Category: Uncategorized

FOOD

Vegan meats are invading fast food, but McDonald’s is on the sidelines for now

Content Courtesy of: cnbc.com

Written by: Robert Ferris

Vegan burgers suddenly seem to be everywhere.

Several fast food chains are expressing various degrees of interest in plant-based burgers, chicken sandwiches and sausage from new purveyors such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.

The trend is a response to growing consumer interest in alternatives to animal-based meats, which has surged in recent years. Americans want more and more protein, and they want it from a variety of sources.

These new plant based-based products are engineered to more closely resemble animal meat, which many in the industry say is key to attracting buyers.

But a few chains are either not buying in, or are barely dipping a toe in the waters. Perhaps the most notable is McDonald’s, one of the world’s largest and perhaps most famous fast food empires.

McDonald’s Germany recently said it will roll out plant-based options in that country, but top executives in the U.S. have said they are concerned about the effect adding a new menu item will have on the speed of service. CEO Steve Easterbrook also said he wonders how sustainable the buzz over plant-based burgers and other foods will be.

Plant-based eggs land their first major fast food deal

Content Courtesy of: cnbc.com

Written by: Amelia Lucas

KEY POINTS:

* Tim Hortons is testing JUST Egg at locations in Canada, marking the first fast-food deal for the plant-based egg.

* The Canadian coffee chain started offering Beyond Meat sausages and burgers at its stores earlier this year.

* Sales of plant-based eggs reached $6 million in the year ending April 2019, according to data from the Plant Based Foods Association.

Plant-based eggs have landed their first big fast-food deal, following in the footsteps of the plant-based burger trend.

Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons is testing JUST Egg at locations in its home market.

“Canada is one of the most requested markets for JUST and we’re excited to be able to offer our product at select Tim Hortons locations for this market test,” JUST spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement.

Tim Hortons, which is owned by Restaurant Brands International, made a leap into the world of vegan substitutes earlier this year when it started offering Beyond Meat’s imitation sausage on three breakfast sandwiches. It recently added the Beyond Burger — its first burger — to its menu as well.

“We are always listening to our guests and testing a wide variety of potential products in select restaurants across the country,” Tim Hortons spokeswoman Jane Almeida said in a statement. “As you know, we recently introduced our Beyond Meat breakfast sandwiches and Beyond Burger. As we continue to test and get feedback, we will consider expanding plant-based options into other menu items.”

Sales of plant-based eggs reached $6 million in the year ending April 2019, according to data from the Plant Based Foods Association.

To imitate the look, taste and texture of eggs, JUST, formerly known as Hampton Creek, uses mung bean protein, turmeric and other vegan ingredients.

JUST has already inked deals with restaurants like Bareburger and Gregory’s Coffee. Consumers can also find JUST Egg in grocery stores like Safeway and Whole Foods. The company said that it is partnering with major egg companies to collaborate on manufacturing and distribution.

Burger King’s plant-based Impossible Whopper is launching nationwide this month

Content Courtesy of: cnbc.com

Written by: Amelia Lucas

KEY POINTS:

* Burger King is launching the Impossible Whopper in its U.S. stores, starting Aug. 8.

* The plant-based burger will only be available for a limited time.

* Burger King’s North American head, Chris Finazzo, said the Impossible Whopper is drawing a different kind of customer to its stores.

Burger King is bringing its vegan Impossible Whopper nationwide, starting Aug. 8.

The nation’s second-largest burger chain began testing the plant-based burger from Impossible Foods at locations in St. Louis in April. Those Burger King locations saw traffic outperform national averages by 18.5% that month, according to a report from inMarket inSights.

Chris Finazzo, president of Burger King North America, declined to share any specific numbers about foot traffic or sales in an interview.

Since April, Burger King has brought the Impossible Whopper to six more markets. Jose Cil, CEO of Burger King’s parent company, Restaurant Brands International, said in late May that the chain will roll it out nationwide to its 7,200 U.S. locations.

McDonald’s, the largest burger chain in the U.S., has yet to offer a plant-based burger in its home market. CEO Steve Easterbrook has said that the chain is waiting to learn more about how the vegan item can drive foot traffic.

The Impossible Whopper has been bringing in new customers to the chain, Finazzo said. Burger King restaurants testing the burger have been drawing people who usually shop at Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Panera Bread, he said.

