FEW EVENTS IN MODERN HISTORY have been as distorted and demonized as China’s Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Yet few events are more deserving of modern rediscovery.
This unique symposium, REDISCOVERING CHINA’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION, offers an opportunity to rediscover–or discover for the first time–what this “revolution within a revolution” in socialist China was really all about
This is Jelly Helm. If you don’t know him, maybe you should. But you’ve probably already seen alot of his work in your homes and in your life. One of them is probably the Nike Good vs Evil ad. A legend in advertising at Wieden+Kennedy who later quit his job and went on to teach at VCU about the evils of advertising, who then later came back to W+K to create WK12, an ad agency disguised as a school disgused as an ad agency that does work for non-profit organizations. He was also the person behind the Seeking campaign, which in many ways has affected my personal life and journey so far, and given me opportunities to travel to Portland and now to Shanghai. I personally had the honour of speaking to him once, and wished I had more time to learn from him, but I’m glad he has moved on from W+K and is now ‘doing the things that make him happy’, so he said in our last conversation.
Here’s a quote from his blog that i found interesting:
We were at a dinner party the other night and when one woman found out that I worked in advertising, she asked me, picking her words very carefully, “What do you think about truth in advertising?”
The biggest lie in advertising is not that the product doesn’t perform as promised, it’s the consumer fantasy of how to achieve a happy and fulfilling life. That script has stopped being credible. Eventually, inevitably, we stop seeking status and fulfillment through stuff. We seek connection and meaning through experience. We are entering the post-consumer society.
Post-consumer brands help us experience our humanity, joy and connection. The iPhone, Google, Facebook, Obama, Guitar Hero, the Wii, the Toyota Prius. Nascar. The amazing growth of the local food movement and Farmer’s Markets. We seek connection, and we seek experiences that make us feel connected. The post-consumer society.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/12/12/arts/1212-DUMA_index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/arts/design/12duma.html
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=3994&ref=calendar
China in 12 Frames is a collaborative photoblog dedicated to the use of medium format film in China.
http://chinain12frames.posterous.com/#
在北京朝阳SOHO的高楼群中，我找到了年轻插图师巍星宇。从他众多的作品项目中，展现出其独特的设计风格个性，并向我们透露了一些鲜为人知的设计历程以及对未来的构思。
(sorry no english translation available on the site…french?)
http://www.ijoi.net/2008/weestar/
comment: watch the interview…it’s pretty insightful.
ijoi’s Chinese name is 视觉我享, which roughly translates to “I Enjoy Sight.” ijoi is a web platform to promote design(ers) from and in China. They showcase work, conduct interviews and have plans to roll out podcasts (video & audio).
For example, here’s an excerpt from the video interview (subtitled in both Chinese and French) that was done with Weestar 魏星宇:
Somthing quite radical appeared on the front page of one of Canada’s national newspapers this past Saturday – and I’m glad I was part of it. The Globe and Mail put out a special edition on China and asked me to design some Chinese lettering for the front page. The result was striking. The Chinese characters read: Ambitious, Powerful, Restless… Get Ready for China’s Century. This weekend edition sold out in Greater Vancouver on Saturday alone. And here’s one of the emails the paper received: “To live on this planet for almost 70 years and finally witness one of the most spectacular front pages in my lifetime, makes me want to tell everyone where I was when I first saw it.” — J. Kerr, Vancouver
The cover of an album by Han Hong, a singer born in Tibet whose songs
flavor generic Mando-pop with Tibetan influences. The 日 element in her
last name 韩 and the trainling stroke of the 红 are reminiscent of
Tibetan writing.
via http://www.virtual-china.org/2007/07/29/tibetan-inspired-typography/
An ad for Wellcome (one of the big supermarket chains in Hong Kong) based on the premise that if the little daughter saves enough, one dollar at a time, that she can buy back some of her father’s time spent at work.
A documentary about two rivaling video gaming champions on the classic coin-op game Donkey Kong, Todd Rogers makes a brief appearence to give his view points and perspectives on competitive gaming.
These Throwing Star Magnets will hold some notes on your fridge door. It is sold in packs of two each Shuriken has 2 powerful magnets for strong grip and make it look as if they are been embedded into the surface.
