Abstract expressionism: when art became larger than life (from the Guardian.co.uk)

Friday, Feb 12 2010 07:36 | Permalink

Aiming high ... Mark Rothko's Red on Maroon mural sections at Tate Modern. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
The abstract expressionists, those Amercian artists who made their country's art famous 60 years ago, cannot be ignored. They are so real and so massive; so absolute.
They've rolled back over me recently. Walking into Tate Liverpool a couple of weeks ago, I found that Mark Rothko had got to the Albert Dock before me. His Seagram Murals currently hang in a warehouse space on the ground floor of the museum, and I found them devastatingly beautiful. Their wine-dark ecstasy pays such Bacchic homage to the House of Mysteries in Pompeii, whose paintings he saw while planning them. Just recently, I saw Roman wall paintings in the archaeological museum in Naples that bleed with Rothko reds.
Rothko is a great artist, and so is Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective has just opened at Tate Modern. I'll be reviewing that shortly, so I will just comment more generally on how Gorky and Rothko transcended almost everything we now expect art to be. They aspired to greatness – a quality almost no art nowadays believes it can attain. Some people call them pompous for that; I call them courageous.
It's worth looking, in the first few rooms of the Gorky show, at how he tried on different habits of excellence: painting like Picasso, then like Cézanne. The desperation to achieve on their level is both moving and disconcerting. But finally he, like Rothko, found a personal, original road to the highest mountains.
When I encountered the abstract expressionists en masse for the first time in New York's Museum of Modern Art in the 1990s, they taught me that art in our time can be not merely interesting or shocking – let alone "fun" – but can attain the most profound qualities of the noblest masters. And here in the UK, they've taught me that all over again.

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Marketers Need To Better Understand Creativity

Tuesday, Jan 19 2010 05:48 | Design | Permalink

It can be said that creative advertising is like brain surgery.

When advertising is artfully done it cures people of the status quo by activating neural circuitry.

To be creative artfully requires a dynamic mix of imagination and understanding of how the world might work.

This is not a matter of being correct, but rather a matter of making the audience wonder, provoking a self-referring reverie that elicits an expanded idea of ones- self and how the world works.

As a result, we see anew. This, of course, flies in the face of traditional methods of measuring advertising effectiveness.

It also runs counter to today's corporate metric-mania and near incapacity to conceive bold strategies and innovations.

Insight is the coin of business success.

While numbers can provide a means for measurement they cannot "embody," or suggest, meaningful insights into the human experience.

At worst, numbers provide an excuse to abdicate decision-making responsibility while placating executives desirous of propagating "business-as-usual."
Link to Article

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Teaching Students to Swim in the Online Sea

Sunday, Jan 17 2010 19:12 | Lingusitics | Permalink

COURSE CORRECTION
By GEOFFREY NUNBERG

February 13, 2005: NYT Magazine

INFORMATION literacy seems to be a phrase whose time has come. Last month, the Educational Testing Service announced that it had developed a test to measure students' ability to evaluate online material. That suggested an official recognition that the millions spent to wire schools and universities is of little use unless students know how to retrieve useful information from the oceans of sludge on the Web.

Clearly, "computer skills" are not enough. A teacher of Scandinavian literature at Berkeley recently described how students used the Web to research a paper on the Vikings: "They're Berkeley students, so, of course, they have the sense to restrict their searches to 'vikings NOT minnesota.' But they're perfectly willing to believe a Web site that describes early Viking settlements in Oklahoma."
That trusting nature is partly a legacy of the print age. If we tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the things we read in library books, it is because they have been screened twice: first by a publisher, who decided they were worth printing, and then by the librarian who acquired them or the professor who requested their purchase.
The Web imposes no such filters, even as it allows users to examine subjects people would never have gone to a traditional library to research, like buying a printer or a cheap airline ticket. Many adolescents use the Internet to get information about issues they are reluctant to discuss with parents or teachers, like sexual behavior, sexual identity, drug use or depression and suicide.
But there is a paradox in the way people think of the Web. Everyone is aware that it teems with rotten information, but most people feel confident that they can sort out the dross. In a survey released last month by the Pew Project on the Internet and American Life, 87 percent of search-engine users said they found what they were looking for all or most of the time.
That level of confidence may not be justified, particularly when a search for information requires judging a Web site's credibility. According to the Pew survey, only 38 percent of search-engine users were aware of the difference between unpaid and sponsored search results, and only 18 percent could tell which was which.
A 2002 study directed by BJ Fogg, a Stanford psychologist, found that people tend to judge the credibility of a Web site by its appearance, rather than by checking who put it up and why. But it is much easier to produce a professional-looking Web site than a credible-looking book. The BBC was recently duped by a fake Dow Chemical site into broadcasting an interview with an environmentalist posing as a company spokesman.
Then, too, search engines make it all too easy to filter information in ways that reinforce pre-existing biases. A Google search on "voting machine fraud," for example, will turn up popular Web pages that feature those words prominently, most of which will support the view that voting machines make election fraud easier; opposing sites won't tend to feature that language, so will be missed in the search. A researcher exploring the same topic in a library would be more likely to encounter diverse points of view.
Up to now, librarians have taken the lead in developing information literacy standards and curriculums. There's a certain paradox in that, because a lot of people assumed that the digital age would require neither libraries nor librarians. But today, students have only limited contact with librarians, particularly because they do most of their online information-seeking at home or in the dorm.
More important, leaving information literacy to librarians alone suggests a failure to understand the scope of the problem.
Part of it lies in the word "literacy" itself. No other language has a word that covers such a broad swath of territory, from reading and writing skills, to a familiarity with culture, to elementary competence in subjects like math or geography. To many, "information literacy" suggests a set of basic ABC's that can be consigned to Information 101.
One can list some basic principles of information literacy, like "Recognize an information need"; "Evaluate sources critically"; and "Check to see if the site sponsor is reputable." But those precepts are only of limited help with all that people now use online resources to do.
Last fall, for example, I co-taught a graduate course on "Information Quality" at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. The students were highly sophisticated about search engines and knew their way around the Web.
But even they had difficulty with exercises that involved evaluating information in unfamiliar areas, like using the Web to decide which online degree program to recommend to a friend.
Still, given more time, those students would have known where to go for more accurate maps of the territory they were exploring. Unlike most students, they knew that "what's out there" doesn't end with what comes up on Google. University librarians complain that students tend to confine their online research to Web searches, ignoring other resources that the libraries have access to, like old newspaper archives, map collections and census data.
No less important, the students in our course would have known to use an even more basic technique: asking the right person. E-mail turns the Web into a vast digital help desk; user groups are teeming with people who will gladly explain the finer points of espresso machines or the history of English slang. But most people rarely think to make use of them.
In the end, then, instruction in information literacy will have to pervade every level of education and every course in the curriculum, from university historians' use of collections of online slave narratives to middle-school home economics teachers showing their students where to find reliable nutrition information on the Web.
Even then, it is true, most people will fall back on perfunctory techniques for finding and evaluating information online. As Professor Fogg observes, people tend to be "cognitive misers," relying on superficial cues whenever they can get away with it.
Only when confronting a question that is personally important - a health problem, a major purchase - are most people motivated to dig deeper. But that is reason enough to make sure that people have the skills they will need.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford linguist, is heard on NPR's "Fresh Air" and is the author of "Going Nucular" (PublicAffairs, 2004).

