Andy Warhol/Pop Art

Pop Art

 By Tilman Osterwold

Published by Taschen, 2003

ISBN 3822820709, 9783822820704

google books

p.167

"Warhol not only wanted to turn the trivial and commonplace into art, but also to make art itself trivial and commonplace. He not only transforms mass produce objects and information from the mass media into art, but turns his own art into mass produce objects. Whatever is lowest comes out on top in Warhol's work, and vice versa: he knocks elitist "high" art off its pedestal and drags it doen into the slough of everyday life; sub-cultural phenomena, on the other hand, became socially acceptable."

Psychological Research

"On Desire: Why we want what we want" by William Braxton Irvine

Oxford University Press US, 2006

Google books page 

p.105

"Suppose we can avoid miswanting. Suppose we can teach ourselves to want only those things that, when we get them, we will like having. Even then our insatiability will not be cured. This is because of the psychological phenomenon known as adaptation: we tend to get used to what we have and therefore like it less with the passage of time. We grow indifferent to the spouse, home, or car that was once our pride and joy, and because we are no longer satisfied with what we have, we form new desires in the belief that satisfying them - unlike when we satisfied our previous desires - will lead to lasting happiness.

These two psychological phenomena, miswanting and adaptation, lie at the heart of human insatiability"

Obama poster

By Shepard Fairey, similar style to the che guevara and black panther posters from the 60's and 7o's

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey

Theodor Adorno

German Philosopher who commented on popular culture and consumerism.

Quoted in "Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies" by Simon Frith

Theories on popular music here (start on p.325)

"If one seeks to find out who "likes" a commercial piece, one cannot avoid the suspicion that liking and disliking are inappropriate to the situation, even if the person questioned clothes his reactions in those words. The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it.... preference in fact depends merely on biographical details or on the situation in which things are heard"

Cool Hunting

Article from the the new yorker

Baysie Wightman and DeeDee Gordon are "cool hunters" employed by brands such as reebok and converse to go out and find out what the cool people on the streets are doing.

Article talks about Diffusion Research-

"One of the most famous diffusion studies is Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross's analysis of the spread of hybrid seed corn in Greene County, Iowa, in the nineteen-thirties. The new seed corn was introduced there in about 1928, and it was superior in every respect to the seed that had been used by farmers for decades. But it wasn't adopted all at once. Of two hundred and fifty-nine farmers studied by Ryan and Gross, only a handful had started planting the new seed by 1933. In 1934, sixteen took the plunge. In 1935, twenty-one more followed; the next year, there were thirty-six, and the year after that a whopping sixty-one. The succeeding figures were then forty-six, thirty-six, fourteen, and three, until, by 1941, all but two of the two hundred and fifty-nine farmers studied were using the new seed. In the language of diffusion research, the handful of farmers who started trying hybrid seed corn at the very beginning of the thirties were the "innovators," the adventurous ones. The slightly larger group that followed them was the "early adopters." They were the opinion leaders in the community, the respected, thoughtful people who watched and analyzed what those wild innovators were doing and then did it themselves. Then came the big bulge of farmers in 1936, 1937, and 1938-the "early majority" and the "late majority," which is to say the deliberate and the skeptical masses, who would never try anything until the most respected farmers had tried it. Only after they had been converted did the "laggards," the most traditional of all, follow suit. The critical thing about this sequence is that it is almost entirely interpersonal. According to Ryan and Gross, only the innovators relied to any great extent on radio advertising and farm journals and seed salesmen in making their decision to switch to the hybrid. Everyone else made his decision overwhelmingly because of the example and the opinions of his neighbors and peers."

Innovators -> Early Adopters -> Early Marjority -> Late Majority

Cool hunters seek out fashion innovators, who try something daring and different. "...their definition of cool is doing something that nobody else is doing. A company can intervene in the cool cycle. It can put its shoes on really cool celebrities and on fashion runways and on MTV. It can accelerate the transition from the innovator to the early adopter and on to the early majority. But it can't just manufacture cool out of thin air, and that's the second rule of cool."

