“ART & COPY reveals the stories behind and the personal odysseys of some of the most influential advertising visionaries of our time and their campaigns, including Lee Clow (Apple Computer 1984, and today’s iPod); Dan Wieden (“Just Do It”)…”

I lament that it wasn’t until my sophomore year of college in an anthropology lecture that the blindfold was ripped from my eyes and I started understanding culture.  Up until that point I was completely ignorant of the value system I inherited just by living in a semi-conservative-middle-class Midwestern town.  During my adolescence the glimpses of life elsewhere were restricted to magazines, 30 second spots and billboards on our occasional treks to the neighboring hub of art & culture known as Des Moines.  I remember being particularly drawn to a series of ads that Wieden + Kennedy put out pairing Michael Jordan and Spike Lee (1,2 and 3).  They featured gritty black and white photos and aggressive copy that invited aspiring ballers to commune with the gods of the hardwood.  Done.  For the rest of my teenage years I had Nike’s on my feet.

I respect the power that ad agencies exert and mourn that I’ve handed it to them so willingly.  They give us what we want; which is seldom what we need.  Did I need Jordan’s in middle school or did I need discipline and determination?  It’s no new practice; for centuries advertisers have heard our desires for greatness, intimacy, community and authenticity (which never comes easy) and offered it to us for a financial transaction.

Honestly, I’m excited for the release of ART&COPY.  It’s high time a film like this was made and I’m not-so-secretly hoping that it will be a Toto of sorts, pulling back the curtain exposing “very good men and very bad wizards.”  Whether we love or hate it, we’ve made our culture what it is and it’s time to get busy whipping it into shape.  Now, if only I had a smokin’ pair of shoes to do it in…

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Since 1995 Ira Glass has hosted and produced one of the best storytelling radio programs in the country.  This American Life was birthed on WBEZ Chicago and in 1996 was syndicated by PRI and has been national ever since.

My friend Jordan passed this on via the Twitter.  There’s so much going on here it’s overwhelming.  You almost have to pick a character and watch it all the way through in order to not get lost in the chaos.

This will put some perspective on things.  Christian Broda, professor of economics at the University of Chicago, made a map replacing U.S. states with countries of a similar level of GDP.  In our state along (Michigan) we take in as much as Argentina, which has the 31^st largest GDP in the world.

Via Clusterflock

“Facebook”, spray paint on scrap-yard, Bamako – Mali, 2008

“Myspace”, Paint on wall, Phnom Penh-Cambodia. 2007

Filippo Minelli is an Italian born conceptual artist with roots in graffiti.  A great reminder of how “the real world is deeply far from the idealization we have of it, not only in the third world.”

From: Wooster Collective