The popularity of alternatives that taste and look like meat has largely been driven by flexitarians, people who are trying to reduce their meat intake — a fact that surprised and impressed Finazzo when Burger King started thinking about adding a plant-based burger a year ago.

According to data from the NPD Group, 95% of plant-based burger buyers have bought a beef burger within the last year. Thanks to chains such as Burger King, White Castle and Bareburger, servings of plant-based burgers at fast-food chains are up 10% in the year ending in May, the NPD Group found.

As part of its plan to promote the burger, Burger King will offer a limited-time taste test box through its mobile app and delivery partner DoorDash. For $7, customers can receive a Whopper made with beef and an Impossible Whopper.

“I think one of the insights we had during the entire process is that it really does taste like beef,” Finazzo said.

He added that some people in Burger King’s office have been unwittingly served the Impossible Whopper instead of its beefy counterpart.

A similar version of that story played out in Brooklyn in June. Eater reported that a Burger King location had been advertising that it sells the Impossible Whopper on GrubHub’s Seamless delivery platform and then sending a Whopper that contained beef. Burger King said in a statement at the time that the product error was “due to a technology error.”

“It was an unfortunate glitch that’s been rectified but is not expected to be a problem for the national launch,” Finazzo said.

The Impossible Whopper will only be available for a limited time, which Finazzo said is typical for new products.

On Wednesday, Impossible announced a manufacturing deal with OSI Group, a large meat supplier that also makes patties for fast-food chains, as demand soars. The company is also planning to bring its Impossible Burger to grocery stores in September.

The vegan meat craze has helped shares of Greggs surge 77% so far this year

Content Courtesy of: cnbc.com

Written by: David Reid

KEY POINTS:

* A vegan sausage roll just fired the UK’s biggest bakery chain to a huge profit rise.

* Greggs PLC said the first half of 2019 was an “exceptional trading performance. ”

* The sausage roll is a hugely popular savory pastry snack in Britain.

A vegan sausage roll from a Greggs Plc sandwich chain outlet sits in a bag in this arranged photograph in London, U.K.

The success of a vegan sausage roll (a British savory pastry snack) has helped a U.K. bakery chain report a huge rise in profit and reward investors with a share dividend.

In interim results published Tuesday, Greggs described its “exceptional trading performance” in the first half of 2019 as having been helped by its best-selling vegan sausage roll.

The bakery created a social media storm at the beginning of the year when it said it was introducing a meat substitute-filled pastry roll which would use a fermented protein instead of traditional sausage meat.

It led to a debate on social media over whether the vegan product could, or should, be called a sausage roll — an outcome described as “a master class in public relations” by the marketing industry magazine PR Week.

A critical tweet from the TV presenter Piers Morgan only served to spark more interest.

According to Greggs data, the vegan-friendly snack is higher in protein than the meat version, has 2 grams less fat but contains 0.3 grams more salt.

The firm said Tuesday more traditional bakery items also sold well in the first half of 2019, alongside growth in Fairtrade-certified coffee, breakfast items and other new hot food options.

Britain’s biggest bakery brand announced a 58% rise in underlying profit for the first half of 2019. During the same period the company recorded sales of £546 million ($664 million).

Investors in the firm received a 35 pence special dividend on top of an 11.9 pence ordinary pay out.

Greggs has opened 54 new shops and closed 23 across the U.K. so far in 2019. Its number of outlets across the U.K. is currently just below 2,000.

“We have continued to make strategic progress with our programmes of investment in infrastructure to support future growth and in developing the products and channels to market that will help achieve our ambition to be the customers’ favourite for food-on-the-go,” said Chief Executive Roger Whiteside.

Its share price has risen more than 77% year-to date, although the stock price slipped more than 5% Tuesday morning.

Blue Apron surges as much as 53% after adding Beyond Meat to meal kits in a bid to revive orders

Content Courtesy of: cnbc.com

Written by: Amelia Lucas

KEY POINTS:

* Blue Apron says it will add Beyond Meat products to its meal kits next month.

* Blue Apron split its stock last month to avoid being delisted on the New York Stock Exchange, while Beyond’s stock has soared since its May IPO.

* The meat kit provider has turned to partnerships as it has struggled to find a loyal subscriber base.

Beyond Meat plant-based burger patties.

Shares of Blue Apron surged Tuesday after the meal kit provider said it will add Beyond Meat products to its menus in mid-August in its latest bid to get consumers to order its meals.

