By now, we all know that the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign was a great leap forward for the aesthetics of US election campaign, so it should come as no surprise that the director of the Obama campaign, Scott Thomas, decided to publish a book about the innovative Obama design brand and its impact on American pop and design cultures. The resulting book, titled Designing Obama: A Chronicle of Art & Design from the 2008 Presidential Campaign, is an attractive product that includes a short foreward by Pentagram partner Michael Bierut and an introduction by graphic design guru Steven Heller, who cleverly calls the brand “O Design.”
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The films I have chosen are not only incredible films, but also they are films I have loved for a very long time or they are films that I have grown to love after multiple viewings. A couple of them are stylish and cool, while others are extremely slow, difficult, and even tedious at times. However, they are all films that make the viewer think, and they are either films that comment upon film as an art form or are at the very least are aware of themselves as films. Hopefully people find the same joy in my recommendations as I do.
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Co-founded by Carla Repice and Geoff Cunningham in 2007, the Office of Blame Accountability (OBA) is, according to the pair, “not an office … it’s just life.” They have a new book, and they talked to Hyperallergic about their “Blame” project and how it continues to evolve.
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Last June, artist Steve Mumford visited the National Gallery in Kabul to explore the artistic heritage of the war-torn nation. He has written a short account of his visit — along with a few dozen photographs of what he saw — for Artnet.
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Prague itself is like a museum, where contemporary architectural gems are situated next to old landmarks. It’s an embarrassment of riches. One day we walked through Prague’s 10th century castle district, then went down the hill a couple of blocks to find a Frank Gehry-designed office complex, and continued throughout the city to see Baroque, Gothic, Art Nouveau, and Cubist buildings. But if you had to visit just one Prague museum, it would have to be the Veletrzni Palac (Fair Trade Palace), a truly massive collection of Czech and European work originally built in 1925 for trade fairs.
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Over at MoMA, there are two big survey shows that focus on a single theme throughout the history of photography from the heyday of the daguerreotype through to the present. The first, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, is an “installation that comprises more than 200 works by approximately 120 artists.” The second is an examination of photography’s relationship to sculpture titled The Original Copy: The Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, that “brings together over 300 photographs, magazines, and journals, by more than 100 artists” … A good exhibition is not a numbers game. And in Pictures by Women, which is a little diffuse, it shows.
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Everything that matters happens in an office these days. To survive in today’s world, one can’t help but burn with curiosity about why some rise to the top while others gets stuck at the bottom box of the organizational chart. The Office, Mad Men or The Devil Wears Prada all hit this nerve with verve. But what’s been missing for me is that spunkier imagery and wilder narrative that video art can get away with. Cao Fei fills this void in spades with her 2002 video “Rabid Dogs” on view till Sunday at the Asia Society.
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I’m not sure Lateralism, a small show curated by artist Matt Wycoff bares out by the premise put forth in the press release, which promised to assess “a slice of the ever-shifting boundaries and implications of post minimal painting and sculptural installation,” but the exhibition at The Hogar Collection is definitely a wonderful installation of six works by four artists that look great together.
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Video games appear to be making oddly pervasive cameos across fields as varied as architecture, art, cinema, criticism, and now theater. Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage is exactly that, a series of five plays that Jeff Lewonczyk wrote and Gyda Arber directed at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg through July 25.
The premise of Theater of the Arcade is to take the characters from an iconic video game — let’s say “Frogger” — and insert those characters into a world that operates according to the logic and stage vernacular of an equally iconic 20th century dramatist — let’s say Samuel Beckett à la Godot …
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We perceive architecture, Walter Benjamin thought, in two ways: optical and tactile. There’s a progression over time in our optical perception of something that develops from looking at something into contemplating it. Black scratches to letters to a sign to an idea. But Benjamin didn’t think there was a tactile analog to contemplation when it came to perceiving something through touch.
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Lyra
Stephanie Gokhman
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