Not Your Grandmother's Lladro (Thank God)

above: Jaime Hayon's Clown lamp for Lladro.

I've been known to describe my own personal hell as having to spend eternity in a room decorated with LeRoy Neiman paintings and Lladro sculptures, as Dixieland music plays and I am made to to eat Ambrosia Fruit Salad.


above left: Ambrosia Fruit Salad, right: LeRoy Neiman's Tiger

But every once in awhile I am forced to reevaluate my own strongly stated opinions. Lladro's 2007 spring collection has me rethinking my previously formed opinion of this highly popular, ridiculously overpriced line of decorative figurines.

Below is a picture of Lladro's "A Grand Adventure", priced at $34,000.00


Now, don't get me wrong. I still can't stand the majority of their muted-colored elongated people frozen in sappy moments illustrating bygone stereotypes of professions and family roles. While I can respect the craftsmanship, I simply can't stand neither the style nor the subject of their 'collectibles'. You'd actually have to pay me MORE than the price tag to display their $34,000 "A Grand Adventure" train scene in my home.

But Bodo Sperlein's Re-cyclos Collection, new this spring, is not the Lladro I grew to know and hate. (By the way, Bodo Sperlein designed the ever-popular omnipresent blog favorite Red Berry China Collection, some pieces of which can be seen below):




The Lladro 2007 Re-cyclos Collection, to be released this Spring, is created in porcelain with matte white and/or black finishes. The pieces are fundamentally modern in their design and are functional as opposed to decorative. The bottle stoppers, hanging lights, wall sconces, bud vases, jewelry and candle holders are sensuous in form and feel, and frankly (dare I say it) attractive.

Don't believe me? See for yourself:


above: bird ring from Lladro's 2007 spring collection


above: candle holder from Lladro's 2007 spring collection


above: Buddha HeadII from Lladro's 2007 spring collection


above: Winged wall sconce from Lladro's 2007 spring collection


above: Butterfly chandelier from Lladro's 2007 spring collection

above: Bird cuff links, porcelain and sterling silver, from Lladro's 2007 spring collection

above: Flower tapestry bud vase from Lladro's 2007 spring collection

above: Butterfly pendant lamp from Lladro's 2007 spring collection

above: Open necklace, 18k over sterling and porcelain, from Lladro's 2007 spring collection


above: Bacchus Ram bottle stopper from Lladro's 2007 spring collection
So, I guess from this day forth I will have to describe my own personal hell as being forced to eat Ambrosia Fruit Salad while listening to Dixieland, held captive in a room decorated with LeRoy Neiman Paintings and.... Hummel Figurine


UPDATE:
Since this post, Lladro has continued to contemporize their line with the RE: Deco line and wonderful works by Jaime Hayon and other contemporary sculptors and designers:





Visit the entire collection of Lladro here.

Who Says Chandeliers Can't Be Hip? Not Rock And Royal.

Rock and Royal describes themselves on their site as such:
"Rock and Royal was established in 2005 as a trademark of Mothership. Rock and Royal’s core business can be described as “providing personalized advice to help you with your choice of exceptional chandeliers and photo realistic mosaic designs.”

Goodbye Fanny Pack, Hello Koffski! The Hip New Man Bag

Call it the Man Bag for the New Millenium, or the long overdue replacement for that famous fashion faux pas; the fannypack.



But finally there's something for men to wear on their belt that isn't an eyesore and will hold everything from their keys and wallet to their cellphone:


The Koffski is available in both full size as well as a junior version. Also available are shoulder straps or belts with it.



It offers customized design in a thoroughly practical form and is extremely comfortable to wear. This bag for men (we know, an odd thought) is reminiscent of a gun holster and has room for a wallet, your mobile, a bunch of keys, your Montblanc pen, enough documents to have you travel once around the globe and plenty of credit cards to pay for your Martinis (shaken, obviously...).



The junior version of the Koffski is assembled in a traditional leather manufacture in Solingen (famous for the knives usually...) using leather from the heart of Tuscany, a little village called Santa Croce sull'Arno, in between Florence and Pisa. The leather is left in a much less refined state and has a less dense surface, prone to aging in a different way than yesterdays version, more like traditional saddle bags. The metal parts are exposed to a spezial galvanization process, resulting in a matt appearance, resembling old silver...

This version isn't numbered, but has a branded logotype, that reminds you of the manufacturing process. It's available for purchase here.

A :15 second giggle

As "hip" as I may proclaim to be, every once in awhile, something that ought to be on a site called socuteyouwanttovomit.com really gets me.

