Rewilding is an approach to conservation that allows nature to reclaim its space and form a self-sustaining ecosystem. The restoration practice has become one favored solution to remedy environmental degradation and part of the lexicon for climate activism. In Scotland, the increasingly popular approach also brings discussions of land use and access to the fore, paralleling the way people move through cities.

Using rewilding as a way to reimagine what it means to cultivate street art culture, the 2023 Nuart Aberdeen Festival brought together 13 artists earlier this month. Held June 8 to 11, the annual festival commissioned works that explore the tension between sanctioned murals and the unauthorized tags synonymous with street art. Projects include Thiago Mazza’s vivid rendering of native plants, Nespoon’s reference to craft traditions of the area’s Bon Accord Bobbins Lace Group, and Murmure’s imprisoned goldfish that explicates the proliferation of plastic and inaction as it relates to the climate crisis. Swoon, known for her intimate wheat pastes, even came out of retirement to create a series of portraits spread across walls and tucked in doorways and alcoves.

Nuart organizers said this year’s goal was to “provoke reflections on what a city where art is truly free might look, sound, smell, and feel like.” See more from the festival on Instagram.

Swoon. Photo by Brian Tallman

Murmure, “Anarchy.” Photo by Brian Tallman

Nespoon. Photo by Brian Tallman

Thiago Mazza. Photo by Brian Tallman

Escif, “Pollution forest.” Photo by Brian Tallman

Eloise Gillow. Photo by Brian Tallman

Eloise Gillow. Photo by Brian Tallman

Tamara Alves. Photo by Clarke Joss

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article 13 Artists ‘Rewild’ the City Streets for the 2023 Nuart Aberdeen Festival appeared first on Colossal.

DOWNEY — Imagine having your foot in the door of several promising art careers all at once, with all the time and opportunity to explore each option. James Alpert has that luxury.

The 20-year-old Downey resident found himself at a crossroads: The covid-19 pandemic had shut down the world, and the then Rio Hondo College law student knew that his education would not be best spent in front of a webcam.

“When Covid hit, I’m just really one of those people that need to be there at school, so I just kind of took that opportunity to be inside all the time to practice drawing and more artwork,” he said. “This is a good time to take it serious.”

“Taking it serious” may be a bit of an understatement, as in very little time Alpert has taken his art into not one, not two, but three different mediums: tattoo, graphic design, and painting.

Though Alpert says art has been “with me forever,” he got his professional start doing small freelance jobs.

“I found a gig where I started designing skateboards in Downtown LA, and through that I met a ton of people who were just kind of in the tattoo world I guess, mixed with the skating community,” said Alpert.

Alpert would use these newfound connections to find an apprenticeship at a tattoo shop in Pico Rivera. Alpert has been tattooing for two years now, now out of Iconiq Tattoo Studio in Fontana. Tattooing takes a fair amount of his time; around five days a week.

As he grew his clientele, Alpert would meet a videographer who showed interest in bringing his art into entertainment. This was the beginning of his next venture.

“I started doing small things on the side for them, like animating,” said Alpert. “Just getting some of my credits in the music world, I guess; the underground scene for sure.”

Through those projects, Alpert caught the attention of digital marketing company Victory House Agency.

“They work with iHeart Radio and all of their clients,” said Alpert. “I got hired as a graphic designer based off of my work.

“I work on a lot of the podcasts, and a lot of the social media aspect of it, so like the Instagram. I do posters, content creation. And then I do like podcast production assistance, which is like I get the audio, and I write subtitles, and do voice memos; things for people to share, basically.”

In addition to his graphic design and tattoo work, Alpert has entered into the gallery realm, at the suggestion of one of his mentors.

Cheese Crawl to Cheese Ball, Art of Cheese Festival Has It All

MADISON, Wis., June 22, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Wisconsin has always been known for its long history of cheesemaking, but now it may also be known for its incredible artisan cheese festival. Art of Cheese is an exclusive cheese festival created for the world’s biggest cheese lovers, and it’s happening across downtown Madison and the surrounding communities from Sept. 29 – Oct. 1.

Hosted by Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, this first-time event promises exclusive experiences and tours with behind-the-scenes access to creameries and dairy farms, cheese yoga, a Bubbles and Cheese Brunch and a Cheese Fair Off the Square. The festival will also have interactive classes on everything from cheese pairing to crafting and learning the art of affinage, and a chance to meet (and even dine with) award-winning Master Cheesemakers. The highlight of the weekend will be the first-ever Wisconsin Cheese Ball (the kind where you dance and eat cheese).

“Our research shows that people who really love food plan travel around great food experiences, and we know there are people all over the country who are extremely passionate about Wisconsin Cheese,” says Suzanne Fanning, Chief Marketing Officer of Wisconsin Cheese and Senior Vice President of Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin. “We set out to plan the ultimate destination cheese festival of food lovers’ dreams, and I think you’ll discover that’s exactly what we did!”

