I’m off to the Galapagos for the next days for some joyful adventuring. (I know, life’s rough.) I’ve got a new lens for my Canon so expect some pictures when I’m back. Have a great early August and I’ll see you on the 11th!
An interesting trend: joyful aesthetics being used to make budget-friendly purchases seem more palatable. Walmart’s ads are doing it, as are many of the ads I’ve referenced in my discussions on joywashing. Now, for Fall 2009 Coach is launching the Poppy line, which is a lower priced collection of accessories with a youthful feel. Poppy is an appropriate name, both for the energy and the reference. The inspiration here is unambiguous.
Some items, like the Pop C Large Spotlight bag (below) feel a little done (very Murakami for LV without the Japanese master’s artful control). But I’m sure most people will overlook that and feel delighted by the overall vibrancy of the collection. If you didn’t wear everything all at once, you might find a sustained pleasure in a cheerful bag or sequined flats that brings a little sparkle to an ordinary outfit.
Still, I’m sure there’s a fatigue point with all this. Too much intensity tips over the line from joy into ecstasy, where we revel in overwhelming sensation for a short while until the pleasure sputters out. I almost feel like marketers are trying to make us feel giddy so we forget ourselves and start overspending again. But joy isn’t like that. Joy doesn’t leave you feeling depleted, and it doesn’t give you a hangover. There’s a balance here that marketers and designers are struggling with. Deluging us in positivity is a short-term fix; there ways to design joyfully that don’t need to shout so loudly to be heard.
An attempt to bring “joyous vibrancy” to the city is how Renzo Piano describes his plan to cloak the facades of the new Central Saint Giles development with brightly colored ceramic cladding. He says:
The colour idea came from observing the sudden surprise given by brilliant colours in that part of the city. Cities should not be boring or repetitive. One of the reasons cities are so beautiful and a great idea, is that they are full of surprises, the idea of colour represents a joyful surprise.
Against the muted, often grey backdrop of the London cityscape, I think it would be a joy to walk around the corner and be surprised by the delicious glossiness of red or yellow glazed ceramic. They have the rich sensory appeal of the ripe-apple red double-decker buses or the mailboxes or the Beefeater uniforms. The yellow is like a bright umbrella or a pair of wellies in a storm. These oases of color are arguably more important in London life because of the climate. It will be interesting to see public response to these when they are up.
Thanks Maggie for the tip!
More info and images here.
Vanessa has a nice post on for the love of bikes about these beautiful colored tires. The stripes on the side walls blur together when in motion to create a “speed-blend” effect. What a wonderful example of joyful design! As a rider you wouldn’t even get to see them in action, but you would get to see the delighted reactions of people around you.
Via for the love of bikes (more photos there)
Today’s NYT has an interesting article by Ken Johnson on outdoor art, suggesting that there has been a thematic shift from grand, ideological monuments to works that are designed simply to “divert, amuse, and comfort.” But is there really anything wrong with that?
Johnson writes:
The big problem for outdoor art is the absence of any consensus of values in our pluralistic, multicultural society. It’s hard to imagine a public sculpture of a hero today that would not be regarded by one faction or another as partisan. As an unscientific sampling of art in the public realm this summer confirms, contemporary outdoor art tends to offer unobjectionable, mildly decorative or entertaining and relatively empty experiences.
To me, this conflates two separate questions into one murky discussion. First, what is public art for? And second, is the art any good?
The first is a theoretical question about why we make and commission art and what we seek in the experience of art that inhabits public spaces. It opens the door to a worthwhile examination of cultural values and Johnson’s comparison of Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman monument with the adjacent colorful Franz West sculpture illustrates his point nicely. No doubt there’s been a values shift, but I wonder if it’s not so much the fact that multiplicity makes it hard to commemorate our heroes, but that outdoor art no longer is the primary way in which we achieve this end. Think of the Shepard Fairey Obama poster and you’ll know what I mean. In the olden days, people gathered in public squares, and statues were a way of keeping an image in the public consciousness. Now, people still gather in squares, but mostly for recreation; they do the bulk of their thinking and communicating and even rallying online, and images that stick in the public mind now are frequently discovered and recirculated there.
