I’ve had a plan for a long time to collect some of the thinking from this newsletter and turn it into a book. It’s exactly the sort of long, drawn out process that honestly suits the tempo of my life at the moment…

With the general cut and thrust of the book somewhat nailed down, I’ve been contemplating all the artists, movements, scenes and historical events that I’ve written about or spoken about on my previous podcast, and trying to make a decision as to which ones will be most compelling to include in the book version.

Some have really obvious links and ties between the art and advertising world. I’m thinking Bacon, Warhol and Holzer in particular.

I’ve rejected Dali on the basis that too much has been written about him already, and that the challenge of finding an interesting angle is not worth the effort. I’d rather consider a different surrealist like Kay Sage, who’s bleak architectural paintings are criminally under-seen – in my experience.

I want to write about Soviet art and Cold War modernism because I keep seeing the parallels between contemporary marketing and life in the USSR i.e. a system that is essentially doomed to fail repeatedly but the people in charge insist that it is supposed to work like this, and that nothing is wrong. Hyper-normalisation is back.

I want to write about artists who were unapologetically themselves, who knew what to do with the way that they saw the world, and what to do with the things that others discarded. Betye Saar, Tarsila de Amaral and Jean Dubuffet.

I have assembled fifteen chapters for the first draft.

There may be more, there may be less, but the following represents my current aspirations, and I have included a little log-line as a sort of mission statement or synopsis for each of the chapters.

The exact shape and style is still to come…

• Will there be a narrative that connects all of the chapters?

• Will there be any images at all?

• Will there be a structure or template applied to each chapter?

• Will the writing of the book itself be part of the book?

The mode in which I write this newsletter is attempting to convey a sort of careless immediacy in the first person, verging on a polemic at times, and this would be the easiest to translate. However, I would like to stretch myself if possible…

• The Jenny Holzer chapter could be a list of Trusims.

• The John Heartfield could be entirely made of propaganda.

• Betye Saar could be constructed from found objects (verse).

This kind of inscrutable, personal exploration could probably go a long way to achieving the kind of final product that I envisioned in the last newsletter, namely a book that is considered to be:

“Too thicky-thicky-dumb-dumb for the art world, and too clever-clogs for the ad world.”

The dream.

Art for Ad’s Sake’s 15 Chapters:

1. CAUGHT STEALING: FRANCIS BACON

Taste. Wearing your references on your sleeve. Sincerity. Obsessive re-interpretation.

2. RULES ARE MADE OF RUBBER: ALEKSANDR DEYNEKA

Systems can be subverted. The failure of socialist realism to inspire. Soft rebellion.

3. HERE LIES THE TRUTH: JENNY HOLZER

A clever phrase won’t necessarily reveal a cleverer meaning.

4. NOTHING IS SACRED: CILDO MEIRELES

Mass media doesn’t mean paying for mass media. Cunning stunts.

5.CONTROL. ALTER. DELETE: ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Reduction with effort. Messy minimalism. Choose targets wisely.

6. THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY: JEAN DUBUFFET

Traditions are traps. The benefits of naivety. Labels.

7. I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER: JOHN HEARTFIELD

Pain is funny. Pre and Post-satire. Anger is a gift.

8. EXPANSION PACK: REBECCA HORN

Your body is just the beginning. Limits are self-imposed.

9. DON’T LOOK NOW: THE DEGENERATE ART EXHIBITION

The irony of extreme negativity. Moralising is for wimps.

10. PICK IT UP: BETYE SAAR

Magpies and Bowerbirds. Putting it all together.

11. WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?: TARSILA DE AMARAL

Water your roots. Redefining heritage and history and myths.

12. THE ANSWER IS NO: KAY SAGE

The beauty and the bleakness of unfinished architecture.

13. FOUR EYES: LE CORBUSIER

The pull of cliches. The wheel of trends – change is tragedy and hope.

14. CLUBBED TO DEATH: MURIEL BELCHER

Scenes of community. The courage to be disliked.

15. WORKOUTS & SELLOUTS: ANDY WARHOL & JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

This is what commercial creativity looks like. The almighty dollar.

***

More to come…

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Jonathan ✌️

My kid could do that

Another experiment is on the way, specifically designed to help parents make a judgement call on what art they want to keep and what art can be thrown away or recycled.

Follow the Instagram for updates.

I’ve had a plan for a long time to collect some of the thinking from this newsletter and turn it into a book. It’s exactly the sort of long, drawn out process that honestly suits the tempo of my life at the moment.

I wish I had the energy and time to write here more often, but I think I’d rather spend what scant opportunities I do have to write about this subject, in the pursuit of something less dependant on consistent publishing.

For those who have perhaps joined recently, this endeavour originally started out as a podcast called Kunst Please, where I told short stories about art.

Kunst Please is a micro-dose of modern art history. An exploration into the more unexpected side of modern and contemporary art, featuring stories of the famous and the infamous, the weird and the wonderful, the unheard, the cult, the criminally overlooked and the criminally insane.

I fused this with my day job in advertising and created “Art for Ad’s Sake” which was originally just an hour long presentation where I spoke about six artists whose techniques and/or manifestos had really great applications for advertising creatives.

This Substack then followed and those six initial artists ballooned into a whole lot more and were accompanied by a bunch of other stuff.

A book has always been the end goal, but it’s not going to be just a collection of the blog posts.

I want to go back and re-interrogate a selection of them, with a view to writing something more like essays on each theme.

My aim is to create an art book that’s too dumb to be taken seriously by the art establishment, that is also an advertising book that'll be deemed too clever-clogs for the advertising establishment.

Finding a perfect middlebrow audience who exist to sip at the cortado of cultural capital aka. a double-shot of strong, bitter cultural theory topped with the creamy textures of thicky-thicky dumb-dumbness.

Bliss.

Anyway, I’ve seen a trend whereby people talk and post transparently about the books they are writing, and I thought perhaps I could use this ‘sletter to keep me honest.

So let’s start with an intro.

Next time I’ll share some thoughts on structure and chapters.

Let’s push things Forward.

The central tenet of this book is that a greater awareness of modern and contemporary art can greatly enhance the work of commercial creativity.

Art like advertising is quite simple, but it is thoroughly overcomplicated by those who seek to profit financially and intellectually by making it more opaque and impenetrable.

That’s not to say that making advertising more artistic is the answer, but the concepts, manifestos, techniques and decisions taken by the artists in this book could be noticeably useful to those who work in and around advertising and marketing.

I say ‘noticeably’ because this is a noticing book not an instructional book.

It’s not a textbook.

It’s not a manual, or a lesson.

It’s not a “How to X the Y when you’re a Z” book.

This is not part of a curriculum.

What follows are essays about artists and observations about advertising.

It’s an archive of modern art designed to inspire modern creativity.

It’s Art for Ad’s Sake.

***

More to come…

Like, comment and subscribe etc.

Jonathan ✌️

My kid could do that

Another experiment is on the way, specifically designed to help parents make a judgement call on what art they want to keep and what art can be thrown away or recycled.

Follow the Instagram for updates.

I’m reading a really great book at the moment called Art and Revolution by John Berger. It’s all about a Soviet-era artist called Ernst Neizvestny.

I’ve found myself stopping to pause every few pages or so because the world that is being described in post-Stalinist USSR is so eerily similar to the one that we are living in now, that I find myself utterly jarred and also eerily inspired.