Blue Apron’s stock, which has a market value of $153.4 million, soared as much as 53% during afternoon trading. Shares finished the session trading at $10.38, up 35% from Monday’s close. Last month, the struggling company completed a reverse stock split in order to keep its stock price above $1 and avoid being delisted on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company has struggled to grow a loyal subscriber base and turned to partnerships with brick-and-mortar grocery stores and WW, formerly known as Weight Watchers, to revive its business. The addition of Beyond products follows the lead of restaurant chains like Carl’s Jr. and T.G.I. Friday’s. And while its WW partnership appeals to dieters looking for a convenient way to eat healthy, plant-based burgers have received mixed reviews from nutritionists.

Beyond’s meatless imitations of ground beef, sausage and other meat products are designed to appeal to people looking to reduce their meat intake. These so-called flexitarians are expected to help propel the global market for meat substitutes to $18.7 billion in sales by 2023, according to Euromonitor data.

Beyond Meat’s stock, which has surged 582% since its May initial public offering, was up 2% in afternoon trading.

WATCH: How the Beyond Meat burger is taking on the multibillion-dollar beef industry

ART

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Op Art Pioneer Whose Work Challenged Perception, Is Dead at 95

Content Courtesy of: artnews.com

Written by: Maximilíano Durón

Carlos Cruz-Diez.

Carlos Cruz-Diez, the revered Venezuelan-born artist whose multilayered, eye-popping works challenged conventional notions of perception, color, and light, helping to define what became known as Kinetic Art and Op Art, died in Paris on Saturday at the age of 95. The news was confirmed in a post on his official website.

Cruz-Diez rose to international prominence in 1965 when he had work in the foundational exhibition “The Responsive Eye,” curated by William Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition created a media frenzy at the time, as general-interest publications marveled at the dizzying and perspective-challenging effects of the abstract art on view.

The exhibition mostly included American and European artists, including Julian Stanczak, Victor Vasarely, Josef Albers, Larry Bell, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Irwin, Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley, and Frank Stella, among many other well-known names. Cruz-Diez, whose 1964 Physichromie Number 116, made of plastic strips painted with tempera on cardboard, was his only work in the show, was among a small contingent of Latin American artists who had relocated to France and Germany included in the show.

Many art critics at the time disparaged the exhibition. Writing in ARTnews, Thomas B. Hess deemed it a “a mishmash” that “lumps together at least six totally different kinds of painting and sculpture.” Hess especially took issue with the “Hard-Core Op—shapes that provoke strong, often violent, ‘retinal’ illusions, such as after-images, sensations of motion, of blinking, pinging, popping, glowing. . . . Like the T.V. viewer, the Op audience passively participates, conditioned into giving up critical faculties, or at least suspending disbelief. Peripatetic zombies. The threshold of interest is very low; almost anything can be amusing.”

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Physichromie 216, 1966, Cardboard and aluminum modules with wood strip frame.

As the longtime editor of ARTnews from 1949 to 1972, Hess is perhaps most closely identified with his fierce support of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. In the same ARTnews interview, Cruz-Diez said he and his lifelong friend from Caracas and fellow Op artist Jesús Rafael Soto dismissed the supposed superiority of Abstract Expressionism, seeing it as a dead end that was merely “painting as if you were playing the drums, like letting off steam.”

Carlos Cruz-Diez was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1923. He studied at the city’s Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas from 1940 to 1945, where he met Soto and the artist Alejandro Otero. Together the trio would form “the holy trinity” of postwar Venezuelan art, as curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro said in 2010.

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Physichromie 888, 1974, aluminum, silkscreen, and stainless steel.

After graduating from art school, Cruz-Diez first worked as an illustrator for various magazines and newspapers, and in 1946 became a creative director at the Venezuelan branch of the storied advertising agency McCann-Erickson. The following year, he traveled to New York for an advertising training course, and had his first solo show, of gouache drawings, in Caracas. In 1955, he moved to Barcelona for a year and a half, and during that time he visited Paris, where Soto had already relocated, and saw the landmark exhibition of Op Art at the Galerie Denise René during his visit.

“I didn’t know Soto was doing his own Kinetic work, or even that there was such a thing as Kineticism, until I arrived in Paris in 1955 and saw the exhibit at Denise René,” Cruz-Diez said in the 2010 interview. “That opened my eyes. Painting in Paris in those days was dead. I saw a huge room of paintings at the Salon de Mai and thought these must all have been painted by the same artist. They all looked the same. Abstraction had become the academy.”