I’m not saying that a million YouTube hits has the commemorative value of a bronze monument; my point is rather to suggest that the way we use public space is mostly geared towards leisure, so it makes sense to me that enjoyment would be a driving factor in selecting work for this realm. When you leave your office building for your 10-minute “lunch hour,” what would you rather see: a fearsome general in smiting posture, or a bunch of children playing hide and seek around a colorful set of forms? Perhaps this is selfishness, to prefer to have art that brings us enjoyment over art that honors the sacrifices of others. But perhaps it’s just human.
Joy has an important place in urban outdoor art because our limited open space is vital to our mental and emotional wellbeing. I don’t think it’s always a conscious criterion of those that commission such works, but certainly many artists derive pleasure from creating works that inspire nothing more cerebral than delight. And yet, delightful can also be meaningful. There’s no law that says that only somber works have intellectual value. (If there were you might have to banish the Impressionist wing of the Met from school field trips.) Joy is a constant human craving, and much of the artistic experience is to celebrate and revel in this.
Agree or not that joyful art has an important role in the world of public sculpture, the question of quality is still a separate issue. Johnson’s veiled derision suggests he does not think many of these works are very good. Commenting on the Afterparty installation by MOS in the courtyard at PS1, Johnson writes with tepid enthusiasm, “it nicely exemplifies the inoffensive spirit of public art today.”
But inoffensive is not in and of itself bad. Not all art has to provoke, particularly in public spaces which are primarily for enjoyment. This does not forgive weak execution, but suggests artists and curators do better to make the reality as joyful as the intent.
NYT: “Well-Behaved Street Corner Sculpture”
PS: I have to add that I intensely dislike that installation at PS1. I know it’s trying to be all Bedouin-tent-y, but I find it kind of dank and Hobbit-like and totally in keeping with the cranky weather of this summer. It may be inoffensive to my dignity but it affronts my senses. I’m sorry, I like you PS1 but I don’t like that.
I’ve been playing around with headers for a few weeks now, and finally I’m ready to share. Love it? Hate it? Let me know!
Spending so much time looking for joy shows up in my Flickr faves. Everything about this matrix just makes me feel good!
Let the Outside In from Caitlin Parker on Vimeo.
Oh wow. I love this weird, whimsical look into a world we usually pay no attention.
via @design_sponge
I’m not sure why I find Sophie Blackall’s illustrations of Missed Connections so joyful. There is something bittersweet about these missives, written with the knowledge that recapturing such an evanescent bond is deeply unlikely. And yet, there is joy in the moment of connection, the feeling of some tiny but important event between two people. It occurred,(something anyway), it can’t be undone, and maybe, just maybe, it could change both lives forever.
The moment becomes aesthetic when we look at the charming, quirky details people remember about each other. The noisy tambourine and green skirt, the blue hat, the hula hoop, the fear of birds. The aesthetics of missed connections are a study in that which stands out from the rest of the gray city, things which disrupt our attention, make us look and, more often than not, give us a sense of joy that sticks in our memory, at least for the short-term.
For me, the greatest joy lies in the naked hope people display in these postings, believing that the world is full of gifts that come at unlikely moments, and that there’s no shame in believing they’re meant for you. City life is full of guarded, careful interactions. Missed Connections are an oasis of vulnerable openness and optimism, and even if their subjects never reconnect, I love that someone is bringing them to life.
The city has caught the polka-dot bug, and it’s spreading like wildfire. I was pleasantly surprised to see a new crop of green dots in Herald Square, so new they were still surrounded by yellow caution tape. As I was poking around, I caught sight of a truck being loaded up with big green paint sprayers. I interrogated the gentleman in the photo below (who, despite the surly expression, was actually quite amiable) and he confirmed my suspicion that he and his companion are in fact the New York City green polka-dot painters!
Now that I had so serendipitously come face-to-face with these agents of aesthetic good cheer, I couldn’t let them go without another question. “Why are you out here doing this?”
The duo’s answer was satisfyingly, joyfully simple: “Why not?” And really, why not? I couldn’t think of one good reason.
Recently I’ve come across a lot of projects related to the idea of seeding joy and hope by just putting some positive energy out there. The good vibes aren’t directed at anyone in particular — they’re public, designed to touch strangers, people you’ve never met and may never actually meet.
