Hasta La Ideas

With fresh creative talent in place at its flagship brand, Gap Inc. has hit the ground running in 2013, announcing its $130 million acquisition of the 32-store Intermix chain and plans for a Banana Republic summer collection designed by Milly‘s Michelle Smith. Now Gap is upping the cuteness quotient with a new line of unbelievably adorable baby clothes–for girls and boys up to 24 months old–inspired by Beatrix Potter‘s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The author, who pioneered the product tie-in by following up her 1902 book with a (patented!) Peter Rabbit doll and board game, and whose estate is a licensing powerhouse, would surely be pleased to see her illustrations adorning whimsical babyGap one-pieces, patterned dresses, and printed denim. The must-have item is Peter’s famous blue jacket, reimagined as a chunky knit navy cardigan and yours for $34.95. Mr. McGregor was unavailable for comment.

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Nabil Sabio Azadi is interested in a specific form of intrepid, personally connected travel. His new book, “For You The Traveller,” is a painstaking work that combines personal anecdotes with a list of local contacts from around the world, culled from the artist’s five-year stint traveling across five continents….

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Competition: we’re giving readers the chance to win one of five copies of The New Wave in Danish Architecture, a book featuring contemporary projects by Danish architects such as BIG and NORD.

The book documents the developments in Danish architecture since the beginning of the 21st century.

Projects by 12 Danish architecture studios including BIG, JDS and NORD appear alongside interviews with Bjarke Ingels of BIG, Winy Maas of MVRDV and Shohei Shigematsu of OMA.

Featured projects include the Holmenkollen ski jump by Copenhagen studio JDS and the Danish pavilion for the 2010 EXPO in Shanghai by BIG, among many others.

Edited by Kristoffer Lindhardt Weiss and Kjeld Vindum and written in both English and Danish, the hardback book was first published autumn 2012.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “The New Wave of Danish Architecture” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers. Read our privacy policy here.

Competition closes 5 February 2013. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the top of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

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Gary Shteyngart burst onto the literary scene in 2002 with The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, his sublimely hilarious tale of one Vladimir Girshkin, “the immigrant’s immigrant, the expatriate’s expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times.” The decade hence brought us two more smashing Shteyngartistic feats–Absurdistan (2006) and Super Sad True Love Story (2010)–and enough book blurbs to secure the writer a record or two in the Guinness Book, which probably already features his pithy praise on its back cover.

Shteyngart’s superhuman blurb output has occasioned a Tumblr and last month’s reading event-cum-roast, at which the author was made to sit in a child-size wooden chair on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Now it’s onto video. “As we plant our giddy boots in the soil of a hopeful New Year, the blurbs have now spawned a documentary,” wrote Edward Champion in an e-mail sent today to “good souls, listeners, and cultural compadres.” In addition to editors, pundits, critics, cover designers, and authors blurbed by Shteyngart, the documentary–narrated by Jonathan Ames–features “cats and dogs and ice skaters and squirrels inveigled by money,” promises Champion. We laughed, we cried, it’s the feel-good blurb documentary of the year!

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Artist Chuck Close has described his work as “monumental in scale and brutal in detail.” The phrase is just as apt when referring to the painstaking process of cataloguing his oeuvre, according to Carina Evangelista, the editor of the Chuck Close Catalogue Raisonné. The just-launched publication puts a new spin on the form–a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known works of an artist either in a particular medium or all media–as Chuck Close: Paintings, 1967-present also marks the official launch of Artifex Press, a New York-based startup dedicated to the production of digital catalogues raisonnés.

“Our catalogues are every bit the equal of the catalogues raisonnés you know in book form,” said Artifex Press editor-in-chief David Grosz at the launch event held recently at the New York Public Library. “We’re a publishing company, but we’re also a software company.” Grosz co-founded Artifex in 2009 with Pace Gallery’s Marc Glimcher. The Close catalogue debuted alongside Jim Dine: Sculpture, 1983-present, and will be followed by catalogues raisonnés of Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin. Projects are also in progress with contemporary artists including Tara Donovan, Thomas Nozkowski, James Siena, and Richard Tuttle.

With the help of a Macbook, Grosz and Evangelista clicked through a tour of the Close catalogue and its fuss-free functionality as the charismatic artist himself provided running commentary. “It’s a nauseating amount of images,” said Close, as they did a quick sort for self-portraits and his “Big Self Portrait” (1967-68, pictured above) filled the screen. “When I put this image in books I have to add a disclaimer telling kids not to smoke.” Later, it was on to archival photos. “Oh look, there’s Joseph Beuys looking at my painting,” Close said of a 1974 snapshot of the German artist sizing up a Close canvas. “I didn’t know he cared.”
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