Million dollar building

7 comments

1. Sandberg Institute? More like Fraser Institute!

   To be more serious, I question whether this institution knows anything about good design. Even their website sacrifices usability for a clever design.

2. I showed the illustration of the Yonge And Dundas wall to one of these girls in my school, and they thought it really looked cool… but then I pointed out the huge advertisments and apparently it didn’t matter.

   In this instance, this “Million Dollar Building” is hardly art. Corporization of a building is just what advertisers want, but you can’t call it art! There’s no expression in an ad(verstisment), just the message to sell yourself to what they want you to get.

3. I dunno, I like this building. I like this website and I support your mag, but your anti-ad crusade is a bit unyielding and didactic. Art and public advertising are usually pretty exclusive from one another but it’s not like the line between them doesn’t occassionally blur. Campbell’s soup cans, anyone?

4. It’s absolutely insane to even contemplate the idea that this project is “art.” Obviously there’s a HUGE difference between a work of art and someone trying to sell you some kind of superfluous crap. Exactly: Warhol’s soup cans were the beginning of the idiotic idea that anything, even the appropriation of commercials, advertising, and corporate logos, can be considered “art.” This project is completely antithetical to everything that art is and should be. And what on earth is wrong with being didactic? I’d much prefer a magazine/blog to have opinions than to seem as though it was written by a robot or something. To stimulate a critical and intelligent atmosphere there needs to be criticism/opinions.

5. I’m hedging on the building, but I was thinking of that, too–it’s a pure Warhollian visual orgasm. In that frame of mind, even I can dig it.

   Then again, Andy Warhol’s been dead for nearly 20 years–maybe *that’s* the point of the entry…

6. I find it troubling that most people use Warhol as an example of Ads = Art. Even Moscoe played the Warhol card when pressed with the suggestion of more art on the TTC. People forget that pop art was developed as an examination of consumerism, the medium being the message rather than the slogan. When the sole purpose is to sell you something, creative process becomes secondary.

7. “People forget that pop art was developed as an examination of consumerism, the medium being the message rather than the slogan.”

   But there was a dialectical quality to Pop–that is, the “examination of consumerism” wasn’t necessarily a *condemnation* of consumerism; indeed, in practice it was sometimes practically an *exaggeration* of consumerism–whether by way of celebration or by way of critique, who knows. And at least in pre-Reagan, pre-Michael-Eisner days, there was something disarmingly refreshing about it–that’s why architectural schools dug their well-thumbed copies of “Learning From Las Vegas”.

   And it’s a reason why Boston’s Citgo sign in Kenmore Square is commonly regarded as an Eiffelesque “cherishable landmark”, while to regard it as a “consumerist eyesore” is more of a sign of mediocre fuddy-duddy ignorance. And *big friggen deal* if its primary purpose is to “sell you something” (and fossil fuel, at that).

   But remember that in my earlier post, I qualified my appreciation in terms of a particular “frame of mind”, and offered that “Andy Warhol’s been dead for nearly 20 years”. Because a generation later, there *is* a retardataire-80s naivety about this Pop-esque approach, this “setting itself on the borders between commercial and Art”.

   So, that’s the nub of the problem with the Sandberg Institute–that is, unless one wants to view it as some kind of Peaches-esque retro-80s gesture, for better or worse…

   (And as an aside, I think the No-Logo/anti-consumerist/etc realm still hasn’t effectively addressed or confronted these “pop aesthetic” issues; at least, as a Cold War cultural phenomenon…)