SightUnseen, the online magazine devoted to all things design-y, has just launched their latest project, a shop featuring wearable art objects handmade from unusual materials such as copper, rope, powder coated steel, cork, silk, leather, and on and on. So far the artists are mostly known for other endeavors, like Iacoli & McAllister who make high end lamps and furniture, or Confetti System, who adorn shops such as Creatures of Confort and J. Crew with their pinatas and fun decorations. The site is exquisitely curated by SightUnseen founders and former I.D. editors Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer. Just in time to get holiday gifts you really can’t find anywhere else.

top image: Iacoli & McAllister necklace No. Ultra
bottom image: Confetti System rope necklace

The online art gallery It’s Our Playground was built with the idea that exhibitions could live in virtual galleries as well as in brick and mortar spaces. This week, art critic and Dossier contributor Timothee Chaillou curated a customizable triptych featuring an insanely long list of artists including Roe Ethridge, Andrew Kuo, Lizzi Bougatsos, Klara Liden, Anne Collier and Nina Childress. The show, which officially opens today is called: No Color In Your Cheeks Unless The Wind Lashes Your Face. Go to an art show in your pajamas. Why not? BYOB.

Top Image: Nina Childress, Les Blondes III, 1997

Do you ever find yourself gazing at mass transit posters, wishing that they would urge you to behave politely in a more intriguing manner? If so, check out this series of Tokyo subway manner posters from the 70s and 80s, posted by Retronaut. You will never look at public comportment in public transit the same way again.

The above poster, published in 1982, depicts the “three annoying train monsters”: Nesshii (the sleeping monster), Asshii (the leg-crossing monster), and Shinbushii (the newspaper-reading monster).

Imagine being told not to discard your chewing gum on the ground this way! The poster was printed in 1976.

This 1979 poster encourages passengers to wait behind the white line when waiting for a train to arrive.

Check out all of the brilliant posters on Retronaut’s site.

Images and text by Silvia Bergomi

Silvia Bergomi: Briefly describe your career.

Gloria Maria Cappelletti: I have been really lucky, working in the fashion industry with great designers like Stephen Sprouse, great photographers like Steven Klein and great stylists like Patti Wilson, but my heart has always been in contemporary art and I finally opened a gallery in Milan [Gloria Maria Gallery], which is where I am now.

Silvia: Your gallery is among the most interesting in Milan. Is your work in any way influenced by your past experiences in fashion? Don’t you think that the fashion and the art crowds today are in some way similar to those of the ’60s?

Gloria: I think that the gallery is perceived as interesting because Milan is quite a small town and I am very specific in terms of selecting the artists I work with. In the past, I have been able to work with leaders in the fashion field and I guess this helped me develop an avant-garde aesthetic. Fashion and art are often in conversation nowadays, as in the past. They both attempt to mirror society. Andy Warhol was correct in predicting that everybody would be famous for 15 minutes. It’s a lot about marketing and branding, but I am a romantic and love to discover artists that don’t fit into this category.

Silvia: You are one of the few gallerists in Italy who work with web art. Help us understand the rules behind this media and how they relate to the art world, especially the art market.

Gloria: My daily question is: What is Internet art? Do we really still need to embrace Duchampian definitions of art? I feel that we are living on the edge of a crisis and should be questioning what art is in the age of the Internet. We shouldn’t apply an old paradigm to a new phenomenon. The Internet is about relationships, so art reflects this as well. Aesthetic values should now be about relationships, rather then forms and lines. A lot of Internet art deals with blogs, personal diaries, etc., the so-called Web 2.0. revolution, where one can see a significant re-introduction of community participation. Internet art is an avant-garde movement, like the modern art movements were avant-garde at a certain point. Internet artwork is, in fact, uncontained work that [the artists] deliberately spread across a network. It’s not based on rarity, but accessibility; the more accessible, the better. [These artists] are proposing opposite paradigms.

Silvia: What are you looking for? What motivates you to collaborate with an artist?

Gloria: I am always looking for a sort of “love at first sight” with an artist’s work, which is very rare, but when it happens….

Silvia: What’s your opinion about the current creative environment in Milan?

Gloria: I would say it is still running backwards.

Silvia: You spent many years in the USA. What do you miss the most?

Gloria: While in the USA, I lived most of the time in New York, which is great, but I don’t miss it that much. I’m happy to go back once in a while, but I wouldn’t live there again. Nevertheless, I think what’s great about New York is that things happen for real and you meet challenging people on a daily basis, which is very New York and doesn’t apply to the USA in general.

