieth century, advertisers had access to an unprecedented choice of stylistic variations they could mobilize to sell products to increasingly diverse consumers (in part due to the invention of half-tone printing). To make the work of artists productive, stylistic trends were construed (with the help of market research) as appropriate for certain market niches and imagined audiences and styles were not only attached to artists, but to the audiences they could attract.
As the demand for varied stylistic forms in advertising increased, art directors emerged as a key broker between artists and admen. ADs fashioned themselves as taste makers, a class of educated, aesthetically savvy gentlemen who knew what good art was as much as any fine art curator (cf. the history of the ADC). One of the way they achieved this by mobilizing modernist styles in advertising (Bogart 1995, 137). While most illustrations up to this point had been mostly realistic, the fine art world (especially in Europe) was swept by modernism and its expressive, colorful aesthetic. Pushing modernist representational codes in advertising was a way to use its avant-garde value to situate art direction as a visionary, taste-making practice (Bogart 1995, 140) akin to curation. In this context, modernist and realistic styles were turned into class markers with great economic value, the former indexing upper middle-class tastes, the latter the working mass ones.
In 1929, the Great Depression hit, and advertising agencies lost their main account and their priorities and tones shifted. The period of experimentation was over and art directors lost their status and were required to stick to selling products in the most efficient way possible. Modernist aesthetics were abandoned and deemed inappropriate for this austere economic era.
The big absent in this story are, of course, illustrators. In this booming commercial setting, it became clear that style wasn’t only a sign of the artist’s identity, but a commodity with immense value for very different groups. Maybe for the first time, illustrators got a glimpse of the competing interests that would shape their practice and their relationship to their work for decades to come. And in that commercial setting, regulating style and styles became a source of power that often slipped away from illustrators’ control.
Moment 3. Today
Anchored in Fichte’s argument, modern copyright law protects not the ideas but their expression. This stems out of a concern to protect the public domain for future generations and prevent granting private property over what should be common. But style doesn’t fit neatly in this division between ideas and expression, as legal scholar Fitzpatrick put it “the danger in granting protection to these "non-literal copies" is that to do so comes extremely close to granting rights in ideas and, thus, granting the broad monopoly power which the values of free expression and dissemination of ideas demand that we avoid.” The issue is that while we could separate the referential content of a literary work from its form fairly easily, for visual arts “the copyright attaches to their physical embodiment” (Brownlee 1993) which makes style both idea and expression. This is mirrored in my own fieldwork, where illustrators often challenge that division idea/expression in expressing that style, if it is even a thing, is diffuse in nature and impossible to locate precisely.
This is the tragedy of style; it was formed to protect authors, to give a physical presence to the invisible relation they have to their work, but it is now the very thing copyright law fails to protect. Making the most of this loophole, one group managed to make it their business to analyze, steal, copy and capitalize on styles: AI companies.
In the past year, generative machine learning models have proven efficient at extracting and reproducing a certain aspect of artists’ styles to many illustrators’ dismay. Of course, this is nothing new, design agencies have for a long time copied, in-house, the work of illustrators they couldn’t afford. But once again, style, what it’s made of, how we use it and who gets to regulate it, is a central concern to the future of illustration as a cultural practice.
So, what do artists do when anyone’s style can be endlessly reproduced within seconds by a neural network, when laws can’t prevent stylistic plagiarism or when in a connected global economy there’s always someone cheaper with a similar style?
I suggest that illustrators are already doing what they have always done, they’re shifting the role and value of style as an element of their work. Historian of illustration Jaleen Grove (2018) noticed a “theoretical turn” in illustration, whereby educators and practicians are situating the value of their work in more conceptual terms than ever before. We can trace this change in the ways different MFA programs have framed illustration, Falmouth’s Illustration: Authorial practice MA or New York School for Visual Arts’ MFA Illustration as Visual Essay. On the latter’s website we can read:
“We believe this program is as unique as it is revolutionary. It redefines how figurative artists see their work and how that art finds its way into the world of commerce—fine art, illustration and publication. It begins with developing a personal vision. Vision is not style. Whether the work is tightly rendered, loose, more or less expressive or Photoshopped, we help you to achieve personal content in your work—to tell your story as only you can. When your “style” is personal content, the images you make can only be original.”
Note the echoes of the past two moments we’ve been through. From the romantic ideal of one artist=one form to the acknowledgment of the specificities of making art in “the world of commerce”, I see this shifting of the value of illustration to more internal, less reproducible concepts like vision or voice as a futureproofing of illustrator’s expertise. Pushing style to the surface of images as something not too important, we now talk more about vision or voice, more internal concepts that hopefully will be less susceptible to theft or corporate cooptation. While illustrators might not be able to stop or regulate generative AI directly, they can trivialize the very thing AI is celebrated for copying, style, as a superficial, not-that-integral part of what illustration really is.
Conclusion
Whether it’s at the creation of the first formulations of copyright, the first entanglements between art and market or the first whispers of technological replacement, style has always been a prevalent ideological site on which the future of creative labor is debated. Yet it’s still hard to talk about style in our profession. Every day in my fieldwork I see forms of resentment toward the notion (and my eagerness to question people about it), as if giving it too much importance might be dangerous, as if it might actually make our work superficial.
Yet, I do believe it is by developing a deep critical engagement with the concept, rather than to dismiss it, that illustrators would develop more control and agency over their work and their role in the industry. As anthropologists Lily Chumley (2016) and Laikwan Pang (2009) pointed in their work on the Chinese creative industry, style is one of the major form of commodities in neoliberal economies. It’s through stylized good that companies sell product and that consumer identify themselves. And whether we like it or not, illustrators are at the foundation of this stylistic supply chain. It makes sense then, that we should be the ones engaging with it head on.