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The "Maps As Art" Debate

Ah ... art. Art is a contentious area for discussion. One person's work of art is another person's random spots of paint on a canvas. As Rudyard Kipling once put it, "it's clever, but is it art?".

Even artists can't seem to agree on this topic. Compare and contrast Picasso's comment that "everything you can imagine is real" with Warhol's contrarian stance that "an artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have".

Now add maps into the equation and you have a debate where people probably won't always agree. So it was with a conversation on Twitter between myself, Steve Chilton, chair of the Society of Cartographers and psychogeographer Graham Hooper. We were talking about a map like this one ...