These are my thoughts on something ginetteginette said in a comment on the Sexy Irony submission.

She said: "you can be imaginative and while still following design rules. if you're going to have a certain standard of photo-realism you have to abide by those laws or else the design will look lazy/unfinished/or poorly thought out. it just looks wrong."

I gather that Southorn is coming from a more traditional art background, rather than a modern design background (I apologize if that's a bad assumption)...

Art history is replete with these sorts of comments about "following the rules" being made by critics and yet the movements and the art itself persist and grow in spite of the criticism. Pointilism was originally ridiculed -- now it's called "half-toning" (and used in a lot of the Threadless prints partly due to printing limitations surrounding color depth and gradients, though it is occasionally done for the effect of recreating the circa 1950's comic-book illustration style which used a lot of halftones for the same reasons).

Art movements themselves don't happen very often - the most recent one that I can think of is Manga / Anime, the dominance of Japanese comic/cartoon styles, which themselves include one particular sub-style ("super deformed") in which the characters are deliberately drawn with absurd proportions.

Super-deformed style is a pretty extreme example of deliberate deviation from "photo-realism" for the purpose of an artistic effect, but certainly not the only one and many of them have been far less overt. The Greeks at one time were very concerned with "realism" in their sculpture for a while, until they created the Kritios Boy which was exceptionally realistic. After Kritios however they moved away from realism, for example, classical statues of athletes have removed the tail-bone and feature a deep groove in the chest not generally found on real people (at least not usually without steroids). :)

Then there are the impressionists and several post-impressionist movements. Although something like cubism is obviously not intended to be photo-realistic, there's no boundary between cubism and more realistic art, it's more of a spectrum with cubism at one end and realism at the other. In the middle are all sorts of variations which have been popular or unpopular dependent upon the crowd of people viewing them and whatever happens to be in vogue at the time. Matisse and Van Goh created images that were "accurate" in some ways and then strangely disproportionate in others. (Check out the difference between Dr. Gachet's hands, or the fact that he seems to have a lazy eye.)

Whether or not it will be popular as a t-shirt design is a whole other ball of wax. Most famous artists were pretty poor during their lifetimes (as far as I know). Jackson Pollock was an alcoholic who gave away one of his paintings for a case of beer. If his work had been popular while he was alive, he'd have probably been able to get a lot more beer for it. :P

For the record, I personally don't find Sexy Irony very sexy or very ironic. That's not a jab at the artist, just my honest opinion. I'm sure people have similar opinions about a lot of my work and they're just as entitled.

I'm still not going to rate it zero -- I reserve that for designs that either offend me (which is pretty difficult to accomplish) or where I feel the work shows a combined lack of both effort and skill in both the areas of concept and execution. I.e. there was no effort to create a concept and no effort or skill in creating the image. If the image shows either an attempt at concept or any amount of effort in the illustration, I'll give it at least a 1.

In this case although it's "not to my taste", there seems to be an effort on the part of the artist to create a unique concept and the image itself appears to have been originally painted, which ain't the easiest or cheapest thing in the world to do, so that meets my criteria for a minimum 1 score. I won't say what I'm going to rate it (my vote won't have much impact anyway), I just wanted to mention that it would be above zero.

Anyway, that's enough of my jazz... I now return you to your regularly scheduled t-shirt voting. :)

ike