Hasta La Ideas

Remember when you told someone who isn’t related to the design industry either that you were going to see Helvetica or you recommended that they see it? Maybe this isn’t entirely universal, but we remember some of the reactions we received after following up by explaining what the documentary was about (this writer overheard his wife on the phone saying, “He’s going to see some movie about a font. Yeah, I don’t understand either.”) So keep that typography focus, but take that little glimmer of discomfort over the forced self-realization that you’re really kind of a nerd, and amplify it by a dozen. That’s what we felt while watching Neutra Face, the type-focused parody of a Lady GaGa song that’s currently making the rounds. You’ll laugh, but it’ll probably be an uncomfortable laugh, given that we’re pretty sure designers aren’t built for this sort of thing:

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Is it nudity week here at UnBeige? Sure, why not. We talked about Kim Cattrall getting naked to save art yesterday. And there was Terry Richardson‘s Pirelli calendar. And now here’s a third. The AP is reporting that two artists who staged a nude photography session at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a museum full of nude painting and sculptures, have been let off the hook by a New York City judge. Here’s how they pulled it off (semi-pun only semi-intended):

Defense lawyer Thomas J. Hillgardner says [model Kathleen “K.C.” Neill] did nothing indecent while posing in an institution full of depictions of nudes. He says she was making art and he noted court rulings saying public nakedness isn’t necessarily lewd.

Prosecutors say they aren’t sure they could prove the charges beyond reasonable doubt.

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Let’s stay in the UK for a moment longer as we add another entry into our collection of truly wonderful press releases. This one can’t top our favorite of all time, but it’s certainly staked it’s claim near the top. The title goes “UK Van Drivers Turn to Designer Underwear,” and it’s exactly what you think it’s about. Apparently there was a survey done among commercial van drivers (movers, plumbers, florists, etc.) and it was found that 71% of them “had invested in at least one pair of design underpants.” So this was clearly a press release from either a store that sells designer undergarments or maybe an undergarment manufacturer hoping to get into the lucrative van driver market? Nope, it’s from Swinton, a British insurance company. Beyond their connection to insuring vans, the designer underwear bit really has nothing to do with them. So we assume their PR firm, SKV Communications, either a) found they had nothing new to say about van insurance and just went with something goofy, b) are trying to make press releases readable and interesting, or c) desperately want off this account. Whatever the case, they should be applauded, because now we all know a fact about van drivers that we didn’t know we wanted to know (we still don’t) and Yves Behar has a new market to go after.

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To end this writer’s day on a fun and funny note, we turn to a weird batch of strange found by way of Transracial. It’s the blog Damien Hirst: You Got to Love Art! which is run by someone named Damien Hirst from the central European country of Slovenia. On the blog, it highlights new work by the artist with names like “The Tunnel of Love Imagined by a Stunning Supermodel Just Before She Leaped From Her Swank Downtown Apartment to Her Death in an Apparent Suicide,” which is an empty black film canister, and “A Not Too Absurdly Impossible Possibility of Imagining Life as the Absence of Life” which consists of three pieces of doll clothing. What’s most surprising is that each piece listed on the site is available for just £1. There’s also Nothingthing.com, wherein Damien Hirst explains his work:

I am Damien Hirst. I am an unknown artist from Slovenia. I am doing art by doing art. My art glorifies the futileness of being an artist. It’s a parody of the belief in nothing. My purpose is to demystify everything that was mystified in the name of art. Art is a religion and I am an atheist. My goal is the appropriation of art as an intellectual interpretation to reverse the process of applying artistic value to objects and concepts. I am not just doing art. I am doing art by doing art. Which means that I am basically undoing art. I am Damien Hirst and I am artistic.

If art can be a urinal, a dead animal cut in half or even human shit then everything opposite to that has to be art as well.

We’re not sure who is behind all of this (maybe these guys?), but it’s a really funny, impressive batch of work. So much so that even Hirst himself, assuming it isn’t really him to begin with, might enjoy and appreciate it.

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While it’s difficult to find a photo of the late Robert Rasuchenberg without a puckish grin, Jasper Johns tends to confront cameras with an expression of steely bemusement that stops just short of a glower. We like to think of it as encaustic personified. But don’t mistake Johns’s intensity for humorlessness, notes James Rosenquist in his memoir, Painting Below Zero, due out in October from Knopf. The New York Post‘s Page Six yesterday offered this excerpt from the book in which Rosenquist recounts a delightful Johnsian joke.

While [Johns] was working on a project with Edward Albee, he told me this joke using his high ecclesiastical voice. [He goes]: ‘This turtle was walking along and it was robbed by two snails. The turtle called the police, and when they asked him [what happened], the turtle said, ‘Well I don’t know, everything happened too fast.’ He’s an eccentric.

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