This is not an essay about how we are living in a global dictatorship of banal buerocracy that’s totally Orwellian, or Kafka-esque or like Black Mirror etc.

But there was one take from Neizvestny that I was particularly taken with:

“Sculpture is essentially an art for crowds…Because the whole bias of our culture is towards the fragmentary and private, we tend to underestimate the civic, social nature of sculpture.”

Doesn’t that just smack you in the face?

In the century of the self, in the age of aggressive algorithic personalisation what is our shared goal in culture?

Le Corbusier said that once you find the true acoustic centre of a place, the point at which all sounds within the given space can best be heard, that’s where a sculpture should be placed.

Where are the acoustic centres now?

The dream of Trump’s Arc and the reality of Banksy’s flag of blindness monument are attempts from two poles of the spectrum at unity. But both will fail and have failed in fulfilling the civic and social good that a public sculpture should.

One is smug in its ‘vague’ political agenda with a bit of cheeky melancolic British humour thrown in for good measure. The other is typically obscene.

***

I am currently finding Isamu Noguchi’s 1986 Venice Biennale exhibition “What is sculture?” to be an excellent void-filler, and perhaps a monument to what could be possible if we created with the communal in mind.

In particular the centrepiece: Slide Mantra.

It’s a marble slide. It’s fun! It’s also a thing of beauty and inarguably a sculpture.

Originally concieved in the 1960s, Slide Mantra was eventually constructed from 120 tons of raw marble carved into eight pieces.

It has the elegant gravitas of a monument but the spatial awarness and generosity of spirit to become something more interactive. This opportunity to activate tacticle and sensory interactions with his art and design was something he would explore again and again.

The modular ‘Octetra’ series, each unit a pyramid composed of five hollowed-out tetrahedrons. In the White Cube Gallery, and in Moerenuma Park, Japan.

The UNESCO Gardens in Paris

Perhaps the most audacious was Play Mountain, conceived in 1933. I’ll let Noguchi’s statement speak for itself:

“I wished to bring my vision of a pyramid in Idaho into the experience of people in the city where I lived. Play Mountain was conceived as a way of building on a city block in New York a mountain, which would, in fact, be an enhanced area for children’s play.

There were steps of all sizes, a slide with water in the summer, a longer one for sledding in winter. These sloping surfaces could also serve as a roof. In 1934 a model of this was shown to Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, which only gained his perpetual antagonism.

The work is inclusive, communal and social.

But importantly, it responds to the space.

One more quote from Noguchi:

‘The nature of trees and grass is one thing, but there are many degrees of nature. Concrete can be nature. Interstellar spaces are also nature. There is human nature. In the city, you have to have a new nature. Maybe you have to create that nature.’

What is audience?

Are you aware of the ball-pit-ification of art galleries?

Brad Troemel talks about it in expert detail. He charts the evolution of the gallery space into adult day care centres with their tactile, colourful, interactive events.

They are for influencers. They are activations. They are an economic response to a generation that has been conditioned to fear art, and has thus retreated into a safe space of childlike ignorance. This has ultimately resulted in a kind of perversion of the sort of art that Noguchi was making.

However, the crowd is not stupid. It is merely responding to what’s in front of it.

The art world has to be accountable for decades of inpenetrable artspeak and obscene wealth stockpiling – it’s no wonder alienation has set in. The advertising and marketing world too must reckon with its own mis-handling of the audience.

Mainly that they are regularly thought of and treated like utter imbeciles.

In commercial creativity brand activations make sense – getting people hands on with the product, manufacturing joyful or unique experiences under the banner of Brand X perhaps in collaboration with Brand Y.

These are sculptures in a way; monuments to the brands they represent.

How they respond to the space, how they enhance their acoustic centre, and how they enable us to act in a way that feels naturally and communally joyful should define their success.

Monuments shouldn’t have to be mirrors.

Thanks for reading!

Like, comment and subscribe etc.

Jonathan ✌️

Have you tried this yet?

Noticed Board

• Chipmunks at 16rpm

• Woset World

• RIP Tony Stella

• More Noguchi

• Drunk Jonathan Frakes

• OINK!

Die Brücke formed in Dresden, Germany in 1905 as a bohemian collective of artists in staunch opposition to the older, established bourgeois social order. The collective sought to confront their feelings for alienation from the modern world by reaching back to pre-academic forms of expression.

Here is their first manifesto. Printed using a woodblock techniquue.

“With faith in evolution and in a new generation of creators as well as appreciators, we call together all youth, and as youth, carrying the future, we will obtain for ourselves freedom of life and movement in opposition to the well-established older powers. To us belongs everyone who renders directly and authentically that which drives him to create.”

This meant using methods like woodcut prints, carved wooden sculptures, and more primitive modes of painting. The art often appears naive, basic or simple – but that was the point.

It was all in aid of finding authentic emotion, and they felt that using an expressive style that containted lots of colour and direct simple forms would give them the most direct path.

Die Brücke translates to the bridge, and for the artists this particular bridge would connect the rich artistic past of Germany with the contemporary future that as young people they felt responsible for. The gap they were attempting to navigate was the stuffy and restrictive Academies and Arts infrastructure and rules that they felt could only hold them back.

None of the artists from Die Brücke attended any institutions.

But this was not the only bridge they built.

Another was between the artist and the patron. The group created a early subscription model which entitled members who paid an annual fee to a portfolio of prints from the collective.

Another bridge sought to connect humans with nature. Pieces often included scenes and imagery associated with the natural world or just humans at play as nature intended, free from the inhibitions and structures of middle-class life and propriety.

Although much of the inspiration for the form of the art came from the cultures and tribes of the South Seas and Africa, the movement was resolutely German. There was a determined nationalistic quality to it, which in retrospect bumps around uncomfortably with the collonialist pilfering that was obviously going on.

But the sincerity and earnestness was clear, and definsible.

However, these forms would also make Die Brücke traitors in the eyes of Hitler, and the art was diminished, ostracised and destroyed as part of the Degenerate Art Exhibition.

No patrotic enough for some. Too patriotic for others. The kind of quandry that youthful exuberance and optimism can create for oneself. Less of a bridge perhaps more of a tightrope.

Optimism. Poptimism. Sloptimism.

Returning to established, objective principles.

Throwing off the shackles of a contemporary, socially constructed way of doing things.

Trying, succeeding, maybe even failing in a way that only the young (or young in spirit) can.

That feels like a balm for the continued stings of our present predicaments in 2026 AD.

Seeking out true human emotional responses, trimming the fat off anything akin to technique or rules feels like it could bloom the kind of sincerity that sometimes goes a bit missing in today’s culture.

What if we tried to bridge the gap?

The importance of being earnest

Naive creativity is a beautiful thing, and no-one is more naturally naive than children.

Their art is wonderfully free but woefully misunderstood.

That’s why I vibe-coded My Kid Could Do That.

It’s a web app that analyses your kid’s art, tells you which artistic maestro they are closest to interpreting, and gives them a critical score based on novelty, nuance and narrative.

Check it out here.

Thanks for reading!

Like, comment and subscribe etc.

Jonathan ✌️

Noticed Board

• Complaign is the antidote to Campaign

• Jimmy Fallon is the anti-christ

• Luigi Ghirri’s photos

• Birkenstock x Song for the Mute

• Norm.

