Van Gogh at the Modern

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/09/19/arts/0919-GOGH_index.html


The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit, “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” includes “Starry Night” and “The Potato Eaters.”


Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night
September 21, 2008–January 5, 2009
Special Exhibitions Gallery, second floor
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/vangoghnight/


"Starry Night over the Rhone,1888," is one of my favorite Van Gogh's paintings. In this painting, my favorite part is how he portrayed the lights reflecting on the surface of the river. Van Gogh left several firm and short strokes in yellow with lite orange. The reflections look glamorous and attractive. I have one copy, but It looks dull, and size is small. When I saw the real piece, I was astonished. Its color is much more rich and saturate. He applied many different blue colors, light blue, iron blue, gray blue...etc. The smooth blue gradation creates a consistent clear sky. In this painting, the stars are twinkling, and the light reflections are glittery. This painting remind me of being alone in the midnight, a feeling of peace and quiet.

Stepmothers of Invention: Branding Firms Enter the Industrial Design Fray, by Carl Alviani

http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/stepmothers_of_invention_branding_firms_enter_the_industrial_design_fray_by_carl_alviani_11273.asp


"..........a lot of product designers have made their careers by getting in on the branding game in the past couple of decades. It shouldn't come as any surprise to hear that the same thing is starting to happen in reverse--branding agencies are doing product, and they're doing it fairly well.
Should product designers feel threatened? Depends on who you ask.......「Product is the ultimate communication tool," Winsor explained, "To me, branding and ID are different sides of the same coin. We're both satisfying the needs of the customer.」.........."


Today, customer purchases products considering not only the function, but the abstract values. They buy certain goods to satisfy their need; moreover, they transfer the extra values on themselves. When customer become richer, they are no longer bind for the price. In this way, branding will be come the major part of product design industry. Personally, I think product designers should get involved with branding if they don't want to be eliminated from the competitive market.

Artist in Residence, Sort of, at the Whitney

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/arts/design/03voge.html?scp=1&sq=Artist%20in%20Residence,%20Sort%20of,%20at%20the%20Whitney&st=cse


Some artists are happy enough just having their work shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but 37-year-old Corin Hewitt is actually moving in.
For three months starting Friday, visitors will be able to observe him working every Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the small gallery just off the Whitney’s lobby. There he has created his own universe, an environment that is part kitchen, part office, part garage and part garden.
In a blend of photography and performance and installation art, Mr. Hewitt will construct objects, compose still lifes and take photographs of his creations. As the project, called “Seed Stage,” unfolds, each of the photographs will be framed and hung on the gallery walls surrounding the environment.
Strewn around the space is everything from a hot plate, freezer and microwave oven to a paper shredder, pressure cooker, camera and water-filtration system. There is a custom-built worm composting system, a crawl space, trapdoors and a root cellar filled with vegetables that he grew this year in Vermont, where he spends his summers.
“We’re always looking for interesting ways of enlivening our lobby,” said Tina Kukielski, a senior curatorial assistant at the Whitney who organized the project.
Installing the environment was a 10-day undertaking. Mr. Hewitt described the space as something “between a studio and a still life in motion.”
He enjoys fashioning objects from unusual materials. He weaves baskets from pasta, for example, and paints spinach red before torching it and then photographing it.
Ms. Kukielski predicts that by the time Mr. Hewitt wraps up his project on Jan. 4, about 70 of his photographs will be hanging on the walls. “It’s an examination of the cycles of transformation and transience,” she said of the project.

Corin Hewitt: Seed Stage 
on view October 3, 2008 - January 4, 2009
 
http://whitney.org/www/exhibition/hewitt.jsp

CORIN HEWITT
Born 1971
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Education
1996 Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Karlsruhe, Germany
1993 B.A., Oberlin College, OH



It's really a new way of presenting artist work, including the process. The museum set up a studio in the lobby, and the audience can peer at the artist while he is doing his work. I think that must satisfy some curiosities about how artist proceeds their job.

Closer to Mainstream, Still a Bit Rebellious

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/arts/design/02fair.html?ref=design


Being called a sellout can hurt. Still, he’s not bitter. “I hated being under anyone’s thumb when I was younger and now I’m not, through my art,” he said in an earlier interview at the Obey headquarters in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles. As he signed 450 of his Billy Idol posters, he added, “This ability to make things creatively on my own terms that then found an audience and sold — I’ve sort of made my dream come true.”


I feel that we love some artist's works which are rare or small amount . Once they are accepted by most of people, we discard then. We ten to show our differences or uniqueness by using all kind of methods: clothe, images, music, movies. We tell people what we like and what we appreciate. Those things are mostly rare in order to express our prominent taste. But, sometimes, I wonder we may just want to differentiate ourself from other, so that we don't go with the mainstream.

Does Nokia's "Tube" have what it takes? And why do people buy what they buy?

http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/does_nokias_tube_have_what_it_takes_and_why_do_people_buy_what_they_buy_11330.asp


We have to disagree with PC World's recent article, "Why Nokia's 'Tube' Is the iPhone's Biggest Threat," purporting that Nokia's 5800 will provide close competition to the iPhone. And our stance does not come from some blind reverence for Apple; we're talking about a basic understanding product designers should all have--the importance of emotion when it comes to people, objects, and purchasing decisions.
The article points out that the $390 price tag of the Nokia is okay because it's simfree. They also say the phone
...will feature the Nokia's Comes with Music bundle, which will allow users to freely download an unlimited number of songs from Nokia's Music Store over a year after the initial purchase.
...Nokia's 5800 Express Music also features a 3.2-megapixel camera, with autofocus Carl Zeiss optics and a dual LED flash. All these blow iPhone's 2006 style 2-megapixel-no flash camera out of the water. Also, Tube records videos at VGA quality (640X480px) and has a frontal camera for video calls, something that the iPhone can't do at all. In this category, it's clear who's the winner.

Really, it's not. No one buys the iPhone for the camera. And are there a lot of bands people like on the Nokia Music Store?
The Apple hype did help Apple to sell millions of iPhones, but Nokia sells over 500 million devices every year, out of which almost 100 million are smartphones. If we take in consideration brand loyalty and the other advantages Tube has over iPhone, we're about to see a very tight competition between the two.
We disagree. People like the iPhone because it's easy to use, simple, and for better or worse, it's considered "cool." People ditched brand loyalty to get their hands on the iPhone, and the insane store lines proved it. The Nokia may have better features, but when it sees wide release and the two phones really go head-to-head in the marketplace, I think we'll all have an opportunity to learn something about product design.
Two more things: 1) Let's pick this conversation up again in a few months, when sales figures start coming out, and 2) right now, what do you guys think?



I think Nokia can't win. Apple manages their brand image so successful. People buy Apple's products are not for its superb functions, is because its trendy design and the social value. People built up their self-images by using them. In Taiwan, people buy Apple's products just like people buy luxury goods in the United States. They show off what they have got. One of my friend complained about inconvenience of operating I-tune; however, he still bought another Apple's products. Nokia should reinforce their brand image if they want to compete with Apple.

The Big Picture

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/magazine/28Style-t.html?ref=design

The same week that scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva were getting ready to fire up the Large Hadron Collider, the artist Josiah McElheny was conducting a test of his own ideas on the Big Bang theory at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City. Inspired by the Lobmeyr chandeliers at the Metropolitan Opera House and informed by logarithmic equations devised by the cosmologist David H. Weinberg, McElheny’s chrome, glass and electric-light sculpture “The End of the Dark Ages” is part of a four-year investigation into the origins of the universe. What began with “The End to Modernity,” a sculpture commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, will culminate next month in a massive installation titled “Island Universe” at White Cube in London. “I had this quixotic idea to do modernized versions of the Lobmeyr chandeliers as sculpture with secret information behind it,” says McElheny, who upon first encountering these “gilded age/space age” objects immediately thought they looked like pop renditions of the Big Bang.
According to McElheny, physicists continue to struggle with the question “is the world this way because it must be, or is it just random?” In 1965, the year that the Lobmeyr chandeliers were designed, it was suddenly evident that our world is not in fact the center of the universe. This idea that there could be an infinite number of possible narratives was becoming popular not just in science but also in literature and art — so why not in interior design, too? As it turns out, Wallace K. Harrison, the architect for the Met, having rejected the original design for the chandeliers, gave Hans Harald Rath of Lobmeyr, the Vienna-based glassmaker, a book about galaxies and sent him back to the drawing board.
“The End of the Dark Ages” is a scientifically accurate model: the shortest rod represents 100 million years, the longest about 1.3 billion; the clusters of glass stand for galaxy formations, the lights for quasars. Still, McElheny is less concerned with the conceits of exact science than the limits of reason and knowledge. (The White Cube show proposes a “multiverse” and “speaks to what Kant describes so well as an endless world made of imperfection, complication and specificity.”) “Politically, I’m against finding the single answer,” McElheny insists. “I’m more interested in what these questions mean to our sense of who we are.



Art and Science? Searching for the truth is too serious. I don't really enjoy the work which connect to rational reasons. Can't it be more relaxing. Let simple thoughts dominate.