THAT’S �NTERTAINMENT!
http://entertain.ianlynam.com

Graphic design culture at large has the potential to be intellectualand critical in nature, yet the individuals and groups that operate
within the sphere of cultural production and assorted economies
attached to graphic design consistently ignore intellectualism asoperational methodology. This exhibition is the opposite—within, I
attempt to suggest some of the difficulties that both the public anddesign practitioners are facing with the development of design in theNeoliberal Era.
FORMAT FOLLOWS FUNCTION
This exhibition utilizes a more-or-less dead format: political posters,
though almost unrecognizable as such, as the posters within do
not have the aesthetic attributes of retro activist posters. Instead,the posters adopt a contemporary aesthetic—one free from theconstraints of “the grid” and akin to “the cloud”, a whole other formof tyranny. The aesthetic is that described as “The Global Style” inJeffery Keedy’s eponymous 2013 essay:
The Global Style looks new, but still familiar… it radiates
newness and very little else… it is obedient to the point of neartransparency. On an emotional level it sublimates quotidianboredom into a contemporary expression of cool, ironic, quotidianboredom into a contemporary expression of cool, ironic ennui.”
Most of the formal and aesthetic attributes of the new Global
Style are lifted directly from the International Style. White spacebackgrounds, sans serif typefaces, minimalist asymmetricallybalanced compositions with limited color palette. No extraneous
decoration, ornament or complex patters, A love of simple
geometric shapes. The one notable exception is the grid.
It’s not that the grid is no longer there—it’s that the grid is no longervisible or even detectable. It is embedded in the 0’s and 1’s and x andy coordinates of digital space… just like the movie Tron, the digital
environment is built on a grid (it just doesn’t glow like neon). So it isunderstandable why designers would stop fussing with grids when
it is the ground beneath us, the water we swim in and the air webreathe in our virtual/digital world.
Keedy’s thoughts on the Global Style far transcend mere
aesthetics—they function as stand-in for the designer as laborer in
the Neoliberal economy, unmoored from economic structures andstandards of the late Fordist policies of developed nations (e.g.:freelance/contract-to-contract-based designer and/or adjunctdesign faculty sans steady employment, health benefits, et al).
The political poster and general visual activism first devolved
first to Adbusters-esque ‘culture jamming’ in the 1990s, and theneven further in the 2000s to just mere product—designers/artists/
marketeers and their army of interns have drained political imagery
from even being pastiche.
The political poster today is the semantic equivalent of a bloatedcorpse floating in an aquatic environment with face, genitals, andlimbs nibbled off. There is a body, but there is little to distinguish
it as unique, much less rebellious in nature. Beret-wearing ‘visual
revolutionaries’ have drained the impact of historical reference inservice of the Fall/Spring fashion season cycle.
When the lessons, inherent meaning and visual impact of history
are drained in vampiric service of the market, even at least on thesurface level. What do we have left beyond visual freefall?
Beyond aesthetics, designers are currently besieged by a brave
new world. The multi-member independent design studio model iscurrently in it’s death throes, and the individual designer (versus theworld) is quickly becoming the new standard. Graphic design itself isincreasingly fractured and graphic designers must be adept at moreskills and specializations than ever before.
Simultaneously, graphic designer as ‘hired gun’ must operate as his/her own public relations representative/hype man, promoting poststudio output in the digital sphere as rapidly as it is made. If one’swork does receive popular attention, it is most likely through nonremunerative channels (medium.com views/reads, Facebook likes,reTweets, Pins, Behānce dingleberries) that serve to bolster one’s
self-worth in a way that is purely ‘social’/network-based.
This is reified in Keedy’s The Global Style, as well:
Feeding your blog, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter account isself-promotion, but is it design? The fact that you are busy doing
design doesn’t mean you are a designer any more than the factthat you are busy cooking makes you a chef.