Cruz-Diez returned to Caracas and began searching for a way to move art forward, away from such academic ideas, and in 1959, he had his breakthrough when he sketched a red line and a green line askew on a black background. Cruz-Diez had arrived at an optical illusion where somehow “a yellow that’s not there [appeared],” Pérez-Barreiro said. “And that’s the kernel of everything that follows.”

Installation view of “Carlos Cruz-Diez: Autonomía del Color,” 2017, at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, Houston.

Cruz-Diez moved to Paris the following year, in 1960, where he lived until his death. There he began to develop his rigorously conceived work, which was firmly grounded in his own version of theory of color and light. It was work that moved as the viewer moved, that shifted as she shifted—where what appeared was, in fact, not there.

He first created his works by adhering colored strips of plastic to cardboard, at small scale. In 1973, for archival purposes, he switched permanently to working with aluminum and as time went on, his work became more ambitious and grander in scale—whole walls could be become a place to experience how interactions of light and color were experienced in the eyes of viewer.

Just as Cruz-Diez’s work sought to challenge the ways in which a two-dimensional work could become three-dimensional, his work eventually leapt off the wall and into sculptures, installation, and immersive environments, what he called “Chromosaturations,” in which neon lights are projected into a space as a way to produce saturated hues in their purest form.

In an email, New York dealer Leon Tovar, who has shown work by Cruz-Diez for several years, wrote, “In his approach to color and his desire to release color from the confines of form, he infused it with a poetry that allowed us to see the world with new eyes. Cruz-Diez’s artwork wasn’t limited to any gallery, to any museum, or even to art history—it gave us lessons to use in our everyday lives. As one of the last of the pioneering kinetic and optical artists, such a breakthrough is part of his enduring legacy.”

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Physichromie Panam 309, 2018, Chromography on aluminum.

In 1967, Cruz-Diez won the international painting prize at the 9th Bienal de São Paulo, and in 1970, the artist represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale. A 2008 exhibition at the Americas Society in New York, titled “(In)formed by Color,” brought him renewed prominence. A career retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez, that brought together 150 of his works followed in 2011.

“Carlos Cruz-Diez’s life was consumed with his passion for color and for communicating a novel chromatic experience to the world at-large,” Ramírez wrote in an email to ARTnews. “If there is an artist who came close to realizing his Utopian vision it was indeed Carlos. Despite the complex scientific and aesthetic theory that supported his production, his work was easily accessible to anyone who cared to experience it.”

While Cruz-Diez was lionized in Latin America and particularly Venezuela, he was less well known for most of his career in the United States and Europe, where Op Art became a marginal movement in the years after the 1965 MoMA exhibition. In 2016 exhibition, though, El Museo del Barrio staged an essential exhibition, “The Illusive Eye,” that handily rebutted the criticism of Hess and others, centering Latin American artists as being at the forefront of Op and Kinetic Art, as it simultaneously made the case that they are essential parts of 20th-century art history.

However, Cruz-Diez, ever the radical, would no doubt reject having his work merely consigned to history, and one can see his influence on many younger generations of artists, from Ad Minoliti to Sarah Sze to Tauba Auerbach, and many others. And his art, it has to be remembered, was about rejecting any notion of static identity or image. As he once put it: “There is a yellow here and a red there, but they are permanently in the process of becoming. They are never fixed. This work is not happening in the past. It is forever in the present.”

Ai Weiwei Wins Court Case Against Volkswagen In Denmark

Content Courtesy of: artlyst.com

In 2017, SMC a Volkswagen dealership in Copenhagen shot a photo of a new Volkswagen Polo parked in front of an installation by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. The photograph was subsequently used to promote a new model of the Polo car on its website and inhouse magazine.

The artist was furious and sued for damages. The case reached court this week and SMC has now been ordered to pay 1.5 million Danish kroner for the unlawful use of the work and an additional 250,000 for non-financial damages. In response, Mr Ai had accused VW’s CEO Herbert Diess of turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in China, where the company is expanding production. “Volkswagen’s conduct towards my artwork is a small reflection of a global lack of respect for the rights of individuals today”.

“In our globalised era, corporations often operate with impunity, answering only to their shareholders,” – Ai Weiwei

The artwork (used as a backdrop) is titled “Soleil Levant”. It displays 3,500 life jackets collected from refugees who had arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos between 2015 and 2016. The lifejackets were displayed in the windows of the Charlottenborg art gallery to illustrate how desperate the migration crisis has grown.

