Wow.
How did they event make it out of the hospital door? Oh wait–being hot. Got it.
Right… I’ve never properly rooted around in the New British Artists concept from the 90s, but they did represent a turning point in the postmodern art world, specifically in the quotidian aspect of people like Tracy Emin.
I’ll put it bluntly: she is the opposite of the sorority girl who goes to college to land a job at a corporation that will give her a salary to merely exist and create value for the company. She walked out on a televised art roundtable, obviously drunk and with a splint on her finger, and the British television-watching public thought it was the coolest thing ever. Well, kinda. Remember this was the 1990s, way before Big Brother, The Bachelor, Masterchef, and all the kitschy reality television that has basically been accepted as an art form in its own right.
What I like about Emin is her brutal honesty. She accepts where’s shes’s been and what she’s focused on, and couldn’t care less about the critical reception.
I agree with this statement.
Confident people can rock basically anything. Case in point: put hipster clothes on classical sculpture. You’re welcome.
Clickity click click to see some more examples.
The BBC’s documentaries are generally top notch–the polar opposite of current US “edutainment” shows that have distilled down formulas to get the highest eyeballs. It’s little wonder that The Family (above–full) from 1974 would be the precursor to reality TV shows–but that theirs would be more “fly on the wall” and genuinely curious about and relatively impartial towards their subject. An American Family from 1971 is its precursor, but I haven’t checked it out yet.
Compare this style to a parody of what masquerades as reality TV in the states, one that’s blatantly geared towards a perceived audience who apparently incapable of paying attention unless there are gongs or trombones to highlight emotional moments, and chopped up, heavily edited dialog that literally spells out the dialog needed to prove a point.
Check out this British parody of what it’s like to watch an American reality show:
“[The Family] followed the working-class Wilkins family of six (led by Margaret and Terry, who divorced in 1978) of Reading, through their daily lives, warts and all, and culminated in the marriage of one of the daughters, which was plagued by fans and paparazzi alike. The show was the basis for two parodies: Monty Python’s Flying Circus, in their very last episode which aired 5 December 1974, featured a sketch called “The Most Awful Family in Britain 1974″; and Benny Hill, on one of his 1975 specials, did a takeoff called “That Family.” Margaret re-married (like her ex-husband) and became Margaret Sainsbury; she died of a reported heart attack in Berkshire on 10 August 2008, aged 73.”
Right–well, you may have noticed as of late I’ve been on an architecture kick for my consumable media consumption activities. I stumbled upon this 1997 BBC series that tracks how certain buildings adapt to future uses, and how others totally fail at future flexibility–most often the victims of egocentric architects and rigid expectations of future behavior of their users.
Above is the first episode, “Flow” which gives an introduction to presenter Stewart Brand’s thesis, which is loosely that buildings need to learn and adapt. The rest in the series are embedded after the jump.
Stewart Brand is quite the character, as it turns out. From his official biography, we see he’s been part of things like the Whole Earth Catalog (one of the first hippie lifestyle companies), which aimed to be a content portal instead of a retailer (Directing potential consumers to stores, and not taking a cut for the service). He also hung out with Ken Kesey and publicly made known his admiration for experimentation with hallucinogens. Kind of neat that he settled upon architecture as a point of reference. He also snagged Brian Eno to provide the soundtrack. Pretty cool.
The series was based on my 1994 book, HOW BUILDINGS LEARN: What Happens After They’re Built. The book is still selling well and is used as a text in some college courses. Most of the 27 reviews on Amazon treat it as a book about system and software design, which tells me that architects are not as alert as computer people. But I knew that; that’s part of why I wrote the book.
Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like. Please don’t bug me with requests for permission. Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project.
Historic note: this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital— shot digital, edited digital. The project wound up with not enough money, so digital was the workaround. The camera was so small that we seldom had to ask permission to shoot; everybody thought we were tourists. No film or sound crew. Everything technical on site was done by editors, writers, directors. That’s why the sound is a little sketchy, but there’s also some direct perception in the filming that is unusual.
Doing it right.
Susan Gregg Koger turned her fascination with vintage clothing collecting (as in, buying gorgeous, unique pieces from thrift stores in Florida, even if the clothes didn’t fit her personally) into an business known for its “vintage-inspired” designs made accessible to the masses, through an initial survey that showed them it was a need. Along the way, they crafted their own “democratic” social shopping experience that allows the customer to have a voice in the decision of the buyer and what actually becomes a piece for sale. She does name drop Threadless as a business model, but they are more private label oriented, from what I gather. She’s not a natural in front of an audience, which is endearing in its awkwardness, which is a good thing because it shows how genuine her idea and company are.
She also snagged a spot in Forbes’ “30 Under 30.” Hot.
Here is a low-key documentary on John Baldessari.
Here is a playlist of National Geographic’s “Megacities” series. I was poking around to find some architecture documentaries and ran across these. I grouped them first by cities and then by themes that they made episodes around. It starts out in North America with New York, checks in on Las Vegas (yeah, it’s basically a city in a desert… totally a lot of work to create a modern city there), pops down to South America, and then crosses the Atlantic to look at some European cities (London and Paris), and then jumps over to Asia, starting with Mumbai and then checking in on Hong Kong and Taipai. I’ve also found a Jakarta documentary, but the resolution is so low it would be an embarrassing addition to the playlist.
Here are some selected Industrial Design lectures by Matthew Bird from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has a self-deprecating sense of humor, which you can really see in “Bauhaus to Broadway” (below).
The first one, above, is “Josiah Wedgwood for Industrial Designers”:
Josiah Wedgwood was a tireless innovator who introduced and employed many important components of what designers still do. Or SHOULD do. This is an overview of Josiah Wedgwood’s work, with a focus on how it shows evidence of early Industrial Design thinking and process. And the first Chia Pet!
This 80s-retro documentary is hosted by a socially awkward engineer who fumbles his cuecard-reading way through uncomfortable, scripted segues with props that illustrate the point being made. It’s a decent documentary on engineering, nonetheless.