Social media-based promotion puts neither the non-proverbial ‘food’on the table, nor pays the rent on one’s co-working space as one has
to now pay a premium for one’s monthly/annual software-licensing/
software-based storage-licensing. Fealty to an employer has been
supplanted by ‘independence’, but at the cost of the snowball effectof exponentially increased and diversified labor for lesser returns
and a simultaneous reliance on much-misunderstood PostFordist
interdependence.
Design is potentially at the edge of a precipice—one that is symbolicof culture at large. If design is one of the major vehicles for culturalexpression and communication, then it may be bigger than we allthink. Designers are more ‘free’ than ever, but simultaneously moretethered to their workstations than ever before.
The posters in this exhibition—printed in 2 spot colors on A3-size
paper using Risograph printing explore these ideas as much as
many of the other constituent parts of the contemporary culture ofgraphic design.
CLOUD AS SITE
Encircled by the polyphonic ‘mist’ of the posters is an on-demand
replica of the Free Speech Monument erected at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley—a physical celebration and memorial to the FreeSpeech movement there. It reads,“THIS SOIL AND THE AIR SPACE EXTENDING ABOVEIT SHALL NOT BE A PART OF ANY NATION AND SHALLNOT BE SUBJECT TO ANY ENTITY’S JURISDICTION.”
The original monument, Mark Brest van Kempen’s “Column of Earthand Air”, has no legal bearing—it is merely a monument to the notionof free speech and is not a true autonomous zone. The monument isrecast here (in another educational environment) in order to suggest
the freedoms that global citizens do not truly have—by intimatingthat the cheaply-reproduced four-foot by four foot space is a spacefor freedom of speech and action, and that most individuals who
reside in developed nations cannot physically live for long within thedesignated space, the possibility of actual freedom from control isnearly nonexistent in the contemporary moment.
One of the outcomes of the First World’s economic shift to
Neoliberalism is that the Information Economy destroyed boredom

by occupying citizens’ time while simultaneously deskilling them.
(Shorthand: That’s entertainment!) This has continued unabated—arelatively few American technology companies (Apple, Amazon,
Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) have created economic/
commercial monopolies surrounding surveillance, e-commerce,
hardware, software, telephony, data aggregation, social
interaction, et al.
On a smaller scale, say that of technology surrounding graphic
design, there are two corporations that supply today’s creativetools: namely, Adobe and Monotype. Each has a virtual monopoly
on specific software—Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite for digital
imagery and typographic form-giving and Monotype’s nearmonopoly on digital typefaces (what the general public uses forthe transmission of visual language). The stock value of both
corporations for the past three years forms the outermost layer ofthis localized ‘cloud’—the real-time commercial worth of the digitalmechanics of graphic design.
Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunt and ontology), a term coined byphilosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx, is astate of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction in which theostensible immediacy of presence is replaced by “the figure of theghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead noralive.”
By utilizing the dead format of the political poster, one could
invoke this type of intellectual idea as a raison d’etre, though thisis confounded by the content being generated by a graphic design
critic, another practice which is becoming nearly nonexistent in
the contemporary cultural context. (Shorthand: Outmoded formsof graphic design being produced by an individual working in aseemingly obsolescent form of practice.)
Economist Tyler Cowen wrote in his 2009 book Creative
Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’sCultures that:Critics and experts tend to be most effective when the evaluateditem is large in value, relative to the effort required to assess it.
Experts are hired to assess the quality of diamonds, but not thequality of brass. We buy Consumer Reports to evaluate new cars
or stereos on the market, but not new brands of thumbtacks or
paper clips.

The role of the critic in contemporary society, especially in termsof graphic design, is shifting in that the perceived value of design
seems to be increasing socially, whereas the economic value ofdesign is increasingly atomized, fragmented, compartmentalized
and destabilized. In the recent past, operating as a critic implied acertain sense (and obligation) toward objectivity in assessing thesubject at hand, often through critics being employed in academia
in lieu of being reliant upon the service sector for income. The
role of the critic at the contemporary moment is simultaneously
destabilized in that the role of the ‘pure’ critic is placed in limbo dueto the possibility of an academic being able to operate outside of theservice sector being rarified to the point of near-non-existence.
COMPLICATIONSThis is further complicated by the emotional and economic
involvement that I have with the subject matter at hand:••				••
		•••I am adjunct faculty at a university.
I champion design, yet see how institutions utilize the problemsolving ethos of design to obliterate or absorb inquiry-based
theory and art programs.
Google and Adobe have been my clients.
I receive monthly royalty payments from Monotype for thelicensing of my fonts.
I own stock in both Adobe and Monotype.
My last book was crowdfunded via Kickstarter.
I utilize social media for the promotion of my career.