The complete lineup of events is designed for the truly cheese obsessed. Experience America’s Dairyland through 16 unique limited ticketed events, including:

• Exclusive Excursions: You’ll board a bus and be swept away for a day you’ll never forget with access to creameries, farms, cheese experts, award-winning chefs, makers and more.
• A Journey to the Heartland of Wisconsin Cheese: Spend the day in Southern Wisconsin’s Green County with visits to two legendary creameries followed by a coursed lunch at Seven Acre Dairy and ending with a lesson from Marissa Mullen of @thatcheeseplate.
• Aged to Perfection: A Bourbon & Cheese Excursion: Kick the day off with a cheese sensory class at the Center for Dairy Research, followed by a bourbon and cheese tasting and catered lunch by James Beard Award-nominated chef Daniel Fox at J. Henry & Sons Bourbon.
• Breaking the Mold in Cheese & Architecture: Start the day visiting the farm and creamery at Uplands Cheese. Then we’ll make our way to lunch & a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright designed Taliesin with James Beard Award-nominated chef and host of Wisconsin Foodie, Luke Zahm, who will draw inspiration from local cheeses.
• Cheesemaking 101: Science for Cheese Geeks: Take a mini course in cheese science at the UW’s Center for Dairy Research. Then have lunch at Cadre Restaurant with a group of Wisconsin Master Cheesemakers.
• The Wisconsin Cheese Ball at Garver Feed Mill: Boogie with Blue, romp with Ricotta, spin with Swiss, or hop with Havarti; it’s a cheese party featuring music and cheesemaking royalty. For every ticket sold a donation of cheese will be made to a local food bank.
• Classes & Seminars at Various Venues Around Madison. Join James Beard Award-winning author such as Laura Werlin, cheese gurus like Liz Thorpe of The People’s Cheese™, as well as James Beard Award-nominated chef Luke Zahm to reveal new wonders of Wisconsin Cheese.
• Cheese Fair & Marketplace: The Cheese Fair Off the Square is open to the public alongside the Dane County Farmer’s Market. This pop-up market is your one-stop shop for sampling and purchasing your new favorite cheese directly from makers from around the state.

This ultimate cheese fantasy is just a few months away. Tickets are limited and will go on sale July 13, 2023. Go to ArtofCheeseFestival.com to check out the full line-up of events, stay connected and purchase tickets when they go on sale in July. 

About Wisconsin Cheese: The tradition of cheesemaking excellence began more than 180 years ago before Wisconsin was recognized as a state. With 90% of the State’s cow’s milk being turned into cheese, Wisconsin’s 1,200 cheesemakers, many of whom are third- and fourth-generation, continue to pass on old-world traditions while adopting modern innovations in cheesemaking craftsmanship. Wisconsin has won more awards for its cheese than any other state or country. For more information, visit WisconsinCheese.com or connect on Facebook.

About Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin: Funded by Wisconsin dairy farmers, Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin is a non-profit organization that focuses on marketing and promoting Wisconsin’s world-class dairy products. For more information, visit our website at wisconsindairy.org.

SOURCE Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin

Whether floating in pools of rainwater in the center of chrysanthemums or navigating the chaos of a fish tank, the characters in Felicia Chiao’s drawings encounter surreal circumstances that tap into complex emotions. Her illustrations (previously) follow the experiences and interactions of solemn figures who search for the sun, become immersed in blossoms, and appear both curious about and overwhelmed by the huge world around them.

Chiao incorporates anthropomorphized elements of nature to represent moods, like in “Try,” which contrasts the cheerful, sunny top level of an apartment with a dim, melancholy lower level that gets little light. In “Bloat,” a dark, inner monster—a recurring specter—is dispelled by the shining sun. Peering past giant flower petals or surrounded by prying eyes, her figures express universal feelings of awe, anxiety, uncertainty, and joy.

Long using Copic markers for her drawings, Chiao recently switched to watercolor for gallery works, maintaining a similar style of washed hues while achieving better archival quality. She continues to use the markers for personal work, sharing with Colossal, “The new medium, however, has enabled me to push the boundaries of scale and color application.” Some of these pieces are part of New Normal, the artist’s solo exhibition at Giant Robot in Los Angeles that continues through June 28 and showcases her new watercolors.

In October, Chiao will be part of a group exhibition presented by Hi-Fructose Magazine at Arch Enemy Arts in Philadephia, and she’s looking forward to another solo show next year in New York City with Harman Projects. Follow updates on Instagram and Patreon, and find prints on Society6.

“Fish Tank”

“Chrysanthemum”

Left: “Growth.” Right: “Bloat”

“Try”

“Floral White”

“Geraniums”

“Handle With Care”

“Pattern Worms”

“Seen”

“Waiting”

“Sun God”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article In Ink and Watercolor Illustrations, Felicia Chiao Immerses Curious Characters in Surreal Scenarios appeared first on Colossal.

