Chan is right, art breaks laws, but I can’t think of an instance of completely lawless art. Artists are constantly negotiating laws, or to use another word, expectations: an internal expectation to make art, the expectation of the gallery for production, the expecation of the hosting instution to install something ‘artful,’ and the expectation of the viewer to encounter art.
So as Chan explains art is made when these expectations are challenged (which is to an extent what we expect art to do), and to challenge these expectations an artist needs to be strategic towards their audience. Perhaps truly lawless art can only exist without an audience, or without consideration thereof.
Chan’s statment can be extended to design, and I think it’s useful! Especially as design perhaps has a broader audience and a broader range of operation than art, both bringing broader expecation. A book, for instance, has to be interesting to other designers, to publishers, to the author, to the lay reader, who may judge it solely on content, and to the designer herself. But I think that design breaks laws for the audience by proposing a new structure. While art is allowed to surprise, baffle, shock its audience without offering any more fulfillment of expectation, except that they have encountered ‘art,’ and therefore should reconsider their own understanding of laws, designers tend to replace the laws they break with new laws.