Having trouble relating Western art history to contemporary culture? Watch this video that the French-American band Hold Your Horses made for its track “70 Million,” produced by L’Ogre. Apparently, the entire video was filmed over two weekends in a parking garage in Paris. See if you can name the painting and the artist.

Answers on next page.

Answers:

• “Last Supper” by da Vinci
• “The Birth of Venus” by Boticelli
• “The Anatomy Lesson” by Rembrandt
• “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Vermeer
• “Portraits of Henry VIII” by Holbein
• “The Raft of the Medusa” by Gericault
• “The Death of Marat” by David
• “The Creation of Adam” by Michelangelo

Chorus:

• “The Son of Man” by Magritte
• “Composition with Large Red Plane” by Mondrian
• “Self-Portrait” by Kahlo
• “Portrait of Dora Maar Seated” by Picasso
• “The Scream” by Munch
• “Self-Portrait, 1899” by Van Gogh
• “Ten Marilyns” by Warhol

Verse:

• “Gabrielle d’Estrees et une de ses soeurs by Unknown
• “Maesta” by Cimabue
• “Salome” by Caravaggio
• “Olympia” by Manet
• “Liberty Leading the People” by Delacroix
• “Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden” by Dix
• “The Kiss” by Klimt

Chorus again:

• “La Mariee” by Chagall
• “Las Meninas” by Velazquez
• “Sunflowers” by Van Gogh

This summer it wasn’t hard to see elephants on the streets of London; they were everywhere. Created to support endangered Asian elephants, the public arts campaign placed 260 brightly painted fiberglass elephant sculptures all over the city to highlight the plight of Asian elephants, whose numbers have declined by nearly 90 percent over the past century. Each elephant was decorated by a well-known designer, artist or celebrity and then auctioned off, raising more than four million pounds for 20 conservation charities in the UK.

The elephants of London join a long parade of other civic public arts fund raisers. Back around 1998, Zurich placed a collection of 815 decorated cows around the city, bringing in more than a million tourists to gawk at the display. A Chicago businessman visiting Switzerland considered cows equally apropos for his hometown, which is famous for its old stockyards and Mrs. O’Leary’s cow who kicked over a lantern causing the Great Fire of 1871. He convinced Chicago to bring in some 300 fiberglass cows from Zurich, and then got local businesses to “buy” a cow and the services of an artist to decorate it. The cow project rounded up millions of dollars to support city arts programs.

Around 2004, both New York City and San Francisco followed suit, picking symbols of their city for their public arts fund-raising campaigns. Hundreds of “big apple” sculptures, decorated by well-known artists, popped up all over Manhattan as part of the Big Apple Fest, an initiative to promote the city and benefit charities. Businesses paid to sponsor an apple or kicked in more to sponsor it and keep it for themselves. San Francisco chose the heart as its symbol — as in the Tony Bennett song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco – and got 130 Bay Area designers and artists to decorate the sculptures, which were then auctioned off to local businesses, raising more than $2 million for the San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center.

In 2005, Munich sold off 500 decorated fiberglass lion statues, with proceeds donated to a children’s charity.

Today it is a delight to walk around these cities and encounter one of the sculptures. Everybody wins and the cities are better for it.

Most designers know that typefaces like Poster Bodoni take up more physical space on a page than, say, News Gothic Condensed, and that choice of typestyle not only affects readability but the credibility of the message as well — for example, never, ever typeset the CEO’s letter to shareholders in Comic Sans. One thing that designers probably haven’t thought about is how much ink each typeface consumes on an office printer. Well, a Dutch company called Printer.com did. It compared 10 of the most frequently used typefaces on a Canon inkjet and a Brother laser printer (both set at 600×600 dots per inch), using Arial as the baseline font.

Century Gothic resulted in a 31% ink savings over Arial. It even beat out Ecofont, which was specifically developed to spare the environment by cutting down on ink usage. By Printer.com’s calculation, a business that printed out 250 pages a week would save about $80 per year just by switching to Century Gothic. Times New Roman, Verdana and Calibri all performed better than Arial, but Franklin Gothic Medium (11 pt.) gulped ink like a bar room drunk, consuming nearly double what the ink sipping light, thin lines of Century Gothic did. Is there a point to all this? Not really. We just thought it was interesting to contemplate.

Urban transportation planners everywhere are grappling with the question of how to move traffic faster, cleaner, greener and cheaper. They have urged people to ride bikes, telecommute, buy hybrid vehicles and mini-cars, but here’s a concept from China that is truly original – a super gigantic bus taller than an overpass that straddles the road creating a moving tunnel that regular cars can drive through. Bus passengers board on the upper level from elevated platforms, while smaller vehicles drive under and through the bus. Ultrasonic waves alert trucks too tall to fit to go around the bus on another lane. A stop light activates to stop cars in the tunnel when the bus needs to make a turn.

The “straddling bus” was exhibited at the 13th Beijing International High-Tech Expo in May and a pilot model is being built in Beijing’s Mentougou District by its developer Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co. Powered by electricity and solar energy, the straddling bus can carry between 1,200 and 1,400 passengers at a time and travel at speeds of up to 60 km per hour. Developers claim that it will reduce traffic jams by up to 30% on main roads and can be built in a fraction of the time that would be required to construct a new subway. The bus is also projected to save up to 860 tons of fuel annually, reducing carbon emissions by 2,640 tons. There is also no need to build a parking lot to house buses out of service; they can be left straddling the road.

We happened across a video on social media done by Erik Qualman and were blown away. Then we noticed that it was produced in 2009, which is so last year! Fortunately, Equalman Productions came out with this revised version in 2010 – probably also outdated, but less so.

The takeaway message is that traditional consumer research, advertising and marketing methods are quickly becoming ineffective and irrelevant. If we aren’t factoring social media into our marketing plan, we’ll be left behind.