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• EA’s “FIFA” series is a big revenue driver, but its next soccer video game won’t have that branding.
• CMO David Tinson reveals his plan to drive fans to EA’s new soccer franchise EA Sports FC.
• Losing FIFA branding gives EA opportunities to work with more brand partners than before.

Electronic Art’s marketing muscle is going to have to do some heavy lifting this year to build a new powerhouse brand around its soccer video game series.

“Our global football business is one of the biggest properties,” EA CMO David Tinson told Insider. “It’s our biggest business. It’s, frankly, one of the biggest pieces of sports or entertainment IP in the world.”

In 2022, EA and FIFA ended a licensing partnership that lasted nearly three decades and helped make the “FIFA” video game series the most popular sports franchise of all time. Its latest and last installment with the FIFA branding, “FIFA 23,” was the top seller in the franchise’s entire history, company CEO Andrew Wilson said during EA’s latest quarterly earnings call. And the “FIFA” franchise, which also includes mobile games, online services, esports leagues, and competitions, was a major revenue driver for EA.

This year, the tried-and-true branding is going away, and EA is going to release a new slate of soccer video games and services under a completely new brand: EA Sports FC.

“We’ve been building equity in the name of the game as “FIFA” for 30 some-odd years,” Tinson said. “And we’re making a branding switch now. So that’s going to be our constant challenge and our job as marketers: to help ensure that there is awareness of that change and that there’s a real affinity for what we’re delivering in the product itself.”

For nearly a year and a half, Tinson said, he and his team have been moving to establish this new brand, with the product launching under the new name this Fall. The most prominent offering will be EA’s next soccer video game, which is rumored to be coming out in late September, based on EA’s history releasing “FIFA” games around that time.

“From a pure go-to market standpoint, you’re seeing us introduce more about the brand earlier than we often would,” Tinson said. For instance, EA announced the new branding as early as April, when it unveiled some of the soccer stadiums that would be featured in the game, including FC Barcelona’s Camp Nou.

This is a key component to making sure fans of the “FIFA” franchise glom onto the new one.

“We’ve done extensive research and we’ve spent a ton of time with our community and understand that they want a great playing game, and they want a great game that’s authentic,” Tinson said.

Fans want the game to feature real stadiums, and they want to control real players and real clubs, like Real Madrid, Manchester United, and FC Barcelona, Tinson said. A lot of EA’s marketing is designed to solidify that even though the overall franchise has changed names. The players, teams, and stadiums will still be recognizable for fans.

“There’s a lot that we’re doing to reinforce the authenticity of the experience,” Tinson said.

At the same time, EA has been able to open up EA Sports FC to more brand partnerships which it hadn’t been able to do under FIFA’s licensing restrictions. For instance, EA announced a partnership with Nike in June, to sell Nike “digital goods” in EA sports games. “We’re able to collaborate in ways that we weren’t before,” Tinson said.

Still, Tinson is aware that much of EA’s fortunes will hinge on the success of the new, FIFA-less EA Sports FC franchise.

“This is a major moment for our whole company,” he said. “We had a small core group that looked at the business case for it and have navigated this complicated, but exciting and energizing move for the business.”

By Seth Matlins Managing Director, Forbes CMO Network

One year ago, and to mark the 10th Anniversary of the Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs list, we created The Forbes CMO Hall of Fame, recognizing those chief marketers who have appeared, or would have, on the list at least five times since its inception. Each subsequent year, on what would be the fifth year of a CMO’s inclusion on the list, they too, will become part of The Forbes CMO Hall of Fame.

In 2022, the inaugural year, we inducted 17 CMOs, all titans of this community whose influence is measured in terms both qualitative and quantitative.

Induction recognizes a chief-marketer’s enduring influence and impact on the brands and businesses they steward, on our industry and, often, the cultural landscape itself.

In 2023, only one CMO was eligible for induction, having appeared previously 4 times. While past performance is no guarantee of present or future performance, we are honored to recognize and induct Morgan Flatley, EVP, Global Chief Marketing Officer, and Head of New Business Ventures at McDonald’s, into the Forbes CMO Hall of Fame 2023 Class.

For more on this year’s inductee and all of last year’s, please read on. We are grateful for their innumerable contributions to our community and the art and science of marketing.

Forbes CMO Hall of Fame: Class of 2023

Morgan Flatley

^{EVP, Global Chief Marketing Officer & New Business Ventures: McDonald’s}

Since joining McDonald’s in 2017, Flatley has been the driving force behind some of the company’s most inspired marketing campaigns. In 2020, as U.S. Chief Marketing & Digital Customer Experience Officer, she led initiatives including the company’s “Fan Truths” strategy and its record-breaking “Famous Orders” collaborations, which resulted in dozens of creative excellence awards. Shortly before this story went to press, and for the second consecutive year, McDonald’s was recognized as one of the top 3 most effective marketers worldwide by the Effies, the industry’s standard for same.