The court agreed that the misuse of concept and imagery could be detrimental to the artist’s reputation and a “clear contradiction of the considerations and thoughts behind the work.”

Charlottenborg Art Gallery Copenhagen 

“The infringing material was circulated to over 200,000 people, giving the false impression that I had authorised Volkswagen to use my artwork in its ad for the new Polo,” he said.

Ai Weiwei was born in 1957 in Beijing and now lives and works in Berlin. He attended Beijing Film Academy and later, on moving to New York (1983–1993), continued his studies at the Parsons School of Design.

A global citizen, artist and thinker, Ai Weiwei moves between modes of production and investigation, subject to the direction and outcome of his research, whether into the Chinese earthquake of 2008 (for works such as Straight, 2008-12 and Remembering, 2009) or the worldwide plight of refugees and forced migrants (for Law of the Journey and his feature-length documentary, Human Flow, both 2017). From early iconoclastic positions in regards to authority and history, which included Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and a series of middle-finger salutes to sites of power, Study of Perspective (both 1995).

Ai’s production expanded to encompass architecture, public art and performance. Beyond concerns of form or protest, Ai now measures our existence in relation to economic, political, natural and social forces, uniting craftsmanship with conceptual creativity. Universal symbols of humanity and community, such as bicycles, flowers and trees, as well as the perennial problems of borders and conflicts are given renewed potency though installations, sculptures, films and photographs, while Ai continues to speak out publicly on issues he believes important. He is one of the leading cultural figures of his generation and serves as an example of free expression both in China and internationally.

TECH

The digital reconstructions bringing Roman ruins to life

Content Courtesy of: apollo-magazine.com

Written by: Matthew Nicholls

A visualisation of what visitors to the Ara Pacis Museum see via their AR headsets.

Reconstructions have long been used to bring Rome’s ancient ruins back to life. The drawings of Dupérac and Piranesi, and physical models made for Grand Tourists, were joined in the 20th century by the little books still sold at kiosks in the city, in which painted reconstructions on acetate pages are laid over photos of each site’s current state. Digital technology provides new ways of accomplishing this centuries-old task, restoring broken walls, fragmentary marble remains, patched mosaics and faded frescoes with vivid approximations of their original appearance. These novel approaches rest, ideally, on familiar scholarly foundations, but the medium is new: digital models created by a computer can bathe sites with light and add motion, visual effects and sound to the static images found in guidebooks and display panels.

In Rome, a growing number of sites deploy digital reconstructions for visitors, in three different ways. High-resolution projectors mounted inside archaeological spaces supplement the standing remains with pixel-precise light shows, outlining features of interest and restoring, in non-invasive fashion, the missing elements of mosaics and frescoes. Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) reconstructions use headsets to immerse a viewer in a 3D model of a space; a pair of screens provides a stereoscopic sense of 3D, and motion sensors track and update the view. VR shuts out the world outside the headset; in AR the same technology depicts reconstructed elements – the missing parts of a building, say – overlaid on a real-time image captured by the device’s outward-facing camera. (You can try AR apps on your smartphone; Ikea makes one, for instance, to show you how a new piece of furniture would look in your living room.)

I recently spent a weekend in Rome visiting a selection of these newly displayed sites, some of them only recently (re)opened to the public. The sites using digital projection offer the most straightforward experience. Naturally this works in spaces with low ambient light, generally indoors. The best of these displays are superb, both spectacular and informative. On the Palatine hill the so-called Houses of Augustus and Livia, parts of a first-century BC palace complex, are among a range of sites now open to visitors. Here projectors (with audio commentary) beam reconstructions on to fragmentary floor patterns and plaster ceiling vaults, complete and recolour the splendid frescoes and restored details recorded by earlier explorers but now faded from view. At Santa Maria Antiqua, a sixth-century church inserted into a cavernous imperial hall on the edge of the Forum, a light show cleverly picks out the many layers in a palimpsest wall of fresco, illuminating a complex sequence of overpainting that would be nearly impossible to decipher without assistance. In the basement of the 16th-century Palazzo Valentini, rippling light ‘refills’ the marble bathtub of a late imperial-era residence, restoring illumination and colour to what is now a dark underground world. Visitors who don’t want to book a ticket to one of these sites can pop into the basement of the upmarket department store Rinascente, where a similar projected light show outlines different construction phases in a stretch of aqueduct from the first century BC.