This has been bouncing around Twitter a bit for the last few weeks – probably pre-Oscars to be honest, as part of the PTA for-your-consideration hype-up (well deserved).

But it’s well worth a watch if you work in and around advertising and you browse in and around LinkedIn and have seen the recent ‘beef’ regarding eduction vs. experience.

This bit of Director’s Commentary does a nice job of sitting on the fence and eating a big old slice of cake.

Paul Thomas Anderson famously quit film school early on, I’m not going to look it up because I want to keep typing, but I feel like it was something about his tutor getting all sniffy about PTA loving Die Hard, or some other kind of slightly schlocky movie.

Anyway, being a big old movie nerd, PTA got his eduction by watching movies before making them himself. And listen, fair play because what a career that’s been by the way.

“You can learn more from John Sturges’s audio track on the ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school.”

Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997.

Screw education, I just need experience, I’m going to listen to John Sturges drop knowledge bombs.

1. Formats don’t equal rules.

“If you had widescreen, that meant thousands of extras, thousands of togas, amphitheaters with Christians being mauled by law and so on. They said, ‘What are you going to do with all this space?’ I said, ‘Well, the idea of a man in a black suit standing against this empty space. Doesn’t that tell you something? Isn’t that better the bigger the screen is?’ No, they didn’t understand it.”

2. Film isn’t real.

“And the great terrible problems of how do you do close-ups? Well, obviously they weren’t problems at all. It’s a technique like making films technique. Films aren’t real anyhow. people’s close-ups 20 ft high who’s got a 20 foot head. They’re flat – so it’s technique.”

3. Find your own tricks.

“He (Spencer Tracy) would memorise the lines and he wouldn’t look at them for five days. So that when he looked at people, he was hanging on to them as if he was listening to it for the first time – because in fact he was. He wasn’t that sure of what they were going to say. What an actor.

It’s all technique. And that comes with time and practice.

A Bad Day at Black Rock was John Sturges’ 21st film. A career which started in 1932 as an editor in Hollywood before working for the US Army’s in-house film agency during WWII making propaganda.

He’s an advocate of the school of hard knocks approach.

Great. Fuck institutions.

Except, that filmmaking –much like commercial creativity- is a team sport.

Bad Day at Black Rock was written by Millard Kaufman, a university educated ex-journalist, screenwriter with enough intellectual and emotional principles to once lend his name to the famously blacklisted Dalton Trumbo.

It’s based on a story by Howard Breslin, a journalist who graduated with a BA in Arts degree summa cum laude from the prestigious and private Manhattan College.

The score was composed by André Previn who was the product of both Berlin and Paris conservatories, the first of which he enrolled in at aged 6. He won four oscars and is perhaps one of the most famous film composers of all time.

So hey, wadda-ya-know. It takes a village!

If you want to stick two-fingers up to the system and make your own rules, sometimes it helps to team up with a bunch of people who know the rules inside out. That way, when you break them you don’t look like a total dumbass.

Well, that was a long intro for what was intened to be just a simple bits and pieces ‘curated’ edition of this newsletter…

Here’s some stuff I’ve foraged.

Photos of the dictionary from The Simpsons writer’s room.

Cut!!! Print it.

Like, comment and subscribe etc!

Thanks for reading,

Jonathan ✌️

Noticed Board

• Bus tickets from the ‘50s

• OJ made from 100% literal sunshine

• 10,000 concert recordings

• Music for programming

• This insane H&K ad

Hannah Wilke didn’t wait to be discovered. She put herself in the frame, built the stage, lit the spotlight, and stared straight into it. Not as object, but as author. And the art world — deeply uncomfortable with beautiful women demanding attention — didn’t quite know what to do with her.

She posed nude. She posed sick. She posed defiant. She stuck chewed gum on her face in the shape of vulvas.

She made vaginal sculptures out of latex, erasers, chocolate, whatever was at hand. And she photographed herself in a confrontational way, constantly, glamorously – long before selfie culture existed.

If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal’, why not universalise the personal and make it the subject of our art?

She knew her face, her body, her experience. Her self was not small, it was not secondary. It was not something to crop out. So she made it the work.

She was prolific in the way that canny OnlyFans models are in today’s times. Her exposure is not weaponised vanity, it’s a the product of someone who is hyper aware of themselves and their power as a woman.

Beguiling violence.

In a world of minimalism, she went maximalist, and when cancer came for her, she didn’t retreat; she documented it. Wilke photographed her hair loss, her lesions, her decay. Not to shock, but to claim authorship. To insist: I still get to direct this story.

Where others would try to blend in or disappear, Wilke stepped into the centre and held the shot. Long take. No filter.

Not because she was vain. Because she was visible – and so she remained visible.

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Jonathan ✌️

Links for Ad’s Sake

📷 The kept and the killed

💎 The best jewel thief in the world

🛻 The autobiography of a Jeep

🎸 Little nice bastard

🔫 Brosnan exposition voice

I’ve been collecting a few bits and pieces recently from old motoring magazines and vintage car ephemera. Here’s some snaps and scans. There’s a mixture of old ads and design work across all kinds of European and Australian motoring.

One of my favourite discoveries in 2025 was the Auto Catalog Archive, and I’ve really been enjoying some of the beautiful copy, art direction and design that used to be such a massive part of the car world.

I think I could do an entire post just on the Honda NSX 1991 brochure.

But until then, here’s some other motoring stuff that’s really caught my eye recently:

Vrooooom.

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Jonathan ✌️

Links for Ad’s Sake

💿 Jamiroquai for MiniDisc

📂 Social Signals 2025

🔫 Gangster Characters

🎥 Heat is 30

Joseph Beuys said he was saved by a group of nomads known as ‘Tartars’ after his plane was shot down over Crimea during World War II.

He said that they wrapped his broken body in felt and fat to keep him warm and alive.

He said that this is why he chose to use those materials in his art.

There is zero proof that any of this took place.

But it doesn’t matter.

He wore the same felt hat every day, and he used fat, felt, copper, honey repeatedly throughout his career.

Every piece he created became part of the myth, and every piece strengthened the meaning behind the myth, and his resolve to keep it alive.

His entire body of work was in response to one simple and finite belief:

Everyone is an artist.

Not in the sense that everyone literally makes art, or should make art, but that creativity itself is a human energy, and an energy that everyone possesses.

The act of shaping the world, politically, socially or spiritually is a form of sculpture.

Bueys called it “social sculpture” and treated every speech, action, and encounter as part of that invisible artwork.

He planted trees and called it sculpture.
He lectured with chalkboards and called it performance.
He spent three days in a gallery with a wild coyote and called it “healing.”

It’s all about finding the meaning in the myth.

The felt wasn’t just insulation, it stood for protection.
The fat wasn’t just fat, it stood for energy, transformation, memory.
The hat, the cane, the on his body were ritualistic symbols.

They gave his life coherence, even when the world didn’t.

Ideology without meaningful myth can rapidly become cold, mechanized, weaponized belief systems that are liable to flatten and destroy culture. This is a man who fought for the Nazis as a teenager, who watched his country ravaged by hate and nationalism.

So he turned to soft materials, soft symbols, soft power. And yet despite this interest in softness, his presence was anything but. He was solemn, magnetic, devout – German.

A serious artist who didn’t paint beauty, but he did offer the substance of belief.

The belief in art as a living force.
In ideas as materials.
Actions as sculpture.

