Hasta La Ideas

We’re still trying to get past its unfortunate name, but since opening in 2008, the new and improved Newseum has made a real splash on the National Mall. Now the 250,000-square-foot, seven-level institution is making headlines with a freshly inked partnership with HP. The embattled tech company, which last week appointed former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker to replace Mark Hurd as its CEO and president, is underwriting a new, interactive media gallery in the Newseum. Expected to open in early 2012 on the museum’s fourth floor, the HP New Media Gallery will allow visitors to explore technology’s impact on how information is reported, distributed, and accessed. HP will contribute $5 million over the next 10 years to underwrite the gallery, which will continually change to reflect the ever shifting and occasionally shifty media landscape. Think massive HP touch screens that offer customizable mixes of grainy historical footage, iconic photos, and streaming live Twitter feeds (sample tweet: “at Newmusem (sp?) exploring technology’s role in the democratization of content & news! anyone know where 2 get good burger nr white house?”).

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From becoming a new trustee to designing electric car chargers, curating his first exhibition to making glasses for the Mexican government, we’ve said it before and we’re about to say it again that 2010 is the year of Yves Behar. He’s returned to the land of attention and press coverage again with the release a new collaboration with Herman Miller. He’d previously worked with the company creating the small, eco-friendly table lamps for them, but now he’s entered their bread and butter turf with an actual piece of furniture, specifically the SAYL Chair. Dexigner landed this first peek at the construction of the suspension-formed chair, which true to both Behar and Miller form, looks downright beautiful. However, the real story seems to us to lay in the fact that the SAYL is set to retail at just $399, much less expensive than the company’s standard offerings (their most familiar product, the Aeron, traditionally runs somewhere north of $600). And of course, given that it’s Behar, the chair is extra green (as in earth-friendly, though you can get it in green, the color, too), reportedly being 93% recyclable and shipped in smaller, newly designed packaging to save on waste. Like Behar’s other big projects this year, it’s sure to get some attention. Add on top of that, Miller’s “Design for You” contest launch, which cleverly uses the amount of email sign-ups it receives to push the contest along, and they’re sure to sell more than a few of these.

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Jeff Koons, his BMW art car design concept, and a BMW M3 GT2 are all radiant at Monday’s press conference in New York. (Photo: Jim Sulley)

How is Jeff Koons coming with his BMW Art Car? The project is on track—literally. The car, a BMW M3 GT2 customized with a Koonsian explosion of color, will race at Le Mans this June, BMW announced Monday at a press conference in New York City. The Koonsmobile will follow in the tradition of previous BMW Art Cars that have competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, including those designed by Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. En route to Le Mans, Koons’ car will make a pit stop at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where the artist will unveil and sign the car on June 1.

In revealing his concepts for the car, Koons stressed that the image shown (above) was preliminary. “I’m going to be bringing this on a higher level,” he said. “I’ve been working in 2-D and 3-D and on computers articulating everything.” His starting point was energy. “I wanted to look at the type of energies that are involved in cars and kind of the type of subliminal design work that’s been done to them as far as graphics,” he said, noting that he looked at a variety of race cars and studied zooming jets, explosions, and the bending of light. “I ended up getting really inspired by Christmas tree lights,” said Koons. “And that was really one of the bases I used for the design.” A digital collage of inspirational images led to the exterior graphic, which evokes a confluence of lasers or stylized tubular balloons on a black background that will contrast with the car’s silver interior. But it wasn’t all colorful zips and twinkling lights. “I wanted an aesthetic of winning. To me, it’s really important that the team wins,” said Koons. “Winning is the most important aesthetic.” Which we think would make a dynamite title for his next exhibition.

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One of the 31 back-lit collages that Chris Rubino created for the Distrikt Hotel.

A New York hotel that celebrates New York—that’s the concept behind the new Distrikt Hotel, which opened last week in midtown Manhattan. The 155-room hotel was designed by New York-based OTTE Architecture, and the firm tapped artist and designer Chris Rubino to create collages, murals, and typographic work that explore Manhattan from Harlem to the Financial District.

Each of the hotel’s 31 floors features an eight-foot-long lightbox by Rubino, who sought to highlight the distinct feeling and features of the city’s diverse neighborhoods. “One of the beautiful things about New York is that you can be walking down Eighth Avenue for an hour and feel like you’ve visited five different cities,” he told us. “I know people say New York City has become homogenized, and of course it’s cleaned up now, but I still have no problem feeling which part I’m in.” A challenge of the long-term project was making sure that the neighborhood-themed works didn’t feel isolated from one another. “I tried to find a consistent illustrative collage aesthetic that I could carry throughout the 31 floors while trying to capture a certain feeling in each,” said Rubino. “I didn’t want Midtown to feel like Chinatown.”

After creating a unique collage for every floor of the Distrikt, Rubino decided that the hotel’s cafe neeeded to represent all of them. The result: two 22-foot-long murals that offer guests the opportunity to see elements of the works—and neighborhoods—on floors other than their own. “I took sections of each collage and combined them to create these new images mixed with an illustration of an Althea Bloomingdale, which once grew wild on that very piece of land in the days long before 32-story hotels,” said Rubino. We couldn’t resist asking whether he has a favorite among all of those works. “I really like the Central Park piece (above), that park means so much to me,” he said. “Plus, I had the opportunity to work the Guggenheim into that one, my favorite!” Another intriguing reason to take a closer look? “There is also a hidden secret in that one.”

A mural by Rubino in the Distrikt’s cafe and a typographic treatment on the a hotel wall.

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Jeff Koons fondles an inflatable in his Manhattan studio last night, where guests including BMW President Jim O’Donnell, architect Richard Meier, and every museum director in a 50-mile radius celebrated the announcement that Koons will create the next BMW Art Car.

Last March, when a selection of BMW Art Cars were exhibited at New York’s Grand Central Station, we tried our best to convince the impeccably dressed BMW execs to spill the beans on who would follow in the footsteps of such artists as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Jenny Holzer. Despite our eyelash-batting pleas (in charmingly bungled German), they would divulge only that “plans were underway” for the next creative customization. Well, now the secret is out: Jeff Koons is creating the seventeenth BMW Art Car as the program celebrates its thirty-fifth year. The announcement was made last night at a event held at Koons’s Manhattan studio (as followers of the UnBeige Twitter feed already know). “The entire BMW Group is looking forward to this celebration of contemporary art by Jeff Koons, one of the greatest artists of our time,” said BMW president Jim O’Donnell in making the announcement. Koons, who first expressed his desire to create a BMW Art Car in 2003, said that he is honored by the commission. Stay tuned to UnBeige for details on the model Koons will be working with as well as his preliminary design (is chromium steel too on the nose?). The completed car will be unveiled later this year.

“I tried to portray speed pictorially,” said Andy Warhol of the BMW M1 he transformed into an Art Car in 1979, pictured above on exhibit in Grand Central Station’s Vanderbilt Hall last spring. “If a car is moving really quickly, all the lines and colors are blurred.” (Photos: UnBeige)

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