The Art Category Archive
Welcome to the Art archives. The posts are listed in chronological order. Click the post title to read more.
I’m totally blown.
“Insight has launched an impressive art installation series entitled Dopamine, from setting up underwater art installations with surf actions shots in Bali and having re-created famous skate spots in the middle of the Balinese jungle.
The surf installation was inspired by Beatnick;, Steve Gorrow embarked on a journey beneath the sea to explore the depths of the mind and creativity. Along with the help of his brother, Steve shipped out to Bali to take on the massive feat of building above and beneath the sea to give birth to the latest Insight surf spectacle, and that is Dopamine. Not one to cut corners on creativity, Steve combined upside down bedrooms, naked girls on motor bikes and underwater shanty towns with the amazing skill of the Insight surf team (surfnics) and the photographic talents of Dustin Humphrey to create an array of split double world madness. Welcome to Insight’s latest surf campaign featuring surfers Kai Otton, Luke Stedman, Warren Smith, Jared Mell, Made Lana,Jason Apparicio & The Jamaican Surf Team.”
Did You Need Another Reason To Avoid Spring Break?
Sarcastigate got your back….
Sarcastigate at the Movies: Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman is, without a doubt, one of the most creative and ambitious writers working in the world today. Though this movie is ultimately a miserable failure, his ambition and gift still allow me to understand how it was elevated to numerous top-10 lists for 2008.
First, and most notably, the ambition of it all. This movie did not reveal itself to me as much as a movie as it did an experience akin to waterboarding — not in the tortuous sense but in the sensory. I was completely sucked in, seduced by the developments of the characters and the incredible furtherance of metaphor. The beauty in the character development may have only been eclipsed by the profound sadness and the pronounced misery that was in the screenplay.
The same unraveling that exists in the fictional Cadens’ work is exactly the cause for the movie to result in incredible failure. Cadens theatrical work sprawls and expands and overflows and just grows to be too damn big to ever be possible. Spectacular stories and relationships exist as disconnected (but never really so) from each other and from the “outside world.” In the same way, Kaufman begins with an idea for a movie, then 2 movies, then 100 movies, and then every movie ever created that will ever be created. In typical Kaufman fashion, the viewer is never quite sure where the film and the meta-film and reality truly overlap (and in my case, the continuation of the film into my Kaufman-edited dreams.) The problem, however, is that this movie is finished. It’s a complete representative of a work that will never and can, by definition, never be complete. It’s not the happy medium between Cadens’ unfortunately enormous work and Adeles’ unfortunately small. It’s failure. It’s surrender. It’s reality — or, at least, some trippy representation of the limitations of cinema. (Or, at the very, very least — a trippy representation as Kaufmans failure as a director.) And yes, I understand, that’s exactly what the literary allusion in the title refers to. A piece representing a larger whole. My head continues to hurt.
I’d love to be able to rewind the entire experience and allow Spike Jonze to more deftly steer this. As a directorial debut it was just too much, too much, too much.
Apparently, People Don’t Steal As Much Porn in Utah
A study by a Harvard Business School professor shows that Utah outpaces the more conservative states — which all tend to purchase more Internet porn than other states.
Online porn subscription rates are higher in states that enacted conservative legislation banning same-sex marriage or civil unions and where surveys show support for conservative positions on religion, gender roles and sexuality, according to an analysis published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. [...]
Utah has the nation’s highest online porn subscription rate per thousand home broadband users, at 5.47, while the nearby states of Idaho and Montana showed the lowest rates of 1.98 and 1.92, respectively, according to the study.
Full Article at The Salt Lake Tribune (via KFB)
Madison Ave Has Re-Invented LSD
The latest Pepsi rebranding has been…. controversial. Personally, it makes me want to drink Coke Jim Beam, but … truth be told, I’ve never been a Pepsi drinker and it would probably take more than just a logo to persuade me.
What does interest me, however, is the process behind this rebranding. Initial estimates put the cost of launching this new logo in the $1B+ range. All for a concept that has (at best) baffled people, and (at worst) polarized the existing market-share. Now, the creative team behind the logo, Arnell Group, has “leaked” a document that was used during their Pepsi pitch. I put “leaked” in quotation marks because it’s debatable whether this was the result of corporate espianage, or whether the entire thing is some kind of self-satirical joke. I haven’t made up my mind yet…. The effort required to put a document like this together? Mindboggling. And to think that all of this Copernican mumbo-jumbo was manufactured (on company time, no less) as a joke? REALLY?
ASTONISHING.
More sample pages available at Brand New.
I’ve been spending too much time appreciating photography, part 1
New York-based photographer Alison Brady creates images that are mysterious and sometimes overtly violent. Her mostly female subjects look like victims of the beauty ideal, but whether they’ve sacrificed themselves at the altar of pop culture’s idolization of feminine perfection or if they’ve been been attacked through the result of their own vanity is unclear.
Her photographs all have a totally unnerving context of stillness: there was violence, there is about to be violence, but each time we are in the eye of the storm. The effects and impact are obvious, but help isn’t yet on the way… or perhaps never will be.
Like Hitchcock, Brady understands that the greatest fear lies in the subtle unseen. That the human imagination, given a hint, will conjure storylines far more disturbing than any picture can capture. In many of her images we only see the legs, dangling, prostrate, filthy. The upper half, the face, the expression, is hidden: in sand, in the ceiling, in the refrigerator. What has happened or how they’ve come to lie there is unknown to us. That visual curiosity, that we’re seeing the conclusion but never the beginning, is the most disturbingly eerie half-knowledge of all.
Part of the “I Can Read Movies” Series
More movie posters in the style of 60’s paperbacks at Flickr. So damn cool.
We drink Jim Beam. RSS Feed.
April 2nd, 2009
“Fill Collins”
You all know I already stand behind [almost] anything Dave King says, but when he was quoted as saying, “double fuck Don Henley,” my respect for him doubled.
From Do The Math, the Bad Plus blog (run by Ethan Iverson).