Two Images in the New Yorker

This is the layout of last week's pages 38-39 of the New Yorker. The article is about sports, marketing, stardom and money. The New Yorker's illustration for the article is a photograph of a Banksy street art piece; it reveals the writing's main thesis. In an uncanny echo, page 39 presents a wonderful Gillette ad which, with similar cues (fence, black man, physical activity involving height, etc) let's you know what's up: just buy deodorant.

Purposefully or not, I think this is great.

Not So Failing Failures and Urban Art Interventions

This summer Barcelona-based production company, El Cangrejo, directed the adorable short "L'Equip Petit," about a soccer team that never scores. Here's the trailer of their latest creation, "The Last Ones," and what appears to be another beautiful looking documentary. The story isn't clear but it hints at their recurring interest in the ones society considers failures: in "L'Equip Petit" it was six to seven year olds that couldn't put a ball through the net, and here it may be a group of store owners that desperately need people to walk through their area (instead of malls and super stores?) - and use plastic bottles and communal imagination and work to do so. 

Your Phone Is Hungry

JR's TED wish

JR in London during the 2008 exhibit at the Tate

Hard not to love JR and admire the artist's aspirations and process. Since his 2005 takeover of the 16ème arrondissement in Paris with portraits of banlieues inhabitants during their riots, JR has gone around the world to make his large glued-in-publicscapes portraits more than just street art but agents of social change.

All of his art excursions tackle topics animating our contemporary culture by way of personal narrations. In Israel he placed side by side portraits of Palestinians and Israelis in 8 cities; and in Brazil he invaded one of the most dangerous favellas of Rio to question the gap between the media's portrayal of the area and its inhabitants' stories.

Probably his most powerful project as of yet, is his 2009 travels with Médecins Sans Frontières through Sierra Leone, Kenya, Soudan and Liberia to meet women, many of them rape victims and most of all discriminated against throughout their life because of their gender. Speaking to them and then snapping their portraits JR and his team plastered their black and white images on rooftops, trains, and other public platforms as if to give their life a place in the public realm. It isn't only faces, it is about making material objects that give meaning and bring respect to their subjects as well as a means to discuss the everyday to change it.

There is a lot of idealism involved in his work - and at times the rhetoric of changing things with little images relative to the poverty and violence of its subject seem to make it the quintessential western 'feel good' project - but then again there isn't much to loose and certainly so much to make better. I've wanted to send him an email for years along the lines of "I love you" but now that TED has made him the winner of their 2011 TEDprize (in 2005 a certain singer and NGO owner with a Louis Vuitton contract had won) I fear my declaration would be discarded as insincere. He revealed his TED art project last week. Called the Inside Out Project, it is about getting anyone who wants to upload and plaster a photograph in their public space to do so.

That's great, but in my opinion it excludes a lot of people without the internet or a camera (means of communicating about oneself) and as such, not nearly as great as this: