While I agree that to some extent with this view, especially as it’s found in the film Helvetica, I don’t think we should be so quick to throw (modernist) minimalism away. I think that it has a certain power to strip away baroque, Imaginary “meaning” and to reveal beneath it the pure mathematical formalism underlying design: to this extent, I think there is a certain radical aspect of minimalism, what we might call “militant minimalism” (as opposed to today’s self-contradictory ideology of what I would call “romantic minimalism,” as exemplified by the trite works of Malcolm Gladwell).

As a broader point, I think typography is just as worthy a domain of ideology critique as art and architecture, perhaps much closer to the latter insofar as we spontaneously interact with it, yet nevertheless operates at various levels: political, aesthetic, social, economic, etc. In so far as it materializes at the aesthetic level our unconscious, ideologico-political fantasies, typographic critique can function as an important element in the overall critique of ideology.

And as a side note, I just wanted to compliment the Lenin’s Tomb’s header image.