The Ara Pacis Augustae (Augustus’s Altar of Peace) in the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome.

At most of these sites audio commentary accompanies the light show. This and the fact that the visitor can only look at what’s lit up create the downside to this technology: a visit becomes a son-et-lumière show, with groups sent round on a fixed itinerary and items that are not part of the preset narration left literally in the dark. In some sites there’s no time to explore at leisure, dwell on an object or space, or check what your guidebook says. It’s reasonable not to let visitors roam unchecked through fragile spaces, which only a few people can enter at once, but more traditional interpretation boards in the queueing areas would give more context.

Other sites use VR or AR delivered via headsets. Eager crowds at the recently opened Circus Maximus excavations follow a route through the ruins with stops for VR and AR reconstruction views of the ancient chariot-racing stadium. This is a large outdoor area, so visitors have room to set their own pace, and the use of large-scale architectural reconstruction works well to supplement the relatively scant ruins and fixed interpretation boards. At the Ara Pacis, one of the finest surviving monuments of Roman art, AR headsets restore impressive colour to the now-white marble altar. The headset screen’s pixelated image is no substitute for inspecting the object itself at close range, though: I kept wanting to take off the device for a better look.

Most remarkable of all are the remains of Nero’s two palaces, the Domus Transitoria on the Palatine hill and the Domus Aurea (‘Golden House’) near the Colosseum. Both of these structures were buried under later imperial building projects to erase Nero’s legacy, accidentally preserving them but also driving massive concrete foundation piers through their rooms and sealing them off forever from light and air. Both have been closed to visitors for years, so just entering them is rather a thrill (and requires booking into obligatory guided visits). Here, immersive digital reconstruction can really come into its own, taking impressive but fragmentary and confusing spaces and restoring them to something like the palaces Nero knew. The short VR element at each comes towards the end of the visit; visitors sit to don the headset, and the narrated display then removes later walls, restores fragmentary decoration, plumbs virtual water back into the fountains, and floods the spaces with light. The viewer stays seated throughout, and can look around, but the point of view in these reconstructions gently moves, rising to look at ceiling vaults, or travelling to see how a room once communicated with a garden terrace outside. The experience is undoubtedly spectacular, many times more vivid than a picture or text explanation. The sense of spatial depth and motion in VR adds a great deal to the viewer’s comprehension of these spaces. But sitting in the dark, looking at headset screens rather than the actual remains, won’t appeal to everyone.

As this technology matures, the practical challenges involved in making it work reliably for large numbers will be resolved and sites will discover the best ways of adding to a visitor’s experience of a place without intruding on it. Headsets are fun but isolating, and a bit of a nuisance to use. I would put my money on more use of projection on to the surfaces of monuments, and AR delivered to visitors’ ever-more-capable smartphones, rather than devices they have to sign out from a ticket desk. But the idea of using rich, immersive digital reconstructions to enhance the presentation of a site and help people understand something of its original appearance and meaning is here to stay.

CULTURE

Bass Museum of Art Will Present Digital Exhibition on Instagram, With Funding from Knight Foundation

Content Courtesy of: artnews.com

Written by: Claire Selvin

Over the past few years, Instagram has become a potent tool for dealers and artists offering artworks for sale. Now a museum is using the app as an exhibition site.

Tomorrow, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach will open a show of digital art, titled “Joyous Dystopia,” with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund, on a dedicated Instagram account, @TheBassSquared. New and existing works by artists Bob Bicknell-Knight, Jeremy Couillard, Keren Cytter, Elliot Dodd, Anaïs Duplan, Rosie McGinn, Eva Papamargariti, and Scott Reeder will included in the show.

Jeremy Couillard, Self Portrait As a Dingus (still from video work), 2019.

“Joyous Dystopia” is curated by David Gryn, who founded Daata Editions, an online platform that commissions and exhibits digital and new media works. Each week of the exhibition will focus on a different artist, and their pieces will be archived on Daata Editions at the end of the show’s run.

Gryn, who has previously worked as a curator of the film and sound program at Art Basel in Miami Beach, told ARTnews that the exhibition includes “artists who make a twist on their daily or regular use of Instagram, or their artworks make commentary on our daily lives or daily use of social media in some way.”

He added that the the project represents “another way of getting people to connect with those artists.”

