During the course of the next month, including during “Next: the AIGA National Design” Conference, a series of banners will hang on California Street between 14th Street and the 16th Street Mall in downtown Denver.
These banners have been designed by a combination of design professionals and students. The project is called Denver Urban Forest, and is an offshoot of the Urban Forest Project that was presented in New York last fall.
The Urban Forest Project was conceived by Worldstudio in conjunction with AIGA NY and Times Square Alliance. The original event brought together 185 designers from 21 countries to create an outdoor design exhibition throughout the Times Square area in New York.
A similar project took place in Portland Oregon recently; the banners are created in a fabric created from 100% recycled plastic bottles, ecophab, and once the presentation is complete they will be turned into tote bags and sold to support colorado design initiatives.
Jordan Carver from Agency made this happen. Congratulations to him for pulling it off.
If a “fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees”, you must also conclude that a wise man sees not the same tree a fool sees.
This begs the question of who the fool and wise man might be.
Take Damien Hirst for example. Large animals in vats of formaldehyde. Had such work been done in Rome, would the Louvre today contain a 2000 year old dead animal in a glass case?
If Jackson Pollock splattered paint on a canvas during the Renaissance would the results be in every art history book?
Has it taken a world of 6 billion people to produce enough wise men to purchase this artwork, or has it taken 6 billion people to find the unlikely combination of wealth, a fashion victim sense of high culture, and plain good old fashioned foolishness to create this market?
It seems to me that the crowning achievement of our age is that even tastelessness has become a high art form right down to pink inflatable bunnies posed in front of mirrors. Ah. Kulture and sophistication, derived from the word “sophism” of course.