The thing I loved about the Anish Kapoor was that his exhibition at the Royal Academy was fun. By that I mean it was accessible in a way that some art sometimes can’t be to one’s mind instantly. Anish Kapoor’s work is big, daring and all about texture. While I was exploring his work in each room I would become tantalized – I knew I wasn’t allowed to touch his work but his sculptures make you want to prod them and feel them. Being an interactive based exhibition made me feel as if I had a role to play in his work.
The room which impressed me the most was the room filled with mirrors (a range of stainless steel cuboids, ellipsoids and discs) which distorted your image and sense of space in a different way for each one you looked and stepped towards. It is worth going just to feel the slight unease of your image and sense of space being warped completely. Being in this room you couldn’t help but just talk to the stranger next to you, to express how it made you feel. This is probably why I enjoyed wandering around this room the most, for the personal and collective experience.
The power of sculpture certainly prevailed but I wish there had been just a few more rooms to explore….
I have been reading Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein and am finding it fascinating.
What is interesting about this book is that it can serve as a possible explanation as to why research companies often fail in generating valid human insights i.e. what motivates us. This can lead often to a weak ‘ad campaign’ being produced. This is because such research is based on the idea of the Rational Economic Man, but books such as Nudge and authors such as Gladwell are suggesting that man can often be irrational, inconsistent, ill informed, weak-willed and lazy.
There are flaws and inconsistencies in our decision-making apparatus and yet our models of human behaviour are still based around the idea that:
“each of us thinks and chooses unfailingly well…if you look at economics textbooks, you will learn that homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. Really. But the folks we know are not like that. Real people have trouble with long division if they don’t have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse’s birthday, and have a hangover on New Year’s Day. They are not homo economicus.”
Rory Sutherland discusses this in one of his latest blog posts here. He talks about his frustration with the shallow nature of our models of human behaviour and the need for the use of anthropologists over the likes of trend-spotters. He thinks it is vital we welcome such behavioural theories as if we carry on speaking in “Marketingese – a language unintelligle to outsiders” then communicating ideas to audiences won’t work. This is because:
“we spend almost all out time attempting to change behaviour through overt persuasion – while paying no attention to influencing the other, barely conscious ways in which people behave.”
Thaler and Sustein explore the less obvious ways in which we can influence human behaviour through little nudges and influences to improve people’s lives and address many of society’s major problems. They look into the way we operate and the irrational decisions we often make. They also talk about how we often follow the crowd – which reminded me of Earl’s work in Herd and how such analysis can be used to improve living standards.
I am only half way through this book and would recommend you read it. I am thinking of doing a book review section on my blog in order to keep track of the ideas I have been reading about. I think it could come in handy. Someone tweeted last week that books were merely ‘padding’ and that the main ideas of a book could probably be put into no more two or three blog posts. Although this could be the case, I think reading a book can be of more value than reading ideas solely from blog posts. There is something about holding a book and turning its pages too…
I agree with Amelia that it must be extremely difficult to get a message across to an audience who probably do not really want to know. Demanding a teenager’s attention to listen can be an almost impossible task.
I think this work this is really good. For a start, it is something which all people whether young or old have witnessed or experienced.
Whether it is something one has experienced walking down the street sober, trying to get away from the drunken idiots trying not to feel intimidated by people that are probably younger anyway or whether it is something you cringe about when you wake up having done something like this yourself…
Either way it works. It made me feel a bit horrid about alcohol and what it turns people into.
Really useful stuff – that is the thing about blogs, you just never get bored of reading them and then realise that 3 hours of life has just gone by!
I know many people say they are narcissitic but I think the people that really use a blog would definitely agree on the benefits of having a blog.
Sharing your thoughts with others is a way to work out what you think and maybe even start to realise that the thought you just had may not be what you are thinking now. But if you had not had blogged then you would not have even realised the new thought that had just formulated in your head. Or perhaps it would have taken a much longer time for you to realise.
It has taken me some time to work out what I think about this ad. But after three weeks I have now decided. It is still entertaining and is continually intriguing.
At first I thought, “Are Fallon just trying to put out another ‘crazy’ ad?” (not that I am saying that the Gorilla one was bad because of the craziness). I read this and thought a bit more about it. But I really think they have cracked it again. It’s good.
The theme tune is not becoming tiresome for me, in fact it helps. There is also something about the girl’s Cadbury-coloured dress which works cleverly and subtley enough not to detract the novelty of the two kids’ static faces having raving eyebrow attacks.
I wasn’t going to blog about it, as it has had a great deal of coverage on everyone else’s blogs.
