iPads, Mountains, and Optimus Prime

Apple is, first and foremost, an organization of artists. Yes, they’re scientists. Yes, they’re engineers. But people often forget what distinguishes that particular technology company from all the others. The technology itself appears to have evenly distributed itself across the industry. What sets them apart is their focus, even obsession, with design. The designers at Apple see themselves, in an almost spiritual manner, as artists overthrowing dead culture. They’re certainly artists, and technology is simply their medium.

It’s a fallacy to claim that practicality detracts from the artistic value of something. That a creation has a purpose other than just to entertain has no relation whatsoever to its ability to create an impression. In fact, that added practicality of an object such as an iPad might make it a more valuable piece of art than a simple painting hanging on a wall or a poem sitting on a shelf. The iPad, among iPhones, iPods, Macs, and Apple’s other creations, is a beautiful piece of art. It embodies the best type of design. And you might sit and look at the device for several seconds, and ask yourself, “what design?” It is noticeably simply a large screen. But that action itself is testament to why it is so great. The best type of design is the design you don’t notice. It’s the design that seems so obvious as to make you think, “well, how could there be any other way.” I’m sure if you think back several years to the tablet computers of the early 2000s, you’ll notice the “other ways” and come cowering back to your iPad within moments. The iPad’s form couldn’t be more honest with its function. It’s simplistic, it’s elegant, and it’s beautiful. There’s hardly a painting or sculpture that could consider itself more inherently art than the iPad can.

On the iPad is a landscape of a lake, several trees, and towering mountaintops. It’s certainly beautiful, but is it art? If you look at the landscape as a picture, then I would say its art. This is true to my beliefs that anything created or influenced by human hands can be considered art (this includes taking a photograph). But if we were to look at the landscape as simply a creation of nature, I may contest that it is not art. It doesn’t hold to my beliefs or qualifications for what is art. It may still be beautiful, but it may not be art.

I close out of my Photos app to check the latest movies on Netflix. I decide to watch Transformers. A movie fits in fairly firmly with even the most conservative spectrum of what is considered art. And much of that art is considered beautiful. Yet for me, I can’t exactly bring myself to use that word to describe that film. I’m sure some were definitely entertained by Michael Bay’s work, but I wasn’t one of them. It may even be my fault. I may have missed the “beautiful” in between the giant robots, explosions, and Megan Fox. Then again, the movie was essentially those three things.