London Street Art

One thing still surprises me about London. The streets and walls are very clean. Even in small cities in other European countries (I consciously don't just talk about 'Europe', as if the UK would not belong to it...) the streets are full of graffiti, and I don't talk about nice graffiti, but rather about useless tags and signs, which cover pretty everything from bins to street lamps to doors and of course transformer boxes. But London seems to be almost untroubled by the big black marker.

This gives space to something much more creative and valuable for the society: Street Art. If you walk through Shoreditch, Brick Lane or Camden Town you'll find all the time new surprises, sometimes hidden so you can only notice it when you're very observant.

You'll find Street Art also in museum shops and design bookshops, but I still think Street Art is just best enjoyed where it belongs, in the street. There it is also exposed to the surrounding and the constant change, although it is definitely a shame, when you want to see a picture again and it's covered by something else.

A very interesting development is brands, which started to use Street Art or maybe Street Art, which started to use advertising? Sometimes it's not so easy to distinguish. It does not work for all brands of course, but where the brand has already a connection to the street and where the target group is the same, street art advertising works very well and is a wonderful bridge between art and commerce. Most of the pieces are unique and imbedded in the environment. The brand therefore can start a conversation with the people enjoying it and can very well represent its personality.

The examples I would like to show you now have all vanished already. Next time I see one, I'll post it...

Banksy in Shoreditch

Mars Attack!!!

I knew that they're going to attack us...

Absolut Pureté

Absolut Vodka and the German artist Simon Schubert collaborated together to create a print ad for an Avenue de l'Opera bus shelter in Paris. But wait, you can't call it a print ad, because there is no print. No ink and no paint, just the paper folded creating shadows and notches. This merges into an amazing picture of vodka bottles and it definitely looks "pure".

Advertising regularly uses creative or even artistic tools and utilises them to commercialise a product. I would definitely not call all the ads out there pieces of art, but some of them are indeed creative maserpieces. This Absolut poster from Simon Schubert is a very good example and will most likely have the desired effect for the advertiser and will be shared and liked on social media platforms. That's also the only way for Absolut to reach the mass consumers, since the pure poster is a unique copy.

Enjoy the video supporting the campaign:

The Hunger

To be honest, I have never heard the name Rankin before.
But, I checked out his website rankin.co.uk and had a look at his absolutely nice photographs. I also found a lot of books on his website, which I actually knew and looked through before on one of my many visits to Waterstones or Foyles. However, that's not what this is all about. The reason I even had a look at Rankin's website was The Hunger, his new bi-annual magazine. It has been in the window of Artsword Bookshop in Shoreditch for two weeks and after I had seen it a couple of times I decided to buy it. It's almost a book, you could probably kill somebody with it. Another surprising fact, it was only £ 4.

And the magazine is amazing!

I haven't started reading it, but checked out all the photographs. He included many different people from actors to musicians, artists and models. Rankin writes in the introduction "I have launched this magazine now, because I want to give a voice to the creative people who drive forward out of pure love of the process". I love this statement and I love this mix of people from different creative fields. In the magazine are mostly photographs but also interviews with the people he had in front of the lens. The magazine is so pure and direct, a piece of art in itself.

I know more about Rankin now, look forward to reading the launch issue of The Hunger and also already to the next issue in summer 2012.

Creative Industries

For the last couple of weeks I have attended the course "Creative Industries - Theory and Context" by Anna Dempster at Birkbeck College. I never really heard about creative industries before I chose the course, but the title definitely got my attention. Creative is something I associate with art, industry sounds more like production or manufacturing. Are there two worlds suddenly clashing? Art and Commerce?

And yes, the course was a lot about art and commerce. How artists work with people together, who do their job just to earn money. That does not mean artists do not want to earn money, but they might also have other and more important motivations behind the work they do. It was also about people who are able to found a business with their creative inspirations.

This is now probably a bit a too simplistic summary of the course content and not really academic (sorry Anna), but I got the point.

However, even more important for me was a combination from interests I always had. Architecture. Film. Advertising. Theatre. Art. Since I've never really been creative myself, I especially liked the business approach of seeing the "creative industries". Therefore, I thought I could start writing about that topic. As you might have noticed, I already reduced the areas within the creative industries and I will probably also just write about the stuff that interests me. But I definitely also honor all the people being creative in other fields. Have fun!