Torontoist presents an imagined inside look at the creative process behind the AGO's shiny new logo, above. Designer: Bruce Mau Client: Art Gallery of Ontario Due: May 15, 2008 Creative Brief: Design a "distinctive new logo that will represent the Gallery well beyond its Fall 2008 opening." Logo should capture "both the stability of the century-old institution and the forward-looking energy of the new Gallery." (If that proves too challenging, refer to graphic design......

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......

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......

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. Fortunately for Radigan, the folks at the AGO have a sense of humour and are even talking about making the installation permanent rather than over-reacting at his tongue in cheek work. Thanks to Sally McKay for the link and photo. Also, spring means another rash......

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. Built in 2000, it was adored by critics for its boldness (Lisa Rochon,......

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......

Bruce Mau's exhibit Massive Change, which takes over the AGO until May 29, scares me. It's not Avigdor Cahaner's featherless chicken or the sexing up of military design that's got me a little freaked out by Bruce Mau's exhibit/manifesto. What scares me is the blind faith that Mau puts in design and technology. It starts from the moment you walk and a sign poses the question "Now that we can do anything, what will we......

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......