Today, Flatley oversees McDonald’s marketing efforts globally, as well as new business ventures designed to extend the reach of the McDonald’s brand. Her tenure at McDonald’s followed nearly 13 years at PepsiCo, where her time included stints as both Gatorade’s CMO and CMO of the company’s Global Nutrition group. 2023 marks what would have been Flatley’s fifth year on the Forbes World’ Most Influential CMOs list, and thus her induction into the Forbes CMO Hall of Fame class of 2023. She is this year’s only inductee.

Forbes CMO Hall of Fame: Class of 2022

Leslie Berland

^{CMO: Peloton Interactive}

Named CMO of Peloton in January, after six years as he CMO of Twitter, Berland first appeared on the Forbes World’ Most Influential CMOs list in 2017 and did each year following until her induction into the CMO Hall of Fame in 2022. Prior to her tenure as Twitter’s CMO she was EVP of global advertising, marketing, and digital partnerships at American Express.

Linda Boff

^{Global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer: GE}

At GE for over 20 years, Boff has served as the company’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer since 2015, with oversight over the GE’s global marketing, brand, content, digital and sponsorships, during a time of historic transformation for the company. Boff also serves as President of the GE foundation, manages GE’s global learning, and co-leads the GE Women’s Network. She first appeared on the Forbes World’ Most Influential CMOs list in 2017.

Chris Capossela

^{CMO: Microsoft}

At Microsoft for over 30 years, Capossela has been CMO of both the consumer and commercial sides of the nearly $200 billion annual revenue business for the past 9 years. His oversight and influence extend across all Microsoft services and products, business planning, brand, advertising, events, communications, research, ad sales and Microsoft stores. He first appeared on this Forbes list in 2017.

Olivier Francois

^{Global CMO, Stellantis & Brand CEO: Fiat}

For the past 15 years, Francois has been Global CMO of Stellantis across its brand portfolio, which includes, among others, Dodge, Fiat and Maserati and has been the Global President of the Fiat Group since 2011. The longtime automotive marketer first appeared on this list in 2014.

Julia Goldin

^{Global Chief Product & Marketing Officer: The Lego Group}

The Global Chief Product and Marketing Officer for The Lego Group since 2015, this former Coca-Cola marketer and Revlon CMO is responsible for the Group’s product development, marketing, research and insights, licensing, partnerships, and the brand’s in-house creative agency. She first appeared on this list in 2018.

Kristin Lemkau

^{Chief Executive Officer: J.P. Morgan Wealth Management}

Lemkau first appeared on the Forbes World’ Most Influential CMOs list in 2014, when she was CMO of JPMorgan. She held this title until 2019, where she led a global marketing team responsible for brand, media, analytics, and consumer communications. One of few CMOs to become chief executive, she has been CEO of J.P. Morgan Wealth Management for the past 3 1/2 years.

Ann Lewnes

^{(Retired) Formerly CMO and EVP, Corporate Strategy & Development: Adobe}

For over a decade, Lewnes was Adobe’s CMO, driving the brand’s ties to creativity and the creative community, and its digital marketing and design. Joining from Intel in 2006, she pioneered the company’s digital shift and spearheaded its growth. She first appeared on this list in 2017 and retired in February 2023.

Antonio Lucio

^{Principal & Founder: 5S Diversity}

The principal and founder of 5S Diversity, Lucio held Global CMO roles for Facebook, HP Inc., and Visa, as well as the role of Chief Innovation and Portfolio Transformation Officer for PepsiCo Inc. He first appeared on Forbes World’ Most Influential CMOs list in 2012, when he was CMO of Visa. He has appeared on the list as the CMO of each of three different companies.

Michelle Peluso

^{EVP & Chief Customer Officer, CVS Health & Co-President: CVS Pharmacy}

Peluso joined CVS in 2021 and has been responsible for transforming CVS Health’s consumer experience across multiple touchpoints. She first appeared on Forbes’ World’ Most Influential CMOs list in 2012, when she was CMO for Citigroup. While there she oversaw all global marketing and brand experiences, digital sales, and the commercial business. She has appeared on this list as the CMO of both Citi and IBM.

Marc Pritchard

^{Chief Brand Officer: Procter & Gamble}

Pritchard has been with Procter & Gamble for over 40 years, serving across the company. He has been P&G’s Chief Brand Officer since 2014, responsible for the company’s brand-building disciplines and marketing innovations worldwide. He first appeared on the Forbes World’ Most Influential CMOs list in 2013.

Raja Rajamannar

^{Chief Marketing & Communication’s Officer: MasterCard}

Since 2013, Rajamannar has been MasterCard’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, and President of its Healthcare business. In this role he is responsible for all aspects of the brand’s marketing and has been a leader of its transformation. Rajamannar previously had stints at Citi, Diner’s Club and Unilever. He first appeared on Forbes World’ Most Influential CMOs list in 2015.