He talked more than he sculpted in the traditional sense. He planted more trees than he painted canvases in the traditional sense.

He existed as a living performance piece – the myth of Joseph Beuys.

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Jonathan ✌️

Links for Ad’s Sake

🪓 The Shining Open Matte

📺 The Big British Castle

🎨 Dirty Sink paintings

⚾ Beat Takeshi pitching

🎵 You Died

Louise Nevelson didn’t just make sculptures, she assembled worlds.

Wall-sized, black-painted, shadow-boxed universes of cast-offs and carvings that appear like Cathedral altars made from junkyard scraps. They are monuments built from the bones of America’s broken furniture.

Much of her work is instantly recognisable, despite being composed of found objects. They are often huge wooden constructions, all in one colour – often matte black, sometimes white or gold.

Neither minimalist, decorative or polite, they are more like environments than sculptures.

Born in Ukraine but raised in Maine, Nevelson came up in the art world of the 1940s and 50s, a world which was dominated critically and numerically by men. But she did not use this inbalance to fuel her in a traditionally feminist way, she opposed it from a more idiosyncratic standpoint.

She wore elaborate turbans and heavy eyeliner. She smoked constantly. She said things like “I’m not a feminist. I’m an artist who happens to be a woman.” Then she built an entire career out of turning discarded domestic debris into sacred architecture.

He craft was different to traditional sculptors. She didn’t carve stone, she curated identity.

Nevelson understood that visual unity creates emotional power. The use of a single colour flattens hierarchy and forces focus. Monochrome wasn’t employed for mere aesthetic – it was a strategic.

It creates mood, and feels intentional – even when the parts are chaotic.

When you see a bunch of broken chairs and table legs, scraps of wood, flotsam and jetsam, cupboard drawers and busted tools – what do you think?

There’s meaning in that mess.

Cheers for reading.

Like, comment and subscribe etc.

Jonathan ✌️

Links for Ad’s Sake

🌐 The ‘Post-Naive’ internet era

🏎️ Ridge Racer Type 4

🍿 Bar Planet’s popcorn recipe

🏍️ Tron Legacy bike chase

🚙 1999 Dodge Viper

I can’t stand it when you go to a book store that has all the hallmarks of Black Books –it’s an absolute tip– but the books are priced absurdly high.

I encountered two on a recent trip up north, where some incredible rarities were priced in the triple figures despite being strewn about the place like the celeb rags in a waiting room.

And it’s always nice to find some classic old Advertising Annuals in a book shop, or an op shop, or in one of those little community libraries, or in a bush along with the pornography left there by the Sixth Former’s for the younger boys to find.

Of course we’d find it and examine it, and that would be that. There would be more of course. There was a time when you were as likely to find pornography magazines in a shrubbery outside a Grammar School as you were on the top shelf of a newsagent.

This sort of thing has probably been going on since 1949 (attempted segue).

Of course back then it might have been a buxom vixen peeled straight from the fuselage of a B-52 Bomber and gunned into the eye sockets of some young whippersnappers who found a copy of “Less than Ladylike” outside the Gardener’s shed.

Whilst I, a Millennial born in the late 1980s, did not grow up in the totally lawless and visceral world of the 2025 Internet, where young people’s senses are torn apart within minutes of opening essentially any app. No, the stork dropped me off a little further back which meant that I did get a porno bush – but being that it was England in the late-90s, early-00s the content rotting in the sludge of damp leaves came with the kind of photographic intimacy and mood that both Jurgen Teller and Mike Leigh aim for, albeit for very different reasons.

Grim.

Anyway, here we are in 2025, and the reason I’m tapping away is because instead of paying an exorbitant fee* for some knackered old Advertising Annuals, I just snapped a bunch of pictures in the shop. Here’s some of my favourites from camera roll across some 1949, 1953 and 1963 annuals - in no particular order:

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Jonathan ✌️

Links for Ad’s Sake

🎹 All the noises

🤘 Burn at Woodstock ‘94

🤖 Luxury Plagiarism

🇮🇹 Billion Dollar Bathtub

📫 Deliver mail to a planet

*I did actually purchase some other books…not entirely out of guilt, but they were much more reasonably priced.

HARSH NOISE QUEENSLAND is a collection of six photographs and six companion films. The imagery has been distorted via a feedback loop of the audio found within. The films feature recordings of that audio running through an oscilloscope.

On a recent trip to Far North Queensland I visited many beautiful places full of history and natural wonder, but I also found it to be an immensely gothic place. Death stalks throughout in so many guises whether through flora or fauna or the historical violence that hangs heavy in the air.

Using a process called “Data-bending”, I placed six photos from my trip into Audacity, a Digital Audio Workstation where I was able to manipulate the waveform created by each image.

The distorted, degraded images in this collection were created by turning that manipulated audio waveform back into an image file.

From there, I took the new audio file and used a granular synthesizer to further manipulate the waves, adding new shapes and sounds by experimenting with a series of low frequency oscillators.

Once I had the new audio, I then placed that into an oscilloscope to visualise it again, but this time as a moving waveform.

HNQ // 01 - THE LOW ISLES

An island with a history of madness. Lead poisoning destroyed the minds of the early lighthouse keepers whilst the current caretakers are subject to all manner of mental and physical brutality thanks to the weather, wildlife and loneliness.

HNQ // 02 - CROCODILE

A violent death awaits anyone who encounters these beasts. This image was taken of the amazing but abandoned mosaic on the wall of the Kuranda Aboriginal Co-Operative Society.

HNQ // 03 - TALAROO

This is a natural spring on land reclaimed by the Ewamian people. They now run it as a campground and spa. This particular spring was the site of an atrocity wherein a blak victim of assault was drowned by the white perpetrators. Her body never recovered.

HNQ // 04 - SKULL

The skull of a horse found in the outback. One of many gothic decorations littered around a bar in Undara.

HNQ // 05 - TOAD CORPSE

In 1935 there were 102 cane toads in Australia. There are now more than 200 million. A blight on the crops and wildlife, their predators have had to evolve new and horrific ways to kill them without being poisoned. For the birds, this mostly involves picking them up, flying them to great heights and then dropping them to splat on the ground.

HNQ // 06 - THE LAVA TUBE

This is a Lava Tube in Undara. These ancient volcanic tunnels run below the outback and what remains of the rainforest. The roots from the trees make their way into the caves, filling them with carbon dioxide. If you go too deep, you suffocate.

View the original images and the soundscapes on Instagram

Cheers for reading,

Like, comment and subscribe etc.

Jonathan ✌️

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Gilbert & George met in 1967 at Saint Martin’s School of Art and decided almost immediately that the rules of contemporary art didn’t quite work for them.

So they became the art.

By 1969 they were calling themselves living sculptures, and they still do. They began dressing in identical tailored suits, performing synchronized movements and presented all aspects of their lives as works of performance art.

It was radical, but what made it all the more interesting was how restrained their lives were. In a non-conformist statement against the contemporary art movement they conformed their lives into rigorous consistency.

The tweed suits were always the same. Every meal was always the same – always at the same place. Every piece work was born out of this greater concept of self-representation.

From the early 1970s onward, they began producing large-scale, multi-panel photo-based works. Bright, brash, tiled like stained glass windows from some blasphemous cathedral.

At the centre of the pieces were Gilbert & George. Surrounded by urban debris, their own bodily fluids, racist graffiti, newspaper headlines, sexual innuendo and political slogans.

