Fish Don’t Fry in The Kitchen. Beans Don’t Burn on The Grill.

If you’re like us, you have found yourself flummoxed on more than one occasion by what we call The Riddle of The Golden Turd.

Here’s what we mean: an average, run of the mill art director that we know, maybe even someone with whom we worked alongside of in the trenches. (We don’t really work in trenches, but allow us, if you will, a small attempt to make our career choice seem less sissified than it is.) Anyhow, through some fluke or another this art director gets transmogrified into The Client. 

“Oh goody!” says we. “A confrère!” 

Then, after arriving at their freshly painted office to make a presentation, only to have them tear into our concepts the way a grizzly bear rips into the soft underbelly of a salmon, we leave muttering, “What Golden Turd did that hack ever produce to which our work pales in comparison?”

Comments

[Shoes4Industry]

A quotation by John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton (1834–1902). The historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." (or art directors)

Another English politician with no shortage of names - William Pitt the Younger, The Earl of Chatham and British Prime Minister from 1766 to 1778, is sometimes wrongly attributed as the source. He did say something similar, in a speech to the UK House of Lords in 1770:

"Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it"

[Peavish Pixel]

Are you talkin 'bout just this week?

[fully justified billing-blockhead]

Edwina,

In the interest of clarity, we must not disengage ourselves from the idea that the process of transmogrifying from a "creative" to a "suit" (the quotes were my idea and I even flicked my fingers up in the air for dramatic emphasis) has a necessary role to fill within our industry.

Is it not our naturalistic Darwinian urge as creative saplings freshly planted in our cubicle to reach for the sky and taste the freshest air of the towering forest?

Those of us pruned branches left scattered to the mud can still experience our glory as we gleefully witness the forest fire known as a "change in studio regime" sweeping across the executive suites. Think of the "suit" crawling back to reenter our lowly the lobster pot, properly humbled.

Gives us something to live for!

Or as my dearest friend Gore Vidal says (OK... I only know him from appearances on Charlie Rose and the LA Times Festival of Books):

"Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies."
Quoted in The Sunday Times Magazine, London (1973-09-16)

"Envy is the central fact of American life."
"Gore Vidal," interview by Gerald Clarke (1974), The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work, 5th series (1981)

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."
Quoted by Gerard Irvine, "Antipanegyric for Tom Driberg," [memorial service for Driberg] (1976-12-08)

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:dE8GA4q7zEYJ:en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gore_Vidal+every+time+my+friend+succeeds+i+die+a+little,+gore+vidal&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=safari

[StinkyMcFarty]

you mean like the "creative" director at sbc?

[joe sixpack]

why not name names? or don't you have enough bandwidth?

[Shoes4Industry]

http://tinyurl.com/5kdbvo