ideas + images

[By Little Factory, via Core77]

Art is integral to how we do business. It’s in our DNA.

Laysha Ward, Target’s president for community relations

According to Robin Pogrebin's NYTimes article on Target's philanthropy, the company continues to give 5 percent of its income (roughly $3 million a week) to causes in the arts, education, social services and volunteerism, despite the economic downturn. Pogrebin observes that many of Target's beneficiaries are arts institutions across the nation, who often hold "Target days" offering free or discounted admission to a program, performance or museum exhibition. Laysha Ward's comment above serves a dual purpose within the article: it reminds readers both that Target supports arts organizations through philanthropy, and that they strive for beautifully designed products on their shelves (Ward cites the work of Michael Graves as an example of their commitment to creativity in Target's stores).

Other interesting articles in the NYTimes' Giving section online cover SFMOMA's challenge to find space for Don Fisher's collection, raising awareness (and funds) using social media, and the look of cause marketing during the recession.

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The increased popularity of MoMA under Lowry hasn’t pleased everyone. “There’s never a quiet moment,” said Frank Stella, the 73-year-old American artist, speaking at a packed opening last month for a retrospective of designer Ron Arad.

Stella said the gradual expansion of the museum to artists such as Arad -- who works in various media -- has de-emphasized painting, sculpture and architecture.

“That was the focus of the museum,” Stella said. “Now it’s just a couple of floors in the department store.”

From Philip Boroff's Bloomberg article on highly paid museum directors and MoMA's success under Glenn Lowry's leadership [Museum of Modern Art’s Lowry Earned $1.32 Million in 2008-2009 | Bloomberg]

Bang-yao Liu's senior project at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Chris Gavin's experimental stop-motion film, Txt Island.

If you throw everything away, there will be just a big pile of garbage, and you won’t have anything to make collages with.

Alexandra Lehrer, 5, a student at Beginnings Nursery School in Manhattan. The school's Materials Center collects unwanted materials (everything from LPs to champagne corks to seashells) and uses them in the children's art projects. [ Where One Man's Trash Is Preschoolers' Art Material | NYTimes ]

Good design is always about the truth... I think our things should reflect that. There is a lot of illusion in design, a lot of surface and playing with reality. That’s why I like things that have a sense of humor. They just seem more true to life.

Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt [Kicking the Tires | NYTimes]

Kaspen's promotional images for Prague bookstore Anagram Bookshop.

Michael Cannell has a nicely illustrated post on Fast Company about recent discoveries on the neuroscience of architecture. Among other discoveries, it turns out that our brains are more receptive to rounded, cushy designs instead of hard edges:

A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects—sofas, watches, etc.—subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. Mose Bar, a neuroscientist, speculates that our brains are hard-wired to avoid sharp angles because we read them as dangerous. He used a brain scan for a similar study and found that the amygdala, a portion of the brain that registers fear, was more active when people looked at sharp-edged objects.

And as if in affirmation, Jonah Lehrer observes that the "padded leather womb" of his Eames Lounge Chair makes reading tedious articles a little more approachable; he calls the chair a rare intersection of comfort and modernist (read: characteristically geometric and angular) beauty. (By the way, Lehrer also recently wrote about neuroscience and a different form of art—jazz improv.)