David Barrie

Stickier media

Just now, broadcasters in the U.K. are angsting over the role and meaning of public service broadcasting.

The personalisation of media, growth of the Internet and disappearance of traditional ideas of public realm have thrown the meaning of the public value of the media in to crisis.

What's great is that new platforms promise to end monopolies on narrative and its traditional form. 

So should old media players just pack their bags and go home?

No.

In the real world, there is a crying need for 'connectors' to bridge between people, government and life.

The return on investment required by the public and private sectors in the built environment place ever more importance on the social, not just physical infrastructure of place.

And companies increasingly recognize that there is competitive advantage to be had in sustainability, not just in the resource flows of material culture but also social and human capital.

What's exciting is that broadcasters now understand that new media platforms are just that - platforms and not pipes through which information can flow.

What's clear is that the public still identify and want some form of support to enable them to manage real and personal economies.

The challenge for broadcasters is whether they can meet their pledge to use new media to support public service - and define what that service is.

For if it's to mean more than acting as a nodal point for information and social networks, it needs to engage with the dreaded 'm' word...moral purpose.

In my mind, there's no dread in this.

And there's a willing audience out there. 

Why?

Because people innately understand through their everyday experience that communication matters.

The challenge is to embrace this understanding, take on the 'm' word and be inspired by the words of John W. Gardner, the former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Lyndon Johnson and founder of Common Cause:

Communication in a healthy society must be more than a flow of messages; it must be a means of conflict resolution, a means of cutting through the rigidities that divide and paralyze a community.

Image of TV courtesy of  Niemster. Cross Story Platform Telling by Russell Davies. Video shared by yannoucs.   

Crunching on credit

It was on this parade of shops in Whitechapel, London in the 1970s, in a kosher restaurant called Blooms, that I had my first gherkin.

The British call the cucumber a Wally which is a bit of a shame since - in shape at least - it has graced the gardens of the Chatsworth House stately home in Derbyshire, England.

In some weird twist of fate, the (slightly) uncouth vegetable turned totally luxe when someone decided to call Norman Foster's chic Swiss Re building in the City of London "The Gherkin".

 

But now thanks to Norm and financial journalist Chris Blackhurst, the small, bitter and not actually very pleasant gurka has come of age.

Writing in real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required], Blackhurst turns Foster's building in to a ready reckoner for measuring demand and supply of office space in the City of London.

Everywhere I go, should I meet any property developer with an interest in the Square Mile, the chat quickly gets on to the Gherkin.

So we've had a warning of 40,000 City job losses - or the equivalent of eight Gherkins (500,000 sq ft each, at 100 sq ft per person).

Meanwhile, Lehman Brothers analyst Mike Prew has calculated that a total of "11 Gherkins" are being built by developers.

All hail the Gherkin!

The indigestible cucumber has become as august a measure as the Roman Mile or French meridional definition.

5000 people = 1 Gherkin

30 people = a nibble on an indigestible stalk end.

Image of Whitechapel High Street, courtesy of Danny McL. Chatsworth, courtesy of  Dr Loplop.  Gherkin packers in Bangalore, courtesy of Lefranz. Foster's Gherkin, courtesy of  acampm1.   

The Cinderella of the Volga

Here's Natalia Vodianova on a recent tour of Russia raising funds - and promoting Nina Ricci - for her charity, the Naked Heart Foundation:

Vodianova's tour manages to grab no less than 22 pages of this month's Vogue: a Versailles Revisited romp through an orgy of fund-raising gigs that includes a 220 ton ice palace and, God help us,

A Slavic Tania Bryer lookalike called Polina Kitsenko paying €90,000 for a privately performed love song by Bryan Adams.

Vodianova's charity is devoted to creating modern parks for less fortunate children in Russia, spreading health and happiness in Natalia's homeland, according to her charity's website.

But not once does Vogue tell you what the organization does other that it somehow relates to children and Vodianova thinks that play is therapeutic.

Over at Vanity Fair, there's a ten or so page spread given over to Madonna to promote her new album:

The piece contains a shockingly pretentious comment on her new documentary on Malawi:

I feel this film was seriously influenced by Godard...He's the one film-maker I was always inspired by...

(Godard would love this - I interviewed him once and he's a total slave to pop.)

Once again, there may be mention of a generic concern for children but the article doesn't give readers the faintest idea what the charity she represents does.

There's something in all of this that says that you can personalize a brand but you can't personalize a cause.

You can attach your name to something: but the media is interested in you, not what you think or hope others will think you're about.

In effect, what may be genuine conviction becomes myth-making, as Vodianova and Madonna harness their image-making credentials and abilities to a cause but can't escape being represented as a brand.

Madonna continues to be Queen of Pseudo Fetish Super Pop.

And for the umpteenth time, Vogue recycles Vodianova as Cinderella.

Vodianova image by Mario Testino. Madonna by Steven Meisel.