It was a slavish, fanatical devotion to a practice that never broke character.

Art for All

Gilbert & George’s motto is part manifesto, part brand promise.

The kind of succinct idea that we all aspire to grow ideas from.

It appears on posters, gallery statements, and even some of their works. It’s short, emotional, and easy to remember. The kind of line that works across every touchpoint.

They’ve stuck to it for decades.

There has been no refresh or re-jig. No evolution or revolution. No tonal wobble. One simple idea hammered over and over again in all kinds of different shapes, sizes and forms.

Shockingly British

The pair are an anachronism. Overtly stylized, affected and twee. They have an egalitarian stance that stems from their motto and yet have been staunchly pro-Thatcher and pro-Brexit.

They are terribly British on the surface (although Gilbert hails from an enclave in Northern Italy where most people speak German), and have lived proudly in East London for their entire career.

And yet the individuals with whom they share many political views with, would most likely be shocked by their flagrant homosexuality and the fact that many of their artworks contain their own shit, piss and semen.

They have never run away from these views. As said George to the Telegraph:

"You're not allowed to be Conservative in the art world, of course...Left equals good. Art equals Left. Pop stars and artists are meant to be so original. So how come everyone has the same opinion? ... We admire Margaret Thatcher greatly. She did a lot for art. Socialism wants everyone to be equal. We want to be different.”

Art for all means art for all.

They have never presented any other form. They have never sold out, because they have never bought in. They are unconventionally, unequivocally, uncompromisingly consistent in their Gilbert & George-ness.

Thanks for reading.

If you enjoyed it please like, comment or subscribe. Go for the hat-trick if you like.

Jonathan ✌️

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🇬🇧 The state of Britain voxpop

Cultural elitism as a concept is having a bit of a rough time of late. Firstly there’s that word “elitism” which has so many negative connotations in modern parlance that to mention it will most likely just conjure up thoughts of privilege, wealth and inequality.

But that has nothing to do with Cultural Elitism.

Then there’s that “culture” bit. How do you define culture these days? Trends move so rapidly that they barely have time to bed in or trickle down. Everything is available all the time across multiple formats and primed for passive consumption.

This has everything to do with Cultural Elitism, and specifically why it appears to be losing its vigour.

In the 1990s, Condé Nast had a Cultural Literacy Test as part of their hiring process. If you applied for a job at Vogue Magazine, you’d be confronted by a vibrantly diverse list of cultural artifacts that you’d be expected to be aware of. This list was recently surfaced in a book called Empire of the Elite by Michael M Grynbaum.

It’s really important to note that this list is chock full of highbrow and lowbrow culture. Stuff that’s relevant to fashion, stuff that’s separate from it. Famous faces. Movies you should have watched. Designers you should know. 178 notable people, places, institutions, titles and cultural ephemera.

Grynbaum describes it as an “obstacle course” for candidates. A successful applicant would need conversationally navigate their way through everything from Pink Flamingos, Squeaky Fromme, Frank O’Hara, The White Album, Cy Twombly, The Connaught and Siegfried & Roy, all to get in within the orbit of Anna Wintour and that coveted job at Vogue.

And why not? Does it not make for a more interesting candidate, employee and colleague? One that can discuss both the merits of a martini at the Connaught, the poetry of Frank O’Hara or debate whether or not the dog turd that Divine eats in Pink Flamingos was real.

Literate, progressive and balanced – that is true cultural elitism.

To be well read, to be well watched, to be well browsed, to be well versed in any number of things that you find interesting, or that are objectively interesting to the culture at large. Highbrow or lowbrow, mainstream or underground, it doesn’t matter.

Condé Nast knew that to be well-everything’d should be aspirational, and they knew that it was as important to their hiring process as it was to their own employees.

Because how are you supposed to drive culture or even document or interact with it effectively if you don’t understand it – if you’re not in touch with it?

Arguably, the largest intellectual obstacle these days is that cultural exploration has become extremely passive. This has rather unfortunately led many “old-heads” to the conclusion that people are stupider these days.

The data tells us that fewer people are reading for pleasure. We’re told that attention spans are dwindling. We’re at the mercy of an algorithm that tells us what we like based on the narrow parameters of what we have previously watched or listened to. It’s a world of ruthless conformity. But as Daniel Keller, coiner of the term ‘sloptimism’ said, “culture doesn’t always look the way you want it to”.

This doesn’t make us stupid, but it can make us lazy.

To be culturally elite is not to be especially smart, it’s not about being able to deploy 50 dollar words or having watched a tonne of challenging European Cinema.

You could smugly soak up the approximately eight-hundred hours it takes to read Infinite Jest, and that doesn’t even come close to the 6,907 hours of Joe Rogan podcasts you could listen to. It doesn’t matter if one is more ‘worthy’ than the other.

David Foster Wallace and Joe Rogan can both teach us so much about culture. If you wanted an insight into contemporary masculinity, they are two incredibly important figures on both sides of the ego divide.

If you want to be a writer, you should probably still read The Great Gatsby. If you want to be a great writer you should probably watch some Love Island, listen to sports commentary, and read tweets from people you don’t agree with.

To be culturally elite is to be culturally progressive, culturally flexible, culturally optimistic and always ravenous for more.

It’s about sustaining the effort to seek out the new, and the nagging unquenchable need to stay in touch with what is moving, shaking, driving or even destroying the contemporary culture of our times. This is the challenging aspect of being culturally literate, and this is where the relevant definition of elite comes in.

The elite are the people that aspire for more. The culturally elite aspire to be “well-everything’d” in the past, the present and the future. As a premise, the Condé Nast list still holds up. But it’s way harder to be well everything’d now than it was in the 90s. If you aspire to enjoy a varied, eclectic and understanding of the cultural landscape, the parameters have changed significantly.

So how would one create the list for 2025? Here’s where I’d start:

Highbrow (difficult) and lowbrow (easy) culture are still essential as the vertical axis of this imaginary graph. The accessibility of the items within the following categories is then spread between them. Notable people, places, institutions and titles are nice and vague and are still relevant. However, the Internet is now the gigantic elephant in the room, adding fat to every category and essentially creating one more in the form of “memes”.

Adding “modern culture” and “contemporary culture” as two ends of a horizontal axis will give us our timeline from past to present, emerging and future. Finally, there is also the issue of place. For example, the Condé list was unmistakably New York-coded. A global list would be far too unwieldy, and to be fundamentally useful as a tool there would have to be an element of locality.

So, once you get the chaos matrix that best represents cultural literacy in your neck of the woods, you give it the old randomizer treatment and pop it into the cold, brutalist columns of a checklist.

Then you get to find out how culturally literate people are…

I’ll lay my personal cards on the table, here’s a stack of things pretty much off-dome that I think mean a lot to the culture in-and-around 2025…with the caveat that I live in Melbourne, Australia.

Cheers for reading something 🙏

Like, comment and subscribe etc!

Jonathan ✌️

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👄 Thirst Trap

🐻 80 Years of Smokey

🐚 100 Years of Art Deco

🐔 Shut up

🍦Old ice creams

Nat Taylor is a producer extraordinaire and an extraordinarily decent human being. She brought her positively wonderful talents to starting production powerhouse POPPET, she’s a founding member of The Aunties, and served as Chief of Staff for the Melbourne Advertising and Design Club (MADC).