Here's one of those examples:

Ever wonder what a baby panda's sneeze sounds like?
Well, even if you didn't, it's worth a listen.

Funky Find of The Week: Bloomframe, The Insta-Balcony

Insta-Balcony! The Bloomframe®

This cool architectural gem (a balcony that folds open with the push of a button in 15 seconds and closes flat to be a window) was created by an architectural firm in Amsterdam named Hofman Dujardin.



It was presented as a prototype at the 2007 International Building and Construction Exhibition in Utrecht Netherlands last week. The design is patented and Bloomframe® is expected to be available for both commercial and private residences later in 2007.

Stop Sitting Up Straight! The Right Angle For Your Task Chair

Your mother was wrong: Sitting up straight is bad for you. Scottish radiologists confirmed in a study last year that a 130-degree angle of recline between torso and thighs reduces pressure on the discs in the lower back. This (and its sleek design) is why the ubiquitous Aeron chair was so ahead of its time in 1994. It deeply reclined by pivoting at the hips.

But designers find that the features of chairs like the Aeron (see image below) are lost on most sitters. The array of levers and knobs—recline tension, lumbar support, seat-pan depth, forward tilt—are commonly ignored by users, who only think to change the chair’s height.


above: The revolutionary Aeron Chair

This neglect has manufacturers such as Herman Miller and Humanscale looking toward the next frontier: a self-adjusting chair. “We’re working on a chair that will listen to who’s sitting on it and adjust itself to their weight,” says Bill Dowell, director of research at Herman Miller, which makes the Aeron.



Humanscale’s Freedom chairs (shown above) include a counterbalance system that adjusts itself like scales to the sitter’s weight as he or she reclines, eliminating the need for recline controls.


above photo by Nick Kaloterakis

Or perhaps the chair of the future isn’t one at all. Chairs contribute in part to the high rate of back pain, which, according to the National Institutes of Health, affects eight out of 10 Americans. “Our notion of a machine for sitting may not make sense in a globalized world,” says Herman Miller designer Cameron Campbell. Galen Cranz of the University of California at Berkeley points out in her book The Chair that the Indian practice of squatting and the Muslim practice of stretching five times a day to pray have great ergonomic benefits. Ten years from now, one worker may settle into a low recliner, another will kneel on a soft carpet, and they’ll talk across a pile of office cushions.—

This article is reprinted from THE FUTURE OF WORK-Pimp Your Cube 2017
The ultimate self-adjusting office chair plus seven more concepts that will make your daily grind a little smoother By Peter Hall and Lauren Aaronson | February 2007 Peter Hall

“Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making”

Art Review | 'Comic Abstraction'
Visions That Flaunt Cartoon Pedigrees By Roberta Smith
(reprinted from the NY Times with some additional images)

The trouble with too many museum theme shows is that they begin with a viable idea and, through lack of institutional commitment, curatorial imagination or old-fashioned connoisseurship, fail to fulfill their promise.

This untitled 1990 painting below by Michel Majerus is among the works in MoMA's new exhibition:


So it is with “Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making,” a sometimes perky but inoffensive and ultimately dispiriting exhibition of recent artistic endeavor at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized by Roxana Marcoci, curator of the department of photography, it brings together nearly 30 works in drawing, painting, sculpture, video and installation made over the last 16 years by 13 artists who borrow one way or another from comic strips, cartoons and animation.

The motor behind this show is a big idea: the lively and essential contamination of abstract art by popular culture that began with the Surrealists but has greatly expanded during the last 30 years. It could be argued that most new abstract art since the late 1970s has had comic aspects. After all, ironic self-awareness is one way that abstraction has dealt with the resurgence of representation and the splintering of the modernist trajectory.

A wall text outside the show’s first gallery lies in wait. It announces that the works on hand use the conventions of comics “not to withdraw from reality but to address perplexing questions about war and global conflicts, the loss of innocence and racial stereotyping.”


But in the end the works here are mostly cute, neat and perfectly pleasant, implying a view of contemporary art as mildly titillating but basically toothless entertainment. Thankfully there are some exceptions. For example, “Crazy Conductor,” a 1993 drawing on chalkboard by Gary Simmons, conveys the nasty racial caricature implicit in many animated cartoons. (Mr. Simmons’s 1996 “boom,” however, is simply a big, beautiful explosion — too close to its source, merely lifted without comment.)