The method in use is more akin to “fog computing”1 which operates
both outside of and within the constructs of cloud computing2 as
the structure is more complex. I am not afforded the traditional roleof the critic, as I am just as much a participant in the subject matterat hand—I would not be able to write this without the fluency andimmersion within Neoliberal graphic design. This may cast me as an
unreliable narrator, but I am a narrator nonetheless.
It is through truly understanding the methods and mechanics ofdesign at a deep level wherein we can facilitate a more fluid, candid,and honest expression of design to non-experts as well s within ourpractice, while simultaneously making work with a greater senseof engagement and mastery. By exposing ourselves, however
uncomfortably, to the pressures faced by contemporary graphic

designers, we can peel back the facade of ‘cool’ cast by ‘creative’
economic forces and get to the data behind the spectacle of‘innovation’, as well as create empathy and deeper understanding of
the market forces that prop up graphic design.
From an as-yet unpublished essay by Randy Nakamura and Ian Lynam:
The ubiquity of the overused catchwords “creativity” and“innovation” are perhaps the surest indicators that a culture is indecline. The fact that the noun “creative” has been synonymouswith the denizens of ad agencies since the 60s is more evidence ofa broad co-optation of the term that has insinuated itself unopposed
into the popular lexicon. If we now assume that any notion of a“creative” must be linked to the marketing orifices lining the dank
underbelly of corporate capital, then how is it even possible to talkabout creativity in a way that is neither insipid nor irrelevant?
Innovation, creativity’s idiot cousin, is in barely better condition.
Although dubious associations as a word do not blight it, the word
has the problem of being never precisely defined, yet implicitly
packed with all kinds of moral and virtuous goods. But innovationis shorn of its moral virtue when one considers the fact that almost
anything can be considered the product of innovation. Unregulated
credit derivative markets? Unmanned drone assassinations?
These must be considered products of innovation, but they lack any
inherent “good” moral value. It is likely that most people would findboth either despicable or vaguely frightening.
The exhibition is provided to the public in an non-numbered series
so that it can be taken away by exhibition attendees or downloaded
from the Internet in PDF format so that it can be freely distributed—astrategy deployed as “disruption” by many major technology
companies (e.g. Google’s free Android smartphone/tablet platform,
Facebook access, etc).
The exhibition website also contains a list of suggested further
reading wherein participants can interact with many of the source
materials that have helped inform the concepts, themes and visuals
content of the exhibition.
This model allows the exhibition to function in the realm of
elucidation and communication rather than just in the realm of merecreative production and interpretation—the work within is notcommodified, but instead focuses on the commodification of cultureand our role in it in relation to the act of cultural production we call
“graphic design”.
FOOTNOTES:
1

Data architecture that uses one or a collaborative multitude ofend-user clients or near-user edge devices to carry out a substantial
amount of storage, communication, and control, configuration,measurement and management.
2�biquitous, on-demand internet-based digital information access.

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FURTHER READINGCan Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design & Politics
by Metahaven
The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things by Bruce Sterling
The Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl
Solution 168–185: America by Tirdad Zolghadr
Enlightenment 2.0 by Joseph Heath
The Efficient Society by Joseph HeathThe Global Style by Jeffery Keedy
The Global Style, Revisited by Anther Kiley
Huh? #10: An interview with Randy Nakamura by Ian LynamA NOTE ON THE TYPE
The typeface used for the exhibition is Stamen, developed for therelease of the LP “I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler” by theband YACHT. It is a typeface that is ‘lost in time’, referring toneither strict historical models nor purely futuristic forms. Thisexhibition was partially inspired by the song “The Entertainment” on
ITTFWBC and which serves as the theme song for this exhibition.
DOWNLOADS
Exhibition participants can view an enhanced digital version of theessay at http://entertain.ianlynam.com, as well as download digital
versions of the exhibition posters, this pamphlet, and the poster
announcing this exhibition.