MonKeyArtAwards

Rest In Peace Anthony

This is from Mark Weinstein's FB post, and it is elequent:

In June of 1994, my good friend and co-worker at 20th Century Fox, Jill Green, introduced me to a man who would alter the course of my life. I found out earlier today that this man, Anthony Goldschmidt, had passed away this morning. I didn't cry, or freak out. I was a bit startled that he died so young, but the true reaction hadn't yet formed in my head.

For those of you who didn't know him, he owned & ran a boutique entertainment ad agency in Beverly Hills called Intralink, where I cut my teeth as an Art Director and had the honor of helping build an award-winning creative team as his Senior Art Director in the mid 1990's. I learned more under his discerning eye then at any other agency or school combined. Anthony had a history of taking risks that others couldn't or wouldn't take, because he didn't NEED the business to succeed or fail for financial reasons - he was independently wealthy. He was driven solely by the challenge of striving to be the best - creating classic posters for ET, Gremlins, the list is endless. Anthony was an extremely polarizing yet dynamic and brilliant visionary, who had very profound effects on my life, both positive and negative. I was never as driven to create big ideas and be brilliant at any stage in my career than I was by Anthony G. He truly inspired me to be better and helped me to realize that creatively, I could be as good or better than anyone else.

He also had no interest, understanding or care that I was a father, and when he made it clear that it wasn't important to him that I take a break from my 90 hour week to spend a few hours with my daughter, we parted ways. But I don't fault him for my departure - it was the next step in my life which I would not have been ready for had we not worked together. That next step turned out to be one of the greatest gifts I have ever gotten. It allowed me to be a freelance artist, and later to help build a startup company, an opportunity that afforded me the luxury of a flexible schedule that allowed me to watch my daughter grow up... Picking her up from school, spending afternoons together, volunteering for pizza day or a week at outdoor education camp or a trip to help build houses for needy families in Tijuana with her youth group. All of these were opportunities I'd have missed had it not been for Anthony.

On top of all that, he gave me a gift that I'm not sure he even knew he gave me. The people that I met while working at Intralink were some of the most gifted people I've ever met, but the bond I have with them, the fraternity we formed, will live on for the rest of my life. One of my best and closest friends to this day is someone I met at Intralink. There are also those that I don't speak to very often, but on occasions that we do cross paths, it's almost as if no time has passed. They are like my extended family, and will always be my friends and have a huge place in my heart.

Anthony - Thank you for being a huge influence in my life. You will always be remembered. And just so you know, I still have those Ostrich skin leather boots, and I always will.

Rest In Peace Anthony.

Still Popping Up On The Internets: A Sean Tejaratchi Quote Attributed To Banksy

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it.
They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs. 

Fotoshop By Adobé

Kevin Bachman And Christian Struzan Star In “How The Sausage Is Made”

Union + Webster is as sleek, modern, and cool as you'd expect a 21st century design studio to be, especially one that caters to the sometimes-oversized and unpredictable egos of Hollywood, and specializes in the creation of such a very carefully crafted marketing tool as vital as a film's poster (or in industry terms, "one-sheet"). Hosting the festivities today from Union + Webster are Kevin Bachman, who will serve as the shoot's creative director, and partner-in-crime Christian Struzan, a senior creative director with the firm and whose father is perhaps the most legendary movie poster illustrator of them all, Drew Struzan.

As would become clear from talking to Bachman, Struzan, and Ricardo Marenco, the photographer, the making of every poster has its own backstory — and yes sometimes those stories will include plenty of vanity, like an actress who refuses to stand upright for the shoot.

Read more here: How They Make a Movie Poster: Behind the Scenes of Clark Gregg's 'Trust Me' Shoot

Another Steaming Load Of Horseshit Passing Itself Off As A Scientific Study

This from Artnet: According to a recent study, artists may have increased neural matter in areas of the brain that are linked to fine motor skills and visual imagery. 

Rebecca Chamberlain, who helped author the report for NeuroImage, claims that “The people who are better at drawing really seem to have more developed structures in regions of the brain that control for fine motor performance and what we call procedural memory.”

[When] the brains of 21 art students were compared to 23 non-artists… the artist group had a larger mass of gray matter in the parietal lobe’s precuneus area. According to Chamberlain, “this region is involved in a range of functions but potentially in things that could be linked to creativity, like visual imagery—being able to manipulate visual images in your brain, combine them and deconstruct them.”

Not to mentionthe ability to copy and paste images and claim them as your own.

A Brief Message From The MPAA And Frank Underwood

From Deadline Hollywood: After “a reconsideration” of its earlier hard stance against the Key Art for the documentary Fed Up citing ‘offensive language’, the MPAA’s advertising administration reversed its decision late Wednesday night and will now allow the art without any alterations.

Since no mention was made of the 2009 teen “comedy” Fired Up, we assume it was the M&M candies that the MPAA found to be in poor taste.

Some weeks back we saw the teaser below for Friended To Death pop up briefly on IMPAwards and then vanish into cyberspace. The image on the right is what we believe to be the final art.

Putting The Ex In Marketing Exec

Lionsgate and Summit have merged their marketing divisions, tossing Summit marketeer Nancy Kirkpatrick into the dumpster and crowning the fierce, tattooed warrior Tim Palen as Grand Poobah of All Things Marketable.

According to Variety, Kirkpatrick, who has served as Summit’s president of worldwide marketing for the past six years, will resign at the end of this month.

That gives her about a week and a half to hide a dead raccoon somewhere in Palen’s office.

"Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal." - Pablo Picasso. "Monkey See. Monkey Do." - Edwina Trout

We Ran Out Of Ideas So We Just Put Everything In Boxes

If You Don’t Have The Time, Don’t Do The Crime

Clearly this was intended as an homage to 1989's Uncle Buck. 

Photoshoplifting

As seen on Buzzfeed:

Drinking The Kool-Aid

We came across the following in The New Yorker in an article called The Cult of Overwork:

In a culture that venerates overwork, people internalize crazy hours as the norm…. Grinding out hundred-hour weeks for years helps [workers] think of themselves as tougher and more dedicated than everyone else… Over time, the simple fact that you work so much becomes proof that the job is worthwhile, and being in the office day and night becomes a kind of permanent initiation ritual.

Does this sound like your agency? It’s no wonder, key art directing is, after all, a feminine discipline - all that fussing over colors and photographs of movie stars. It’s downright silly when you think about it, so naturally a certain amount of macho-shitheadedness creeps into the workplace in order to make you poncy art majors feel less sissified.