Art of Magic, Art of Play and The Importance of Style and Design with Dave Buck and Elliott Terral

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In this episode we got an opportunity to sit down with our friends at Art of Magic: Dave (of Dan and Dave), and Elliott Terral.

It was a very insightful conversation about art, and how it applies to the world of cardisrty and the world of magic, and how they are evolving right now and in the future.

At the start, we spoke about the launch and purpose behind Art of Magic. Of course we had to dive a little bit into the Dan and Dave story to find out why the separation and deviation from the classic Dan and Dave brand. Dave explained that there wasn’t as much room to grow when it was all under the same roof, but now that they have separated magic and cardistry (as well as puzzles and games) each individual brand has the space to really hone an idea.

The goal of Art of Magic is a curated resource for people to trace the journey through magic, and inspire them to make it more artistic. They have created just that. The design and organization of the site make it look and feel top notch, a real beauty to explore, but the separation of websites has allowed home pages and banner photos of this website to not be more playing cards, and more cardistry, which is visually appealing, but detracting from magic.

We touch on the fact that with the creation of things like this, people coming into magic are very lucky to have a world of incredibly curated magic at their fingertips, instead of when we were kids, scrolling youtube, watching VHS tapes, or buying doohickeys and tiddlywinks and the magic store.

Then, we dive into the world of cardistry, which is very exciting for us, since we aren’t cardists, but we are of course blown away by what they do. The world of cardistry is exploding right now. There’s development in style where people are creating their own design and style, like isolations or #carddestroy. More specifically we chat about the personal styles, music choices and gear of cardists. How it’s representative of the rebellion movement given the age range, and for us, it reminds us of the breakdancing movement. But most importantly it is real self expression, between the recording of it, editing, music selection, deck choice, personal style, and that’s not even talking about the cardistry.

Maybe instead of the next dance movie STEP UP 17, where someone makes it against all odds by dancing, we have the underground cardistry world, and people making it big, by flipping cards around their fingers at underground competitions.

Since the art is in such an evolutionary phase, there are more and more creations happening each day, and as they both explain, its such a unique form of self expression because unlike magic, there isn’t really a goal in mind, it is, once again just like dance.

Finally we dig into the age old question “is magic art?”. As one can imagine we bring up other art forms like painting, and elliot brings up a beautiful comparison between if all paintings are art, and why or why not. You really do have to listen to understand the details of their points. Nothing new in the discussion of the art, but definitely something unique given their position, perspective, and closeness to cardisty.

We super enjoyed the interview, and if you are interested in their new(ish) website and project Art of Magic, I super recommend checking it out! As well if you are interested in some of the best designer decks in the world as well as some puzzles I would recommend checking out Art of Play, to see what they have to offer