The spectre of market-oriented thinking as a solution for everything was ruling in the Dutch cabinet policy. The world seemed interpreted solely in economic terms: if you don’t make money, you’re finished. For the arts in the Netherlands became clear that they must force themselves into the straitjacket of supply and demand, of a product for which there must be a market. If subsidies were provided at all, these were now called investments. As far as the government was concerned, the product designers and the creative industry are the saviours of the cultural world, because they know how to deal with supply and demand. Dutch Design became the standard bearer for the Dutch arts and the designer became the spin-doctor for every product to be sold. Hal Foster already anticipated this in his well-known ‘Design and Crime’ (2002).
In this context, Face Value focused on the re-evaluation of the question of autonomy in the design process. What role does independent research play – non-commissioned, with no thought of possible applications and without significance – in the development of the designer’s work? What value could autonomy, authenticity and originality– so characteristic for the work of a visual artist – have in the practices of product designer Bertjan Pot, graphic designers 75B, designer Sophie Krier and fashion designer Marga Weimans?
In the exhibition, these four prominent Rotterdam-based designers presented their autonomous research as a structural component of their design practice. They showed their indebtedness to the free arts and partly undermined the significance of their own commissioned practice. Without the words that belong to the discourse around design: utilizable, solution-oriented, durable, ecological social design. Free from supply and demand, they called attention to the fragile and difficult process of research, in a place outside the commercial arena, somewhere between the private and public moment, where it doesn’t just revolve around (mass) reproducible designs, but also around individual wishes and desires.