Hasta La Ideas

Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled A-E” (1975)

Sure, it’s only July, but we’re already predicting this year’s hottest Halloween costume: Cindy Sherman. The chameleon-like artist’s recent Museum of Modern Art retrospective apparently attracted a bold impersonator who chatted up visitors in the guise—well, a guise—of Sherman. The bold soul chanced upon This American Life host Ira Glass, who was checking out the show with his friend Etgar Keret, the Israeli writer and filmmaker (whose own compact narratives, you may recall, inspired that wee Warsaw house designed by Jakub Szczesny). Simultaneously flummoxed and delighted by the encounter, Glass and Keret told the story at the top of a recent This American Life broadcast on the topic “Switcheroo.”

“If I had to describe her, I’d say that she looked like she was about 55 or 60, wire rim glasses, gray hair,” says Glass of the woman who approached them at the exhibit and introduced herself as Sherman. “Looking at her, thinking that she might be Cindy Sherman, I thought if you were to try to put on a costume to exactly blend in with the crowd at the Museum of Modern Art, this is the costume.” They chatted with her, but eventually she changed her story and insisted that she was not the artist after all. The plot thickens. “Later I thought to myself that if I would pretend to be Cindy Sherman, the last thing I would do would be to tell people I’m not Cindy Sherman,” says Keret. “I would be too embarrassed to say in the end I’m not Cindy Sherman. So I kind of thought in the end, like after she had left, that she probably was Cindy Sherman.”
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“Richard Saul Wurman, who invented the TED conference, in 1984, lives in Newport, Rhode Island, in a gated Gilded Age mansion made to look like an eighteenth-century country home. When I arrived one day, in midwinter, he showed me into his study, which was painted forest-green and packed with baubles: Teddy bears beneath glass bells, sneakers speckled with paint (a gift from the artist Dale Chihuly), a large bowl filled with multicolored baseballs and globe ornaments, three bent spoons, and an action figure in his own image, propped up and ready to fight. Not long after I’d sat down, he stood—’Come with me’—and led me to an adjoining cottage, where the walls were hung with potraits and magazine profiles of Wurman, elegantly laminated.

To spend time with Wurman, a keen, fast-talking seventy-seven-year-old who has trained as an architect, is to enter a world whose careful design, childlike restlessness, and narrative authority feels—for want of a better term—TED-like. He designed much of the furniture on in his house; the grounds are landscaped to his specifications. Wurman’s attention span operates on TED-like rhythms, with frequent scenery changes and breaks, and although an assistant screens his calls, I never saw him turn one down….If you ask him why, given all the things a wealthy and well-connected man could be doing, he has spent four decades organizing conferences, he will look at you as if you asked him why he’s wearing pants. ‘I’m not an athlete, I’m not an entertainer, and I’m not smart,’ he says. ‘I have no skills, I’m abrasive, I can’t type. What would you like me to do?’”

–Nathan Heller, in his article about TED Talks in the July 9 & 16 issue of The New Yorker

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(Courtesy Vanity Fair)

• Vanity Fair has restored Susan White (pictured) to her former position as photography director. She replaces Judith Puckett-Rinella, who arrived in December from T: The New York Times Style Magazine. White worked at Vanity Fair from 1988 until last year, when she left to become the executive director of editorial at Trunk Archive. “The depth and breadth of Susan’s knowledge, both of Vanity Fair and of the world of photography, are invaluable,” said editor Graydon Carter. “We’re so pleased she’s coming back to the magazine, not only for what she brings as a professional but also as a friend.”

• Their shared currency may be on shaky ground, but that hasn’t stopped major news agencies from ten European countries coming together to create EuroPhoto, an online archive of historic photojournalism. Funded by the European Union’s Information and Communication Technology Policy Support Programme, the project aims to digitize 150,000 historical pictures from the agencies’ archives and make them available (and fully searchable) online along with hundreds of thousands of their historical pictures that are already digitalized and captioned. Participating agencies include EFE (Spain), DPA (Germany), and ANSA (Italy). Bookmark it now.

• And today in Kodak bankruptcy news, the embattled company has received the greenlight to auction its 1,100 digital capture and Kodak Imaging Systems and Services patent portfolios. Both Apple and FlashPoint had contested the sale on the grounds that they had ownership interests in a small number of the patents involved. The Bankruptcy Court judge looked up from his iPhone and said, “Nope, this is all squandered Kodak IP. Go ahead and put ‘em up on eBay” (or something to that effect).

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Coup de cœur pour l’artiste Darragh Casey qui a réalisé une série de clichés appelée « Shelving the Body » se focalisant sur la place des étagères dans notre quotidien et dans nos personnalités. L’idée, simple et très bien conçue, donne des clichés et des situations réussies à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.

Sandwiched between Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics comes yet another reason to run amok in the streets of London: Mick and the gang are fifty. July 12 will mark five decades since a group of youngsters who called themselves The Rollin’ Stones played their first gig (at London’s Marquee), and the band tapped Shepard Fairey to create a logo to celebrate the big 5-0. The designer, a die-hard Stones fan who previously worked with Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart on SuperHeavy, says that he felt “overwhelmed” by the commission. “One of the first things I asked Mick was ‘don’t you think the tongue has to be included?.’ He responded ‘Yeah, I guess it ought to be.’ Case closed,” explains Fairey in a statement posted yesterday to his website. “I was very humbled and honored to be asked to work on the 50th anniversary logo, so my objective was to service and showcase the Stones’ legacy rather than try to make my contribution dominant.” Starting with John Pasche’s 1971 lips-and-tongue logo—”the most iconic, potent, and enduring logo in rock ‘n’ roll history,” according to Fairey—he played with ways to creatively and memorably integrate the number 50. Noted Fairey, “I think the solution speaks for itself in celebrating the Stones’ trademark icon and historical anniversary.”

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