Phil Schiller

^{Apple Fellow: Apple}

At Apple for over 30 years, Schiller was the company’s long-time SVP of Marketing, where he led the introduction of a portfolio of products that have since become cultural touchstones. He currently serves as an Apple Fellow, where he has responsibility for the App store and Apple Events. When the first Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs List debuted in 2012, Schiller ranked No. 1.

Diego Scotti

^{Formerly EVP & CMO: Verizon}

Recently announcing his departure from the company, the former EVP and CMO, Scotti had been with Verizon since 2014, overseeing all aspects of the brand’s marketing, experience design and communications. He joined Verizon from J. Crew, where he’d also served as CMO. He first appeared on this list in 2017.

Marisa Thalberg

^{Chief Marketing and Communications Officer: SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment}

Joining SeaWorld in April 2023, Thalberg is responsible for brand and marketing strategies that increase visitation, drive revenue, and elevate the company’s conservation mission. Before SeaWorld, Thalberg was EVP, Chief Brand Marketing Officer for Lowe’s from 2020. She also served as Global Chief Brand Officer for Taco Bell, for almost five years. She has been recognized on this list for her work as CMO at both Lowe’s and Taco Bell, first appearing on it in 2017.

Lorraine Twohill

^{CMO: Google}

Recently celebrating her 19^th year with the company, Twohill has been Google’s CMO since 2009, and came to the position after six years as the company’s head of EMEA marketing. She currently manages a global team responsible for telling the evolving story of Google’s brand, driving revenue growth, and helping billions of users discover and make the most of Google’s products. She first appeared on Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs list in 2014.

Deborah Wahl

^{(Retired) Formerly Global CMO: General Motors}

Wahl stepped down from her tenure as General Motors’ Global CMO, in March 2023, a position she held since 2019. Prior to GM where her focus included driving transformation and growth as GM embraced the possibilities of an all-electric future. She had previously served as Cadillac’s Global CMO, joining the automotive company from McDonald’s, where she had been its CMO. She first appeared on Forbes’ World’s Most Influential CMOs list in 2018, as CMO of Cadillac.

Keith Weed

^{Independent Director}

Weed was Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Unilever from 2010-19, where he was responsible for Marketing, Communications and Sustainable Business functions across the company’s purpose-driven brand portfolio. He first appeared on the Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs list in 2013, its second year.

_{MORE FROM FORBES}

If AI doesn’t cause human extinction over the next few years, and, these days, who knows, it seems fair to posit that its influence on marketing and marketers will be massive, even if exactly how remains unknown. I recognize this isn’t news in and of itself.

But the November 2022 release of ChatGPT has provoked a speed and scale of conversation, experimentation, and adoption—of generative AI in particular—unlike anything this industry has witnessed before. For this reason, for the influence generative AI has, may, and will have on the art, science, and fundamental structure of marketing, for its influence on how the character and destiny of brands will be shaped, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is the Unofficial Number One on the 2023 Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs list.

The release of his ChatGPT has done more to accelerate utilization, advances, collaboration, conversation, and a collective what-if-ing of the technology’s cultural and marketing applications at scale than anything preceding it.

Precisely how generative AI will revolutionize marketing and/or replace marketers is a tale still to be written, and there are more than a few marketers who think all this is just another distraction from the important work of today. That, yet again, and with empirical evidence, the marketing community confuses noise with signal, and is akin to a cat chasing a light bouncing across a room. I have thought this about more than a few “next big things” more than a few times over time. But this is different, and this is not yesteryear’s Metaverse or NFT conversation. To the contrary, today’s generative AI and its offspring seem certain to irrevocably change the inputs, outputs, and exercise of the CMO’s influence.

While acknowledging that the broader potential impacts of this technology would, should they come to pass, render questions of marketing (or anything else presupposing the continuance of the human race) irrelevant — for the purpose of this piece (and, optimism), we’ll stay in our lane.

And in this lane, we find that the alphabet soup of AI (GPT, LLM, ML, NLP, etcetera) will evolve how and with—or without—whom CMOs will decide to reach and influence audiences. Search and SEO are but two parts of the marketing mix being dramatically altered in real time, both raising new and fundamental questions about where and how marketers will reach audiences, only months since ChatGPT’s release and perhaps sooner than anyone expected. While humanity may be safe, for marketers this might be an existential threat of its own.

Among other things now known and not, the technology’s ability to “optimize” and create content en masse and in a moment, in text, image, video, iambic pentameter, haiku, or in a voice similar to David Ogilvy’s, is part of the great (r)evolution, and is not without its threats to and influences on CMOs, the internal and external teams that support them, and the work they put in the world.

What happens if, at scale, marketers start defaulting to the that offered by the machines? Will the promise of hyper-personalization at scale actually look more like hyper-commodification at scale?