Turnabout is fair play. Andy Warhol used pop stars, pop culture and pop products to create pop art, and now Dom Perignon has returned the compliment with advertising in homage of Warhol’s iconic silkscreen stencil style. The ad was inspired by Warhol’s March 8th, 1981, diary entry in which he talked about getting together with 20 friends and buying 2,000 bottles of Dom Perignon that they would keep in a sealed room until the year 2000. In an aside comment, Warhol wrote, “the running joke is who will be around and who won’t…” Warhol, who died in 1987, didn’t live to see the day, but he certainly drank plenty of Dom Perignon in his time.

Recently, Dom Perignon commissioned the Design Laboratory of Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design in London to reinterpret its famous champagne bottle in a manner that Warhol would love, using Warhol’s signature red, blue and yellow color combination.

Two questions: What happened to the 2,000 Dom Perignon bottles that Warhol and friends stashed away in 1981? And did anyone break them open in 2000 and toast in the new millennium?

Logos are not just for corporations and sports teams. During World War II, virtually every unit in the U.S. military adopted logos that they emblazoned on aircraft, ships, boats, jeeps, tanks, bomber jackets, trinkets, and bombs and torpedos. The main provider of such insignias was the Disney Studios in Burbank.

First asked to create a humorous logo for a Naval Reserve Squadron stationed at Floyd Bennett Field in New York, the Disney Studios quickly found itself inundated with requests to draw emblems for other military units as well. Disney had to assign five artists full-time to the task, but never charged a dime. “The insignia meant a lot to the men who were fighting…I had to do it…I owed it to them,” Walt Disney explained later.

Before the war had ended, Disney had created some 1,200 cartoon insignias for all of the branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, as well as for many Allied troops. Reflecting the esprit de corps and bravado of the unit, the cartoon character patches were worn with pride. With the exception of Bambi, virtually every Disney character appeared at least once on a logo. The most requested character was Donald Duck, beloved by troops for his quick temper and fighting spirit. Pluto and Goofy and even Grumpy of the Seven Dwarfs appeared on decals. Mickey Mouse was never linked to a combat unit. His affable, nice guy image made him better suited for the home front defense industry. Snow White appeared as a military nurse, and Flower the Skunk was on the emblem of three chemical warfare units. Dumbo the Flying Elephant appeared on bomber planes and bombs, and Jiminy Cricket, the wise conscience of Pinocchio, represented military chaplains. In cases where Disney characters seemed out of place, the studio created new mascots, as it did for the Mosquito Fleet, the Flying Tigers and the Seabees.

As incongruous as Disney characters are to the horrors of war, these cartoon military patches embodied pop culture, innocence, American values, and everything the troops loved about home – a much more fitting emblem than a heraldic pompous symbol with no sentimental significance.

Feature films are a universal language as the media design students from Hannover, Germany, who put together this animated video prove. Felix Meyer and Pascal Monaco picked 35 of their favorite blockbuster movies from over the decades and distilled them down to an iconic sight or sound from each. The answers don’t seem to be posted anywhere online, so you might have to email them to find out if you guessed right.

What does it feel like to be a stranger in a foreign land? If you could communicate in the simplest, clearest language, what do you want others to know about you? Established in Berlin by two women from Argentina – one an artist, the other a journalist, Migrantas is a collective project that helps immigrants in Germany give voice to their concerns.

In conducting workshops for immigrants, Migrantas asked participants to make drawings inspired by their own reality and emotions. From the drawings and thoughts common themes emerged. These were distilled into pictograms and turned into posters put on display in bus shelters and on subways “to make visible the thoughts and feelings of those who have left their own country and now live in a new one.” Migrantas adds that “mobility, migration and transculturality are not the exception in the world, but are instead becoming the rule….We, the immigrants, are always the ‘others.’” Although the pictogram posters are a one-way dialog, they are meant to make passersby who see them reflect on the immigrant experience and see the world from their perspective.

Over the past couple of weeks two separate stories appeared in the news. One was a report by Amazon that for the first time its e-books outsold its hardcover titles. For the quarter, Amazon says it sold 143 e-titles for every 100 hardcover books.

The other story, which appeared in San Francisco Bay Area newspapers, was about the town of Walnut Creek’s new library, which incorporated 17 original works of art at a cost of $300,000. The neighboring town of Lafayette (population 25,000) spent roughly $400,000 on paintings, photographs, sculptures and prints when it rebuilt its library last year. The local paper described this new crop of libraries with conference rooms, fireplaces, computers and cafes as “community living rooms.” Libraries are not just repositories for books anymore. Some public libraries are redefining their role by positioning themselves as knowledge centers free and open to the entire community – not a museum, not a school, not a social club, but a place that bridges the digital divide and draws together those who share a love of art and learning.

Some people argue that such changes are premature, that traditional printed-book-based libraries will evolve gradually, but they said the same about video rental outlets and CD music stores – and where are they now? The question is: Does the rise in Amazon e-title sales and the public embrace of the iPad signal a tipping point in the physical form that books take – and what does that say about the future of libraries (not to mention publishers, bookstores, authors, designers and suppliers to the publishing industry)?

Some communities aren’t waiting around to find out. The new Walnut Creek library, for instance, strikes a balance between the visual arts and letters to create an intellectually nourishing environment. At every turn, there are intriguing art pieces to view, beginning with a 26-foot-tall art installation created by internationally known artist Christian Moeller for the entrance of the library. Titled “Shh…A Portrait in 12 Volumes of Gray,” Moeller’s work is made from 3,960 books in 12 shades of gray. Perhaps someday people will go to libraries to enjoy the art and stay to read a novel on their Kindle or join a discussion group led by a local author.