Four paintings by Ellen Gallagher skewer Minimalism in general and Agnes Martin in particular with expanses of bug eyes and blubbery lips. At once gorgeous and barbed, these works are the most sustained and substantial efforts here, but their motifs are most potent in the smallest and earliest canvas; the others are elegant dilutions.



Sue Williams’s all-over paintings look similarly benign from a distance. Draw near, and you discover that her attenuated Pollock-like patterns roil with suggestions of body parts, bodily fluids and sexual couplings. Whether this payoff compensates for the emaciated effect of the work as a whole is debatable; it certainly lacks the punch of Ms. Williams’s nonabstract, savagely comical early feminist paintings, one of which appears in the catalog.

But otherwise too much here operates in some kind of vacuum, far from the madding crowd of ambition, recent art history, life or a deep engagement with the primary vehicle of visual experience, which is form. In little of it can you sense the force of a first-rate, profoundly engaged, here-for-the-duration artistic sensibility. This is because too many of the selections are early, sometimes promising work that never amounted to much, or are transitional, anomalous, derivative or tangential to the show’s theme.

In the case of Inka Essenhigh, Arturo Herrera and Julie Mehretu you have early works of limited promise that has so far not been fulfilled. In the case of Franz West and Polly Apfelbaum you have works that are charmingly whimsical but irrelevant to the show’s focus. Mr. West’s four small plaster and iron sculptures, called adaptives, are available for handling. Fun. “Blossom,” Ms. Apfelbaum’s stained-velvet Process Art floor piece, is named for one of the superheroic cartoon Powerpuff Girls and can therefore be construed as feminist. So what?



Like Ms. Gallagher, Philippe Parreno excerpts and repeats, but uncompellingly. His helium-filled Mylar “Speech Bubbles” from 1997 hover overhead, a dour, derivative meld of Claes Oldenburg and Yayoi Kusama plus Andy Warhol’s silver pillows. The caption rationalizes: They were once used as signs by protesters who wrote slogans on them.



Speech balloons also figure in Rivane Neuenschwander’s altered comic book pages, where they are blanked out with white (or occasionally blue) and the rest of the panels are bright monochrome colors. They provide some welcome if relatively pure visual intensity, regardless of what the label says about the cultural significance of the comics used. They might be better bigger, but then that would invite comparisons with Roy Lichtenstein, early Warhol and John Wesley.



Which is the problem with the efforts of Michel Majerus, a German artist who died in a plane crash at the age of 35 in 2002, especially if you factor in early Peter Saul and Albert Oehlen. A series of small canvases from 1996 have their comic moments, the best being a strange cross between an eye and an explosion. But the painterly fragments of images, words and letters of “Eggsplosion,” from 2006, could have been made in the 1950s or early ’60s. Best known for large, scrappy painted installations, Mr. Majerus clearly had talent, but not the time to find himself.



The megastar Takashi Murakami is represented by two paintings that feel like excerpts of his own work. “Cream” and “Milk” (seen below) are sparse, mural-size cartoon renderings of flung liquids that function best as backdrops to anime-inspired male and female figures that are present only in the catalog. Their markedly unabstract bodies are shown expelling the liquids implied by the paintings’ titles.


More comic installation than comic abstraction, Juan Muñoz’s “Waiting for Jerry” consists of the soundtrack of a “Tom and Jerry” animated cartoon: a cacophony of inferred chases, sneaks, skids, crashes, plops and general hysteria. Emanating from a lighted mouse hole cut in the old-fashioned molding of a small, dark room, it echoes throughout the show. The work is a refreshing anomaly, given the usual heavy-handed humanism of Mr. Muñoz’s figurative sculpture, but notice what engages you. I’ll bet it’s the appropriated soundtrack. Wonderfully complex, it bounces back and forth between descriptive and abstract, and represents the kind of concentrated thought and work that is missing from too much of this show.



“Comic Abstraction” would have benefited from more space, nerve and historical awareness. The catalog establishes no context for the origins of the comic in art, which gained speed with Pop Art. Also worth mentioning if not including in the show itself are artists like Mr. Oehlen and Carroll Dunham, both of whom are younger than Mr. West.

Especially pertinent is Mr. Dunham, whose automatist, Disneyesque excursions into the hormonal sublime, made in the 1980s and early ’90s, may be our moment’s richest, most disturbing, most perplexingly real works of comic abstraction. The efforts of several artists in this exhibition are nearly unimaginable without Mr. Dunham’s precedent.

