More than you can handle in this edition of Quipsologies.
Miss America has moved from Atlantic City to Las Vegas, but at least some beauty contests (2nd from the top) are still viable. We’re hoping Speak Up gets Miss Congeniality.
Taking desktop images to the next level. [Thanks to Erik Moga for the link]
Blackletter in Mexico: A beautiful thesis project by Cristina Paoli at the London College of Communication.
The winners of the more-complicated-than-it-would-seem DWR Champagne Chair Contest 2005. [Via Kottke]
The Museum of Bad Art. [Thanks to JonSel for the link]
Adscape, a study by Alexis Lloyd, a student at Parsons The New School for Design, of the type of advertising in three different sections of New York. [Via Gothamist]
A bevy of beer bottle caps.
Otto adhesive film is inspired by the intricately chiselled wooden screens that are found within Islamic countries. Otto captures the hand made quality of these decorative designs within this translucent material for the modern home.
New meaning to in and out burger.
“Perhaps, after all, Baudrillard’s abreactions are performed to help us forget the trauma of the death of photography. A death which, as he says, ‘enfolds the image’ as in this series of images assembled around a nothing, a punctum, a death which survives in the work of the photograph. For Baudrillard, post-photographic practices enact the death of the punctum itself, which is the poignant nothing at the centre of the image, but lost to both time and the viewer. It is this death of the death at the heart of the photograph which haunts him and which he fears will be ‘lost in the automatic proliferation of images.’” Artaud scholar Edward Scheer on the photography of Jean Baudrillard — “The most delicate of operations”: Baudrillard’s Photographic Aberactions — found in the most recent issue of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.
Prince Charles: font critic.
John Courie II “The Process (detail)”, 2005
Announcing the Dept. of Applied Office Arts. In office space, no one can see you draw.
Cingular Wireless was given a patent for emoticom usage on mobile phones. So instead of making cell phones sound better, improving battery life or reducing their environmental impact, we get new ways of texting smileys. (•_•?) (-_-)
Contextual advertising gone bad.
And here’s another unfortunate juxtaposition.
Plan 59’s Gallery of Demonic Tots and Deeply Disturbing Cuisine as found in mid-20th Century advertising. (via The Consumerist)
Department of Better-Red-Than-Dead Co-Branding: Last week, Bono, American Express, the Gap, Giorgio Armani and Converse launched Project Red.
Return of The Department of Perhaps They Went for the Lowest Bid: If the United States is the most powerful nation on earth, then why is the National Security Agency’s CryptoKids website so awful?
Issue 20 of P.O.V. — a Danish journal of film studies features several worthwhile articles on the iconography of terror, mass media, and the collision of the two.
Yesterday, while driving back from a lovely weekend in the country, we passed a billboard which brought to mind one of The Ten Commandments: Thou shall not steal.
Carlo McCormick, Adam Purple, Justin Ladda, Duncan Hannah, Tseng Kwong Chi, Jack Goldstein, Mike Bidlo, Sur Rodney (Sur), and Gracie Mansion. Just some of the names which were omnipresent in the downtown New York that I moved into during the 1980s. And to see them again evokes cherished memories. These names, and many others, make up a wonderful interdisciplinary exhibition currently at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and Fales Library — The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984.
A concurrent exhibition (organized by ex-I.D. Magazine editor Christopher Mount) that also celebrates my beloved New York is at Parsons, The New School for Design — Anarchy to Affluence: Design in New York, 1974-1984.
About a year and a half ago, Milton Glaser proposed a silent demonstration of anger against the Bush Administration. Sadly, things haven’t gotten better and an organization known as The World Can’t Wait is proposing an extremely loud evening to coincide with the upcoming State of the Union address. One of the organizers is Debra Sweet who, upon receiving a public service award from President Nixon, said “I find it hard to believe in your sincerity in giving out the awards until you get us out of Vietnam.” Plus �a change…
A quieter and more elegant symbol of protest is the proposal from Arms Against War. If you want an end to the war in Iraq, then simply wear a strip of white fabric around your arm. (via CounterPunch)
Oh great, another surface for a branding touchpoint:
Rooftop ads for Google Maps.
“Andrew. Really. I don’t think the creative directors in question are so much ‘looking to the masters for inspiration’, as they’re scanning art databases with one hand, sipping from a Cosmo with the other, and hitting ‘save’ when a work of art pops up which portrays several human figures, with at least one of them supine and/or eye level to another’s crotch. Then they click, ‘add jockstrap’. The classics are then reinterpreted for a new age, and the pants are marked up another few hundred.” (via Modern Art Notes)
“How to define success in the arts? Answering this question is harder than it may look. Do you define success by comparing salaries? (But can Sly Stallone be called a better actor than many of the people he out-earns?) By asking profs to supply the rankings and make the judgment calls? (But profs … Well, patooie on them.)”
Prince Charles: font critic.
Nice one! Very funny, Mark.
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Re: Got Faith
But the Ten Commandments don't say, "Thou shalt not make amusing parodies."
On Jan.30.2006 at 09:20 AM