The Throwing Star Magnets is available for $19.
via http://www.2dayblog.com/blog/2008/12/05/throwing-star-magnets/?lang=en
Browser-based image editting tools for you and me.
No installation required. Click and use.
look out for Jackson Pollock’s Mona Lisa at the end.
There were no superheroes during the renaissance period. Why? Apparently there were no supervillains so they were not needed. That would explain the lack of superheroes in fine art. It’s time to fix that.
The rules of the contest are thus:
Take any piece of fine art and incorporate a superhero (or supervillain).
via http://www.worth1000.com/contest.asp?contest_id=22312&display=photoshop
Flickr user fsumaria has herself a great husband. After all, only a great husband would bake a Nikon D700 cake for his wife’s birthday then follow it up by giving her the real thing.
via http://gizmodo.com/5104469/best-husband-ever-bakes-wife-nikon-d700-cakewith-a-surprise
After trimming jobs throughout the year, Madison Avenue is bracing for even bigger layoffs in 2009.
Ad executives and recruiters expect agencies, which have been cutting in dribs and drabs, to hand out a flurry of pink slips early next year as the ad downturn worsens.
The talk in industry circles is that the major agency holding companies - Interpublic, Omnicom and WPP - are planning deeper cuts to ring in the New Year.
“Close to 50 percent of agencies are owned by holding companies,” said Joanne Davis, a longtime ad-industry consultant. “The public markets are putting pressure on these companies to perform.”
WPP agencies are bracing for cuts across the board in January after CEO Martin Sorrell acquired UK research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres, sources said.
The $2 billion deal raised concerns about WPP’s debt load just as the ad downturn hit. WPP owns creative shop JWT, media-buying firm Mindshare and direct marketer Wunderman.
At the same time, Interpublic is bracing for things to get even worse for the auto business. Interpublic agencies Campbell-Ewald, McCann Erickson and Deutsch all have a piece of the General Motors account.
Interpublic is mulling layoffs in the event GM slashes its ad spending even further or reduces its stable of car brands. Interpublic agencies employ an estimated 900 people in Detroit with ties to the auto business.
“Everybody is focused on Detroit, where there will be significant cuts,” said one source close to the situation. “Anywhere that you have an agency that touches the Big 3, you are preparing for spending to be down 25 percent.”
Several Omnicom agencies, which include BBDO, DDB and TBWA, have cut jobs this year, and industry watchers expect those agencies to make additional cuts next year.
Several ad execs estimated that the big agency holding companies have cut at least 1,000 jobs this year. Agencies usually try to keep layoffs under wraps to avoid appearing weak to clients, making it tough to get a total tally.
ZenithOptimedia, part of ad firm Publicis, predicts ad spending in North America will fall 5.7 percent in 2009, down from an earlier forecast of 0.9 percent growth just two months ago.
The last two ad recessions in the early 1990s and then again a decade later during the dot-com bust led to the loss of thousands of agency jobs, many of them in the high-flying ad center of New York.
“My phone usually rings off the wall the beginning of the year, but there isn’t going to be any hiring,” said veteran recruiter Susan Friedman. “When people quit, they are not being replaced.”
http://www.nypost.com/seven/12082008/business/ads_subtracting_143211.htm
Today on BBC, they uploaded pictures that related to my last post on the importance of creative space.
A really nice collection of photos that portray life itself in a very sincere way.
Tom Sachs was born in New York on July 26, 1966. After studying briefly at the Architectural Association in London in 1987, he received a B.A. from Bennington College in Vermont in 1989. Throughout the 1990s, Sachs developed a technique based on the concept of bricolage, a sort of “do-it-yourself” ethic that he deployed in both video and sculpture. Hello Kitty Nativity Scene (1994) is a traditional depiction of the Christian Nativity with modern characters such as Hello Kitty and Bart Simpson substituted for the religious figures. This work, along with others such as Prada Toilet (1997) and White Ghetto Blaster (2000), epitomize Sachs’s humorous approach to object making. Nutsy’s (2002), a model of an imaginary city complete with “ghetto” and “modernist art park” areas and featuring sculptural, mechanical, and video elements, is intended as an amalgam of the Modernist utopianism of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation housing block and the capitalist modernism of McDonald’s.
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here’s the site that teaches you how to make these bentos!
