Besides, his artistic passion were busted in other fields like movie.."

Dear Seoul Art Museum,

Holy spattered excreta on a steaming shingle! It is an Andy Warhol exhibit, a pretty big thing. You obviously spent piles of money on the staging, which was totally brilliant, and much more just to get the art over to Seoul.

Why is it, then, that you chose to do your translation into English though Babel Fish? This was the worst set of translations I have seen in my life (you may click on the graphics for bigification).
"In works, he focused on to express public emotion that shares star not on star itself."

WTF is that, some kind of splattered Zen koan?

Ahem…

The lovely fiancée and I went downtown to see the Warhol exhibit. It was great. The art was much better than I had expected, and the museum did an astounding job of laying out the rooms. Luckily, particularly for an opening weekend, the place was nearly deserted. I don’t think Warhol is the kind of artist that causes parents to grab their kids and head to a museum. Consequently there were almost no kids in attendance, and the normal push-pull-squeeze was not in effect. There was, however, one totally cute little 5-year old wandering solemnly from piece to piece, writing something down in a little notebook.



There were no signs (that I saw, anyway) saying no photography, so I took some snapshots of the absolutely terrible translations. About 2/3 of the way through the exhibit I saw the docents stopping Koreans from taking pictures of each other, so I’m assuming it actually WAS a no photo zone. Maybe the docents just didn’t want to try to explain that to the weird foreigner who wasn’t even taking pictures of the art, just the explanations postered on the walls.

This exhibit is absolutely worth checking out – it makes the Renoir exhibit that came through a few months ago look absolutely lame. At only 8-chun and with unimpeded views and paths? Get down there!

And laugh at the English translations..

I have no idea why a coffee-machine in Korea would have football on it at all, much less Pac-10 football. My guess is that is one of the only leagues in the country in which you could snap a picture of a college football game and actually get three white faces in the thing.


On the other hand, the complete lack of fans that you see in the background suggest that this is an actual picture of that actual league. Stanford versus Oregon, unless I've lost my memory of the gang colors of the rich white colleges.


I saw this out of the corner of my eye and it drew me across the street so quickly I didn't even look for rogue taxicabs.


I was lucky.

Then there is the "Bucky Katt" wallpaper which features a vine growing completely through Bucky's skull. It gives me something to wake up to every morning, I'm telling you. I can't tell if the top bit of the bottom half is the part of Bucky's skull that was buried in the dirt, or if the evil (Korean no doubt!) vine has destroyed half of his noble orb.

Which is, if you think about it, far too much thinking about my wallpaper.

The editing thing for the pro-nuke folks went splendidly, now we'll see if they pay me (Ewha has still not paid me for work I did some months ago). It sounds like they will used me again, and I certainly hope so.

Since the plan here is to make money and then come buy all of America on the cheap (When Bush's ruinations have come to complete fruit, some couple of years from now), it seems as though all is going well.

So tell me about yourselves?

SIGNS, SIGNS, EVERYWHERE THE SIGNS

As I was walking to work the other day it suddenly occurred to me how many damned signs there are on the way, and the wide range of styles they represent. There are signs which date from the 50's to just yesterday and as I wandered along I took pictures of them and wondered if there was any conscious effort to their design. Obviously someone designed them, but how much of that design was just drawing shit and knowing material specifications and how much was what I would call "bullshit?" That is, how much was a designers way of actually making something work - attempting to signify things? Did the odd and mismatched shapes of some signs represent "futurism" or "consumerism" or something else that I can't see as I try to peer back in time?

The signs are very different and use space very differently. The earlier ones, for instance, seem very cavalier about "wasting" space. That is to say that they don't utilize all the space they take up. This particular sign is one of that kind. I'd date it to the 1950s, but that is the rankest speculation. The first thing I noticed is that it really tosses space away - each 'signlet' is surrounded by space, no two are shaped the same, and even the signlets themselves don't use all the space they might have - Look at that second one from the top - it bows in on itself on the top and the bottom. This looks like a very 50's sign to me and you can attribute the lack of concern about space to optimism (there will always be more signs and more space), to waste (after all, there was no reason not to waste things, space included. In the 50's we had it all, from the A-bomb on down). Anyway, as the blanked out contents indicate, this sign is probably not long for the world and there's not much I can say about the use of fonts on it. ;-)

You can compare that use of space to what I think is a more modern, but odd and transitional, sign. This is a sign at a small strip mall by my house. At the top it has the same disregard for conservation of space that the previous sign does, but at the bottom it begins to become more "traditional" in that it is tightly gridded and filled (perhaps the epitome of this "efficient" approach is the realtors sign tacked on the bottom of the blanked out sign. Colliers isn't about wasting space!).

The same shift occurs in font as the top has two fonts for a mere two words, one script and one print, and the leding on the word "center" is ludicrous. In the bottom section the fonts are unified, easy to read, and fill the space without stretching.

The other weird thing about this sign is its remarkably religious appearance. The sign is in the shape of a cross and the top resembles a sacristy arch. Even the dark adobe-like color of the thing lends to its religious/missionary look. Too bad the shopping mall has dive food, liquor stores, pool, and bars. ;-)

The end of this transition is to the purely "functional" sign. It maximizes its space and probably cost per square inch as well. It is the most formal gridded approach - rectangular. Here is an example of a relatively maximized/functional "monument" style sign:

Somewhere between the Woodhams sign and the purely "functional" sign, is the Safeway sign. The Safeway sign is also a very formal call to the grid, but also wastes a great deal of "see-through" space. At least, in traditional ways, it bounds the space it wastes. That is to say that even the "see-through" sections of the sign are clearly of it and function something like "white space" in a print advertisement. This also looks like it was probably one of the more expensive signs to design and build, so I'm sure there was a lot of "bullshit" behind it's design - I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the architect proposed and sold this design.

This isign s also interesting because one element of that grid is the logo itself, pulled out of the rest of the sign, signifying on its own. Safeway, in this way, is on the way to another sign tactic, the logo as the sign (or the sign as the logo, whichever works better), which I'm sure I'll get to someday soon after I go out and find more of those 50's flying V type signs.

Cause they rock!

The Cost Plus sign puzzles me. The sign is modernish in use of space in that the text fills it and is dead easy to read (other than that mysterious "+" in the "C" which is, I think, supposed to indicate that pharmaceuticals are sold inside), but the shape of the sign is 'wasteful' in a purely functional sense, and the fact that the pediment is as impressive and featured as the sign bothers me. It's like building the base of the Statue of Liberty and then tacking a Garden Gnome on it. Proportion is somehow lost.


Finally, at the end of my walk, is the mighty Winchester sign, which calls to an entirely different time. It completely 'wastes' space - the higher you go on it the more it fades into the sky and has design elements which make no formal sense (what is with that descending "V"?) The font is also a bit weird, particularly the "Winchester" script, which is difficult to read. The picture doesn't show it, but this sign is not only old by design, but by material as well - the text is outlined in neon, and approach that is almost never used now that LCD and other lighting is cheaper and easier to use.

So, this one wins the coveted "coolest sign of them alls for today" award. ;-)