One of these projects is You Are Beautiful. As part of the project, stickers like the ones above are distributed free of charge for anyone to place in whatever public places they choose. As the statement on their website says:
You Are Beautiful uses the medium of advertising and commercialization to spread a positive message. Projects like these make a difference in the world by catching us in the midst of daily life and creating moments of positive self realization.
The two key joyful elements here are surprise and transcendence. The surprise of seeing a positive, anonymous message catches our attention and interrupts whatever frame of mind we were in. That interruption, in turn, leads to a moment of transcendence, where the beauty of the sentiment is absorbed in what You Are Beautiful calls a “moment of positive self realization.” Ideally, it causes a shifting of perspective that makes us feel, if not beautiful, then at least connected to something beautiful.
Another variation on this theme is the yarnbombing movement, which is documented beautifully by Leanne Prain and Mandy Moore on their blog and forthcoming book of the same name. Yarnbombing, also known as guerrilla knitting, is an affectionate term for a kind of soft grafitti, where artists attach knit or crocheted “tags” of brightly colored yarn to elements of the landscape. Often found in urban settings, these tags brighten the environment and invite people to consider their surroundings in a new way. Sometimes just the sight of a knitted sleeve around a bus stop sign post will make people smile and share a laugh, connecting in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. I did an interview with Leanne earlier this summer, and she had so many wonderful insights that I’ll definitely be posting more on this topic (after I’ve finished chs 1 and 2…).
One more example is Operation Nice, a project designed to add a little positive energy to the world through gestures. A variant on the theme of random acts of kindness, Operation Nice posts examples of extraordinary niceness to inspire others to do the same. Reading the stories, you can’t help but feel good, and motivated to pass the positive energy along.
This positive energy is all the more powerful for being undirected. The joy of those who create it is purely in the giving, without even the satisfaction of seeing the results of their efforts. Once released, these positive vibes are free to ricochet around and recombine, creating unexpected combinations that compound the joy they bring. Recipients of kind acts may in turn spread more kindness, and those who witness an interjection of joy into their environment may be inspired to transform their world in their own way.
Image: temp13rec.
Ben sent me these wonderful photos of hidden smiley faces. He writes, “I think you have to look at the world in an optimistic way to see them in the first place.”
While the human brain is wired to see faces (which is why people see Jesus in a piece of toast, but not toast in statues of Jesus), I don’t think we’re programmed to see them as happy or sad; to Ben’s point, it must be a matter of your personal prism. Do sad people see fewer smiley faces and more sad faces in things? In other people?
It bring up an interesting chicken-and-egg question. One thing I want to suggest with this project is that designing aesthetics of joy into an object or experience can create more opportunities for people to feel joy and therefore improve overall emotional wellbeing. But to what extent do we need to be receptive for these aesthetics of joy to work in the first place? Which comes first: the positive attitude or the positive aesthetic experience?
Thanks, Ben.
The scene in the photo above has the precious quality of a carefully constructed scale model, the meticulously crafted miniature boats floating in an inch-deep bay. But in fact, this fakeness is fake, because this is no model — it’s a real scene made to look tiny and toylike with the use of a Photoshop technique known as faux tilt-shift photography.
You can see many more examples like this on Flickr, in pools like this one, where tilt-shift enthusiasts showcase their best work. It’s especially amusing when tilt-shifters use photos with people in them, as in the one below. The people look like toy figurines, and it’s easy to forget for a moment that those are real people with names and lives, and not molded pieces of polystyrene.
It’s also wonderful when you see a familiar scene, like this typical New York City block, transformed through tilt-shift. This transformation, from familiar to strange, is at the heart of what’s joyful about tilt-shift. It’s about more than just getting the joke. Yes, there’s a moment of revelation where you discover what you’re looking at is actually a new perspective on something you know well. But jokes get old, punchlines fail to have the same impact once you know what’s coming, and yet these photos make me smile whenever I see them. I think it’s because the apparent scale shift jars us out of our customary position in relationship to the world around us. Through these distortions, we’re given a moment in which we can realize how small we are, how tiny even our biggest structures can seem, and this momentary change in perspective is liberating.
