The Art Applied to Business

Abstract

The article presents an overview of Russian authors’ publications, mainly from the first issues of the journal “Technical Aesthetics” of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics (VNIITE). The purpose of this study is to highlight the controversial issues and problems relevant at the initial stages of forming the theory of a new type of artistic and industrial activities: technical aesthetics. The study’s relevance is determined by the fact that in the theory of design, at present, the aspect of the “art — design” linking is considered systemically incomplete. While the stages of the development of Russian design in chronological and biographical perspectives are covered quite fully by K.M. Kantor, N.V. Voronov, Yu.V. Nazarov, G.V. Vershinin and a number of other authors, but the theoretical aspects require further research development.The years of the Institute’s active work (1960s—1980s) are called fruitful in conceptual, scientific and creative terms, it was then that the professional model of the service and interaction between design and the planned economy was finally formed. The article shows that, at that time, intensive discussions of the main problems of artistic design and the provisions of aesthetics were reflected in regular publications of a number of periodicals, especially the journals “Technical Aesthetics” and “Decorative Art of the USSR”; and the difficult question of the criteria for evaluating the aesthetic qualities of industrial products turned out to be paramount. The term “artistic construction” implied the solution of the problem of bringing art and science closer to industry. In this process, in the discourse of the principles of technical and aesthetic creativity, all employees of the Institute — theorists and practitioners who would become outstanding design specialists — took part.The VNIITE’s activities met the demand of the time, the task of national importance — to establish mass production of a decent aesthetic level of industrial products. The period of 1964—1969 is the first stage in the study of the Soviet design formation history and is associated with intensive studying the heritage of the 1920s, introducing new materials into scientific circulation, formulating a number of new problems, and developing criteria for an objective assessment of many phenomena. It was accompanied by a number of difficulties in the relation between the settings of artistic construction and Russian art studies. This article justifies the importance of the work of the pioneers in the field of design in connection with other fields of art, and specifically with architecture and printing.