Art and Design Vis-à-Vis the Digitization of Vital Experience

Abstract

This article explores how boundaries between art and design have become increasingly blurred in the digital age, the changing materiality of art, how artists are increasingly involved in tasks of self-design in the service of potential buyers, patrons, and subsidiaries or even taken as free labor on social media platforms. These topics are connected through the consideration of the exhaustion of the model of the world as a complete and apprehensible unity and the purpose of human activity world that entails human beings. The text also maintains that exploitation of cognitive labour is linked to the enormous manipulation by the few actors who manage to set agendas and suggest behaviours. The text has a pendulum- like shape and winds its way through polarities until it finally suggests that there is a hint of utility in all artistic expressions by reconciling the idea of art with utility.