Provenance is a luxury item

In a recent edition of Metropolis magazine, Bruce Sterling wrote an article on Slow Food - and took no prisoners:

The upshot is an obscure piece of rural heritage reengineered as a curated service/product in Europe's modern-food heritage industry.

At the centre of Slow, according to Sterling, is a rigorous system of authenticating and anointing  local products like

The Cornish Pilchard. The Chilean Blue Egg Hen. The Cypriot Tsamarella and Bosnian Sack Cheese.

In another part of the ball-park, Lucia van der Post opens an article in the London Financial Times saying:

These days, among sophisticated consumers, provenance counts. Where the fish is caught, how the product is made, whether the makers are properly paid and whether the materials are ethically sourced are no longer just polite questions but real considerations.

Van der Post goes on to extol the virtues of decorative felt rugs that retail up to $10,000, are handmade by nomadic peoples in Kyrgyzstan and fragrantly marketed with Capital Letters as

Unique felt rugs from the Mountains of Heaven.

Once upon a time, there was a heritage industry: today, it's authenticity.

Now authenticity is no bad thing but it does have a habit of converging with business planning for sophisticated  consumers, get smothered in sincerity and it's at times over-liberally sprinkled with words like 'sustainability' and 'democracy'.

So by the time it hits the plate - as food or anything else - it carries high life-cycle costs and is expensive.

As Sterling writes,

In a globalized "flat world", the remaining peaks soar in value and become natural clusters for a planetary elite.

In other words, things that are authentic and have provenance become a luxury item.

So what?

Well there is a casualty.

And it's something really basic:

The thrill, excitement and subversion of imitation.

Cartoon courtesy of Gastonomica.

Art with baggage in tow

I love Takashi Murakami and his art.

The redeemed cosmopolitanism that curator and critic Dave Hickey highlighted in his Sante Fe Biennial back in 2001 was a fantastic catch-all for an artist who loves sheen, style, otaku and the baroque rendering of some kind of primordial iconography.

   

But there's something annoying about Murakami - and I can't quite work out whether it's him, the bad behavior of those who surround and promote him, a bit of both or a bigger message about art. :-S

There's a major retrospective of Murakami's work currently on show at the Brooklyn Museum.

At the gala opening last week, outside the museum, in pride of place, were street vendors

the kind typically seen on many New York/Hong Kong/Paris/whatever avenues, selling "Louis Vuitton" bags

writes Vanessa Friedman in the London Financial Times.

Guy Trebay in the New York Times gives an eyewitness account:

Standing outside them were men who resembled the African immigrant vendors who haul around telltale bundles of alluring, cheapish and almost-right copies of stuff from Gucci and Louis Vuitton. This time, however, these characters were playacting. The goods laid out on trays and tarps were real Vuitton accessories. They cost, as they do in the stores, a bomb.

The entire stunt - or piece of performance art, to use Friedman's words  - was designed to publicize counterfeiting.

In the words of the Chief Executive of Louis Vuitton:

It's an opportunity to send an artistic and political message, showing that street vendors can be good - they're part of the life of a city - but that counterfeit is bad - it destroys that life.

What is all of this? Art? Politics? Pure public relations?

Yes, to all of them.

But Murakami needs to watch out.

It's great that the street show defiles those who cherish the idea of art as the creation of a unique primary object and exhibitions as a pompous opportunity to celebrate and investigate all of this.

It also great that the blood boils when street culture is appropriated and selectively edited to make a pseudo political/promotional point on behalf of a luxury brand, and for an elitist band

who had almost certainly never bartered for an $80 copy of a $1,400 bag off a blanket on the sidewalk.

But Murakami is in danger of becoming a vehicle for moral judgement - and judgement over an economy that's a well-spring of his happy aesthetic.

For the black economy is an intrinsic part of the energy and joy of the city, its obsessives and obsessions. 

And it's somewhere in this culture that Murakami and his art finds its strength and expression.

Images of Brooklyn Museum street market courtesy of Athlete Movie.

Forbidden love

Scarborough is an outstanding play that was just staged at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

It tells the story of a teacher on a dirty weekend with a school student in a hotel bedroom in the English seaside town. The play is in to two parts. Each part centers on one couple. Both couples follow exactly the same script - but with genders reversed.

The play painfully - and hilariously - highlights society's schizophrenic attitude towards children, their sexuality and relationship with adults.

On the one hand, the scenario fulfills Lolita - a fantasy of an adult having an affair with a precocious young girl or boy, what one character sees

in me mam's magazines all the time. That Sadie Frost, she's always knocking off young lads and she's ancient.

Then cutting across the entire play is society's all-round obsession with perv and paedophilia:

AIDEN picks up the Sun, there is a paedophile story on the front page.

BETH: What's up with you?
AIDEN: I can't believe you bought this shit.

BETH starts to read his magazine.

AIDEN: Disgusting.
BETH: You don't have to read it.
AIDEN: I'm talking about the little kid who was molested.
BETH: Oh yeah - Pervert.
AIDEN: I mean, who could...
BETH: Fuckin' beast, they should lock him up and throw away the key.