Will we become so hyper-focused on “efficiency” that we continue ignoring “effectiveness”? And if all marketers find themselves relying on essentially the same inputs and data corpuses (and the last decade of data mining and application suggests that more or less we are and do), how will brand X and business Y differentiate from others? How will they matter more than others? The golden road to profitability is not paved with parity.

Perhaps the greatest irony and threat of AI’s rapidly evolving place in the marketing firmament, is that the best marketing has always appealed to our humanity, individually and/or collectively. It makes us feel something that either defies or reinforces reason. And it seems that unless (or until) the machines do become sentient, the empathy that has always been at the heart of the best and most influential marketing, is equally threatened. Because while AI may be able to “learn” from trillions of data points about human belonging, identity, need and want, can it ever do more than approximate them?

In 1978, British journalist Bernard Levin said of the silicon chip that it “will transform everything, except everything that matters. The rest will be up to us.” And so it is again, and the question then is what will we do? Time and technology will tell. But for this year, Sam Altman’s influence on marketers and marketing (to say nothing of humanity), makes him the unofficial number one on this year’s list.

MORE FROM FORBES

Sprawling tufts of looped, wound, and crocheted yarn sprawl across walls and floors in Vanessa Barragão’s elaborate, nature-inspired textiles. The Portuguese artist (previously) draws inspiration from the textures of coral, rock pools, botanicals, and the cosmos to compose expansive fiber pieces.

Each piece can take upwards of three weeks to complete, as Barragão and a team of six studio assistants—including her mother, sister, with additional crocheted contributions from her grandmothers—collaboratively knot the yarn through every single hole in the jute canvas to create lush, biomorphic forms.

If you’re near Lisbon, you can find Barragão’s work in Morphosis at the Museu das Artes de Sintra, Portugal, alongside ceramicist Catarina Nunes, which opens June 29 and runs through October 1. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Vanessa Barragão’s Sprawling Biomorphic Textiles Evoke the Remarkable Textures of the Sea Floor appeared first on Colossal.

To read Part 1 of “It’s Hannah-matic,” click here.

Art museums, incidentally, do have a problem with over-romanticizing artists, and not just Pablo Picasso.

“This artist is a creative hero” is an easy entry point for modern audiences, particularly when you are dealing with experimental art that might require a lot of context to get into. In reviewing a show, I often find myself trying to undo some degree of myth-making, as museums sculpt an artist’s biography to fit the presumed identifications of the art audience (I’m thinking, for example, of how the recent Alice Neel show treats her Communist politics).

Picasso died in ’73, just as museums were taking their turn towards blockbuster-ization. Certainly the success of Picasso’s media legend inspired the way modern art came to be marketed and presented to a mass public. Indeed, the Big-Name Artist Blockbuster era was the context for Rosalind Krauss’s essay from 1981, “In the Name of Picasso,” arguing that the obsession with the “Autobiographical Picasso” flattened our ability to see the artworks as artworks.

But that reference itself shows that there is a long critical history of viewing biographical readings of Picasso’s paintings as kitschy—which is, among other reasons, why many observers view Hannah Gadsby’s singular focus on Picasso’s biography as obtuse.

Personally, I am not so much of a formalist. Historical background does matter. It also matters if, in selling us an artist, a museum creates a distortion of the past. But saying that biography matters is different than saying that biography is all that matters. It seems to me that the Gadsby way of thinking simply flips the museum’s “good artist = good art” default marketing pitch on its head.

And this logic—simplifying the art, the life, and the relationship between the two to make a point—leaves us with all kinds of dilemmas in “It’s Pablo-matic.”

Etchings by Pablo Picasso in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

To make an exhibition, however, the Brooklyn Museum has to show actual artworks, so it needs a more concrete argument about stakes when it comes to viewing actual art. “It’s Pablo-matic” throws any and every anti-Picasso talking point into the mix, including some brief remarks on Picasso and cultural appropriation.

But mainly, the show homes in on how Picasso’s real-life relationships with women matter particularly for judging his art because he so often depicted women and sex.

The specific Picasso images brought in to serve the prosecution are mainly ones depicting nudes or sexual encounters, usually in classical or mythologizing settings, with the argument being that they encode Picasso’s demeaning ideology about women.

Pablo Picasso, Model and Sculptor Drinking with Minotaur (1933) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

Hence, Gadsby’s one-sentence commentary on Picasso’s use of the imagery of sleeping female figures: “It is terrifying how benign this subject is considering how unsafe it would be to be an unconscious woman around someone like Picasso.” Or this, made about an etching showing a sculptor shaping a female figure, “No head. No arms. The sculptor shapes only what is necessary… for him.”

The theory that classical nudes in art have serviced the “male gaze” is not a new one. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing made it—on TV—more than a half-century ago. In fact, the position is so old that there is a long tradition of critics trying to nuance or complicate it (as Berger himself did).

