The Brazilian shoemaker Melissa has created with the trendy architect Zaha Hadid a pair of shoes that will be available only at the Dove Street Market in London since September.
Visit the Melissa Plastic Dreams website and click on boxes of shoes at the bottom. They will open and … enjoy it!
Below the top 10 newly coined words compiled from various sources by Cramer-Krasselt, a Chicago-based advertising/PR agency.
1.Luxcession: As the economy continues to hit consumers’ wallets affecting their purchasing choices, many mass-class luxury items are also taking a hit.
2.Dotcomrade: A friend or acquaintance that you met online but have never met in person.
3.Greenwashing: The practice of bogus environmental marketing.
4. Info Snacking: Wasting time at work by surfing the Web.
5. Blacking Out: To turn off any device that people can reach you with (cell phone, two-way, computer, home phone, morse code, etc.) in order to avoid someone.
6. Compunicate: To chat with someone when you are in the same room, each on separate computers, and you talk via Instant Messenger instead of speaking to them out loud, in person.
7. Defriend: To remove somebody from your established list of contacts, considered the ultimate snub on social network.
8. Generica: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where you go such as strip malls and fast food places.
9. Mouse Potato: The online generation’s answer to the couch potato.
10. Googleganger: Another individual with the same name as you whose records and/or stories are mixed in with your own when you Google yourself.
In the exhibition ‘Beyond Paradise’ tourist image production and narratives, as we know them from travel brochures, postcards, advertisements, films and so on, are appropriated in the works presented. They reflect on the construction of expectations, experiences and the social imaginary of places evoked by the ubiquitous and pervasive culture of tourism we are living in nowadays.
The starting point of this exhibition also stems from the paradox that tourism still involves romantic, if not paradisiacal imagery, whereas the tourist experience is actually shattered by all kinds of forces that haunt our daily lives: commercialism, gentrification, the complex entanglement of migration and tourist destinations, war, and fear of terrorism. But it is also significant for the strength of our tourism-minded culture that even such threatening notions and experiences can be integrated in a package tour.
‘Beyond Paradise’ investigates modes of representation and visibility, starting from the mass production of images – a scheme central to the leisure industry – and the idealized imagery of places, and moves away from the familiar Tourist Gaze to construct unexpected fictional or personal narratives. The promises of these idealistic and seductive images are appropriated and eventually shifted in the works presented in the exhibition, to reveal other realities, and take us beyond paradise in order to question one of the greatest fictions of our times: that of tourism.
20 July – 7 September
SMBA Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam
Non déjeuner sur l’herbe ma interni. Se continua a piovere (per cui e’ preferibile stare in un interno a contemplare capolavori impressionisti piuttosto che fare picnic a Fenix Park) e se il post su Interior at Arcachon vi ha incuriosito, ma soprattutto se siete o sarete Dublino prima del 10 Agosto, Impressionist Interiors e’ aperta alla National Gallery of Ireland. Enjoy it!
L’Annual Report 2007 dello svizzero media group Ringier e’ stato pubblicato. Diciamoci la verita’, la lettura dei corporate reports e’ di sicuro fra le cose piu’ noiose (se non deprimenti) che esistano. Questo pero l’ho addirittura richiesto e adesso occupa un posto di tutto rispetto fra i miei cataloghi e monografie piu’ cari.
Sin dal 1999 infatti il gruppo ha trasformato gli annual reports in vere e proprie opere d’arte, affidandone il visual concept ad artisti piu’ o meno noti. L’edizione 2007 e’ stata disegnata dal duo Fischli/Weiss e se le prime qaranta pagine raccolgono numeri e torte, le restanti ottocento (si’, pesa tantissimo!) sono dedicate alle pubblicita’ piu’ note degli ultimi decenni per riflettere sui desideri collettivi della societa’ contemporanea.
