Hasta La Ideas

The Guggenheim looks to be backing up the promises they made back in early-spring in an open letter they issued to the artists who had announced a boycott of the organization’s latest and still under-construction museum in Abu Dhabi. The artists, largely well-known people from the Middle East and therefore pivotal to the success of the new arm of the Guggenheim empire, formed the boycott after learning that Human Rights Watch had deemed the construction site both unsafe and unfair to workers there. The Foundation’s response was that they a) believed the report wasn’t entirely accurate and b) they knew there were some failings and would now do all they could to fix them. The latest is that an independent monitoring firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, has been hired by the Tourism
Development & Investment Company (TDIC) to “oversee worker welfare for the more than 10,000 labourers who live and work on the island.” Here’s a bit from The National‘s reporting on the new, but independent hire:

In a statement, the leadership of the Board of Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation called the PwC appointment “an essential component of safeguarding workers’ rights”.

“We remain committed to the workers on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi construction site, to maintaining the integrity of our joint project with TDIC and to establishing a truly international museum that will reflect and celebrate the cultures of the Middle East while fostering an atmosphere of open, intellectual exchange,” the statement said.

PwC will work with TDIC’s internal audit department and work with the developer’s audit committee when needed.

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For fashion retailer Urban Outfitters, this long weekend past couldn’t come quickly enough. Just before everyone left the office for barbecues, road trips, and hopefully some memorializing along the way, an accusation was leveled against the company by Chicago designer Stevie Koerner, who claimed the company had stolen the concept behind a popular set of necklaces she’d been making for her Etsy-based shop and were now selling them in stores and on their website. “My heart sank a little bit,” she wrote, “The World/United States of Love line that I created is one of the reasons that I was able to quit my full-time job. They even stole the item name as well as some of my copy.” While the retailer is no stranger to these sorts of accusations, something about this allegation took hold and by the end of the week, was everywhere, swamping Twitter and landing mentions in surprising places, like on the Apple-focused Daring Fireball. By the time pop star Miley Cyrus tweeted, “Not only do they steal from artists but every time you give them money you help finance a campaign against gay equality,” a reference to the company’s founder’s contributions to the campaign of Rick Santorum, it was all over. Originally remaining silent during the early days of the controversy, Urban Outfitters eventually issued a statement, saying that a) they did steal the idea and b) that Koerner’s idea wasn’t original to begin with, and even vaguely accused her of copying the idea from others. “…We believe the media response to her campaign is threatening to impact the dozens of independent designers we work with on a daily basis,” the company wrote on their blog. “For many of them, having their work sold at Urban Outfitters is a very positive turning point in their careers, and we will not allow their hard work and commitment, or ours, to be undermined by these false allegations.” Fortunately for the company, following that burst of negative press, the weekend came and the fires seemed to die out a bit (until, of course, people like us decided to do a wrap-up post about it). Between then and now, they also apparently decided to pull the offending product from both the site (now just a blank page) and from their stores as well. And meanwhile, Ms. Koerner received a flood of support and what sounds like more orders than she’d ever expected in record time.

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(Photographs by Lee Friedlander for The New York Times)

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Finally, nearly two months after his original arrest and detainment by government officials in China, and only recently reported to still be alive by his wife who was allowed to visit him, the charges against artist Ai Weiwei have been revealed. According to a very brief story originally published by the state news agency Xinhau, police authorities in Beijing have stated that the reason for Weiwei’s arrest stems allegations that his company, The Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., “intentionally destroyed accounting documents” and that the artist himself had “evaded ‘a huge amount’ of tax.” Though officials still stand beside their claims that these “economic crimes” are the sole reason Weiwei was arrested and remains confined, critics of the government and friends of the artist still believe that “the charges seemed designed to justify Ai’s arrest and ‘restrict his personal freedom.’” The brief release about why he was arrested was filed Friday evening, but as the LA Times reports, was removed from Xinhau’s news wire shortly thereafter, though not before it had already disseminated across other news outlets.

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Late last week, while the city of Seattle was upping its coolness points by unveiling plans for its own High Line, with High Line co-designer James Corner there to show off his ideas (calm down, Witold), across town, there was the quiet shut down of one of its more hip design firms. Cnet got the scoop that software giant Microsoft has shut down Pioneer Studios, ” a skunkworks operation to develop consumer electronics and experience” (think: the company’s less-hidden equivalent of Jonathan Ive‘s top secret Apple bunker/cave/floating city). The side project firm had just been open for three years, founded by longtime Microsoft employee J. Allard, who helped launch the company’s original, and insanely successful Xbox game system, and had recently been working on projects like Microsoft’s answer to the iPad, the Courier tablet, which the company ultimately decided to cancel. Here’s a bit about the original birth and residence of Pioneer:

The idea behind Pioneer was to breathe a culture of innovation into the all-too-often stolid company. As it’s grown, Microsoft has become increasingly bureaucratic, a place where creativity could often be crushed under a mountain of meetings and dependencies on other Microsoft products.

That’s one reason why Pioneer opened in Seattle’s Pioneer Square, a creative hub at the southern edge of downtown and some 16 miles from Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters. The company hired SkB Architects to design the 36,000-square foot space and spared little expense. The location offered huge open spaces, dotted with cushy Eames lounge chairs, angular white desks, blond wood floors, and exposed brick walls.

If you’re curious, here are some photos of the office. And for the reason why Pioneer no more, Cnet speculates that the studio was closed because Allard left Microsoft last year, and without his ability to fight off its behemoth parent, it was only a matter of time before the unit would be folded.

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