It’s always a pleasure to be on a shoot with Nat, and not just for her immense skill but as a fellow Brit in Melbourne, one does just need to discuss biscuits and remember specific pop culture references from time to time.

So this one’s for all the daaaaarlings out there. Kicking off with some words from Nat herself…

“I’ve always felt that art and creativity are really just about connection, even if it’s only with yourself. At POPPET, that’s what we are all about. Nurturing the creative spark in all of us, making everyone feel comfortable enough to be able to express their most creative vision, then helping bring that to life.”

Let’s get it 💪

Ask for Ad’s Sake

1. What’s the first piece of art you saw that really stayed with you?

Henri Matisse, The Snail. I first saw it on a school art outing and it just stayed with me. The colours, the simplicity, the movement, it brought out a simple joy in my heart. It always has.

2. What is your Mount Rushmore of artists (four, all-time, unranked)?

Andreas Gursky. Large-scale photography and clean lines get me every time.

Tracey Emin. I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with her work growing up in the Britpop art era, but looking back at the statements she made and the influence she had on that time in my life, it was pretty powerful.

David Shrigley. I love everything he does.

Banksy. I know it’s a bit cheesy, but I have so many personal connections to his work. It always fills me with pride to think of it.

3. What’s one piece of art you’d love to have in your home?

An original Andreas Gursky print would be rad.

4. What’s the best museum/exhibition/gallery experience you’ve ever had?

It’s a tough call, but probably MONA in Tassie. That said, on my last trip to New York, I spent a whole day alone wandering around MoMA, and it made me truly happy. Every time I go back to London, I always visit the Tate Modern, via the Turbine Hall to see what giant wonderfulness awaits.

5. What’s an ad that should be in a museum?

My first instinct is Blackcurrant Tango from 1996. It'd a slice of British humour, the size, scale, tone, and execution of that ad were incredible for its time.

Thanks Nat! 😘

Who should be Asked for Ad’s Sake next? Shoot me an email with a tip, or even your own answers.

Like, comment and subscribe etc!

Jonathan ✌️

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💿 How MiniDiscs work

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👽 X Files VHS covers

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🇮🇹 The Football Italia sample

I have spent half of the last week in my shed, learning the dying art of taxidermy. It’s a complicated process, a somewhat disgusting one, but one that has been endlessly fascinating and in truth – quite easy to pick up.

Once you get past the squeamishness associated with the nature of the task at hand -namely the skinning and partial dismemberment of a rat’s corpse, followed by a reconstruction from the inside out- it’s really quite a simple and satisfying activity.
I have spent the first half of the last week in my shed, not looking at LinkedIn.

This is of course a lie. Even when engrossed in the process of delicately cutting around the inside of a rat’s eyelids it’s impossible not to perform one’s little routines on the small screen.

Death has been very much top of the agenda recently. Both literally for me, sat in the shed with the aforementioned rat corpses, but also across the feeds of LinkedIn, Meta and X: The Everything App. 

It’s because the people of the Internet have spent the first half of the last week making stuff look like other stuff. And so, the great lumbering juggernaut of the Generative AI debate continues to ravage every corner of every platform. Everything is dying.

Everything is dead.

We can’t have nice things anymore, or ever again – because it’s all dead now.

‘Slippage’ occurs in taxidermy when bacteria starts to break down the skin layer, leading to bald patches and holes. The epidermis essentially eats itself, and this leads to an aesthetic that can appear unpleasant. It ruins the weird faux-reality we have worked hard to construct.

Aside from trophy displays, most taxidermy falls into two kinds of executions, and it shares these two methods with Generative AI. 

The first is an attempt at realism. The notion that by stuffing and then arranging the animal into a natural pose and realistic environment, we can recreate the glory of its life. Behind the glass of museums the otters and the gazelles appear as they do in the wild. The cat you’ve had since you were little sits on its favourite cushion in the house. In death, they are three-dimensional snapshots of life.

The second execution is more fantastical. It’s about the anthropomorphisation of creatures; the human poses, the outfits, the characters. What if I gave a rat a top hat and a dandy little coat? What if I gave it a little tennis racquet and some sneakers? What if it was Steampunk? (there’s always a Steampunk one).

I have spent the first half of the last week in my shed, learning how to taxidermy a rat so I can turn it into ‘Rat Damon’, complete with the lime green trunks, glasses and a hairpiece inspired by Human Damon’s role in ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’.

I too have been making stuff, look like other stuff – albeit over the course of three days, not three seconds. But much like my first attempt at a rat, “slippage” is also visible in the world of Generative AI. 

The material eats itself, and with every new visualisation the potential of the platforms becomes diminished, and we become distracted by the stuff we don’t want to look at.

The debate is certainly not new, but it’s been re-ignited by the launch of the new Chat GPT capabilities and the realisation that you can now ‘Studio Ghibli-fy’ stuff. And so we get an action replay from previous MidJourney versions, except instead of Wes Anderson it’s become:

What if the cast of Severance was Studio Ghibli? What if I was Studio Ghibli? What if Donald Trump was Studio Ghibli? What if The Lord of The Rings was Studio Ghibli? What if that guy who said he hates AI is now ironically Studio Ghibli?

There’s an old wives tale about London that warns that you’re never more than 6 feet away from a rat. In 2025 we seem to never be more than 6 minutes away from a mischief of incredibly lukewarm takes regarding “those darn robots”.

The AI ‘slippage’ is undoubtedly caused by the unimaginative self-obsessed hoards, but the damage is certainly enhanced by the relentless pearl clutching.

Is art really being killed? If true, would that make Gen AI a homicidal art-form?

But its not really being killed is it. Not properly. It just sucks right now because some of the most annoying people on Earth are making a terrible bedlam about it.

Unlike its murderous digital counterpart, The ‘Rat GPT’ I’ve been using in my shed doesn’t really have any of the baggage surrounding it. There’s not really an environmental impact as such, the rats were sourced from a pet shop freezer, having been grown for the purposes of feeding snakes (they were euthanized with painless gas). Still, people that I talk to about taxidermy wince and groan when I describe how the rat’s hands move when I place the wires inside the stripped tendons.

But in spite of their disgust, taxidermy has taught me a lot about creativity and craft.

The melding of science and art. The willingness to face the grotesque and the discomfort in order to reach the artistic outcome that you desire. The fact that ear buds are perfect implements for removing brain matter. And most importantly, that just because something is pronounced dead, looks dead, has all the hallmarks of something that is dead, with a little determination you can fashion it into a parody of Matt Damon.

I’ve spent the better part of a week in my shed, learning the ins and outs of an art-form made famous by the Victorians. 

During the Great Exhibition of 1851 at The Crystal Palace in South London, some of the greatest minds of the age declared that there was nothing left to create. 

History has not been kind to that opinion, and yet here we are in 2025 once again bearing witness to pronouncements regarding the death of creativity and invention. This time its at the hands of an AI-powered death squad.  

“Slippage” happens. It’s not the end of the world.

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🪓 Scan from a KGB training manual

🍹 Is this where Doug Funny came from?

🎵 Tenderoni (no, not that one)

Steve Hudson is a multi-award winning advertising creative and director who’s worked at the some of the best acronyms in the UK - BBH, AMV BBDO & DDB.

Steve created The Power of Advertising which is an incredible resource for everyone from juniors to clients, “non”-creatives and just about anyone who wants to sharpen up their ad chops.