Below is an example of Carroll Dunham's work:


Other artists whose work would have vitalized this show include Lucy McKenzie, Pipilotti Rist, Amy Sillman, Gary Hume, Josh Smith, Thomas Nozkowski, Chris Ofili, Monique Prieto, Joanne Greenbaum and, finally, Udomsak Krisanamis, whose work from the mid-’90s has a stand-alone power, even if it has yet to develop.

Beyond the big solo retrospectives that MoMA handles with expert aplomb, too many of the museum’s recent exhibitions have a veneer of political piousness that limits and shortchanges everything: art, artists, the public and the institution itself. In MoMA’s efforts to go beyond a formalist, linear view of modernism, the museum often seems to confuse sincere political intent with genuine, groundbreaking artistic quality.

No wonder it ends up showing shallow, label-dependent art rather than work that offers deeper, more contradictory encounters. Art becomes a kind of one-liner. The viewer looks a little, reads a label, says “I get it” and shuffles on. If you are new to art, you don’t know what you are missing. If you aren’t, you feel had.

“Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making” continues through June 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400.

Meet The Nouveau Niche: Your New Demographic

"NOUVEAU NICHE"

BusinessWeek called it 'The Vanishing Mass Market', Wired Magazine spoke of the Lost Boys and the Long Tail. Others talk about Niche Mania, Stuck in the Middle, or Commoditization Chaos.

Those at Trendwatching dubbed it NOUVEAU NICHE: the new riches will come from servicing the new niches! And while all of this may smack of wordplay, the drivers behind this trend stretch widely and profusely, and have been building for years. So even though you may be more or less familiar with the below, it's definitely time to incorporate NOUVEAU NICHE into your corporate vocabulary AND your business strategy. The move towards everything niche should definitely rank right up there with other mega trends like GENERATION C, MASSCLUSIVITY, MASTERS OF THE YOUNIVERSE and so on.

What's fueling NOUVEAU NICHE?

1. Consumers are more individualized than ever, expecting every good, service and experience to be addressing their unique and oh so important selves. Gone are the traditional demographic segments, the distinct consumer classes: this is all about being MASTERS OF THE YOUNIVERSE. Gone too are the days when, as BusinessWeek so eloquently put it; "the ideal was not merely to keep up with the Joneses, but to be the Joneses." In a NOUVEAU NICHE world, where the demise of institutions and their stifling conventions has unlocked latent hyper individualization, where it is all about 'me' (for better or worse), where being special will lend consumers status, to be mass is now every consumer's nightmare. Witness GRAVANITY, witness MASSCLUSIVITY. Even the few mass objects of desire that still manage to unite large groups of consumers -- iPods, Nokia handsets, or the Mini Cooper -- are likely to be customized and personalized the moment they leave the warehouse, website or store.

Consumers are also more experienced than ever. They expertly cut through the crap, ignore advertising, and know which quality and price levels are fair. They actively hunt for the best of the best, and the best of the best is often NOT mass. (The only mass they're willing to put up with is the stuff they don't really care about and can get on the cheap at Aldi or WalMart).

As Chris Anderson, author of the excellent Long Tail article points out, the only reason mass used to equal 'hit', had to do with the now outdated perception that if something sells well, it must certainly be good.

Now, with consumers not only being comfortable wandering further from the beaten path, but the beaten path also being much easier to leave (thank you WWW), they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought. Mass popularity was based more on what was available (think mass marketing budgets, limited physical shelf space, limited broadcasting channels, and a nearly complete lack of transparency), than on absolute laws of nature that dictated 'good' or 'bad'.



No wonder that retail and hospitality players, which currently find themselves at the forefront of the NOUVEAU NICHE slash best of the best revolution, are opening up specialized stores and venues as fast as you can say 'NOUVEAU NICHE'.

From British The White Company (above), which only sells white home accessories, to NY's Rice to Riches (twenty flavors of rice pudding, including endangered maple with sun dried blueberries) to fast-expanding Oil and Vinegar (twenty five kinds of olive oil) and so on.

On the US West Coast, the next big NOUVEAU NICHE thing is regional Italian restaurants, from San Francisco based A16 serving food solely from the Campania region and its capital city Naples, to LA's Locanda Veneta in Los Angeles and Genoa restaurant in Portland, Oregon (source: Debra Mustain, Springspotters).

Hospitality? Lake Tahoe's THE BLOCK hotel welcomes snowboarders (see our BRANDED BRANDS update below), while countless B&Bs (all with their own websites) around the world now cater to every alternative lifestyle, preference or inclination known to man.

