You are browsing the archive for January2009
2009 had already been a big year for Bruce and something of a return-to-form. His track for Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler should have received an Oscar nomination, he performed at the Obama inauguration concert, he’s performing today during the Super Bowl half-time show, and his new album is getting really solid critical praise. NY Magazine recently posted a nice road map to the 40-year career of the NJ Pop Music Ambassador to America.
Fantastic little film that showcases all the latest appliances, fashion and furniture from 1958. The best is the Murphy-bed style stove!
1000 drawings were created by anonymous artists around the world and then sold.
There are no specifications regarding the content of the works. The artist’s anonymity can be lifted by means of purchasing a drawing for the symbolic unit salesprice of 150 EUR. The buyer can take his drawing right off the wall and s/he is then told the name of its author. The empty space the drawing leaves behind will be marked with the artist‘s full name.
The predefined unit salesprice of 150 EUR is not to be understood as a real market price but rather as a placeholder-fee for any possible amount of money. The exhibited drawings will be work of both established and lay-artists. Due to this fact blütenweiss asks the viewer him/herself to draw the line between Art and Non-Art. The participating artists agree to withdraw themselves and their usual pricing in favor of the subject: the drawing itself. Typical mechanisms of the art-market, like ricing, the artist’s own ego, and predefined concepts of quality are turned upside down and questioned in an experimental way. A priori for the evaluation of the work is not the name and the biography of the individual artist, but the work itself.
Converse sponsored a documentary last summer about Beijing bands, one of which was Jonathan’s band PK14. Along with Queen Sea Big Shark, the bands toured 6 cities on a converted bus, at the same time as the Summer Olympics hit.
[via Shangahiist]
French photographer Pierre Siedel takes eerie photos of people stopped in moments within the chaos of Beijing subways.
In these photographs, the subject in the midst of the bustling is being stripped away from his/her surroundings, transcending space and time.
This method became my “artistic medium” in which the subjects are placed in the artificial urban landscape, contemplating time. The subway, hidden and secluded, became an underground bubble that holds the flow of people.
Being isolated from the rushing crowd, one feels alienated, lonely, detached even abandoned. In this artificial universe, the underground transit bubble stirs the mind to a kind of self-reflection. I thought it would be interesting to explore through photography such absurd places like the subway where everyone is running in the same direction and never stops.
Vorspannkino is the title of an exhibition of 54 film title opening at KW in Berlin on February 7. The opening titles are often my favorite part of a film, so I’ve no doubt that this exhibition will feature some great work. The opening invite is adapted from Barbarella and describes the film’s title sequence as follows: “A stunning beauty weightlessly floating through space. As she gradually unveils words emerge and descend, covering her body like fig leaves. At the climax of this intro Barbarella delightfully floats before our eyes in paradisiacal nudity.”
To get people interested in the Bundesliga, fashionable “outfits” were created to inspire fans to dress in support of their local teams. We just like the dancing.
Oliver Percovich arrived in Kabul from Australia in 2007 and is on a mission to promote sports, class integration and economic empowerment to local kids. Inspiring story.
Lushpad has posted this article, which appeared in a 1961 issue of Playboy. The subject is furniture design of the 1950s and it provides some insight into how many of the masters of the era were perceived in their day. Also, this quote from Charles Eames, which I like quite a bit:
“My dream is to have people working on useless projects. These have the germ of new concepts. Our backlog of undeveloped concepts is becoming very low.”
George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Risom
The LA Times recently asked a panel of architects and critics to choose the all-time 10 most significant homes built in LA. The result is a concise history of residential modernism in America. Of course the Eames’ house made the cut.
(Julius Shulman Photography Archive; J. Paul Getty Trust)