Results tagged “brucemau”

Torontoist presents an imagined inside look at the creative process behind the AGO's shiny new logo, above.

At the Interior Design Show this past weekend, British innovator-icon Tom Dixon lamented the impossibility of creative rebellion in today's art and design world. In the eighties, he said, postmodern design values were near-universal, and thus easy to subvert. In the oughties, however, the aesthetic is increasingly fractured, and there is no one standard to either strive for or strain against. If anything goes and nothing is new, how are today's students to design anything truly radical?

Good news. Eastern Front Gallery is up and challenging Bruce Mau's massively-hyped and masterfully-disorganized EPCOT AGO show with a rebuttal called Massive Response. The show, which opened yesterday, presents works by twenty-three artists, which run from the humorous to the mildly profound. The gallery is also presenting a series of lectures in tandem with the show. Tonight "curator Ron McKay delivers a provocative keynote address: “Spitting on a Hummer as Performance Art,” which will be followed by a screening of Soylent Green. Who knew Charlton Heston and Bruce Mau would ever find themselves in the same paragraph? And who we knew could spit on a Hummer and call ourselves Picasso?

Actually they're nickels, giant nickels. Third year OCAD student Kevin Radigan's intervention outside the AGO pokes fun at Bruce Mau's blustery and sometimes pompous Massive Change exhibit which we've reviewed.

Maybe celebrity architects are trying to tell us something when they come to our city and refurbish us with zany pole-vaulted matchboxes or a giant steel "O" looming over Harbord Street. TOist has always felt such examples of architectural swagger bring more good than harm despite being aesthetically distasteful, especially in the case of Thom Mayne's U of T Graduate House.

TOist had the opportunity to visit the Lost Articles Office at the TTC a few weeks ago. It's a vast repository for things lost and unloved, where the finds range from the mundane (hundreds of pairs of gloves) to the magnificent (a super vintage apple laptop, similar to the ones presently starring in Bruce Mau's massive change). But while the TTC formerly offloaded the unclaimed items with bi-annual sales, they're now, like much of the western world, going Ebay. Apparently, Toronto Police Services has been doing this since last year, and it's always a good idea to follow the lead of the TPS. As of press time, bidding for the 'Assortment of Beauty and Healthcare Products' stood at $13.00. Check out that quality Clingwrap.

Bruce Mau's exhibit Massive Change, which takes over the AGO until May 29, scares me.

This week marks the countdown to next weekend’s opening of the much-anticipated and much-debated Massive Change exhibit at the AGO. Everyone has criticized Mau’s bizarrely utopian and woolly optimism. Mau’s 2001 book, Life Style, focused on shaping design’s role in individual lives, recognizing that ‘lifestyle’ in the post-war period had come to be defined solely in terms of consumptive patterns rather than class or occupation. The argument was loosely patched together by brilliant aesthetic design and soaring catchphrases, but when broken down, puzzlingly vacant - resembling an elaborately bound PowerPoint presentation with great photography.