Tuesday, June 30, 2009

David Fincher to Direct The Facebook Movie?


"Golden Globe nominated screenwriter/producer Aaron Sorkin had joined Facebook and announced that he was writing a Facebook movie for mega-producer Scott Rudin. Today Variety offers an unbelievable follow-up, filmmaker David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en, Benjamin Button) is in “advanced talks” with Columbia Pictures to direct the film, which has been titled The Social Network."

The movie is going to be based on a book called "The Accidental Billionaire: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal" by Ben Mezrich

Nooka x UNDRCRWN ZENV Watch



Nooka’s latest timepiece collaboration is with basketball focused brand UNDRCRWN. The watch utilizes the popular ZENV display style and features a black aluminum face, atop a fun and colorful polyurethane band. The Nooka x UNDRCRWN ZENV Watch was produced in a limited run of 200 pieces and sells for $275 USD. Available at the end of June through www.nooka.com/buy.

Node Outlet.





With increasing number of electronic devices intruding apartments as well as offices, we require lots of sockets to plug-in the gadgets, which often mars the decor of the modern residential and work spaces with the web of wires and extension cord.

Via: designblog

WOODEN iPOD MINI






A similar-natured Australian, Josh, chose to redeem his iPod mini using nothing more than wood and screws. The choice of wood, though, was special as Josh chose Australian red cedar for the exterior casing. The click wheel was recast in camphorwood laurel. The other major constituents were brass plates and screws, and Josh despised glue lest for the wheel that was double-taped on the original.

Via: gizmowatch

Wonderland


The first images from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland were released.

USA Today has a special feature with production art stills, and Yahoo Movies features the main character stills.

Sebastian Wiernick


Forwarding thinking Interior Design from Paris based Sebastian Wiernick’s on-site-00 programmatic furniture ... his residency project “This is the end” brings together form, function and unique creativity to public seating.

via: cpluv.

Malcolm Sutherland


Trailer of the gorgeous new short by Malcolm Sutherland.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Lyle Owerko's Boombox GelaSkins



Photographer Lyle Owerko's Boombox series for GelaSkins is the latest (and one of our favorite) graphic tributes to the giant stereos that ruled the '80s.

His take on the trend draws on his personal collection of 42 ghetto blasters, which he's been amassing for their ostentatious, industrial look since the mid-'90s. The result is a range of Owerko's reverent images printed on GelaSkin's removable adhesives that feature scratch and UV-resistant coating to keep iPhones, laptops and a wide variety of other devices intact while looking sharp.

While Owerko's own nostalgia for the portable stereos stems from memories of heavy metal, punk and ska, his video with Fab Five Freddy for NPR Music explores the history of boomboxes to explain the stereo's affect on all genres—it's well worth a watch.

Known for being one of the first photographers on the scene at the World Trade Center on 9/11, Owerko's images from that day are the subject of the book, "And No Bird Sang." He was also recently named a finalist for the Hasselblad Masters award for his series of Samburu photos.

Prices for the GelaSkins start at around $15 and are available on their website.

via: coolhunting.

Cy Twombly Retrospective ‘Sensations of the Moment’ at Museum Moderner Kunst


A retrospective of Cy Twombly’s work is currently showing, for the first time in Austria, at Museum Moderner Kunst [MUMOK]. On view until October 11, the exhibition includes 200 pieces, ranging in medium from photography to painting, sculpture to drawing, as well as graphic works. The exhibition, curated by Achim Hochdorfer, features works drawn mostly from private holdings.

via: artobserved.

This Summer, Some Galleries Are Sweating

IT’S hard to believe that only nine months ago art dealers everywhere were still dreaming up plans for vast multinational expansions. Since September, however, the contemporary art market has careened from boom to bust. Nowhere has that reversal of fortune been more sharply felt than in New York, whose galleries represent the full spectrum of the art world’s pecking order.

Some two dozen galleries here have folded. The most notable among them — Clementine, Guild & Greyshkul, Roebling Hall and Rivington Arms — are midsize galleries, where the reputations of up-and-coming artists first gain traction.

