Hasta La Ideas

Just before the weekend, you may have caught word of one of the greatest fashion heists of all time, that every last stitch of assembled fabric had been stolen from Marc Jacobs‘ 2012 collection in a daring daylight robbery. Outlets like Gawker led with breathless headlines such as “The Entire Marc Jacobs Spring Collection is Missing!” So bad was the theft that Jacobs was forced to cancel a planned European press day, which led to speculation that this might also be an end to the company in full, given that now they don’t have any clothing left? Turns out, the whole thing, while bad, wasn’t nearly as bad as it was initially reported. Over the weekend, the story straightened out a bit, with the NY Times reporting that the items stolen were simply samples for press events, and that the company still had the originals safe and sound. The Jacobs Twitter feed also tried to clamp down on the speculation, writing “We do still have other samples thankfully. Life goes on.” So, again, bad but certainly not the end of the world. Personally, we think the whole thing got blown out of proportion because of the Jacobs PR team, who released a far too cryptic note upon the cancellation of the aforementioned European press get together, writing simply, “The Marc Jacobs PR team is sorry to inform you that our press day tomorrow in the Marc Jacobs store is cancelled, due to the theft of the spring/summer 2012 collections during its transfer from Paris.” That also likely wasn’t helped by the posting of this Tweet almost immediately thereafter:

So clearly not something the company would have asked to have happened, and there’s likely some work ahead in trying to help the police nab the thief and keep a lid on the early release of counterfeit copies, but they wound up getting a swarm of press over the past few days, both in the initial overblown reporting and then again in the backtracking.

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Apparently one of the benefits of being repeatedly ranked as the most important artists of the year is that lots of people are more than willing to lend you a hand when the government is demanding cash. Over the summer, you might recall, information had gotten out about the laws that the Chinese government alleged artist Ai Weiwei of breaking and were the reason for his three-month detainment at their hands, primarily that he’d not paid a large amount in taxes. The Associated Press reports that the artist has received a good deal of help paying that total back, to the tune of more than $800,000 in donations sent by more roughly 20,000 people thanks to an online campaign. In return for the money, members of Weiwei’s company have sent sunflower seeds from the artist’s popular exhibit last year at the Tate Modern as a thank you. However, despite all this outpouring of goodwill, the news service also reports that “a state-run newspaper criticized the outpouring and warned it could be illegal.” Given the frequently combative relationship between the government and the artist, that certainly could wind up being the case.

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The design world’s favorite podcast takes its place alongside the likes of a bracelet that spells out the alphabet in Braille, Trek’s Lime Bike, and Toms Shoes as the winner of the 2011 People’s Design Award. Design Matters, hosted by the indefatigable Debbie Millman on Design Observer, bested hundreds of other nominees—from the Ford Model T and Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower to an all-glass mobile phone and cutlery for babies—to earn the title, which was announced by the unlikely duo of White House Social Secretary Jeremy Bernard and Pharrell at last week’s National Design Awards gala.

“Design Matters harnesses the power of online radio to communicate insights about design, great design minds, and the lives of designers,” said Bill Moggridge, director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. “I’m thrilled that the public has chosen to honor it.” Millman, who recently completed a two-year term as national AIGA president, launched Design Matters as a radio show in 2005. Since then, she’s used the program to profile designers, artists, writers, and the odd Nobel Prize winner. We once made the mistake of listening to an episode featuring Brian Collins while jogging and ended up in a chuckling heap on the side of the road. Download Design Matters past and present here, and click below to watch First Lady Michelle Obama honor the National Design Award winners last month at the White House.
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It’s hard enough to craft intelligent design criticism, let alone guide others in doing so, but Alexandra Lange excels at both. The Brooklyn-based critic, journalist, and architectural historian pens pointed reviews and thought-provoking observations on the visual world for Design Observer (“Stop That: Minimalist Posters” is among our recent favorites) and on her own Tumblr (Hello Kitty spotted in Lisbon!), and teaches design criticism in SVA’s D-Crit program and at New York University. Having co-authored the 2010 must-read Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle), Lange is preparing for the release of her next book, a primer on writing and reading architectural criticism that will be published next spring by the Princeton Architectural Press. In the meantime, she’s branching out beyond the built environment with Let’s Get Critical, her new shortform blog that cherrypicks reviews and essays from the wider world of culture. What makes a piece of writing worthy of appearing on the site? “Everything on Let’s Get Critical should be well-written, its point of view clear, its language hooky,” says Lange. We reined in our verbosity and formulated seven semi-lucid questions for the veteran critic and pied piper of quality criticism.

