Hasta La Ideas

Limited-edition cans of Campbell’s Soup with labels derived from Warhol artwork.

Andy Warhol would surely have been one of the first people aboard the social media bandwagon, and while we’ll never know how he might have translated his “Pop art is for everyone” ethos into pixels, tweets, and status updates, a new photo app hazards a guess. Seizing the Warhol-mania moment, Campbell Soup Company has introduced “Pop Art Portrait,” a nifty tool for transforming your Facebook photos into a Warhol-style silkscreen. “A few lucky fans will receive their 15 minutes of fame by being displayed on the Campbell’s Condensed Soup Facebook cover photo,” promises the company on its “Art of Soup” site, created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Warhol’s “32 Campbell’s Soup Cans.” Once you’ve tired of the DIY portrait app, test your recall with a round of Soup Can Memory. Meanwhile, back in the non-virtual world, limited-edition cans (pictured) of Andy’s favorite–Condensed Tomato–are available at Target stores nationwide, reprising similar collaborations (between Campbell’s and The Andy Warhol Foundation) with Barneys and a Pittsburgh supermarket. In a true pop twist, the cans that sold at Barneys for $12 in 2006 during its Simon Doonan-helmed “Warholidays” campaign are now priced at just 75 cents each.

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

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Backstage at Friday’s Jason Wu show. (Photo: Mimi Ritzen Crawford)

• Jason Wu pared down his palette and toughened up the silhouettes for spring 2013. He described the collection, shown Friday at a downtown studio space, as “Helmut Newton meets Lillian Bassman.” The late photographers’ contrasting aesthetics inspired one of Wu’s most accomplished outings to date. Peekaboo sheaths, jackets, and suiting accented with leather (Newton never met a harness he didn’t like) and lace spotlighted Wu’s tailoring chops, while a floral x-ray print nodded to Bassman and offered a darker take on his signature ladylike luxe.

• Shepard Fairey will not serve jail time in the criminal contempt case involving his Barack Obama “Hope” poster. On Friday, a New York federal court judge sentenced him to two years’ probation and a $25,000 fine. The sentence also includes 300 hours of community service. “I accept the Judge’s sentence and look forward to finally putting this episode behind me,” wrote Fairey in a statement posted to his website. “My wrong-headed actions, born out of a moment of fear and embarrassment, have not only been financially and psychologically costly to myself and my family, but also helped to obscure what I was fighting for in the first place—the ability of artists everywhere to be inspired and freely create art without reprisal.”

• In case you missed it, Julie Lasky recently jumped in the design time machine and considered which of today’s objects will be revered as classics come 2050, “the sort of thing our grandchildren will drag out of our children’s attics and install in their own living rooms.” In addition to querying a dozen contemporary furniture experts (including Murray Moss and Paola Antonelli), she came up with her own list of five future icons.

• And speaking of design classics, Vitsœ is lifting the lid on its 50-year archive. Look for digitized ephemera from the furniture company, best known for its modular shelving system designed by Dieter Rams, to be posted on its new Tumblr. The site debuted today with a look back to 1971, when live performances at furniture showrooms were a growing trend, at least in Karlsruhe, Germany, where Vitsœ plied shoppers with a vinyl sampler of the Sidewalk Hot Jazz Ochestra.

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You know Google Maps and the spiffy 360-degree navigation of Street View, but what if you want to get a closer look at Antarctica or dive into Australia’s Shark Bay? For that, you’ll want to consult the search giant’s new World Wonders Project, a cultural digitization platform created in collaboration with organizations such as UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund, and CyArk. The World Wonders website features an index of 130 places (and counting), ranging from Stonehenge and Rome’s Temple of Hercules to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In addition to panoramic views of the cultural sites, there are photographs, 3-D models, and videos.
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Piscina Municipal de Montjuïc, Barcelona. ©2012 The Olympic City Project

• It’s all systems go for Gary Hustwit and Jon Pack’s The Olympic City, a photography project that looks at the legacy of the Olympic Games in former host cities around the world. Having raised $66,162 through Kickstarter and racked up major frequent flyer miles, the duo is staging a guerrilla exhibition of their work in progress to coincide with the London Games (the project is slated for completion early next year, and Paul Sahre has signed on to design the book). “The Post-Olympic City” opens this evening at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture. Can’t make it to NYC? Follow the project on its new website.

• Also debuting a fresh online home is Elle Decor, which today relaunched its website with bigger photos, faster slideshows, and a more user-friendly layout. And don’t miss Karl Lagerfeld’s list of must-haves, including his favorite sketching tools: Caran d’Ache pencils, S. T. Dupont pens, and Shu Uemura eye shadows.

• Art critic Robert Hughes died yesterday in New York. He was 74. “Bob was a complex man, confident and filled with doubt,” writes his friend and fellow Aussie Peter Carey today in the Guardian. “He possessed a thrilling sort of energy. He was wilful, ambitious, needful of his friends, then not at all. He was as generous in his support of fellow writers as he was with his cellar (which word evokes a vision of Bob carving one of his bloody legs of lamb with the gusto of a sensualist).”

• Get your Josef Albers and Anni Albers fix online, with the Albers Foundation’s debut on Fab. Among the items on offer (for a limited time!) on the designcentric flash sale sale are DIY Anni jewelry kits, a Josef typography card set that includes an Architype Albers font stencil, and “Homage to the Square” magnetic post-it notes that are sure to make you the envy of your workplace.
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New York’s New Museum, which celebrated the big 3-0 with a stunning new SANAA-designed home on the Bowery, is celebrating its 35th birthday with a fresh online HQ. Today the museum debuted its new website, designed by NYC-based Kettle to address four major new online initiatives: “to expand the conversation about contemporary art in a global context, premiere new works, share our history, and provide expanded resources on exhibitions and programs both past and present,” according to a statement released today. Refreshingly, these goals have already been translated to specific facets of the overhauled site. History comes alive in the museum’s new digital archive, a site within a site that provides access to more than 8,000 written and visual records, as well as a searchable database of over 4,000 artists, curators, and organizations associated with the museum’s history. Meanwhile, the latest and greatest is featured in First Look, a series that will showcase a new digital artwork each month. First up: Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz’s “Image Atlas” (2012). And with an eye beyond the Bowery, the site includes an interactive, international guide to over 400 independent art spaces from 96 countries and Six Degrees, “a blog about new ideas elsewhere.”

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