Hasta La Creative!

Heineken arrived to share.
Now in 600ml.

Advertising Agency: Fischer America, Brazil
Via: Kuteev

Print and radio channels were used to lead people to www.wordherinnerd.be. On this contest blog people could upload stories related to gift moments that went wrong, in a funny or embarrassing way. Three commercials were posted on several video sharing websites.

Advertising Agency: Duval Guillaume, Belgium

Print and radio channels were used to lead people to www.wordherinnerd.be. On this contest blog people could upload stories related to gift moments that went wrong, in a funny or embarrassing way. Three commercials were posted on several video sharing websites.

Advertising Agency: Duval Guillaume, Belgium

Last week i visited the Paul McCarthy exhibition at the S.M.A.K. in Ghent (Belgium.) I knew little of his work, all i had seen before was his Santa merrily carrying a buttplug outside the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam. Then i heard about the Ghent exhibition, saw the images in the press kit, learnt that it featured a mechanical pig, a rabbit with a 12-metre long rubber penis, some fierce-looking pirates, image of Osama bin Laden wearing a Guggenheim turban, etc so i thought; “Yesss, this is going to be a nice & easy & fun little exhibition”.

Spaghetti Man, 1993 (collection FRAC)

It’s nothing of the kind. At all! The Head Shop / Shop Head exhibition is rough, abject, violent, it grabs you by the guts, hovers between bad Hollywood slapstick and the restroom, it’s a carnival of the vile and filthy but it is fascinating and mind-blowing. In fact, it must be one of the best exhibitions i’ve seen this year (together with History Will Repeat Itself (Part 1 and 2) which is currently running at the KW in Berlin.)

McCarthy’s work throws at our face the dark side of The American Dream and western consumer society. S.M.A.K. presents a selection of the works he produced between 1966 and 2006, plus a series of new works which premiered in Ghent.

Caribbean Pirates, 2001-05. Both Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich London

The Pirate Project was by far the most appealing/repulsive body of works for me. The artist’s studios are in Los Angeles and one can feel the references to Hollywood. It’s not so much a critique of the “dream factory” as a parody of it. Caribbean Pirates for example is inspired by the Disneyland attraction and movie Pirates of the Caribbean, only that there’s nothing glamour and entertaining, it heads straight to the gore and soft porn.

The Frigate, 2001-05. Collection of the Artist, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich London

The center piece is an imposing 5 meter high pirate ship made of fiberglass. The deck of this brownish-red hull is strewn with objects and smeared with chocolate sauce, ketchup and fake blood. The Pirate Party videos projected on the walls surrounding the ship reveal the obscene and brutal scenes which took place on board. In the movies, thirty actors, some of them wearing oversize carnival heads, simulate the invasion of a village, complete with rape, mutilation, violence and the public sale of the village women.

Caribbean Pirates, 2001-05. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

There’s so much fake blood/ketchup in his work that some critics have compared it to Viennese Actionism. However, McCarthy said: “The use of ketchup and masks grew out of my work and not out of being conscious of their work. I was pretty aware that certain artists were doing stuff like that. I think I found out about the Viennese in the early 1970s. Vienna is not Los Angeles. My work came out of kids’ television in Los Angeles. I didn’t go through Catholicism and World War II as a teenager, I didn’t live in a European environment. People make references to Viennese art without really questioning the fact that there is a big difference between ketchup and blood. I never thought of my work as shamanistic. My work is more about being a clown than a shaman.”

Caribbean Pirates, 2001-05. Collection of the Artist, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich London

Beyond the farce, the masks and the grotesque spoof horror movie scenes, McCarthy’s Pirate work makes also some references to the US invasion of Iraq, some scenes have been said to allude clearly to Abu Ghraib and the abuse of prisoners.

In 1991, McCarthy outfitted himself in a chef’s costume and Alfred E. Newman mask and performed a cooking-show parody on a set –a hamburger stand– once used for the TV sitcom The Hogan Family. But now the set is exhibited as an installation smeared, damaged and sullied with the remains of the artist’ Bossy Burger performance: dried splotches of ketchup, a feeling of squalor and furniture in disorder are clues that a bloody gastro-massacre has been going on there. Outside the production set, a monitor screens the performance.

Mechanical Pig, 2003. Collection of the Artist, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zürich London

The Garden features sets from Bonanza, a cowboy TV series from the 1960s. Seen from a distance, the artificial forest glade looks quite innocent, but walk closer and you’ll spot two life-size mechanical male figures – an upright and pathetic “father” fucking a tree and a “son” giving the same kind of attention to a hole in the ground.