Silvia: Touching on motherhood, is it difficult dealing with the gallery and taking on the mum role? Is your daughter [Pann] already interested in the art world? Should we expect to see her as the new Vanessa Beecroft?

Gloria: Pann is a real neen artist. She loves to play on the iPad with the Random Pollock by Miltos Manetas and she loves to draw on every flat surface she finds, so I guess she definitely has some artistic attitude. She might be a new 2.0 version of Mariko Mori, actually she will probably be a 3.0 version…

Silvia: Do you like the idea of your baby growing up in such a creative and dynamic surroundings?

Gloria: Freedom of thought should be always encouraged. At the same time a three-year-old should have some strict rules, so I guess I like the idea of a creative environment, but I try to keep a very stable surrounding.

Silvia: Name three important contemporary artists…

Gloria: Off the top of my head, I could name Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois and Maya Deren… Mah, I have so many to name…

Silvia: And three emerging artists…

Gloria: All my neen stars!

Silvia: What do you think about the blogging phenomenon? Why is it so big in the fashion world but so tiny in the art field?

Gloria: I find blogs really interesting. As a matter of fact, I just co-founded—with Nadia Rebeccato—an art-buying agency called The Nanalog, which creates teams for online projects, so we deal a lot with bloggers and web directors. Art needs to embrace a wider sharing of information, so I hope there will soon be a stronger recognition and following of their work.

Silvia: Tell me something that nobody would expect to hear from you…

Gloria: What I love most about working in the gallery is drilling concrete walls and driving the truck.

Silvia: What is a restaurant in Milan that you would recommend?

Gloria: Oliviero Leti’s La Casa dei Demoni.

Silvia: Do you cook? What is your best recipe?

Gloria: I am such a bad cook. My best recipe is to order delivery!

I love art on objects. Recently, I am also fascinated by surfing. Enter here art on a surfboard, in the form of the “Ari Biscuit.” Designed by Ari Marcolpolous, the limited-edition board (produced in ten numbered editions) is a special collaboration between the artist and ZED Surf of Byron Bay. The project is curated by The Adam and Eve Projects, an Australia-based creative projects website which features interesting people from fields as diverse as art, design, literature, fashion, music, and architecture (I contribute a stream to their blog, as do other Dossier contributors such as Pedro Ramos and Samantha Casolari), via live posts, exclusive collaborative projects, and a recently opened web shop.

I’m not sure what to say about the Awkward Family Photos website. It is what it sounds like, and it made me laugh out loud. Click “Read More” for a selection, or visit the site to waste an hour.

Originally intended as a kind of pop-up-shop assemblage of graphic artists and architects, gathering together on a job to job basis, Commune has followed is own innate rhythms to become one of the hippest and most respected design firms working today.  Their top-to-bottom build-out and decor of the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs was among the most talked about in years and their retail space for Opening Ceremony in Tokyo is no less impressive.  As the opening date for their retail space at the Standard Hotel in New York approaches we take a minute to appreciate this innovative collective.

“We get all our work from word or mouth,” says partner and Creative Director Roman Alonso.  ”It used to be that whoever brought in a job would lead the project but we’ve recently officially divided the tasks.”  Now each of the four partners,  Pamela Shamshiri, Steven Johanknecht, Alonso, and Ramin Shamshiri handles a specific field of endeavor–be it residential or hospitality, retail, graphic or product design–and divide up the projects accordingly.  Even the ebb and flow of their team follows an organic pattern, according to Alonso.  ”We now have a staff of ten.  We were up to 35 and ten came back to seven.  We’re at ten now and that’s about right for us,” says Alonso.  He describes the team’s work mode as a holistic process.  ”If an architect is drawing a building he is also project manager and takes care of everything in that building until it is graphics–a custom pattern for a carpet or something–then it’s graphics.”

Their delegation appears from the outside seamless and their creations for clients as diverse as Oliver Peoples, Heath and Barneys, designing websites or stores or hotels are both delicious and inspiring.   We can’t wait to see where their next groove takes us.

The proliferation of image blogs powered by the tumblr platform raises the interesting question of how the internet as a structured society of individuals can collectively produce a homeopathic response to itself. The relationship between the particular nature of the way information is disseminated online and our diminishing attention spans  has become frequently remarked upon by behaviourists and educationalists: regular web ‘users’ suffer an inability to concentrate on large quantities of related information, preferring to reach a holistic understanding by absorbing multiple units of information from different sources. In this way the synaptic patterns of brain activity come to mirror the mechanical nature of the internet itself, whereby information on a webpage is often embedded from a source elsewhere, the page made complete by combining these packets from each distinct location.