Depending on the nature and length of their works, artists in the exhibition will also make use of the social media platform’s extra features, with videos longer than one minute posted to Instagram TV.

According to Bass curator Leilani Lynch, “Joyous Dystopia” is a test run for future digital initiatives by the museum, though there are not yet concrete plans for what they will entail. She said that the exhibition on Instagram is the result of conversations about the ways in which “technology be used to enhance a museum experience, what it can do, and what we need it to do, without creating something that could be seen as unnecessary.”

“We came full circle and ended on something that is actually quite simple but at the end of the day is about engaging our audiences in a way that is native to them, through their phones,” Lynch said in a phone interview. She added that the shape of future digital endeavors depend on how people interact with the prototype.

“We’ll see how it goes,” she said. “It’s been a privilege to experiment in this way.”

FASHION

Kim Kardashian Responds to Backlash Over Kimono Shapewear by Changing the Name

Content Courtesy of: wmagazine.com

Written by: Marissa G. Muller

After much backlash over claims of cultural appropriation, Kim Kardashian is officially making changes to her Kimono shapewear brand. In a series of tweets, Kardashian revealed that she will no longer use the name Kimono, which she has trademarked under Kimono Intimates, Inc., Kimono Body, and Kimono World, because she has been “listening, learning, and growing” from all of the feedback.

“Being an entrepreneur and my own boss has been one of the most rewarding challenges I’ve been blessed with in my life,” Kardashian began on Twitter. “What’s made it possible for me after all of these years has been the direct line of communication with my fans and the public. I am always listening, learning, and growing—I so appreciate the passion and varied perspectives that people bring to me. When I announced the name of my shapewear line, I did so with the best intentions in mind.”

She then added that, despite the offensive implications of the brand name, the philosophy behind it is one that embraces all cultures and sizes—which is why she will be adjusting the name to reflect that. “My brands and products are built with inclusivity and diversity at their core and after careful thought and consideration, I will be launching my Solutionwear brand under a new name,” she tweeted. “I will be in touch soon. Thank you for your understanding and support always.”

Kardashian didn’t mention whether or not she saw the open letter that Kyoto’s mayor, Daisaku Kadokawa, penned about how insensitive the Kimono brand and trademarks are to some—but she seemingly did read through some of the myriad online comments and headlines that circulated about the cultural implications of naming her brand Kimono.

To Kardashian’s point about diversity, the website for her now-unnamed shapewear brand holds a similar sentiment. It describes the company as “a new, solution focused approach to shape enhancing underwear,” “fueled by her passion to create truly considered and highly technical solutions for every body.” That includes creating the shapewear in more nine different skin shades and sizes from XXS to 4X. Kardashian has yet to reveal when her shapewear company will be officially launching, so expect more updates soon.

How to Use Nuuly, URBN’s New Clothing Rental Subscription Service

Content Courtesy of: marieclaire.com

Written by: Rachel Epstein

If you, like me, have a borderline unhealthy obsession with shopping at Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters, try not to freak out: As of today, July 30, URBN—the parent company of said brands—has officially launched a subscription clothing rental service called Nuuly, which will feature the company’s “big three,” hundreds of other labels like AGOLDE and Paige, as well as up-and-coming designers.

When Rent the Runway was born a decade ago, nobody knew how popular clothing rental services would become. URBN did its homework and found that its customers were increasingly interested in using subscription services, but hadn’t necessarily utilized it on the apparel side yet. While RTR carriers designer labels at a variety of price points, Nuuly is focused on an assortment of brands for its customer’s everyday needs, whether that’s heading to a work event, a wedding, or brunch with friends.

So, how does Nuuly work, exactly? You can choose up to six pieces to rent for only $88 per month and have them delivered straight to your home with Nuuly’s free two-day shipping. And, no, it doesn’t matter how much the pieces retail for on their own. So, basically, you can get incredible use out of a $300 vintage dress for less than half the price (along with five other items!). At the end of the month, you return the pieces in the reusable plastic- and hanger-free zipper bag that was designed to create as little waste as possible.

With regards to inclusivity, Nuuly will work with Anthro to include the brand’s extended sizing, which launched in March, and expand on its assortment with additional brands on the site. You also have the option to purchase the pieces if you end up loving them.

Since the site is brand new, there could be a long waitlist. In the meantime, you can browse through some of our favorite items, below.