Most importantly, feminist artists have had complex relationships—sometimes critical, sometimes ambivalent, sometimes recuperative—with images of female sexuality produced for the “male gaze.” One of the more provocative curatorial aspects of “It’s Pablo-matic” is how the curators lean in to showing graphically sexual work made by women, directly recalling these debates.

But it’s at exactly this point where the Brooklyn Museum’s too-deferential relationship to its celebrity guest curator really garbles its message.

Porn and Picasso

The Picasso works shown here may not be all that memorable. But what visitors will likely remember from “It’s Pablo-matic” is Betty Tompkins’s big 1972 acrylic showing, in precisely painted black and white, a graphic close-up of (heterosexual) anal penetration, appropriated from a porn mag. “The world was not ready for Tompkins’s utter lack of self-consciousness or modesty,” the wall text notes, adding that French authorities deemed her “Fuck Paintings” obscene in the ‘70s.

Sure—but it seems important to note that other feminists criticized Tompkins as well, not just “the world.” After all, just one room over, the show features a beautiful canvas depicting two lounging nude figures by Joan Semmel. As Alison Gingeras has noted, “Semmel objected to Tompkins’s appropriation of these images on the grounds that they form an exploitative, misogynist industry, and could not be redeemed, even through their cooption by a woman artist.”

A gallery of “It’s Pablo-matic” with Betty Tompkins, Fuck Painting #6 (1973) at center. Photo by Ben Davis.

To this show’s credit, allusions to the internal battles among feminist artists in the ’70s and ’80s over how they approached the “male gaze” are sprinkled elsewhere and throughout, with some sense that these bitter fights damaged careers and undermined what should have been solidarities.

A text accompanying Marlyn Minter’s Big Girls (1986) highlights how the artist “found herself at odds with heated opinions about pornography among feminist artists,” even though the fact has little to do with actual content of the featured painting. Minter had to close a show of porn-inspired paintings in 1992 early, demoralized by the fierce condemnation she received. (In an oral history with the Smithsonian, she recalls being reduced to tears by a friend, Deborah Kass—the artist behind the Brooklyn Museum’s beloved OY/YO sculpture—who chastised her: “I hate this work. You can’t show this. It’s an affront to feminism.”)

Carolee Schneemann, Infinity Kisses II (1990-98) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

The show’s texts nod to these controversies so often that it feels meaningful, but they do not clearly spell out why they are relevant in a show that takes Nanette as its jumping-off point. There’s a large, all-caps quote by Minter, randomly placed over a case with an ancient Aphrodite statue (itself a semi-random inclusion), that reads: “No one’s fantasies are politically correct.”

But why the reference to the perils of political correctness? The quote just hangs there, a loose thought.

Unidentified Greco-Egyptian artist, Female face and neck (Ptolemaic Period-early Roman period) and Unidentified Greek artist, Torso of Aphrodite (1st century B.C.E.-1st Century C.E.) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

It’s convenient today to recall the ‘80s and ‘90s “culture wars” as a period that was only about a berserk religious right. But it also saw a movement of anti-porn feminists led by the late Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon make common cause with the pulpit-pounding religious right to reanimate censorship laws. Their argument was that there could be no ambiguity in how such images were read: “pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice.” The moral absoluteness of these debates split the feminist movement: “the censorial climate they have fostered has caused untold harm,” argued Cathy Crosson.

Artists like Minter and Tompkins—whom Gingeras has dubbed the “Black Sheep Feminist Artists”—had to wait years for the kind of acclaim they get now, basically until a new generation of feminist thinkers made space for their appropriations.

The reason this is relevant background in “It’s Pablo-matic” has to be that Hannah Gadsby very much seems to argue that images of passive female nudes or mythic orgies can only be received as an apology for male domination of women (Hilton Als noted, “Gadsby often sounds like warmed over Andrea Dworkin.”) Too-rigidly insisting that any pleasure taken from certain “problematic” sexual images is evidence of complicity has been divisive, and had costs.

Mickalene Thomas, Marie: Nude Black Woman Lying on a Couch (2012), Dinga McCannon, Revolutionary Sister (1971), and Marilyn Minter, Big Girls (1986) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

A cautionary note about the hazards of Gadsby’s argument seems clearly implied. But in a show that has Hannah Gadsby’s name over the entrance, not many viewers are going to stick around to decode the fine print.

Our “Pablo-matic” Moment 

I have spent a lot of time unpacking this odd, muddled show. Why? I know that for one part of the audience, I will be guilty of man-splaining feminism, and I do not enjoy that thought. Then another part of the audience would prefer that I take much more dismissive delight in tearing apart this show’s “feminist cringe,” as meme-maker Jerry Gogosian put it.

I do not really relish taking apart this show. It makes me depressed about the moment we live in. Let me explain why.

Pablo Picasso, The Shadow (1953) in “It’s Pablo-matic.” Photo by Ben Davis.