Photos, top to bottom: mellocakes, nurpax, agent j loves agent a
Nudity comes in all forms. There’s erotic nude, artful nude, lascivious nude, tawdry nude. There’s shocking nude and boring nude, fantasy nude and reality nude, and (as per Seinfeld) good nude and bad nude. But sometimes a birthday suit is just birthday suit, and being nude is just about the freedom of skin and air, and nothing else.
Another item from today’s NYT explores this kind of joyful nudity — kids just wanting to be kids, unencumbered by clothes — and all the subtle issues this juvenile naturism causes.
It’s an interesting, nuanced treatment. I’d love to know what people think about this. At what age does going nude cross the line from joyful to uncomfortable? And does that age then represent a certain kind of turning point in life, in our relationship to joy?
Roger Cohen has a wonderful op-ed piece in today’s New York Times about the recently published study showing that rhesus monkeys fed a restricted calorie diet (30% below normal intake) live longer than those who eat what they please. He views the study as an opportunity to pose the question, “What’s life for?” Is it for enjoying, with life-shortening indulgences like chocolate and cheese peppered throughout? Or is it for something else, in which case the longer the better, whatever the cost?
Cohen points to this photograph of monkeys Canto and Owen to suggest his answer:
Which brings me to low-cal Canto and high-cal Owen: Canto looks drawn, weary, ashen and miserable in his thinness, mouth slightly agape, features pinched, eyes blank, his expression screaming, “Please, no, not another plateful of seeds!”
Well-fed Owen, by contrast, is a happy camper with a wry smile, every inch the laid-back simian, plump, eyes twinkling, full mouth relaxed, skin glowing, exuding wisdom as if he’s just read Kierkegaard and concluded that “Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward.”
Is this a living example of aesthetics of joy? It occurs to me that enjoyment has its own aesthetic, that its not just the things enjoyed but the results of enjoyment that are aesthetic. Owen communicates joy (as much as a caged primate can, at least) in his roundness, his expression, his glossy wellbeing — the products of accumulated moments of joy in his life. Canto evinces an aesthetic of deprivation, and like parched land, hunger strikers, and disappointed children, deprivation evokes a primal aversion, decidedly not joyful. So is there something to this idea of fat and happy?
It starts with babies. Tiny people with tiny ears, tiny noses, and tiny toes. Tiny hats and shoes follow, and for some reason these ordinary things, shrunken down to impossible proportions, give us a big swell of joy.
Kids get bigger, but the miniaturization continues. Toy cars, soldiers, and animals fill our days, all perfect scale models of the real things. Dollhouses — entire worlds in miniature — involve us in hours of joyful play. And I don’t know if it’s because tiny things remind us of these toys and the freedom of childhood, or whether we have a purely visceral reaction to their comical scale, but it does seem that many miniatures have a joyful quality to them and we often seek to miniaturize things even in the adult world.
Think about cupcakes, a craze you’d have to live under a rock not to have noticed. In recent years these small doses of sweetness have been in such high demand by adults, they seem to be capable of keeping entire blocks of the West Village economically afloat. Fruit is getting smaller too. Clementines and cherry tomatoes have been around awhile, but there’s been a growing prevalence of those tiny apples and pears, and now apricots (which already seemed pretty tiny to me) have shrunken into candycots, and watermelons have gotten “personal-sized.”
There’s a pragmatic rationale for small urban cars, but it doesn’t explain why drivers of the Mini Cooper and the Smart car always seem so smiley. We also find miniatures associated with special occasions known to be joyous, such as Christmas ornaments, souvenirs of famous places, and those bride-and-groom caketop miniatures without which any wedding would surely be incomplete. These “tiny worlds” designed and sold on Etsy by Amy Powers seem take a cue from these inspirations, trying to distill moments of joy into something small, pure, and permanent.
Miniatures are like suggestions of another world, a world of a different scale, but often also a world of a different time or place. Like these miniature tuk-tuks (which, even at life-size, are already miniatures) ensconced in the lighting fixtures of New York Thai restaurant (top photo), they bring distant memories or dreams into a concrete physicality. They also work on a purely visceral level, transforming the world around them in powerful ways. These lamps would look quite ordinary, but the mini tuk-tuks make them look enormous, like giant soap bubbles in comparison. Much the way our hands look giant when held palm-to-palm with a child’s, or a Great Dane looks like horse next to a toy poodle, our world reveals itself to us in new ways in the presence of an out-of-scale element. There’s a transcendence in that feeling that the world is larger than life, or in feeling like we’ve become kids again.