In the last few months, Britain has become obsessed with child-snatching.

First there was  Madeleine McCann, then Shannon Matthews.

These stories are personal tragedies.

But why do they dominate our lives?

For sure, they express innocence lost.

But do they also expose a trauma or messed-up-ness mined by Scarborough - some kind of forbidden love, hidden love or profound guilt?

Go forth and aggregate

One of the key business technology trends of 2008, according to The McKinsey Quarterly [registration required], is making businesses from capturing information.

As we know from shopping sites and business-to-business product directories on the net, there's money to be made from accumulated pools of data.

But something we're failing to do in parallel is understand and exploit the value of accumulation and - more importantly - aggregation to social and economic progress.

A huge amount of information and relationships accumulate in national local government.

Extensive networks of diverse social, economic and physical assets aggregate around the commercial redevelopment and regeneration of towns and cities.

A vast diaspora of hopes and interests sit in devolved off and online groups of people, be it 5-a-side soccer leagues, Facebook groups, community gardeners or moderators of Wikipedia.

There's a vast amount of dispersed energy, enthusiasm, activity and innovation out there. And it's brilliant.

But a key challenge has to be how public managers - not just designers of online entertainment platforms - public initiatives - not just pressure groups - and central and local government - not just eccentric entrepreneurs or innovators - can aggregate this activity.

Why bother?

Because new value might be captured for the benefit of all.

So, here's a message for Lent:

Go forth and aggregate.

And start trading and packaging social, not just physical assets.

 

Slaves to the cult of de-clutter

This is an eagle-eyed view of a new square in the town of Castleford, England:

And this is what it was like five years ago:

An earlier age of crud:

Has given way to something brighter, more elegant and de-cluttered:

But my favorite image of the project is this one:

 

Why?

Because it makes me think about clutter - or more to the point, tidiness.

I was involved in the early stages of design development of the new main square in Castleford.

The selection and management of the design was devolved to a steering group made up of representatives of the local community - and by and large, people got what they wanted. 

The town is proud of the design. I am proud of the design. And there is little doubt that it has contributed to the $400m plus new investment that is now flowing in to the town.

But what gets me thinking is that for many years, the model for successful urban life has been the noise, disorderliness and messy mix of people and traffic of SoHo, New York.

Alongside, creativity has escaped linearity and order: be it ironic, awkward Britart, whimsy, casual Goldfrapp, the popularity of feature-length social documentary film-making, the chaos of social networking and exotic packaging of securitised debt.

And yet we're choosing to scrape the surface of our towns and cities and turn it in to clean, clear and crisp pavement.

In its wake has come outdoor food courts, not street markets and a sweep of control orders that segregate access to the streets.

An irony is that all of this has been done in the name of winning back public space.

Another is the derision that once greeted minimalist, conceptual art in '70s and '80s.

Why is the new public realm so out of sync with the grind, mess, whim and float of popular culture - and of our lives?

And how and why did the cult of de-clutter take hold?

Here's a quick list of some of the things that might have got us here:

• The cult of Copenhagen, Danish urban design guru Jan Gehl and the pedestrianisation of the city
• The stream of sparse, ambient Sigur Ros running through the veins of the design profession
• The massive, hidden influence of chic interiors by John Pawson
• The apolitical lure of an empty stage
• The rise of de-clutter and home cleaning TV shows
• Our un-ending anticipation - and expectation - that something big's about to happen

The problem is that quite often in these places, nothing big does happen.

It's as if city developers skipped the chapter in Jan Gehl, William Whyte or Jane Jacobs that said that "designed" public spaces will be empty of people most of the time if a user population doesn't live near by.

Is it time for the script to move on?

Time for urban designers and their clients to take all of that brilliant new energy and enthusiasm for public space, look at the popularity of artists like Peter Doig and realise something simple?

That what we like and what often works is not just tidy stuff but experiences and images that are colorful, casual and awkward?

Wire is so passé

I can't resist sharing a second image from this week's Sunday Times' Style section, giving us all an inside track on the ultimate new fashion accessory: the cardboard box.

Move over Oskar Schlemmer.

Wire is so passé.

A warm glow of sustainability

When I came across this scene on a street in Shanghai not too long ago, I was filled with a warm glow of sustainability.

Of the ingenuity of humanity, the miracle of the bicycle and the circular metabolism of solid waste in cities - described by writer Herbert Girardet as a calmer, serener vision of cities.

Little did I know that the guy in the picture could have been a photographer's assistant, collecting props for a fashion shoot published today in the Style section of the London Sunday Times:

The coat is by Burberry Prorsum, made of gold foil snakeskin and retails at £6,500 ($12,900) - and is pretty gorgeous.

The pile of cardboard is by I Don't Know Who, with a current retail value of £100 ($198) per tonne.

When you next meet a Martian, I defy you to try and explain the style connection between the two.