The Casus of Artemy Lebedev in the Context of Professional Designer’s Mythology Formation

Abstract

The article deals with mythological structures of the phenomenon of professional designer’s tradition. For a long time, professional design was deemed a “by-product” phenomenon and a periphery of the “true” art, and therefore it was studied insufficiently. Only at the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries, the designing activity in Russia became a separate profession, which allowed forming its own corporate culture. Researching this culture is a new and actual scientific problem, because of development of the profession of designer and its growing importance in the contemporary socio-cultural spaces. This area includes specific norms, values and ima-
ginative beliefs, which allow to advance the hypothesis that they can be considered as a form of social consciousness or a myth as a means of constructing reality. The corporate mythology is analyzed through representation and formation of professional identity, within the archetypal matrix included in the professional community. Identification of the ideal-typical construction describing the cultural shape of designers’ community is of great interest. The article contains a qualitative analysis of the Russian designer Artemy Lebedev’s biographical discourse, which is made to define the specificity of mythmaking. This analysis is based on Internet resources.