Nanette, and the adulation around it, was clearly a product of the early Trump era, explicitly drawing a line from the celebration of Picasso to the celebration of Donald Trump. Terrified and disempowered at the electoral level, liberal commentators turned to culture—where they are, conveniently, overrepresented anyway—as the arena where some progress could be made.

Gadsby’s argument in Nanette, which plays looped in the galleries at the Brooklyn Museum, was clear on this mission:

You won’t hear too many extended sets about art history in a comedy show, so… you’re welcome… Comedy is more used to throwaway jokes about priests being pedophiles and Trump grabbing the pussy. I don’t have time for that shit. I don’t. Do you know who used to be an easy punch line? Monica Lewinsky. Maybe, if comedians had done their job properly, and made fun of the man who abused his power, then perhaps we might have had a middle-aged woman with an appropriate amount of experience in the White House, instead of, as we do, a man who openly admitted to sexually assaulting vulnerable young women because he could.

The argument contains a subreption, in that Hillary Clinton, the “middle-aged woman with an appropriate amount of experience,” happened also to be the wife of Bill Clinton, “the man who abused his power.” And Hillary Clinton’s inability to ever address this fact satisfactorily was something that Trump had exploited to excuse himself.

Nevertheless, the message was heard: Calling out abuse of power was more important than jokes.

Gadsby’s comedy-special-that-refused-to-be-a-comedy-special was perfect for its moment—the one where Kate McKinnon had responded to Trump’s election onstage at Saturday Night Live by dressing up as Hillary Clinton and tearfully performing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Late-night comedy became anti-Trump therapy. Even late night’s own writers would say (anonymously) that it felt as if “whatever I’m doing now, it doesn’t really feel like comedy” and called the situation, by early 2021, a “masturbatory rage ouroboros.”

Guess what happened next? Five years on from Nanette, most of the anti-Trump comedy shows have been canceled or have declined. People used to mock the very idea of mainstream conservative comedy. Now Gutfeld!, Fox News’s answer to the Daily Show, is the biggest thing in late night.

In art, this penny hasn’t dropped, but there’s a definite percolating fatigue with “woke” culture. I’ve said for months that “It’s Pablo-matic” might be the moment when the mainstream art institutions had to grapple with just how uncool moralism had become.

Marisol, Saca la Lengua (1973), with a clip from Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette playing in the background. Photo by Ben Davis.

But the hour is late. What’s scary is that we live in the middle of a gathering super-storm of political reaction. Women’s rights have been decisively eroded, and gender non-conforming people are at the center of a nasty campaign of bigoted scapegoating. But exhaustion, disaffection, and recrimination are gaining steam on the cultural level.

Gadsby’s co-curators at the Brooklyn Museum seem to intimate some kind of alienation from a certain image of social-justice discourse. “One of the really important takeaways that we are stressing, and that we know is really important to Hannah, is that the idea of ‘cancellation’ is not remotely the point of this exhibition—nor is it mostly anyone’s goals in anything these days—as a simple, reductive kind of gesture,” Catherine Morris told Ben Luke before “It’s Pablo-matic” opened. Morris added that the show was about “giving complicated things the space to be complicated.”

But in the audio guide, Gadsby says plainly: “I don’t have much hope that the needle is going to move on ‘P.P.’—and by ‘P.P.’ I mean ‘Pablo Picasso.’ A cancellation of P.P. is an incredibly unlikely outcome.” Well, arguing that the patriarchy won’t let you cancel Picasso is not the same as saying that you don’t want to cancel Picasso. Morris may argue for complexity, but Gadsby’s arguments about what Picasso’s art means today are so totalizing and limiting that the majority of the feminist artists in the show explicitly disagree with them!

Clearly, the curators are trying to soften Gadsby’s argument—their own act of myth-making image-management when it comes to the Big Name at the center of the show. The Brooklyn Museum wanted to do an exhibition with a Netflix celebrity, so the institution is just not going to say anything too plainly about any flaws in Gadsby’s arguments, even though it seems aware of them. Gadsby, meanwhile, admits in the audio guide that they participated, even though they hate the show’s subject, because “I thought it would raise my profile.” It’s a crazy-quilt of faulty incentives, from end to end.

What alarms me about the spectacle of “It’s Pablo-matic” is the evidence that art institutions aren’t able to make better arguments, aren’t able to adjust, aren’t able to assess what has happened in the last five years or where they stand in the doom loop of “woke” and “anti-woke” factionalization that is intensifying.

One final note: As recently as April—presumably as “It’s Pablo-matic” was coming together—the Brooklyn Museum’s staff has been forced to picket their own institution, demanding livable wages. “The whole bargaining process has been very frustrating,” a union rep told my colleague Sarah Cascone. “The museum likes to cloak themselves in social justice.” Can we get a couple of Hannah Gadsby quips on this?

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