Behaving Properly at a Conceptual Modern Art Show

Leave your smiles at the door.

You can exchange them for our patented intellectually furrowed brows.

Speak like you are reading from a book that is meant to be read and never spoken aloud, with complex sentence structure that bends the limits of grammar to its furthest contortions.

Pause for emphasis. Pontificate about the human condition. Tell us the role of art in society. Don’t call it art. Call it a body of work. If you have a beard, your fingers should be grazing against it constantly. (It makes even asinine comments seem profound.) Scowl, squint, and generally pander in over self awareness in the floorspace of unevenly skewed camera per mug ratio.

For tonight, everything is art; and by association, everyone has been granted the status of model. Saunter around. Fix your ascot. Have an ascot. Have a hat that doesn’t look functional and that demands of you minimal head movement to stay atop your head.

If you must laugh, do so in a way that sounds more like a cough than something conveying exuberance. There is no joy in art, or modeling. Upturn your nose at the hors devours that come by on platinum trays.

Ask questions. Too many of them.

Reduce yourself to the most finicky version of yourself possible. Turn into that gallery/art space dweller that you despise. Of course your graphic T matches that suit jacket. The quirky glasses, the 3D goggles of this scene. The frames betraying the recesses of your personality, one you share with two thirds of this room. Don’t react when introduced. Look inconvenienced. Anyone who is not you is to be approached as an utter burden. When met with a general ambivalence to your elevated status, throw in a “and what have you done?” Always a sure fire way of separating the chaff from the high snobriety wheat.

Touch the surface of the art. Especially when instructed not to.

Be on the verge of buying three ‘pieces.’ One for yourself, and the most outlandish/grotesque as joke gifts. Set yourself up as the kind of person that gives 7,000 dollar joke gifts. You’ll find your immediate circle of conversation will swell instantly with such positioning.

When you are bored, do not retreat to the walls at the edge of the space, but rather take your glassy eyed boredom to the center of the room where you cast wanton and distant glances through the rows of models looking to decode the mystique behind your hipster frames. Avoid speaking of current events, the weather or anything that the common man could contribute to in conversation.

Speak in verse. Speak in obtuse metaphors that lead to rhetorically pregnant pauses. If they can’t understand your tangents, there is a chance you seem smarter than them. Intimidate through confusion and circular logic, and random associations.

The real art of this art show is the art of appearing interesting in strategically timed 30 second micro conversations.

Always have the last word. Never say goodbye. Be unimpressed with artists. Don’t blink at celebrity or any other name drop attempts. When you need to leave, just before your act grows stale, find a reason to act miffed about something. Maybe it is the immediate company, maybe it’s the food or drinks. Maybe it is that ‘nobody showed up to this thing.’

Scowl. Pout for the camera. (all of them)

Then get the hell out.

Logo Design: New York Connection

I really like this logo.

I like how the letters are hand done, but still look like they were perfectly designed shapes, consciously placed within the outline of the apple. It isn’t just haphazard scrawling. It is sophisticated hand penned design.

Look at the way the bottom right stem of the K dovetails and creates a uniform width line of negative space against the extended serif of the N below it. Beautiful.

Look at variation of line widths, the kind of variation you get with a calligraphic pen. You can’t even get this with a sharpie, as much as I love sharpies. These lines are interesting to look at, where ever you choose to look.

I love the shape and flow of the wavy double underline at the bottom. And love the artist’s decision to break the lines into a longer set of two and a shorter set of two. It’s those kind of unexpected decisions that make this really stand out for me.

How cool is the loop at the beginning of that first T?!

And I like the rather clunkily shaped, but well placed, chunk of black space beneath it. Delicious!

The back to back N’s in the bottom word have subtle variation to prove their craftsmanship and show that they are not the generic mass offering of a type foundry. No, these lines come from a specific place.

I love this logo as an emblem for this particular exhibition. It’s an exhibition that features wildly colorful works of street artists, all around the theme of New York. But this logo face, doesn’t try to be the literal cover for this book. It exists in an Apple-like minimalism, black and white, confident and bold. Serving as an emblem or shield for the show, while not trying to compete for attention with the works at all.

Tokyo Design

It’s impossible to narrow the essence of Tokyo design down to a single style. It’s a remix culture, that borrows icons and motifs from abroad and spins them in their own way. Usually these remixes are very clean and iconic, pattern oriented, making them ideal for the jump from pure design into wearable fashion.

But the trend of design I’m liking, is a more casual and less fashion ready style. One that mainly exists in the multitude of art mags you can find at the local shops and galleries. It feels to me like ‘photoshop enabled photocopy art.’ And I enjoy seeing that style in a printed and bound volume.

It’s not an attempt at photorealism. It’s a kind of clunky surrealism, that goes for more of a mood than trying to augment reality. It feels very random, but in a visually striking way. Almost like the freedom of doodling in a sketchbook, but with fully realized images.

In Tokyo, there is also a solid mastery of a kind of perfect-imperfect typesetting. Letterforms that look so awkwardly placed, that you soon realize they could not be more awkwardly placed, therefore giving it a certain puzzle solving, eye-pleasing reward. Very ordinary fonts used in a way that makes them alarmingly ordinary. A rebranding of the taken for granted.

If Van Gogh was inspired by classic Japanese paintings, maybe the modern designer can be similarly influenced by the graphic aesthetic of Tokyo today..

Anyway, I’m aiming to post more bits of Tokyo design inspiration on here.