While this patterning can be seen as a useful cognitive adaptation to the modern condition of information bombardment, whether it renders any forensic capability to discern truth from different pieces of contradictory evidence is questionable. Behaviourists argue that this is because on the internet it is almost always easier to click a sequential link and absorb a new piece of information than to stop and make coherent what information you already posess. In dialectic terms, it makes easy the complex task of bearing in mind the thesis and antithesis, but stops short of synthesizing, preferring instead the construction of ever more baroque towers of theses, and recalling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”. The problem in their eyes is that this is more of a dysfunction, an endlessly procrastinating loop, which, while it could never be accused of laziness exactly, promotes an enervating series of deferrals through indecision.

The notion of inspiration is a curious one. To surf through a variety of insp image blogs powered by tumblr is to encounter a disparate collage of art installation shots, photo journalism, fashion lookbook extracts and soft, or in contemporary terms, mildly nsfw, porn. Both insular and extroverted, the easy ability to repost from the blog of another produces a curious shared scrapbook of communicative personal experience, culminating in the demi-meme of acknowledged appropriation:  ’sup χ. In effect it creates the pleasing sense of a community engaged in inspiring itself out of a self-induced torpor. If ranting weblogs perform a teenage self-centred melodrama, the misunderstood voice alone with its diary and pen, then tumblelogs represent the early stirrings of late adolescent creativity, the melodrama formalised, put to music, friends found, band started, bingo. Thus there is always the sense of the achievable in insp blogs, the ever seductive notion that with enough hard work anything contained within it is attainable.  

The general absence of writing privileges the gesture, and indeed it could be seen as symptomatic of the medium that form should resolutely precede content. Therefore while the politics of insp is pretty, shall we say, unimaginative – many would perhaps be more accurately described as aspiration – the sense of excited potential is broadly pretty heartening. Curiously, the most interesting in these terms (and apparently most reposted) are the pornography tumblelogs, which in many cases favour an entirely secular approach to sex, in which there seems to be no curatorial agenda beyond the aesthetic, and which consequentially exhibit an unhesitant series of naked men and women, displayed solo or in flagrante, in all possible combinations. Given that the general timbre of sexual discourse on the internet has, in even the best cases, all the sophistication of a mainstream tv sitcom, and often far worse, the proliferation of these non-denominational sex blogs is the most interesting political development I can recall seeing online for some time.

The fascination the internet holds over us shows no sign of abating. The more we think about it, interact with it, the more entranced we become. The rise of inspiration image blogs is one response to this, a response that looks to promote a greater interrelation between forms of visual communication online and irl. While theories of postmodernity would seem to provide the simplest means by which to gloss this accrual of multiple nuggets of contradictory information minus the super-imposition of narrative, phenomena like insp blogs provide a mid-point in the internet’s growing political self-awareness. One day perhaps it will reach a point where it starts to prod hard at the disparity between its communitarian nature and the attempts make it conform to the rest of the society, to marketise, regulate and supervise it. Until then, until it works out exactly how it wants to proceed, a page of images displayed in glorious defience of any notion of intellectual property, to be cut, shared, pasted, spread about with subversive glee seems an inspiring way to waste some time. Not safe for work indeed.

I am regrettably more of a casual movie fan than I would like to admit. I often watch films months after the hype has worn down, not as some sort of statement, but because of my inherent laziness to actually go to the physical theater itself. Yet, despite being a casual fan of the cinematic experience, I can’t help but feel enamored with I Love Hot Dogs.

Shannon Maldonado’s collection of film stills and posters at I Love Hot Dogs – from such horribly underrated films like Ladies and Gentleman, the Fabulous Stains, cult classics like Pierrot Le Fou, and beloved hits such as Boyz in the Hood – is not only a testament to the power of image but is also an tremendously pleasurable learning experience for those of us who are less knowledgeable about films than we’d like to admit. Her breadth of knowledge and thirst for entertainment is never pretentious. With reviews ranging from a quick riff to a more thought-out analysis and an extensive array of title shots and stills, Shannon presents films in way that addresses the current neuroses and nuances of the internet user by first and foremost creating a heady, visually stunning combination of images that remain unforgettable on first glance.