Brand Noise

Miuccia Prada and the Marriage of Art and Fashion

(from Financial Times) Miuccia Prada symbolises perfectly the merging of these two multimillion-pound industries. Not only are her collections feted for the kind of conceptual audacity that would shame many a so-called artist but she has also acted as a generous patron for all things cutting edge.

Miuccia Prada has already shown that fashion – quick-moving, dynamic, ferociously embracing globalisation – can outsmart more ponderous forms of expression. But the problem, which she recognises as surely as anyone, is this: as art learns those lessons and becomes more approachable and, arguably, more facile, will it lose its sense of gravitas?

Last week the 58-year-old designer announced plans for a new headquarters for her 15-year-old Prada Foundation, in a former spirits distillery in Milan. The €25m project, masterminded by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, will restore most of the distillery’s original buildings as well as providing three new structures.  Read more (FT.com)

Bridge Fair Known for Non-traditional Spaces

Macedonian artist Igor Josifov will shower in the buff as part of a performance piece called "Purification Process.'' Transgender star Amanda Lepore is scheduled to belt out a few tunes while fountains spout absinthe.           

They're among the attractions at the Bridge Art Fair, which is taking up temporary residence in the space once occupied by the Tunnel -- a defunct Manhattan nightclub known for stabbings and drug busts in the '90s.

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David's Got a New Job

Here in a perfect case of cross-discipline learning, life imitates art:

For statues, stress injuries come from standing in place for hundreds of years. Using a novel technique, researchers have now developed a way to predict such fracturing, applying the procedure to Michelangelo's David in an analysis that proved simpler, faster and more accurate than previous methods.

In applying the technique to other objects -- including human bones -- the researchers are also gaining new perspective on how these structures are likely to fail.

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Tate Gallery Distributes Ltd. Ed. Cains Beer

The man who created the Sgt Pepper album cover has designed a beer bottle label to celebrate Liverpool's Capital of Culture year. The label by artist Sir Peter Blake features a Union Jack with his signature, and is featured on Cains' Best of British lager bottles. Cains Beer, based in Toxteth, Liverpool, plans to produce 250,000 bottles. The specially-labelled beer will be available until December. It is available in the Tate Britain and the Tate Modern galleries as well as supermarkets.

Read the whole story.

Spam Art

Like everybody else with an e-mail account, Linzie Hunter gets a lot of spam. It might be a little more unusual that she sometimes finds the subject headings so amusingly absurd — “No More Lonely Nights for Linzie,” for instance — that she forwards them to friends.

More recently, when Hunter, who is an illustrator, was experimenting with hand lettering, she did something extremely unusual. She found a way to convert commercial entreaty and flimflammery into something pleasing. That is, she made spam into art.

Working quickly, with a tablet and stylus attachment that allows her to draw in the computer program Photoshop, she gave each a unique treatment, like a hand-painted sign.

After a day and a half, she uploaded about 20 of these to her account on Flickr, creating a set of “Spam One-liners.” Two weeks later, one of her Flickr contacts, the illustrator John Martz, posted a link to the set from the popular illustration and cartooning blog known as Drawn! at drawn.ca. It quickly ricocheted — via art blogs, design blogs, tech blogs, personal blogs...In the space of a little more than a week, the number of views of the Spam One-liners set went from about 500 to more than 50,000. And more than a few people were asking Hunter to make prints or postcards that they could buy.

Read the whole story.

Reinvented Keyboard Gives Musicians Visual Control

Electronic musicians like Norman Fairbanks have a new ax to wield: the Tenori-on. Meaning "sound in your palm" in Japanese, the eight-inch-square instrument lets would-be techno artists make beats and sequences by sliding and tapping their fingers around the touch-sensitive surface—kind of like finger painting.

Matrixes of LED buttons cover the front and back surfaces and light up as you touch them, so you can visualize the music while you're composing. If your buddy or bandmate also has a Tenori-on, you can connect the instruments for synchronized jam sessions.

Yamaha is test-launching the Tenori-on in the UK at tenori-on.co.uk for about $1,200.

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Model of the Future: Collaborative Existence

In 2006, a conversation started on CIO Insight in answer to the question of "Am I a bad parent if encourage my child's musical pursuits rather than encourage a technical education?" Posts flooded in flaming about on both sides of the issue: Music=starving artist. Tech=guaranteed income. This made us here at scenarioDNA wonder: Is the issue truly that cut and dry anymore? We don't think so.

Take our own world of planning. Here the best lessons learned come from a wide breadth of disciplines. But Wired Magazine brought it all home however in this latest article:

Video Games Live is a 135-minute showcase of music from arcade, computer, and console titles, arranged for and performed by a 66-piece orchestra and a 16-person choir. Its creator and emcee is Tommy Tallarico. When he was 10, he'd use his Commodore 64 to splice together his favorite sound effects and then invite friends to come by and watch him play air guitar over the tracks. As an adult, he has written scores for games like Advent Rising and Earthworm Jim, and today he hosts The Electric Playground on G4 TV, a cable network devoted to gaming.

Videogame music first invaded US concert halls in 2004, when Jason Michael Paul, founder of Play!, brought Dear Friends, a program of music from the Final Fantasy catalog, to the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

To date, these venues are more fun than profitable. But the collaboration that is thriving among these worlds mixing pop culture with art with things people love breeds a model for success. Our hope is that someday no one will have to make the choice between what they love vs. what makes them a living—however modest. Already no one from Gen X and beyond is willing to sacrifice design for cost. Why would they sacrifice their careers?

chashama performance windows

chashama is an NYC arts organization whose mission is to support artists of all genres. chashama adopts vacant properties that are donated by their owners and converts them into theaters, galleries, studios, and window performance sites; chashama then regrants this space for free or at heavily subsidized rates. Since 1995, chashama has transformed more than 40 vacant properties and has given more than 6,500 artists access to space. "

Art: A Leisure Activity Across the Pond

“In America, art is still seen as a luxury activity, as a status game for those who want to class up their wealth,” said Michael Workman, founder of Bridge Art Fair. “In Europe, it's seen as something that John and Judy at the end of the block do with themselves on a Sunday afternoon.”

Because the satellite fairs focus on emerging artists, prices can be considerably lower than their Frieze counterparts. At Zoo Art Fair, buyers will be able to pick up limited-edition works by emerging artists like Matthew Harrison for as little as £50 (about $100).

• Zoo Art Fair made its debut in 2004 at the London Zoo, in Regent's Park. Zoo Art Fair will be held Oct. 12 to 15 at the Royal Academy of Arts.
• Year_07, organized by two former artists who run the Keith Talent Gallery in East London, brings some of the East End art scene's wit and swagger to the West End.
• Bridge (formerly known as Nova Art Fair) was founded in 2005, and has staged events in cities including Chicago and Miami, and in sites ranging from hotels to abandoned office buildings.
• Pulse, which has operated fairs in Miami and New York, will be coming to London for the first time. The fair will be held in the Mary Ward House, a 19th-century Arts and Crafts building.

Read the whole NYTimes story.

The Writing's on the Wall

It's a case of graffiti artists meets mural painter meets incorrigible kid...

Drawing personalised paintings on the wall to decorate one's home has become a rather popular trend among young people in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province.

The local Chutian Metropolis Daily reported on Sunday that Hu Jun, a graduate from Hubei Institute of Fine Arts is the instigator of the fashion trend.

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