Plato’s House is an art company founded by Ruth Bate and Bruce Channing. The guiding aim of the company can be explained by this Bruno Munari quote: “the designer of today re-establishes the lost-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing”. In this way, Plato’s House uses the structure of a limited company and a brand as a meaningful container for contemporary art. 



Core to Plato’s House art already exists and that we can change reality by changing our mind about what defines art. For example, the idea that a Picasso painting communicates more about freedom, discovery, real life than a picture created by a child is a lie.

Because Plato’s House central idea is that what we look for or miss in deliberate art is readily available in the inherent creativity of all people, deliberate or not, Plato’s House frees itself from any contrived attempt at creativity or necessarily the need to produce anything aesthetically new. Instead, Ruth and Tinks will use a product as conceptual container to share an idea abstractly, exactly the way it occurs in how a Nike swoosh contains no literal representation of Nike’s values. Just as a brand has catchphrases, and different series of products, Plato’s House has the following types of product – all of which point to the same end goal of re-establishing the long lost contact between art and the public.

Plato’s House appreciate the utility of conceptual art whilst understanding its irrelevance in a gallery setting. Because conceptual art had to be capable of being anything, it was inevitable that conceptual art would become disconnected from form and at which point become completely irrelevant in any context. With a product or designed object, form cannot be ignored and therefore using these objects as a medium for conceptual art can be sustained in a way it cannot in a gallery. This is a significant message of Plato’s House goal in re-establishing the long-lost contact between art and the public.

Plato’s House use products as containers for its ideas, much in the way a brand uses it’s products as containers for its brand values. The increasing relevance of a brand in all aspects of life, including a persons sense of self, is something that Plato’s House references, without judgement, in things they make - consumerism, commodification, the spectacle, brand values, luxury products, mass production and repetition, collectibles being the most prevalent. However, most important to Plato’s House is producing art that communicates a truth about what art really is, what life today is really like.