After seeing it again and again and again I would not mind seeing it another time so that is saying it works compared to most ads. Fallon are doing good things, they are making me ‘feel’ something.
Robin Wight spoke about this on Radio 4 about a month ago when he was discussing the ads Fallon produce. He explained, in an advert such as the Eyebrows or the Gorilla, Fallon does not create the ad to sell the product directly. Instead by having a captivating scene i.e. kids with mad eyebrows dancing in-sync with the music, we intuitively favour the brand. This is because we realise that if such a brand can ‘waste’ their main resource (the actual product of chocolate) and not sell it to straight away, then Cadburys gain a level of respect with the viewer.
I think he called this the ‘Peacock’s tail effect’ – a peacock has a big ‘wasted resource’ of a beautiful tail, the advertiser decided to not use their main resource, in doing so producing some brilliant work of which other agencies should be envious.
I am quite fussy with my cinema viewing but have seen some really good films lately, Slumdog being one of them. So when my friend said, “lets go see Benjamin Button” I should have stuck to my gut instinct, which was:
A film about Brad Pitt starting out as an old, arthritic foetus and finishing his life as a baby – in between meeting the love of his life, (the only problem being they are aging in reverse) = Brad Pitt saying some moving lines, slowing down his speaking more than usual to emphasise the profoundity of what he says so we all think,
‘Wow…magic…beautiful…moving…great stuff’
Well yes.
There was a great deal more squeezed into to it than that. In fact, there was far too much. Half an hour into the film and my mind started to drift completely as I could not stand the sound of the old woman who was dying yet narrating. It was painful to listen.
Then there was Brad, whom I knew I was not going to enjoy as soon as he started to say the words “mah name is Benjamin, Benjamin Button” said in a lazy Southern drawl. Anna Prickard describes this as his “half-man-half goat” voice which I would say is spot on.
His acting was stiff and my friend Sarah pointed out to me after the film finished, he was trying to be Forest Gump but the problem was the tragedy of his situation of starting out life as a wrinkly little ugly old thing just did not seem a tragedy. In Forest Gump, Tom Hanks was brilliant in making you feel a part of what he went through and really did make you feel empathy for the character through his journey. But not so with Benjamin. I did not feel sorry for him. I wanted him to hurry up and get young so I could work out how much longer we had left to endure the film.
I think David Fincher should stick to films live ‘Seven’ and ‘Fight Club’ and not bother with the ‘life and fate’ type stuff as others have done it better. I suppose one thing good came from it and that was a confirmation to not waste time.
I have been reading blogs for a while now, blogs of the people that have made me want to write a blog and made me realise exactly what I want to do. I have found by being able to read their thoughts and ideas pretty valuable and helpful. I liked the idea of this presentation by Neil Perkin. He wanted to create a presentation on community and the meaning of ‘community’ so he asked the people around him on the web to each send a slide to him on their idea of what community was.
I am going to post it here as the people that may be reading my blog at the minute will probably not have come across this presentation but I think it is worth sharing.
This blog is going to become very useful in collecting ideas and putting them in one place as at the moment I have bits of paper everywhere.
Oh but I do have my white board which I just bought from ebay too ….
Was really pleased to see that Peter Doig won the Visual Arts award at the South Bank Show Awards last night. I went to this exhibition at the Tate Britain last year and thought his work was pretty good.
I am glad that he won because it reminded me of how good the exhibition was and also made me realise that you forget about some really good work that you see sometimes. I remember thinking his work was dream-like particularly the snow paintings.
His technique of painting made his works seem like they were constantly moving and depicted some really beautiful scenes inspired by photographs he had taken which were then transformed into large eerie paintings. ‘Blotters’ below makes me feel like I am catching a glimpse of a scene which is almost not really there, as if I have discovered an unknown passage in a woods. Magical, beautiful and also depict a loneliness about them.
How annoying. I wrote quite a profound first blog post and my computer decided to freeze on me.
Well actually it was not very profound at all, just more along the lines of:
- Sorted my blog so ready to write down my ideas and thoughts and put them into one place
- I am going to try to not get too stressed out at making things perfect on here as that is not really what my blog should be about.
- I am writing this with an aim to become broader in my thinking and to develop a better understanding of everything around me and also to share my ideas and borrow other people’s for help.
- The creative industry is fun and full of interesting people and something I definitely want to be a part of.
- With the creative business there is usually not one correct answer to doing things, but the people in the industry constantly learn and discover and share their ideas and are always curious people. People like this inspire me.
I was inspired to start this blog after reading one of Russell Davies’ most popular blog posts on how to be interesting. His blog is always full of insights and is probably one of my favourites.
