FUCK COMMITTEES
(I believe in lunatics)
It’s about the struggle between individuals with jagged passion in their work and today’s faceless corporate committees, which claim to understand the needs of the mass audience, and are removing the idiosyncrasies, polishing the jags, creating a thought-free, passion-free, cultural mush that will not be hated nor loved by anyone. By now, virtually all media, architecture, product and graphic design have been freed from ideas, individual passion, and have been relegated to a role of corporate servitude, carrying out corporate strategies and increasing stock prices. Creative people are now working for the bottom line.
Magazine editors have lost their editorial independence, and work for committees of publishers (who work for committees of advertisers). TV scripts are vetted by producers, advertisers, lawyers, research specialists, layers and layers of paid executives who determine whether the scripts are dumb enough to amuse what they call the ‘lowest common denominator’. Film studios out films in front of focus groups to determine whether an ending will please target audiences. All cars look the same. Architectural decisions are made by accountants. Ads are stupid. Theater is dead.
Corporations have become the sole arbiters of cultural ideas and taste in America. Our culture is corporate culture.
Culture used to be the opposite of commerce, not a fast track to ‘content’- derived riches. Not so long ago captains of industry (no angels in the way they acquired wealth) thought that part of their responsibility was to use their millions to support culture. Carnegie built libraries, Rockefeller built art museums, Ford created his global foundation. What do we now get from our billionaires? Gates? Or Eisner? Or Redstone? Sales pitches. Junk mail. Meanwhile, creative people have their work reduced to ‘content’ or ‘intellectual property’. Magazines and films become ‘delivery systems’ for product messages.
But to be fair, the above is only 99 percent true.
I offer a modest solution: Find the cracks in the wall. There are a very few lunatic entrepreneurs who will understand that culture and design are not about fatter wallets, but about creating a future. They will understand that wealth is means, not an end. Under other circumstances they may have turned out to be like you, creative lunatics. Believe me, they’re there and when you find them, treat them well and use their money to change the world.
Tibor Kalman
New York, June 1998
The YMFY logo is a Barbara Kruger bite. I hope I don’t get sued.
“I got this in 1979 and it has a lot of miles on it—some motorcycle miles, and it was my regular outerwear during the days when New York streets could be risky. It probably saved my life when I resisted a two perp mugging at knifepoint on Avenue D. (Or maybe it was the Sacred Heart of Jesus pinned inside it over my heart.) Some guys wore tagged leather jackets back then. One day I asked my friend Jean-Michel Basquiat to draw one of his crowns on the back of mine. Jean was so into kingship he smoked Chesterfield Kings. My friend George DuBose had nicknamed me Leroy because he said I acted like a king. This jacket made me feel even more like one.”- Glenn O’Brien
Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan is a 2008 book published by Pantheon Books, subsidiary of Random House, in the United States. The book was designed by Chip Kidd with the assistance of photographer Geoff Spear. It collects a Japanese shōnen manga adaptation of the American comic book series Batman by Jiro Kuwata simply entitled Batman (バットマン Battoman) and also includes photographs of vintage Batman toys from Japan. The Batman manga included in Bat-Manga! was created during a Batman craze in Japan, being serialized from April 1966 to May 1967; the series ended when the craze ended. The manga was released in paperback and at the same time a limited hardcover was released on October 28, 2008, with an additional manhua bootleg and an extra Batman story by the creator.
Lunar meteorites collected in Africa and Oman are, for all practical purposes, the only source of moon rocks available for private ownership. This is because all rocks collected during the Apollo moon-landing program are property of the United States government or of other nations to which the U.S. conveyed them as gifts. Similarly, all lunar meteorites collected by the U.S. and Japanese Antarctic programs are, by treaty, held by those governments for research and education purposes only. Although there is no U.S. law specifically against the ownership of Apollo moonrocks, none has ever been (or is likely to ever be) given or sold by the U.S. government to private citizens. Even in the cases of plaques containing genuine Apollo moonrocks given in 2004 to astronauts and Walter Cronkite, NASA retained ownership of the rocks themselves. Most of the moonrocks collected by the Luna 16 probe are also unavailable for private ownership, although three tiny samples were sold at auction for $442,500 in 1993.
Meteorites from the Moon are exceptionally rare. There are fewer than 70 lunar meteorites known with a total combined weight of approximately 55 kilograms, making them millions of times rarer than gem grade diamonds. However, most lunar meteorites reside in museum collections and research institutions, leaving only 15 kilograms or so available to individual collectors worldwide. Since acquiring an Apollo moon rock is virtually impossible, the only realistic way to own a piece of the moon is by acquiring a lunar meteorite.