The Garden, 1992. Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch, Deitch Projects

Trailer of the exhibition:

I now realize that this might be a very unsuitable post for xmas days but i loathe carols and i had no moose in store for you. Besides, 4 days after having seen the exhibition i’m still filled with the same feeling of bewilderment and wonder. The McCarthy retrospective made me happy like only art can make me happy when it is rare, challenging and good. What else could i ask for come the end of the year?

I took quite a few images.
The exhibition runs at the S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium until February 17, 2008.

‘Tis the season for year-end lists of every variety. Time Magazine has 50 such lists, one of which–Top 10 websites–I’d like to take a closer look at.

1. Lemonade.com
2. AskSunday.com
3. Wink.com
4. TechPresident.com
5. GoodReads.com
6. MenuPages.com
7. DontForgetYourToothbrush.com
8. VolunteerMatch.com
9. Fatsecret.com
10. Indeed.com

It’s pretty easy to see the common thread here–services made possible, or made better, by the interwebs.

As someone who builds websites for brands, I find this list instructive. Mostly, brands want to use the web as a place to run ads, deeper, more immersive ads, but ads just the same. Yet, that’s not what people want from the web. They want useful information, entertainment, connections with other like-minded peope and services that make their day-to-day lives easier and more efficient.

According to The New York Times, real estate tycoon, Samuel Zell, is shaking things up at The Tribune Company. After completing an $8.2 billion deal on Thursday that makes the media company a privately held operation, Zell made himself chief executive, announced a new set of directors and managers, and declared that the troubled company would look to raise revenue.

He disparaged the conventional wisdom that the newspaper industry — and the Tribune Company in particular — was suffering through a long, unavoidable contraction, and repeatedly stated that Tribune could increase its revenues.

“I’m sick and tired of listening to everybody talk about and commiserate about the end of newspapers,” he said. “They ain’t ended. And they’re not going to be.”

He said of Tribune, “I think it’s a very low-risk investment, but this wouldn’t be the first time that my opinion diverged from everybody else’s.”

“What this company needs is an owner,” he said later. “It needs someone who accepts the responsibility for what this company does.”

With an estimated net worth of $6 billion, Zell is the 52nd richest American as ranked by Forbes. He’s also a blast from the past—a time when newspapers were run by strong leaders, not by committee.

Improvise

Advertising Agency: mcgarrybowen, New York, USA
Executive Creative Directors: Warren Eakins, Randy van Kleeck
Creative Directors: Lew Willig, Mark Koelfgen
Art Director: Lew Willig
Copywriter: Mark Koelfgen
Photography: Coppie Barbieri
Published: Summer, 2007

Sorry for all the bad puns, but hey, a bad brand deserves bad puns. I wrote back in March about Circuit City’s decision to fire 3000 employees, the ones who were the most knowledgeable on the sales floor. Of course, at the time, it was a way to make Wall Street happy by lowering costs and boosting profits.

Well, Wall Street is not happy. From the Chicago Tribune:

Shares of Circuit City Stores Inc. lost more than a quarter of their value Friday after the firm posted a wider-than-expected third-quarter loss and said it wouldn’t make money this quarter either, prompting analysts to question whether it should hang out a “for sale” sign.

The stock fell $1.91, or 28.7 percent, to $4.75, on the New York Stock Exchange. It was the biggest drop since February 2002.

“Clearly, we are very disappointed,” Chief Executive Philip Schoonover told analysts during a conference call. He said the company underestimated the financial impact of cost-saving initiatives on sales.

Analysts were clearly disappointed. The results were “absolutely astonishing to us,” said Christopher Horvers, an analyst at Bear Stearns & Co. “If they don’t turn around in the fourth quarter, it will raise the likelihood that this company goes down a dark path.”

Well, it’s not astonishing to me. The in-store experience is one of the most important things they have. Getting rid of 3000 smart workers wasn’t the answer. They’ve killed their brand.

When will corporations and marketers realize that cutting costs isn’t always the answer to their problems?

Advertising Agency: DDB Milano, Italy
Creative Director: Vicky Gitto
Art Director: Francesco Guerrera / Andrea Maggioni
Copywriter: Luca Gelmuzzi
Head of tv: Giuseppe Brandolini
Production Company: Parco
Director: Andrew Hardaway
Visual Effects: The Embassy
Music: Human
Aired: December 2007

Advertising Agency: Demner, Merlicek & Bergmann, Vienna, Austria
Creative Directors: Florian Nussbaumer, Tolga Büyükdoganay
Concept: Georg Rernböck, Marcus Zbonek
Art Directors: Georg Rernböck, Tolga Büyükdoganay
Copywriters: Marcus Zbonek, Florian Nussbaumer
Photographer: Geospace
3D Design: Friendly Fire
Retouching: Graustich