Aside from slashing prices or deepening discounts, art dealers across the city have been coping not just by laying off employees but by dropping artists with poor sales records, creating partnerships with other galleries and reaching out in desperation to tried-and-true customers, many of whom were priced out of the market during its peak. Still, with the exception of several blue-chip galleries who show well-known artists, foot traffic in Chelsea and other gallery precincts has thinned markedly where crowds jostled just a year ago.

Now, on the heels of the annual Art Basel fair in Switzerland, dealers are bracing for the notoriously quiet summer months. “Art galleries typically bring in very little revenue from mid-June to October,” said Josh Baer, founder of the art industry newsletter Baer Faxt, “which is already pretty tough on the cash flow. But when business is off 50 to 80 percent, one wonders how many galleries will reopen in September.”

The most recent casualty, the Charles Cowles Gallery, set to close before the end of the month, will leave a gaping storefront on West 24th Street, the heart of the Chelsea gallery district. After 30 years of selling art, Mr. Cowles said in a recent interview, he was ready to retire. But the economic slide left little room for hesitation. “It’s shocking how bad business has been,” he said. During the big New York auctions last month, he said, “I didn’t see a single major collector in the gallery.”

Also absent in Manhattan these days are the young Wall Street executives who in flusher times routinely dropped the occasional $10,000 on an artwork. Now it’s the wealthiest collectors who are calling the shots. And while they continue to buy, albeit more slowly, they’ve been taking far fewer risks, favoring bigger galleries, like Gagosian and David Zwirner, whose menu of services ranges from discreet backroom sales to name-brand artists with a long history of museum shows and works in prestigious collections.

“What’s going on with the collectors,” said Roland Augustine, co-owner of the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea and president of the Art Dealers Association of America, “is that there’s far more selectivity in the buying at all levels.”

The tougher times have led many dealers to cancel expensive installations and fat, splashy catalogs, keep exhibits running longer, ask artists to cover their own production costs and drastically limit their participation in art fairs, once considered a boon to business. Although the downturn affects everybody, some younger dealers have responded by promoting low-priced artworks and forging collaborative relationships with fellow dealers.

At Schroeder Romero on West 27th Street, for example, Sara Jo Romero said that Compound Editions, a joint venture founded last fall with the neighboring Winkleman Gallery, offers artworks produced in multiples in the $100 to $300 price range. “That’s been a big success for us,” Ms. Romero said. “Also we don’t have any employees, and our space is off the beaten track,” she added, which helps to minimize her gallery’s costs.

Tracy Williams, whose gallery is in the West Village, is also focusing on lower-priced art. Seeing her bottom line plummet in December, Ms. Williams said, she asked a consultant to take a look at her books. After being told, “This is what you did last year, this is what you’re going to do next year, this where you have to cut back,” she said, she let go one of two full-time employees.

She asked her artists to begin covering their own production costs. Then she asked three young curators to recommend emerging artists whose work she could sell — ideally — for less than $2,000. Her goal, she said, was “to show inexpensive work by younger artists” that would sell and draw attention to the gallery. (The exhibition, “Tactical Support: Curator’s Choice,” is open through July 31.)

Cutbacks and bargains on the home front have been accompanied by a vastly reduced presence at foreign art fairs for many dealers.

Referring to her 18-square-foot booth at Art Basel, Ms. Williams said, “It’s $40,000 before anything’s even hanging on the walls.” On top of standard expenses like airplane tickets, hotel rooms and meals for four or five days, “you have to pay for all of the light bulbs,” she said. “You pay for every outlet. And that’s before you even think about framing and transporting the art, or the building of an extra partition.”

Ms. Williams said she has eliminated all plans to attend art fairs for the remainder of this year.

Brent Sikkema, co-owner of the Sikkema Jenkins gallery in Chelsea, said bidding farewell to art fairs has been easy. He participated in five fairs last year. “We’ll never do that again,” he said.

“On the positive side,” he added, “art fairs have contributed enormously to the globalization of art. But on the negative side they spawned a culture of shoppers,” typically newcomers who rarely visit galleries.

“I’ve said for years, the shoppers will be the first to head for the hills when the market softens,” he said. “That has absolutely been the case.”