1. What led you to create Let’s Get Critical?
I’ve been writing and teaching architecture and design criticism for about six years now, and while I love it, the topic started to feel a little confining. I love movies and TV, prefer to read novels, follow pop culture. A person cannot live by architecture alone. At the same time, I felt like most sites about culture, like most sites about design, were purely celebratory. So I wanted to create a place for intelligent writing about intelligent work, where culture was front and center rather than secondary to politics or business or sports.

2. What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
Since I got my first iPhone in January, it is usually my email. But I still get the hard copy New York Times, so then I go downstairs to breakfast and try to read at least one section (I have two small children). I read it back to front, so I usually start with Arts, Dining, or Home. I feel that I get much more out of the paper than I do the Times online or on my phone. By the end of the day I have at least flipped through every section, so I see things in Business or Sports that I would never seek out.

I also think it is important for my kids to have an idea that reading the paper is something that you do every day. If all they see is me staring at my phone all the time, they don’t know what I am doing. Last spring, when the Times was writing about Turn Off the Dark every day, my son got very interested in the news about Spiderman, which I thought was great.

3. What’s the best thing you read over the summer and why?
Not the best, but one that I still think about, and one which relates to culture and criticism: Tina Fey‘s Bossypants. Why, I thought after I read it, do you have to be as fabulously successful as Tina Fey to be listened to when you speak about the way women, and particularly mothers, are treated at and treat work? There’s a terrible silence in architecture about how it really is for women, and I think we all need to be bolder and more straightforward about talking about our children, the trade-offs we make, what we can and can’t do. If no one listens until you have a cult hit, there’s a problem.
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Tiny Dancers Kelli Anderson’s die-cut posters for Girl Walk // All Day, an album-length dance music video. (Photos courtesy Kelli Anderson)

Conveying the pleasures of idiosyncratic dancing in a static logo or poster is no warped waltz in the park, but Kelli Anderson was up to the task. The Brooklyn-based artist and designer created this jazzy logo (at right) and die-cut poster (above) for Girl Walk // All Day, Jacob Krupnick‘s Kickstarter-fueled dance music video set to All Day, the new album by mash-up musician Gregg “Girl Talk” Gillis. The exuberant trailer for the video (below), featuring freelance dancer Anne Marsen, became a web sensation earlier this year and helped Krupnick to raise nearly $25,000 to fund the project (more than five times his original Kickstarter goal). The 71-minute epic will be screened in public spaces, and at festivals, concerts, parties, and beyond, beginning in mid-October.

“The trailer’s surreal energy floored me,” Anderson tells us. “There is something that is so simultaneously disruptive and joyous about Anne’s movements—and the way she creatively uses stairs, benches, lampposts, the ebb and flow of the crowd, as her dance partners.” Asked by Krupnick to whip up some graphics for Girl Walk // All Day, Anderson seized upon Marsen’s “oversized, bizarre jacket” as a mascot. She was after something similarly offbeat for the video poster. “There was no doubt in my mind that the most compelling visual from the trailer were these odd bodily contortions that Anne made through dance—silhouettes we are not accustomed to seeing in public space,” says Anderson, who got to thinking about the work of Robert Longo. “I wanted to use body shapes, but black silhouettes just looked silly. So I decided to make cut-out shapes instead.”

Using footage of Marsen, she traced screengrabs of “Anne shapes,” created vector silhouettes, and mutilated pristine, Helvetica-lettered posters with her Craft Robo cutting machine. The punchouts are scattered across the surface of each poster and only visible at close range. “Even though the poster will be against a wall, I like the idea that the dancer-shapes are windows,” Anderson adds. “It reminds me of that feeling I got when I first watched the trailer—through dance, I was seeing the city anew.”

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