On the site you’ll find an ever evolving masterclass featuring a distillation of Steve’s 25 years of experience, including deep dives into the timeless and award-winning work he created with his partner Victoria Fallon.

Here’s some of their greatest hits:

He’s also someone in the industry with a refreshingly sensible and optimistic view of AI. But before you go clicking off, take a viddy at Steve’s answers to this edition of…

Ask for Ad’s Sake

1. What’s the first piece of art you saw that really stayed with you?

We won ‘The best ad in the world’ by the magazine Reader’s Digest for our milk ad ‘Bones’ 👆 The prize was a free trip to New York and a visit to the Reader’s Digest central office.

The Digest was the biggest selling magazine in the world at that point, and their building was full of incredible priceless art. In one of their rooms was an enormous wall sized Monet ‘Water Lilies’ painting. To get this close to it, and also be able to stand back with no one in the way to fully appreciate it blew my mind. I never forgot the feeling of this masterwork.

2. What is your Mount Rushmore of artists (four, all-time, unranked)?

Monet. Degas. Sarah Dwyer. Suzanne Moxhay (I own pieces by the latter two!)

3. What’s one piece of art you’d love to have in your home?

See 1. (if I could afford that, I could afford a house big enough to fit it).

(Editor’s note: according to the New York Times. An auction of art from The Digest’s offices in 1998 resulted in that particular Monet being sold for $9.9 million.)

4. What’s the best museum/exhibition/gallery experience you’ve ever had?

I went to a Yayoi Kusama exhibition of her life’s work knowing absolutely nothing about her. Towards the end of the exhibition I turned to my friend and said ‘I think this woman has descended into madness’. The exhibition then ended with a video screen showing her making art in mental institution that she had checked herself into.

I was lost for words.

5. What’s an ad that should be in a museum?

Guardian ‘Points of View’ (video installation on a loop, silent).

Thanks Steve! Remember to bookmark The Power of Advertising on your browser of choice for a regular dose of the good stuff 🧠

Right! Who wants to be Asked for Ad’s Sake next? Shoot me an email with a recommendation, or even your own answers.

Like, comment and subscribe etc!

Jonathan ✌️

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💌 Matt Berry reads a letter from South Park to the MPAA

🎟️ Munich ‘72 ticket design

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🛒 Milk, Eggs, Wellbeing

📈 Producdivvity

Michael Andrews was described by friends as a painter who only made masterpieces.

Throughout a long and healthy career he only created 240 works – but he never missed.

His first smash was the brilliantly titled and captured painting “A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over”.

The painting has a sort of dream like quality to it, thick washy-woozy brush strokes surrounding the main figure’s descent to the ground add a sort of surreal element, as if we can actually see the air being displaced by the movement through the air.

But the man’s face is so comical, his neck at such an awkward angle that it’s hard not to envision the sickening crunch of the inevitable impact. The woman behind shrieks as though she can see it too.

Andrews was a quiet type. “In danger of being mistaken for a rumor” said one Tate director. Maybe it’s because of this that he was cast as a deaf mute in 1956 film called Together, directed by his friend Lorenza Mazzetti.

Despite being somewhat of a quiet observer, he fell naturally into the Colony Room set after coming up at the same time fellow artists Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach. During the sixties he would cement his position as the fly on the walls of all the hip parties – by painting them.

His painting ‘All Night Long’ from 1964 is perhaps the quintessential image from this period. A connected triptych, each panel contains scenes of various revelers in various states. It’s sort of like looking at the timeline of one gigantic night out in stills, as the scene lurches from serene to somewhat haunting and ominous at times.

It’s a cinematic montage of frivolity and horror, and looking at it one can’t help but feel almost drunk. And as a product of 1964, it represents an eerie premonition of the 9:16 reels and TikToks that inundate our feeds today.

The original Sunday Scaries…

He pushed the haziness of the party paintings even further with works like ‘Good and bad at games’ from 1968, which features bulbous heads with sinewy frames, inspired by the sculptures of Giacometti.

Downgrading his cinematic quality to that of a dodgy cathode-ray television there is distortion and weirdness, reminiscent of imagery favoured by David Lynch. He enjoyed capturing behavioural dynamics at parties, where people routinely ‘put themselves to the test’ and ‘allow themselves to be judged. They perform… they increase in stature or flop.’

Of Good and bad at games, he wrote:

“I was thinking about the variable effect a number of people had on each other. This might range from, or change gradually from, stage fright to indifference or boredom, or someone's composure or agitation might remain almost unchanged. At any rate I was trying for a definition of how these fluctuations of self-consciousness showed.”

After the parties period, he would move away in an altogether different direction into landscapes. His paintings of Scottish highlands, the magnificence of Uluru, and the Thames beaches containing a spiritual serenity that stood in sharp contrast to the frenetic craziness inspired by his time with the Colony Room set.

All of them masterpieces of course.

Party for Ad’s Sake

How do you explain the art of capturing parties?

Sometimes it’s about turning the volume all the way up and going into the absurd and obscene, the totally unattainable, the beyond aspirational – into Saturday nights we can only dream about.

But sometimes, it’s also about keeping it ridiculously relatable, almost cheap, naff or just plain down to the grubby earth.

Michael Andrews does a great job at capturing the feeling, but we get to sit with his paintings for a lot longer. What can we do with 3-90 seconds?

Here’s some ads that came to party:

Watching this makes me feel rather drunk. It couldn’t have been mistaken for AI in 1996, but nowadays… 🤔

Spot the big names. Everybody wanted to come to this party back in the day.

In the opposite direction, aspiration has never appeared so normal.

Renewed life at the party.

Ghost Chips was a good party. Well hazy.

Indie sleaze. A bombastic UK retort to decades of US party imperialism. Hyperbolic, sure. Hyperinfluential – definitely.

More noughties. Great set build.

Bleary tings.

Pints, chit chat, and good people

End on a high…

Then the hangover…

Cheers for reading,

Like, comment and subscribe etc!

Jonathan ✌️

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📬 Over 5 million people pay for Substack

👗 IYKYK

💖 Gwyneth 4 Eva

🎨 On nudes

📽️ Trapped in a commercial

Trying rules.

Shout out to Timotheeeeeee for his excellent acceptance speech.

Gatekeeping is for dorks, let’s share in the spoils of scrolling together.

Here’s some stuff I’ve foraged.

Or, you can skip to the end for another Ask for Ad’s Sake with Alayna Kunitake.

Let it rip 👩‍🍳

When I heard the Bobby Shmurda X Enya mash-up, I had to make this:

👻 Ghost House.

🇻🇳 From a collection of Vietnamese Graphic Design.

🍸 Sterling’s Gold.

💡 There are no new ideas, just better ones.

🪰 Splat.

👽 Patches from Secret US Military Programs.

🎸 Living Colour performing "Cult Of Personality" on Arsenio

🫡 Never stop bootlegging.

🦎 I went to school here. For my GCSE art project I made a clay sculpture of this Palladian Bridge on the back of a chameleon.

🎣 Back to basics then.

Ask for Ad’s Sake

Always the same questions, never the same answers. This time I danced with the incomparable Alayna Kunitake – Senior Art Director at DDB and one of the fearless leaders of Friends of Rhonda, a social group for queers in ads 🍸

1. What’s the first piece of art you saw that really stayed with you?

This is a terrible question for someone with a hotpot creative stew of a brain, but I’d say seeing a glimmering pumpkin on the rooftop of the Yayoi Kusama Museum in Shinjuku on a crystal clear, blue sky day has left a lasting impression.