If business is far quieter than a year ago, Mr. Augustine, for one, said he takes solace in collectors’ renewed focus on gallery programming, as opposed to faddish speculative buying.

In March, he said, Luhring Augustine mounted the first solo show of the British artist David Musgrave, whose meditative monochromatic drawings and sculptures were priced from $5,000 to $18,000. Everything sold, according to Mr. Augustine: “Did we make a huge whopping profit or cover our expenses for years to come? No, we did not. But we created a market.”

More recently, he added, the gallery’s eighth show of work by Albert Oehlen sold a single picture for a substantial sum, $375,000, suggesting to Mr. Augustine that “it’s not a complete desert out there.”

Desert or not Mr. Zwirner appears to have found an oasis at the high end of the market. Yes, he’s working six-day weeks, he said in a recent interview. Yes, he has to negotiate arduously to find the perfect collector for very choice pieces of art. But after a dry period of about nine months, he said, “collectors have been stepping back in, both as buyers and sellers.”

“The last auction cycle ended the slide,” he said. “It really felt for me as if a floor were appearing under our prices.”

Mr. Zwirner attributed this shift, in part, to clients who are frantically raising cash and negotiating deals privately. “I don’t think anybody was bringing any significant work to the auctions,” he said. “In this, galleries are really strengthened right now.”

That said, he added: “Collectors are very price conscious. And it is a process.”

In this economy, “you need two strong legs to stand on,” he said. “You need a secondary market with a proven track record that’s really focused.” (Mr. Zwirner’s secondary sales cater mostly to Minimalist and Expressionist tastes.) “And you need artists accepted by the canon of art history.”

“If you can’t define yourself right now,” he said, “you’re going to get swallowed up, because the ones who do define themselves are going to take all of the business.”

One could argue that the Chelsea dealer Zach Feuer has defined himself through the painter Dana Schutz, whose work continues to woo institutions and collectors.

But for dealers representing artists who have yet to achieve big success, the recession has swung like a wrecking ball. And as Mr. Baer noted, dealers once raking in $100 million in sales whose business is now down 75 percent are still in far better shape than those once making $1 million, who are now down to $200,000. With half of a dealer’s profits typically going to the artist, he said, “that doesn’t give much room to run a business.”

As if to prove Mr. Baer’s point, on a recent Saturday at the Bellwether Gallery in Chelsea the owner, Becky Smith, stared at the screen of a laptop, her aging Chihuahua mix splayed at her feet. With the bulk of her income generated by five major collectors whose purchases have all but dried up in recent months, Ms. Smith said her current revenues are a mere 20 percent of what they were at the height of the market. She’s laid off all of her employees. She’s renegotiated her rent.

“I’ve gone at my overhead with a machete,” she said. Referring to other galleries she considers peers that have already closed, she said, with a wan smile, “I’m kind of in the perfect sweet spot of misery.

“I might not be open at the end of the summer,” she acknowledged, “and it makes me mad.”

“I bet a lot of great galleries won’t be opening in the fall,” she added, noting that without them a whole generation of voices would be silenced. On Wednesday, she announced that she would be closing her gallery at the end of June.

Lisa Spellman, the owner of 303 Gallery, who will be consolidating her headquarters above a vast second space she opened last fall in the center of Chelsea, said: “What drives me crazy are these clichés that say only the very, very best survive. I don’t believe that recessions are Darwinian systems.”

via: nytimes.

Banksy: behind the scenes




Behind the scenes from Banksy's Bristol exhibition.

via: twbe.

Xavier Veilhan


Situated from the Place d'Armes to Le Notres formal gardens, artist Xavier Veilhan is preparing for the presentation of his work at the Chateau de Versailles starting September 13th. Known for his grand scale, and his investigation of the 'possibility of representation' the French artist is once again sure to create an exciting statement. Not only will the new works complement the history of the grand palace, but the installation will force audiences to rethink the traditional east/west planning of the estate. This follow-up exhibition to Jeff Koons in 2008 is one not to be missed!

via: artco.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Fashion in the year 2000.



1930s prediction on what fashion would look like in the year 2000.