Joyful accessorizing: a polka-dotted headband that said boo! to Saturday’s gray weather.
Today I was interviewed about “joywashing” by Virginia Prescott live on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth, a show about trends and culture. The interview was great fun — I love talking about joy in its many forms, and especially its rise in popular culture.
You can hear the segment online here after 3pm today. And here are links to the ads from French’s, VW, Clorox, Trident, and BMW discussed.
Previous joywashing posts on this blog include one on Clorox and one on Trident, in case anyone’s looking for a more in-depth discussion of the phenomenon.
One point I didn’t have time to make in the interview that I want to add. . . Unlike greenwashing, joywashing doesn’t present a dangerous threat. I meant what I said when I indicated that an abundance of joy in marketing probably is a good thing, and certainly won’t hurt anyone. But that doesn’t mean it’s right for every brand. Not all products should be marketed as joyful products. And this glut of good vibes will definitely make it harder for any one brand to stand out.
Marketers run a very real danger of poisoning the well by jumping on the joy-wagon without backing up their advertising claims with product design or service gestures. Like any major cultural shift, the rising tide of optimism has the potential to be an opportunity or a threat. For those marketers that realize people are looking not just for sugar-coated messages but for uplifting products and services and experiences throughout their lives, the joy wave presents a good opportunity to leave a deep and powerful impression on their customers. Or it could be a fast-track to being perceived as inauthentic. It’s all in what you make of it.
Thank you to NHPR and Word of Mouth for inviting me on to share these thoughts with their listeners. Have a joyful afternoon!
These pudding packages, all designed for the same brand by Dusseldorf-based Yvonne Nieweth, make a great case study in emotional design. Each one is different from the next in the quality and intensity of emotion it evokes. Which ones seem the most joyful to you?
Via TheDieline. See the images larger here.
I discovered William Eggleston, the iconoclast whose super-saturated prints brought color photography into art world’s mainstream, at the recent show at the Whitney Museum. The retrospective is now at the Corcoran in DC, bringing him back into the spotlight again and giving east-coasters who missed it in New York a second chance to see this wonderful body of work.
What’s joyful about Eggleston’s work? The unexpected hits of color, for starters. In this piece on NPR, Claire O’Neill writes about the transformative power of his color vision:
Although he doesn’t quite understand what people mean when they tell him, “You changed the way I see the world,” the fact remains that he has. Perhaps the living legend is an accidental genius, but before his lurid color prints hit the gallery walls, few people would have found beauty in their own rundown suburban backyards. Whether or not he meant to, and whether or not he cares, Eggleston has taught us to open our eyes and see the wide spectrum of colors around us. He says he doesn’t think much about it. But a few subtle winks and a glimmer in his eye tell me he knows exactly what he’s doing.
The article makes clear this approach was born out of Eggleston’s pure joy at seeing his world in vibrant color. Looking at his photographs, the energy seems to bleed off the print, an irrepressible vitality that stretches beyond the borders and makes each image feel hugely alive. But it also suggests Eggleston has the mischievous spirit of a kind of benign provocateur. Playfully transgressive, his goal is not to destabilize, but simply to liberate art from arbitrary rules that limit us from beauty in our own backyards.
Eggleston’s subjects are not always joyful; indeed, they often have a sort of forlorn or derelict beauty that inspires sad nostalgia rather than joy. Others are wonderfully weird, with an internal tension that asks you to consider joyful aesthetic elements — symbols of childhood, fluffy clouds or cotton candy, holiday motifs—in all their bizarre beauty, almost without emotion.
But regardless of the specific elements featured, to me the body of work as a whole exudes joy, arising as it does from the mind of a man who revels in color. In the audio slide show that accompanies the NPR piece, the final question is, “Do you dream in color?” There is such savory delight in the laugh that punctuates his response: “Oh yes. Wonderful pictures that don’t exist. I would love to print every single one of them. So. . . brilliant.”
From NPR, via tipster-extraordinare: Dad