However, all of this pales compared to NOUVEAU NICHE in the virtual world:

2. The combination of online transparency of supply, prices, recommendations and opinions AND near one billion online users enables a match-making game connecting insanely segmented supply with equally fragmented NOUVEAU NICHE demand. Choose from eBay's millions of sellers offering everything from the expected to the unbelievable.

Dive into iTunes' hundreds of thousands of songs, Amazon.com's hundreds of thousands of books, Netflix's tens of thousands of movies and documentaries. Or go to Nicheflix for even more off the beaten path choice. Or visit Mandy May, the world's first DVD rental service to focus entirely on chick flicks (source: Aisha Jordan, Springspotters).



Consumers looking for other people, not things, end up on niche dating sites like cyclingsingles.com, winesingles.com, datemypet.com, singlerepublican.com, democraticsingles.com (source: ABC News). Choice within these niche segments is growing, too: Jewish singles check out jdate.com, jewishcafe.com, jewishmingle.com, gefiltefishing.com, frumster.com.

Add to that the revolution in location-based search (see our READY-TO-KNOW trend), making transparency truly personal and local, and the ongoing proliferation of collaborative filtering ("customers who bought this title also bought..." -- an essential ingredient for consumers to find their way deeper and deeper into unbridled catalogues and databases), and NOUVEAU NICHE no longer 'just' enables consumers to stray from what or who they know, but actively encourages them to do so. (P.S. More on this in next month's TWINSUMER trend description.)

3. New production processes, mass (!) distribution, technologies and communication channels, all enabling global economies of scale and scope, allow for virtually everything to be made and broadcast, at whatever specification, and whatever batch size. China. India. Eastern Europe. USD 29 DVD players. Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Group's 8,530 TEU container ships. Airbus 380. New H&M and Zara collections every week. Podcasting. Virtual worlds. 254 TV channels. Google AdWords.

Ironically, the only mass worth studying may be the mass/abundance of virtual shelf space (inventory no longer equals costs) and communication channels. One marketing message and one product for every individual: it will truly be upon us soon.



But is it all about traditional producers becoming more nimble? Not at all:

4. New producers, including the millions of members of GENERATION C, are adding niche content in text, audio, video by the tera bytes, to be purchased by micro audiences. For all the talk of new opportunities for established niche producers and marketers, the most interesting next development for NOUVEAU NICHE may be driven by ordinary consumers, doubling as producers. Equipped with professional hardware, software, skills and their own showrooms/shops at amateur prices, they're already producing an avalanche of new content: books, articles, songs, photographs, videos; thereby adding billions of new products and items to pickings that are already immense. Just consider how hundreds of thousands of bloggers have already exposed many mass media outlets for the boring, predictable and bland one-for-all content factories that they are.

Next next? Crafts! Not only the world of technology is throwing professional goodies at amateurs, so are the more traditional DIY manufacturers: NOUVEAU NICHE will increasingly be a redpaper.com meets cafepress.com meets lulu.com meets boundlessgallery.com meets GENERATION C. We ain't seen nothing yet.

OPPORTUNITIES
The above is NOT spanking new, and neither is it complete (part 2 to follow soon). However, what IS new, is how rapid NOUVEAU NICHE is approaching its (dare we say it?) tipping point. Everything has been put into place to unlock consumers' need for NOUVEAU NICHE on a global and local scale.

Yes, NOUVEAU NICHE is work in progress, for you and for us. But above all, it's a mindset. To continue thinking of niche as unprofitable or even worse, unpopular, may equal commercial suicide. Expect every significant field in business to succumb to the power of NOUVEAU NICHE. Advertising. Publishing. Television. Food and Beverage. Hospitality. Dating. Entertainment. Electronics. Search. Financial services. And so on. We'll still need mass, whether it's for low cost goods or to satisfy sudden cravings to belong to a larger group. And something that is really, really good or desirable will still be able to reach mass status. But it will be mass by choice, not mass by scarcity.

Where to start? Study the Long Tail phenomenon, hang out in niche venues, experiment with Google AdWords, actively look for NOUVEAU NICHE manifestations while roaming the streets, waiting at airports, and surfing the web. Re-read our MASTERS OF THE YOUNIVERSE trend and keep an eye out for NOUVEAU NICHE, PART 2.

Should be enough to get you going, and hopefully the above will help you to introduce relevant niche goods, services and experiences before your competition does!
--

source:Trendwatching

The New 2008 Olympic Logo: Eeeuuuwww!

My apologies to the designer, but.. yuck.