shepard fairey’s obama: whose is it?

Stephen Colbert peels through the layers of the debate surrounding copyright of Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama poster in this brilliant piece of reportage (The former director of the Whitney Museum, David Ross, and brother Ed Colbert, a copyright laywer, play supporting roles):

… and since I’ve been fighting with the css code freely supplied by colbertnation.com for longer than it’s worth, and have yet to win, this image is just a tease. Check out the whole 6:37 min video here: Shepard Fairey’s Obama: Whose Is It?

market research: olive oil

For research for my recent olive oil primer story for amNY I went straight to the source: Steve Jenkins of Fairway Market, a self-professed “idiot savant who’s whacked out about olive oil.” His knowledge is the kind that is cultivated over time, driven by passion — and let me tell you, the man loves his olive oil.

We talked for just over 30 minutes and exchanged approximately 3,870 words, of which about 120 made it onto the page. Here are another couple hundred of my favorites: 

On good olive oil: “Really good ones are gonna have a medium brilliance and cheerfulness about them. So much personality.” 

On taste: “Everybody’s different. So maybe you want an olive oil that’s really gentle and has got some citrus-y notes and some herb to it. On the other hand, if you’re like me you’ve got to bombard your senses, you want something that’s really robust and has got some bitterness to it, black pepper to it, that’s maybe going to make your tongue tickle or make you want to cough when you taste it.

go forth and multiply

My lurking obsession with typefaces periodically surfaces on this blog in one form or another, and we’re overdue for a sighting. So thanks to Serious Eats for catching a story in Print magazine in which typeface designers Nick and Adam Hayes marvel at the discovery of a NYC street food vendor — in this case, the Calexico cart in SoHo — using their font: 

“We’ve also found this strange use of Monark for a street vendor selling Mexican food [in Soho, New York City]. They used Monark for the menu and the logotype. I have no idea why a street vendor would use Monark to promote their services, because it was a typeface originally designed for a magazine. We love waiting and watching for our typefaces to pop up in the strangest places. This has got to be one of our favorites!”

My obsession with type doesn’t stem from its mathematical principles. Or the aesthetics of typeface design (serifs! spacing!). But rather in how typography is so different from the other creative arts: once a typeface is finished, the artist largely relinquishes control. 

… and it’s how they meet again that’s the interesting part: In the Print magazine article, type designer Mark Simonson talks about how he receives junk mail in Felt Tip Roman, the typeface he designed after his own handwriting. His reaction? “It doesn’t fool me for a second.”

gratuitous holiday cheer

http://mymoet.com/

virtually there

"Sunsets," Andy Warhol (1972) (c) Brooke Alexander Editions

 

Tour Art Basel Miami Beach at your leisure: Artnet has taken the famed American art fair virtual. Browse works by gallery, by artist, or even by floorplan. Best of all, Artnet will add a dozen additional artworks from each gallery’s inventory to the site after the fair closes on December 8, bringing the total to more than 4,000, and the entire site will be live through February 7, 2009. So go ahead, geek out. (Palm trees, umbrella drinks and balmy subtropical weather not included.)

notes from the aisle: going greek

tzatziki prep

A few weeks ago I holed up in a friend’s kitchen for an evening and made like Martha Stewart, taste-testing a handful of common supermarket brands of Greek yogurt (or “Greek style” yogurt, as the underwhelming Trader Joe’s version claims), in the full range of milkfat available: regular, 2% and 0%.

Lo and behold, Fage, which all other brands are attempting to emulate, is rightfully still the standard-bearer. My stream-of-consciousness tasting notes for Fage Total (blog exclusive!) read as follows: “smooth, thick you can almost taste it frozen, icy; YUM. Melt in your mouth, richness, tang a final note. Vague guilty pleasure feeling of eating sour cream out of the container, but thicker! Better!”

The complete findings, along with a short interview with a local nutritionist and a pair of recipes, are out tomorrow in amNewYork: “Explore Another ‘Culture’: Go Greek.”

