Hasta La Ideas

Following up on our story from Monday about designer Jason Wu‘s Michelle Obama inauguration gown being donated to the Smithsonian, which helped kick off a new First Lady-focused exhibition at the National Museum of American History, the good people at the Institution were kind enough to pass along this behind-the-scenes video of preparing the collection for the public.

The exhibition opens today. More info can be found here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

To get around Brazil’s convoluted customs procedures and expensive tax laws that govern importing and exporting art, Brazilian collective Autista and British gallery KK Outlet turned to the fax machine to transport art across oceans for a new show called “Ex-Fax Machina.”

At last Thursday’s opening Brazilian artists Ramon Martins, Eduardo Recife, Elisa Sassi and Carlos Dias made drawings and faxed them to London’s KK Outlet Gallery, while U.K.-based artists Andrew Clark, Billie Jean, Mcbess and Jimmy Turrell faxed their completed drawings to Gallery Pop in São Paulo. Flaunting Brazil’s 50% tax on any cultural item sent or received (the strict rules have prevented both NYC’s Met and MoMA from lending pieces in the past), the pieces now hang on both galleries’ walls through 26 March 2010.

To further demonstrate their point, KK Outlet installed a fax machine dedicated to receiving faxes from all over the world. Select faxes will be included in the show and they’ll accept them (at +44 (0) 207 739 0396) through the end of the show.<

Artists’ faxes sell for about $45 in England and $28 in Brazil.

Faxes by the public will also be for sale for $15, which will be donated to non-profit group Viva Rio.

A curious collection of improbable objects, “Cut & Paste” is the brainchild of the incredibly talented Kiki van Eijk. The project, currently on view at Secondome Design Gallery in Rome, marries disparate elements of material, color, finish and form as a celebration of “designing by making.”

Working with Secondome gallerist Claudia Pignatale, van Eijk labored for a year in development, producing hundreds of sketches and several models before arriving at the final collection of seven works. The objects—more totemic stories really—bear the influence of contemporaries such as Studio Job and legendary figures such as Ettore Sottsass. Somehow unmistakably Dutch in origin, “Cut & Paste” is also the result of a singular personality; van Eijk’s fondness for materials, layering and craft shows in the work.

The show newly confirms designers’ ongoing unwillingness to retreat to the safer ground that treats function and form as intrinsically connected. The recent economic crisis brought with it the possibility that design could become mired in a new era of false modesty, curtailing the wonderful gains that have been made in the past decade. “Cut & Paste” proves that an experimental, poetic and altogether personal design impetus is here to stay.

via Dezeen

At the height of the Art Deco era, the SS Normandie, an opulent transatlantic ocean liner fitted with lavish furnishings, attracted the most sophisticated passengers of the day. To commemorate the stylish ship, NYC’s South Street Seaport teamed up with Lalique—the French label responsible for much of the glamorous interior—for an exhibition opening this Thursday, 25 February 2010, and appropriately titled Decodence. Featuring original furnishings, rare passenger photographs, video footage, voyage logs, uniforms and fashion accessories, the show dives into the history of the glamorous vessel (before it was converted to a troop ship and caught fire in 1942) and we have a few exclusive images from the project to share with you.

The gem-like “floating city” arrived in New York City’s harbor in 1935 to over 100,000 spectators eager to check out the liner’s impressive structure. Pillars covered in Lalique glass stood tall in the three-hundred-foot-long dining room, a winter garden boasted exotic flora and fauna, the first theater-at-sea entertained, while an 80-foot-long swimming pool provided a place for leisure and exercise. Art Deco luminaries, including Hermés, Raymond Subes, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann and Jean Dupas, designed many of the maiden voyage’s features. Organizers even tracked down the only surviving example of Hermés’ contribution, an exceedingly chic boat-shaped clutch given to first class passengers. (Pictured below.)

Jeremy Scott created a limited edition shirt and Lalique reissued their original 1931 Cabochon glass ring. All the exhibit-related products,pictured in the gallery below, sell exclusively through the South Street Seaport Museum shop or by calling +1 212 748 8733.

After new media professor Hasan Elahi was falsely accused by a neighbor of being a 9/11 terrorist accomplice in 2002, the Bangladesh-born American underwent six months of scrutiny from the FBI. Turning the tables, he personally documented the minutiae of his everyday occurrences now on view in a project called Tracking Transience at the Santa Fe art space SITE.

Elahi photographs his meals before he eats them, toilets before he uses them, and a GPS tracker (updated several times a day) shows his precise location. Elahi’s montages made from the snapshots of the banal details of everyday life create a statement about erosion of privacy in our daily lives. The project has attracted a flurry of media attention from CBS News to Wired.

”I’ve decded that if the government wants to monitor me that’s fine. But I could do a much better job monitoring myself than anyone else.”

Part of a larger five-person show, husband-and-wife team McCallum & Tarry, Kaari Upson and Terry Allen will also show. The show runs through 9 May 2010 at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico.