MURKETING

To Do in NYC November 30

Gabriel Urist, partial subject of a Consumed back in June, is opening his own space, Gabriel Urist Worlds Fair (204 Elizabeth Street, Basement) in NY. Looks like there’s an opening event Thursday night, Nov. 30. Info via Mr. Urist, and Freshness, where you can find the details.

Buyer Be Aware

In Consumed: Obsessive Consumption: Products that are meant to make you think – about your purchase.

In 2000, Kate Bingaman-Burt graduated from college and took a full-time job as a designer and art director for a gifts company in Omaha. She worked on ads and packaging and products but didn’t feel great about any of it. Mostly it was stuff that “people didn’t really need,” she says, and ultimately it made her wonder about why people buy what they buy. Eventually she quit, went to art school to pursue a master’s degree — and started wondering about the things she bought. This led to a project she called Obsessive Consumption, which involved documenting pretty much all of her purchases; soon she started collecting those images on a Web site. And this turned out to be the first iteration of something that continues to this day: “I basically built a brand out of Obsessive Consumption,” she says, “and ran with it.” …
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no registration required link.

Additional link: Obsessive Consumption.com.

Something to do … in New Haven .. Nov. 17

“Authentic Happiness,” new works by Sket One, Murketing Q&A subject. Opening reception at Channel 1 in New Haven, Friday night November 17. Show is up through January 28.

Advice

Some of the entrepreneurial DIY types among you — I know you’re out there — might be interested to read this from Grace Bonney of Design Sponge: A basic overview of making money from blogging. I’m really in no position to evaluate any of this on a practical level (I don’t even track readership of this site, let alone have any fantasies about selling ads here or whatever). And it’s a bit vague on some points, some numbers would have been interesting. But what’s there seems straightforward and, possibly, helpful.

The best thing about the piece, by the way, is that it’s all part of a “special promotion” for some American Express product on Slate. So I’m assuming — well, I’m hoping, for her sake — that Bonney actually got paid to write a post giving advice about making money from blogging! That’s why she’s Design Sponge, and you’re not.

“Now You Know”

Tony Arcabascio and Arkitip have collected a set of columns that he wrote for the magazine (under the name “The Alife How To”) from 2003 to 2006. The result is Now You Know, a “how-to book for the street smart,” in the form of a nicely executed mini-book, with a handy slip cover. Apart from being a cool little object, the actual columns inside are pretty hilarious (and depending on what kind of life you’re living, possibly useful). Topics include how to: make a slim jim, avoid assault charges, torch a car, talk someone through a trip, and get married.

The avoid-assault-charges piece includes this observation: “As long as you got your mom with you when you fuck someone up, you’ll always have an advantage. You can’t get away with murder, but you can hurt them bad.”

That clarifying second sentence is an example of what I find appealing here. Obviously I’m quoting that bit out of context, it’s even better when you read the whole (somewhate harrowing) story that leds up to him drawing this particular conclusion.

Probably I also find it so appealing because I know and like Tony, having met him while writing a story a while ago and kept in touch. He seems like such a nice guy — he gave me a copy of the book, after all — I can’t imagine him torching a car.

Although now that I think of it, I can imagine him having torched a car. Just not lately. I don’t think.

Anyway, check it out.

Something to do (November 11)

Sources say:

On November 11, fine artist/street artist Steve Powers, a/k/a ESPO, “will places forty pieces of fine art on the sidewalk of West Broadway in SoHo and sell them himself, first come, first served. …By putting his work on the open market on West Broadway, he is stepping all over the lines between high and low and insider and outsider. The vending law in New York states that vendors must be 20 feet from a place of business. Powers will circumvent this by renting out an unoccupied storefront, which will allow him to operate within the law and accomodate a few hundred guests.”

West Broadway and Prince Streets on Saturday, November 11th. Preview work at www.firstandfifteenth.net on Wednesday, November 8th. Sale starts at 11am. “Cash and all major credit cards accepted.”

TieLab Updates…

Very pleased to see Murketing Q&A subject TieLab getting some more attention, from Adorn Magazine. Meanwhle, the TieLab has continued to add new designs: Skull + Bones, SquidBrain, and Bombs Away!, for instance.

T Time

Clearly I’m still in catch-up mode. Here’s something else I meant to post earlier: At the Museum of Design Atlanta, a show opened recently called To A T: T-shirt Culture … Cute or Couture? Here’s something from an article about it:

With the wildfire growth of the D.I.Y. and affordable-art movements, T-shirts — already synonymous in American life with totemic expressions of selfhood in washable form — have now also become as symbolic to artists as to consumers. As the Wall Street Journal‘s Jamin Warren notes, the limited run of artist-designed shirts also gives them an exclusivity, that elusive “cool factor” that younger consumers treasure.

Laura Moody, a co-curator with SCAD-Atlanta of the MODA show, says the new “Art T” serves two markets: “With the rise of D.I.Y. designers and indie crafters creating limited-edition shirts, you probably won’t be caught wearing the same shirt as your neighbor. For the designer or artist, T-shirts offer an affordable medium for experimentation.”

In any case, we’re actually going to try to see this, maybe in January. I believe it closes January 13. If we go, I’ll report back….

Pleasing Things Roundup

I wasn’t familiar with Adam Neate before encountering this on the Wooster Collective site a few days ago. Clicking away, I really enjoyed the work. Apparently he’s got a show at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms, a London gallery that’s also shown KAWS, Dalek, and others of note. For those of us not in London, more of Neate’s stuff can be seen here.

Next up: I was looking at Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, which is consistently interesting, and was struck by the above image. The artist is Esao Andrews, who I’d never heard of. Here’s his site. This was by far my favorite image, but some of the other stuff is cool, too.

And finally: A skateboard as a band-aid. By Thinkmo, via High Snobiety.

Q&A: Neek

At some point during the reporting of the Brand Underground story, I was introduced to Neek, a high school student who was into The Hundreds, and was also kind of a figure on the NikeTalk message boards. Not long after that, in fact, his notoriety on NikeTalk culminated in someone making a Neek T-shirt. (That’s it at left; the style is an echo of Supreme, of course.) Apart from being another reason that NikeTalk kind of freaks me out, I thought this development was fascinating: Neek had basically become famous by way of his fandom, to the point that he’d made some strange transition from consumer to brand. Of course when I say “famous,” it only applies in the sense of 21st Century microfame of a super-fragmented culture. But still.

Anyway, Neek ended up not being part of the Brand Underground piece, but he’s certainly an interesting manifestation of that culture, and we kept in touch. Lately he’s gotten involved with a project called Fruition — another step on the road to converting his lifestyle into a way to make a living — and I decided it would be worth a Q&A. So here it is.

Let’s start with the very straightforward background stuff about where you live and how you ended up there and so on — including where the name “Neek” comes from, if you please.

Yeah. I live in Vegas and I just graduated high school actually. I am 17 years old, turning 18 next month. I ended up in Vegas because my parents wanted to move away from the hustle and bustle in New York City. They wanted a more slow-paced life. So that is why I am here.

Read more

Q&A: Sket One’s Product Customs

Several months ago I was very taken by some images I saw of vinyl figures made by Sket One, and spent a little time researching (well, Googling) him. The figures were part of a show called “Subcultures: The Art of the Action Figure,” at Channel 1, in New Haven, where Sket One lives; you can check out coverage of that show, with lots of pictures (including one that I use on the jump page) at Vinyl Pulse.
Eventually I decided to approach him as the second in my series of Q&As with people who are artists and entrepreneurs, finding ways to make a living from creative enterprises. He kindly agreed, and that exchange follows.

Sket One has been writing graffiti since 1986 (here are some of his pieces in that medium,via graffiti.org.) He graduated from art school in 1992, and also works on canvass, on products such as skateboards and shirts, and in the form vinyl figures. And, he works as an art director, at a sports marketing agency called Silverman Group. You can read his official bio and see examples of all his work (since here I’m mostly focused on one set of vinyl figures) at his web site, and on his Myspace page.

Since the thing that really got my attention was the Product Customs, I’ll start there. What inspired those? Would you characterize them as making a comment about brands and products and so on, or was it a more purely graphic-driven inspiration? And, of course, I’m curious how you decided on which products. (Windex! I wouldn’t have thought of that…)

The product customs were done for many reasons. I love pop art objects from my past. I also work for a marketing agency so I am drilled the whole “BRANDING” scheme every dear born day. The message I tried to convey is, first off, cool stuff is designed every day by designers who take their time investigate and study design, design some more, and the end result is something as simple as mustard and ketchup get picked up thrown in a basket and used (only later to be thrown out). So think about it: That packaged was designed by someone? Maybe a team? Well I noticed it, do you? Read more

Carry Art

In Consumed: Poketo: How a promotional vehicle for undiscovered artists became a desirable purchase.

Back when they lived in San Francisco, Ted Vadakan and Angie Myung were part of that city’s tight-knit community of young artists, and they would help organize or participate in a variety of gallery shows. It was always a lot of fun, but there was a problem. “No one was buying art,” Myung says, “because all of us were pretty poor.” Their response has gradually turned into a small business called Poketo, which has worked with more than 70 artists in creating wallets, messenger bags, T-shirts and, beginning in the fall, stationery and housewares.

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site by way of this no-registration-required link.

Related links: Poketo; Poketo blog; Poketo Myspace page; The Little Friends of Printmaking; Boy Girl Party (Susie Ghahremani); Hot and Cold; PCP.

Tied Up: The Q&A

From time to time here at Murketing, new features will be introduced. For example: Q&As. There was one yesterday, and there will be one tomorrow. There will never be three in a row again, I can assure you. But this one, here, today, below, is the one I want to introduce with a few words, because I hope it’s an example of the first installment in an open-ended series, a specific subset of Q&As.

The interviewee in this case is Bethany Shorb, and the subject is the ties that she makes and sells, mentioned in an earlier post. (She does a lot of other things as well, and those are addressed below, but see here if you just can’t stand the suspense.) Since that earlier post she has launched the Cyberoptix Tie Lab: “A new take on conservative menswear.” All of this makes for a good example of what I want the open-ended series to be about: interviews with people who are artists and entrepreneurs, finding ways to make a living from creative enterprises.

Clearly, this general theme is a long-time interest of mine, and I’ve pretty much done all I can with it in the various other venues I write in. My focus here is somewhat different, and so is my one and only criteria for these interviews: Here on Murketing I’ll be interviewing people whose work I, personally, find interesting.

Here we go:

You’re from the New York area originally, you have an MFA from Cranbrook, and you live in Detroit. I guess you ended up in Detroit because you went to Cranbrook?

That’s correct — in the Fall of 1999, I packed up all of my earthly possessions into the back of my little red pickup truck and headed for the Great Unknown. I was living in Boston at the time after getting my BFA at Boston University. I cried my eyes out for days upon arrival.

But wait, looking at your blog, your views on Detroit have softened a bit? I’ve never really spent any time with Detroit and sort of fascinated with it.

There are great things to be said about Detroit from a creative standpoint, there is definitely a justifiable fascination with the city. It is relatively inexpensive to live, especially compared to places like New York, Boston and Los Angeles — and that allows you to allot much more time to making art rather than making rent, and there is much more space to do it. Detroit seems to be a unique incubator for quality art and music, there are less distractions and I think people get a lot more done as a result, but if I didn’t make a trip to either coast every few months I’d probably go a bit crazy. Music is a huge exception, there is usually somewhere you can go every night of the week and hear excellent music — whether you want to party or pull up your laptop in a dark corner of a coffee shop or dive bar, I think a flourishing music culture really goes hand in hand with any kind of art making.

The downfall of the Detroit area is that the economy here is not the best at the moment, so people are consuming little else than what is necessary to live, thus why I really want to get my product out to more areas of the country where people are actually spending on luxury and fashion items.[ Read more

Alleged News

Aaron Rose is always up to cool stuff, whether it’s working out the next stop on the extraordinary journey of Beautiful Losers, the exhibition he co-curated, or working on the ANP Quarterly, among other things. His new project is Alleged Press: “Our mission now is to create a unique series of wonderful monographs, beautifully designed and printed, which spotlight the works of young artists, graphic designers, photographers and filmmakers who we believe reflect the tempo of the times.”

The first offering is a book called Out and About, by photographer Ari Marcopoulos. Here’s more on that.

(More) On Target

The other day I noted Target’s couture line, which is not actually available at Target. Since then, there have been a couple of interesting bits of news about America’s trendiest big-box retailer.

Notcot recounts a visit to the Target pop-up store on Melrose and La Cienega. What’s on sale there, through the end of August, is the current round of a Target series called “Go International,” which is basically collaborations with cool (or whatever) fashion designers. This time it’s Paul & Joe, a brand you can learn about at Target’s site, if you want to. Of the store/collection, Notcot says: “It is VERY impressive in presentation and packaging AND the collection was as cheap as they claim, and better quality than i expected.”

Meanwhile, Giant Robot publisher and co-editor Eric Nakamura, on his new-ish blog, offers up some pictures of items in Target’s new “‘alternative’ indie type of line, called Independent Studies.” Evan Hecox notebooks and Deanne Cheuk plates are included. Some of the stuff in this line is apparently limited edition, according to Nakmura, who adds: “While you’re at Target, get an Icee. They’re still pretty good.”