‘bad’ or ‘amazing,’ it’s all relative

Photo: Courtesy Judah Friedlander / NYmag.com

In an interview with Flavorwire earlier this month, Judah Friedlander, the trucker hat-wearing dude on 30 Rock and host of the recent charitable Bad Art Auction, set the record straight on the subjective nature of taste and art: 

“… for the record, I don’t call bad art “bad art”, I call it “amazing art”. Because by calling it “bad”, you’re basing your description of it on another institution’s criteria of what makes art good or bad (a museum’s or gallery’s or art critic’s opinion).

I’ve been collecting art for over 20 years. And I really think the bad art that I collect is amazing. It interests me. If art doesn’t interest me, I THEN think it’s bad.” 

To which I say, “touché.” Or, alternately, “you go, boy.”

new york = the internet?

Where, oh where, does Jennifer Senior, the author of the cover story in this week’s New York magazine, find the … excuse me, the balls, to claim that New York “has become” the Internet?  Or, better yet, that New York was a prototype of the Internet before the Internet existed? 

“… [John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago] was describing the ballet of the train station. But his description could just as easily have applied to the Internet. Think about it: Serendipitous encounters between people who know each other well, sort of well, and not at all. People of every type, and with every type of agenda, trying to meet up with others who share that same agenda. An environment that’s alive at all hours, populated by all types, and is, most of the time, pretty safe. What he was saying, really, was that New York had become the Web. Or perhaps more, even: that New York was the Web before the Web was the Web, characterized by the same free-flowing interaction, 24/7 rhythms, subgroups, and demimondes.”

Which isn’t to say that she hasn’t done her homework (she has), or that the piece doesn’t have it’s merits (it does), or that New Yorkers couldn’t use a little bit (or a big bit) of a hug right now (the do), whether they admit it or not (they don’t).

But if this comparison between a thronging, buzzing, chaotic cityscape and a humming network of fiber optic cables works, how is it not applicable to a dozen or more great cities around the world? Or the great cities of history, for that matter? 

Arriving at this climactic final assertion after passing through such touchy-feeley pit-stops as a visit with a sociologist who reassures us that friends are as important as family — “home of Friends, after all,” Senior quips in a parenthetical aside — I leave the piece with a conclusion of my own. Sadly, it’s the latest instance of New York centricism/egoism gone unchecked.

surprising tranquility of our pulse

I love parks. I love art in parks even more, and even more when it’s interactive and/or touchable. Which is why I hustled up to Madison Square Park on a recent chilly Monday evening to catch Mexican-Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s light installation, “Pulse Park,” before it closed. 

“Pulse Park” is a series of 200 individual white light beams lasering across the central oval grass lawn, and they pulsate. Cool effect, yes, but here’s the catch: At the south side of the lawn you have the option to register your own pulse and become a part of the installation. You can grip a pair of handlebars afixed to a podium-height steel rod for 10-15 seconds (the handlebars are not unlike those on stairmasters and eliptical machines), and once your pulse is calculated, all the lights of “Pulse Park” go dark, and a single beam of light rhythmically pulses to the rate of your pulse for a few beats, solo. Then the rest of the park lights up, pulsating to the rate of 199 previous heartbeats measured.

bananas for ‘Bronx Zoo’

Figure models in lingerie, heels and … ape masks? “Bronx Zoo,” which opens at GhettoGloss in Los Angeles on Friday night, is the “best of the best” of the inspired folly that took place Saturday afternoons all summer long on the back patio of La Cita bar in downtown Los Angeles, where serious students of anatomy, cool kids in search of a cool beer and a hot scene, and just about everyone in between, converged.

Check out GettoGloss’s blog for over-the-shoulder photos of artists at work and the models in action, like these ones here. There are also some great shots of people watching people (see “behind the looking glass (part 2)“). Unless GhettoGloss makes plans to bring these little beauties east, this may be the most we be see of “Bronx Zoo” from afar. For now. 

Through December 1.