Studio F+O

American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection

Tuesday, Jan 5 2010 06:59 | Fashion Industry | Permalink

American High Style: Fashioning a National Collection will include some 85 masterworks from the newly established Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and mark the first time in more than two decades that a large-scale survey drawn from the Brooklyn Museum's pre-eminent collection will be on public view.

American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, the first at the Metropolitan Museum to be drawn from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection, will be on view at the Met from May 5 through August 15, 2010.

The Brooklyn exhibition will present works dating from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century, augmented by a selection of accessories, drawings, sketches, and other fashion-related materials. It will include creations that were milestones in the collection's acquisition history, many of which were gifts from leaders of fashion and major donors to the Brooklyn Museum.

The exhibition is organized by Jan Glier Reeder, Consulting Curator for the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and coordinated by Kevin Stayton, Chief Curator of the Brooklyn Museum. It includes works that have never been on public view, as well as many that have not been displayed in more than 20 years. A simultaneous exhibition,

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Fashion Forward

Tuesday, Jan 5 2010 06:57 | Fashion Industry | Permalink

The British Fashion Council’s (BFC) support scheme Fashion Forward was established three years ago to provide funding for talented emerging British designers. This second stage scheme was introduced to give a further tier of support for the most promising designers as they emerged from NEWGEN.

The award consists of a financial prize, to be used towards producing an on-schedule catwalk show at London Fashion Week, along with access to business support, which provides them with knowledge required to further develop their businesses.

This season’s recipients, despite being relatively new businesses, will have already garnered a following of international influencers and are sold in directional stores and boutiques here in the UK and internationally. Previous winners include Christopher Kane, Erdem and Marios Schwab, Giles Deacon, Jonathan Saunders and Richard Nicoll.

Caroline Rush, Joint Chief Executive of the British Fashion Council commented, “The British Fashion Council’s Fashion Forward scheme plays a key role in building designer brands in London. Last season’s winners were amongst the London based designers who led the world fashion media headlines for their innovation. The BFC is proud to continue to offer support to outstanding British designers”.

APPLICATION HERE

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New Studio Equiptment

Sunday, Jan 3 2010 12:00 | Studio Toys | Permalink

We have integrated our new Edirol into our video production suite to provide our clients with additional options this coming fashion Week in NYC.
This piece of (much needed) equipment has such a low learning curve- we were quite stunned!
Details of this product, and how you may incorporate it into your video production/presentation projects can be found here.

Studio F+O

Slash: Paper Under the Knife

Wednesday, Dec 23 2009 08:38 | Art | Permalink

Slash: Paper Under the Knife explores the international phenomenon of cut paper in contemporary art-showcasing the work of artists who reach beyond the traditional role of paper as a neutral surface to consider its potential as a medium for provocative, expressive, and visually striking sculpture, installation, and video animation.

Selected artists will be commissioned to create site-specific or site-referential works, and others will be invited to create work onsite in MAD's three artist studios that will subsequently be installed in the exhibition.
Slash: Paper Under the Knife explores the international phenomenon of cut paper in contemporary art-showcasing the work of artists who reach beyond the traditional role of paper as a neutral surface to consider its potential as a medium for provocative, expressive, and visually striking sculpture, installation, and video animation.

Organized by the Museum of Arts and Design, Slash features work by approximately 50 contemporary artists from sixteen countries, including Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, Tom Friedman, Nina Katchadourian, Judy Pfaff, and Kara Walker, among others.

Curated by the Museum's Chief Curator, David Revere McFadden, Slash is the third exhibition in MAD's Materials and Process series, which examines the renaissance of traditional handcraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design.

"Despite the many new materials and technologies available to artists working today, we are seeing a wonderful trend in which more and more artists are turning back to age-old materials like paper to really push new boundaries in art," said Holly Hotchner, the Nanette L. Laitman Director of the Museum.

"The artists in this exhibition do not just see paper as a work surface.

They've considered paper's inherent properties and devised ways of transforming this ubiquitous material into extraordinary sculptures, room-sized installations, and animations.

I think our visitors will be surprised and delighted by what can be done with paper."

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