"The key to coolhunting, then, is to look for cool people first and cool things later, and not the other way around. Since cool things are always changing, you can't look for them, because the very fact they are cool means you have no idea what to look for. What you would be doing is thinking back on what was cool before and extrapolating, which is about as useful as presuming that because the Dow rose ten points yesterday it will rise another ten points today. Cool people, on the other hand, are a constant."

In summary, coolhunters seek out innovators who start new trends, and for some unexplained reason have a natural sense for cool. Can these cool hunters make anything cool? What gives them this authority to decide what 's going to be cool next? And where do they get their inspiration? Is there perhaps a missing link in the diffusion research theory. The early majority get their inspiration from the early adopters, and they in turn get their inspiration from the innovators, but where do the innovators get it from?

The next step then is to seek out design innovators and see if we can find out what inspires them.

Sprezzatura

Juno MacGuff: I think I’m, like, in love with you.
Paulie Bleeker: You mean as friends?
Juno MacGuff: No, I mean, like, for real. ‘Cause you’re, like, the coolest person I’ve ever met, and you don’t even have to try, you know…
Paulie Bleeker: I try really hard, actually.
— Juno
from http://quirky1978.wordpress.com/2008/03/

confirms the sprezzatura idea of trying really hard not to look like you're trying really hard - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura


INFORMATION FROM ABOUT.COM

Definition:

The rehearsed spontaneity, studied carelessness, and well-practiced naturalness that underlies convincing discourse. (The opposite of sprezzatura is affectazione--affectation.)

Etymology:

Coined by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier (1528): "[T]o avoid affectation in every way possible . . . and (to pronounce a new word perhaps) to practice in all things a certain Sprezzatura [nonchalance], so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it."

rest of article here

Theory of Cool

http://www.harpercollins.ca/rs/excerpt.asp

The book "the Rebel Sell" deals with, amongst other things, the idea of cool. This excerpt uses the example of sports shoes.

"Shoes were an essential element of the punk aesthetic from the beginning, from army boots and Converse sneakers to Doc Martens and Blundstones. And instead of the big three automakers to play the villain, there were the shoe companies: first and foremost, Nike. For antiglobalization demonstrators, Nike came to symbolize everything that was wrong with the emerging capitalist world order.

Yet this animus toward Nike did create occasional moments of embarrassment. During the famous Seattle riots of 1999, the downtown Niketown was trashed by protestors, but videotape recorded at the scene showed several protestors kicking in the front window wearing Nike shoes. It occurred to many people that if you think Nike is the root of all evil, you really shouldn't be wearing their shoes. Yet if thousands of young people refuse to wear Nike, that creates an obvious market for "alternative" footwear. Vans and Airwalk were both able to leverage some of the rebel chic associated with skateboarding into millions of dollars of sneaker sales."

Cool here has associations with deviating from the mainstream and being seen as alternative. Once an alternative product or idea is accepted into the mainstream however, it apparently loses its coolness. This would explain why fashions and tastes - in clothing and music in particular - change so often. It also shows how one can attempt to create cool by borrowing meanings and associations from other sources - in this example the attractive rebel image of skateboarding culture.

Apple computers have recently experienced this. Jonathan Ive (now their senior vice-president of design) talks of how he first discovered the company

"The more I learnt about this cheeky almost rebellious company the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money."

http://www.designmuseum.org/design/jonathan-ive

At first a refreshing alternative to the boring old PC, Apple products are becoming more and more popular, and in the case of the iPod are dominating the market. Time will tell if consumers will eventually become bored with the iPod and again look elsewhere for something more exciting.

definitions of cool

from "Cool; the Signs and Meanings of Adolescence"

p.40 "Coolness is a percieved state to which many (if not most) teens now aspire, even if its specific behavioral forms can vary substantially"

p.1 " Cool is an age-specific phenonomen, defined as the cental behavioral trait of teenagerhood"