Hasta La Ideas

“It’s like going to a Broadway stage crew, who are very talented at what they’re doing, and saying, ‘Can you help us create the next summer movie blockbuster?’ I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the way design works.

It’s obvious it wasn’t going to work. It’s only if you’re under the spell of this very traditional print-centric bias that you would ever think that this would work. I don’t know who the executive was that said this is the way we’re going to approach it, but this is not a decision that I would put on my résumé.”

-Design mind and former NYTimes.com design director Khoi Vinh on Condé Nast’s print-centric, ‘magazine replica’ approach to the tablet—which made existing art and production staffers from the print side responsible for making iPad layouts on Adobe’s platform—in a story by Nitasha Tiku in The New York Observer

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We don’t often read Design Week, as it’s rightly-so a very British magazine at times (our guess it that it’s because their focus is on British design and advertising news). When we decided to check in today on its site, we were surprised to read a note from its editor, Lynda Relph-Knight, entitled “It’s goodbye from Design Week in print, but we’ll still have a digital presence.” So we’re a bit late to the game, but the news is that, as that post’s title explains, after 25 years, the “print version is no more” as of the first of this month. Further, after 22 years of employment, Relph-Knight has also left her position. However, Design Week intends to continue on, now entirely web-based. Here’s a bit from the tail end of Relph-Knight’s farewell letter:

There are too many highlights for me to list here, but the privilege of meeting so many great creative people has been awesome. Linking with designers across the globe, particularly in South Africa, has made the past 20 years special for me personally and professionally. And the eternal optimism of design has rubbed off. Thank you all for your support over the years and for the great work you continue to produce. Long may that continue.

I hand over now to my colleagues Angus Montgomery, Tom Banks and Emily Gosling who will take Design Week into its next phase. They are amply qualified for the task. I wish them well.

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Put on your dancing shoes and pick up your tablet device, because 2wice has released its first iPad app. The visual and performing arts journal tapped longtime collaborator Abbott Miller of Pentagram to design “Merce Cunningham Event,” a tribute to the late choreographer as the dance company he founded prepares for its final performances. Available as a free download from the iTunes Store, the app highlights 2wice’s collaborations with Cunningham, who died in 2009 at the age of 90. Users can scoll horizontally through a series of 10 “Events”—Cunningham’s term for his way of restaging aspects of his choreography—that come alive through live-action video, interviews, and historic dance photography. Readers of 2twice will recognize performances such as “How to Pass, Kick, Fall” and “Green World,” for which photographer Katherine Wolkoff captured members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company exploring the gilded-age jungles of Vizcaya in Miami. Holding out for the iPad 3 before you take the tablet plunge? Leap gracefully over to 2twice’s new website. Launched Monday, it contains an archive of issues from the magazine’s entire run.

Got an app we should know about? Drop us a line at unbeige@mediabistro.com

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There’s been a major changing of the guard at Art Journal and we’re pleased as punch that their new leader works just down the street from this writer, here in Chicago. This week, the quarterly-published “forum for scholarship and visual exploration in the visual arts” has named Lane Relyea as its new editor-in-chief beginning in July of 2012, replacing current editor Katy Siegel of Hunter College, whose three-year term will be expiring. Relyea is an associate professor in the Art Theory & Practice department at Northwestern and has published in magazines such as Artforum and Frieze and MIT Press will soon be releasing his first book (which can presumably be read in an earlier form, here). Along with Relyea taking over next year, Art Journal has signed on a number of new board members:

Joining the Art Journal Editorial Board for four-year terms are Doryun Chong, associate curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Saloni Mathur, associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Chong is a contributing editor at Art Asia Pacific and worked as associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 2003 to 2009. His recent exhibitions include Bruce Nauman: Days (2010) and Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider (2009–10). Mathur, a specialist in the art of South Asia, wrote India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Her recently compiled volume, The Migrant’s Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

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Even with having finally hooked up the user account thingie so we could download issues on our iPad after our wife recycles the print edition, this writer is still hopelessly behind in his reading of the New Yorker. However, we’ve recently learned that a) we’re not so far behind as to make it absurd and b) if there was a feature profile about us in an issue, we’d likely make the time to read it right away. This doesn’t seem to be the case with forensic art expert Peter Paul Biro, who has filed a $2 million suit against Conde Nast‘s owners and writer David Grann, claiming defamation after a profile appeared about him in the New Yorker in July of last year. Okay, okay, lawsuits must take a while to put together, so maybe that’s why it’s taken a full year to file, but let’s move on, shall we? Adweek reports that Biro’s suit claims that Grann’s piece “paints a portrait of a plaintiff which has no basis in reality, and which has been highly damaging to his reputation.” Fair enough, as we read the piece way back when and it certainly puts both Biro’s past and his methods into sharp question. However, ArtInfo chimes in that Biro “might be in for an uphill battle” considering that several of the sources used in Grann’s article to help paint him in such a fashion were anonymous, and worse for him still, no longer living. So getting proof that he was defamed will perhaps mean finding ways around journalistic privilege and the great beyond. To read up on the whole matter and make up your own mind, you can read some great highlights from the Courthouse News Service about the filing. Here’s but a slight portion of the claims:

Biro adds: “Defendant Grann obtained plaintiff’s consent to a series of interviews, by misleading him about defendant Grann’s true intentions in writing the article, and he distorted the substance of those interviews to serve a predetermind agenda.”

Biro claims that Grann’s article “ignores the many highly celebrated and iconic masterpieces of art which plaintiff has been privileged to work with, including Edvard Münch’s ‘Scream’, works by Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet’s ‘Impression, soleil levant‘, and many works by J.M.W. Turner.

And here’s the official word from the New Yorker‘s David Remnick:

“David Grann’s reporting on this story and everything else he does is painstaking in both its attention to the facts and tone. We stand with David Grann and behind the story and believe the suit has no merit.”

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