As you climb the floors of the museum, you’re taken on a journey through Kusama’s life (and vivid hallucination-laden psychological perspective) and ending the experience with the tranquility of that rooftop moment felt special.

2. What is your Mount Rushmore of artists (four, all-time, unranked)?

• Yayoi Kusama

• Patricia Piccinini

• TOILETPAPER

• Keiichi Tanaami

🔫 Honourable mention: Joan Cornellà

3. What’s one piece of art you’d love to have in your home?

Jeff Koon’s Venus.

Patricia Piccinini’s La Brava.

I’d quite like this ✿ floral bed ✿ I stumbled across in a gallery in Daikanyama.

And James Turrell on speed-dial to design the rest of the space.

4. What’s the best museum/exhibition/gallery experience you’ve ever had?

I love an interactive experience, so I’d shout out James Turrell’s Unseen Seen + Weight of Darkness at MONA in Tassie. After signing a waiver guaranteeing we don’t have epilepsy, myself and a friend were guided by an assistant in a lab coat into a ‘perceptual cell’, essentially a (gorgeous) huge, white orb with a curved staircase tucked inside. I’ll leave it there so as to not give too much away, but if intimate, unique, mind-expanding etc spring to mind.

Also absolutely anything TeamLab…

5. What’s an ad that should be in a museum?

I’d like the set of Spike Jonze's Apple HomePod ad to be immortalised as an interactive exhibition with a launch event featuring Anderson .Paak and FKA Twigs.

Blessings be upon you, Alayna 😘

Who should do the next one? There’s only 5 questions – surely you’ve got an opinion…hmu 🤙

Like, comment and subscribe etc!

Thanks for reading,

Jonathan ✌️

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🕰️ Horizontal time zones

🐦 The crow from The Crow (1994)

🇻🇳 Vietnamese graphic design 👆

🐈 Orion’s Belt

🪨 Pipe Rock Theory

David Lynch has passed, and in losing him, the culture has lost one of the most singular and creative voices in modern history.

Lynch was so committed to his own version of the “art life” as he called it, that he only bowed to pressure once – on his version of Dune. A film that on the surface makes for challenging viewing given its obvious mauling in the edit suite, but nonetheless deserves its recent critical reclamation.

It is a cult classic.

Like much of his catalogue.

His work is difficult, obstinate and sometimes downright unintelligible.

His work is weird.

But it is traceable.

Lynch was a huge advocate for transcendental meditation and utilised it heavily in his art practice, often speaking of the concept of “fishing” when confronted by the interminable question: “Where do you get your ideas from”.

You fish for them.

Given the sometimes abstract, absurd or complex nature of his work, Lynch’s process was quite simple. He was an obsessive collector of things. These things might be physical or tangible like a version of the song Blue Velvet, red lipstick or a derelict factory or they might be abstract concepts like:

The sound of a box of snakes hurtling through the air – this was the mental image that Trent Reznor was given when briefed about creating a soundtrack for the film Lost Highway.

Like all great artists, Lynch is a consummate collector of ideas and references, they are then re-interpreted and reemerge as something wholly unique to himself.

“Lynchian”

It’s become a byword for a certain kind of look and feel.

Usually involving something weird and often dreadful or frightening.

An exploration of the sickening underbelly of the American psyche.

The opening scenes of Blue Velvet are perhaps the best example of this. The pitch perfect picket fence Americana suburbs undermined by the presence of a foul object – a severed ear.

Lynch was obsessed with The Black Dahlia murder. An legendary unsolved LA crime involving the nightmarish discovery of a corpse so utterly befouled that it doesn’t bear speaking about here.

And whilst this flip-side of the normal, the savage underbelly beneath all the smiles, coffee and cherry pie there are a bunch of aspects that make the concept of something being Lynchian far more rounded and fascinating.

Let’s have a look at the different levels of Lynchian via his adverts.

💁‍♀️ People, usually women, enduring psychological torture or rapturous psycho-sexual fantasies – perhaps both at the same time…

👀 Visions of dreams and nightmares.

📺 Digital distortion.

🧈 Abnormal life

☕ He drank 15 of them a day.

RIP to the great man.

See you in 25 years…

Like, comment and subscribe etc!

Thanks for reading,

Jonathan ✌️

Links for Ad’s Sake

🪩 How to throw a party

🪓 Kill your art

🐄 Bulls on Parade

👩‍🔬 7 Cool Science Stories

🐕 Bro, are you coming later?

It’s been awhile (Staind voice).

But new year and all that. Here’s some things I’ve collected.

Or, you can skip to the end for another Ask for Ad’s Sake with Leah Morris.

Let’s go…

Learn synth in the Ableton Playground.

What does QWERTY actually mean?

A bar logo in Japan.

If you love God, burn a church.

Damon.

Japanese-Brazilian artist Tomie Ohtake’s residence in São Paulo, designed by her son Ruy Ohtake.

The Horrors return.

An Org Chart.

An old favourite.

Group B. Let it rip!

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky.

RIP Chuck E. Cheese animatronics.

More Lynch next time. But here’s a classic:

Ask for Ad’s Sake

Same questions, new creative vision. This time I reached out to the legendary Leah Morris – Lead Copywriter at R/GA and Founder of Mavens, an independent, digital publication to champion women working in Australian advertising and media.

1. What’s the first piece of art you saw that really stayed with you?

Can I say the kids’ book ‘Animalia’ by Graeme Base? As a small, I loved connecting the chaotic imagery with the words, which was an A-Z of animal alliterations.

Like if the copy said ‘Horrible hairy hogs hurrying homeward on heavily harnessed horses’, I couldn’t turn the page until I’d spotted everything that was described on the page.

2. What is your Mount Rushmore of artists (four, all-time, unranked)?

Tracy Moffat, Annie Leibowitz, Barbara Kruger and Yayoi Kusama.

3. What’s one piece of art you’d love to have in your home?

I’m a bit of a minimalist and I don’t do well with too much visual clutter. So I think a Rothko would suit me nicely. Plus, it would be quite the flex!

4. What’s the best museum/exhibition/gallery experience you’ve ever had?

I’ve been to some amazing galleries in Australia, Europe and Asia but nothing beats memories at Benalla Art Gallery with my dad. Having grown up in Wangaratta, he’d tell me local bush-ranger legends as we observed the Sidney Nolan tapestry.

5. What’s an ad that should be in a museum?

There’s a 2005 Greenpeace press ad from Saatchi & Saatchi Singapore, written by Jagdish Ramakrishnan. It shows a dark ocean and the copy reads ‘It was a bit like a submarine. A fat, blue submarine. It must have weighed over a hundred tonnes…’ and as you continue to read, you realise it’s describing a whale, as though it were already extinct. Everyone should see that ad.

Cheers Leah! Who should do the next one? If you’ve got some interesting answers to the 5 questions then let me know!

Like, comment and subscribe etc!

Thanks for reading,

Jonathan ✌️

Links for Ad’s Sake

🗒️ 52 things I learned in 2024

✈️ Flying in 1979

🧥AW25 Men’s Wrap-Up

🎨 Abnormal art is the only good art

🖌️ Fucked up Mock-ups

🕶️ The Last Birthday