Futuristic movie timeline


Created by Dan Meth.

Paper Foldable Typewriter



To publicize Canal Publishing's new novel by Christopher Herz (The Last Block in Harlem), Bryan from Paper Foldables recreated the typewriter from the front cover of the book as a foldable. Look for these to be placed in random spots around NYC in a grassroots publicity campaign.

via: plasticandplush.

Darth Vader in Love

Macro-photographs of light interference on soap bubbles.



Macro-photographs of light interference on soap bubbles.

An ongoing long term-project begun in 2005.
The photographs showcased here are part of a series titled "A Kind Of Magic" and are available as fine art limited edition prints.

How it's made:

A flat soap film is made by dipping a wire frame into the soap bubble mixture.
The frame is held above a dark surface, and a studio light is aimed at the bubble. The camera is aimed so that the reflection of the light will be seen over the entire surface of the bubble, and a macro-photograph is taken of that reflection.

All images are created completely in the camera with minor contrast and saturation adjustments.

For more images and info please visit: www.akindofmagic.eu

Via: BogdanChesaru

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Nike Sportswear x Nylon Magazine Dunk High and Windrunner









With the imminent release of the highly coveted collaboration between Nike Sportswear and renowned magazine Nylon set we can provide you with a complete look. In the past we have covered the Dunk High in an extensive way, but this is the first time we have seen the Windrunner that is finished in the same vibrant shades.

Available from Undefeated from June 20.

via: slamxhype.

Okedoki for Mickey Brand Halo Show




Okedoki does not know how to disappoint when it comes to custom toys. Her Mickey Brand Halo custom, dubbed Mr. Ripley brings out a lot of her true talent. This partially dissected custom features one side that enjoys counting money and stealing candy from kids and the other side features a very famous skinless mouse with gloves, shorts, and shoes still intact. This custom will be exhibited at the Mickey Brand Halo Show in Hong Kong, which was put together by 3-Mix and Disney Asia. The show takes place on June 29th at Time Square in Hong Kong. More pictures after the jump.

via: vinylpulse.

Vans Half Cab Lx




Vans Half Cab LX limited edition shoe in a multi neon colourway with yellow, blue red and pink leather pieces, a black fabric interior and black waffle sole with white outsole.

via: oki-ni.

Century Old Color Photography of Prokudin-Gorsky





In 1909 Russian photographer Sergey Produkin-Gorsky decided to photograph the vast country of Russia and its peoples in... Full color !

The process used involved a camera that would take a set of three photographs. These pictures would be monochrome but each picture would be taken using a filter of a different color. When all three monochrome pictures were projected (using light which had to be specifically colored) then the original color scene could be reconstructed.

More images

via: cpluv.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Paris Hilton unveils her pet mansion



Paris Hilton has reportedly twittered pictures of her “Mini Doggie Mansion,” which is a miniature version of her own Beverly Hills mansion.

The luxurious kennel comes complete with air conditioning, chandeliers, an ornate staircase, doggie wardrobe and miniature versions of her own furniture in a two-story construction overlooking her pool.

I have to admit, I may have spoiled them a little too much,” Paris confessed on her twitter page.

“But how can I not? Just look at those sweet lil’ faces, they deserve to be treated like my lil’ prince and princesses :) I love my babies.

They should be treated like the precious diamonds they are!

via: who gives a crap.

Tony Hawk skates the White House.


Professional skateboarder Tony Hawk on Friday took a brief ride at the White House as part of a Father's Day Celebration. Hawk, 41, skated in the grand foyer and the nearby Old Executive Office Building, with the permission of White House officials.

Karmaloop: Buyer Wire



Karmaloop presents a new segment on their website entitled Buyer Wire. The brief sessions will focus on giving viewers an inside look into the details of collections from various streetwear brands. This current segment will explore 10.Deep’s 2009 Summer lineup. Check it out!

PHARRELL WILLIAMS CUSTOM BAPE x CASIO G-SHOCK DW-6900


Based on a Bape collaboration DW-6900, the watch is encrusted in gold while the G-Shock logo on the top of the face is left in rainbow colors.

Via: hypebeast