ADVERTISING

L’Oréal Is Bringing Beauty Online With the Help of Augmented Reality and AI

Content Courtesy of: adweek.com

Written by: Diana Pearl

Chief digital officer Lubomira Rochet explains how new tech nurtures the industry’s ‘natural relationship’ with the internet

L’Oréal’s virtual hair try-on experience

Participate in interactive discussions, problem-solving and networking with the world’s most recognizable brands at Brandweek 2019, Nov. 3-6 in Palm Springs. Reserve your spot today!

Testing products is a quintessential element of the beauty buying experience. There’s a reason the shelves at Sephora are lined with tester tubes, after all. But up until recently, the bulk of that trying-out experience has occurred in person, in brick and mortar retail locations.

FOOD

Mirazur, in France, Tops World’s 50 Best Restaurants List

Content Courtesy of: nytimes.com

Written by: Florence Fabricant

The chef Mauro Colagreco at Mirazur, in Menton, France.

Mirazur, a restaurant on the French Riviera in Menton, took the No. 1 spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, announced on Tuesday at a ceremony in Singapore.

The chef and owner, Mauro Colagreco, a native of Argentina, has also earned three Michelin stars. Last year the restaurant was ranked No. 3.

The annual list, compiled by World’s 50 Best, an organization that ranks restaurants across the globe, has acquired considerable clout since it was started in 2002, as well as criticism for the ways it judges restaurants and chefs.

For 2019, the rules were revised so that previous No. 1 restaurants are not eligible to be considered again, for any spot on the list, preventing restaurants like Noma, in Copenhagen, from securing a perennial lock on the list.

But Noma, which held the top spot in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014, ended up this year in the No. 2 spot. That’s because having moved, been redesigned, reconceived and reopened last year, Noma 2.0 was considered to be a “new” restaurant, the organization said. (Eleven Madison Park, in New York, is not on this year’s list because it won the top rating in 2017.)

Most of the restaurants among the top 10 are repeats from last year, though Geranium, perched above a soccer stadium on the edge of Copenhagen, came in at No. 5, up from No. 19 last year.

The highest-ranking American restaurant this year is Cosme, in New York, at No. 23, up from No. 25 last year. Its chef and co-owner, Daniela Soto-Innes, was named best female chef this year. Pujol, the Mexico City restaurant owned by the chef Enrique Olvera, the other partner in Cosme, was No. 12.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., which was No. 12 last year, dropped to No. 28. Atelier Crenn, in San Francisco, was No. 35, marking the first time its chef, Dominique Crenn, has reached the top 50. Le Bernardin, in New York, sank from No. 26 to 36, Alinea, in Chicago, was No. 37 and Benu, in San Francisco, was No. 47.

Spanish restaurants did extremely well, led by Asador Etxebarri, at No. 3. And a handful of South American restaurants made the top 50, including two in Lima, Peru — Maido and Central — in the top 10. The list includes places with a decidedly casual ambience, like Septime in Paris, at No. 15, just ahead of the hyper-elegant Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athénée at No. 16.

Since its founding in 2002 by an English restaurant magazine, the list has come under fire for potential conflicts of interest; about a third of the more than 1,000 voters (they’re called academy members) are chefs and restaurateurs.

The organization contends that there are no such conflicts, but troubling issues remain: how (and even if) the voters visit the restaurants, who pays and the role of sponsors, including local tourism boards. There are more than 25 commercial sponsors, including Grana Padano of Italy, the “official hard cheese partner.”

The World’s 50 Best has addressed criticism of its preponderance of male members and voters by giving half the voting positions to female participants starting this year.

Still, the rankings are influential, and imitated by other lists. La Liste, a French compilation of 1,000 restaurants worldwide based on guidebook ratings and other reviews, made its debut in 2015. This year the World Restaurant Awards IMG, sponsored by a global sports and entertainment promoter, bestowed its first awards.

ART

‘A Group Effort in Every Respect’: June, New Exhibition Platform, Brings 14 Galleries, Collaborative Spirit to Basel

Content Courtesy of: artnews.com

Written by: Claire Selvin

All over the market landscape, alternatives to behemoth art fairs have been cropping up recently. In May, the booth-free Object & Thing show opened in Brooklyn, and in February, Felix LA revived the scrappy hotel-fair model with a relatively modest number of dealers. The latest experiment is June, an exhibition platform set to run from June 11 to 14 in Basel, Switzerland, during Art Basel and Liste.

Cofounded by Esperanza Rosales, the director of VI, VII in Oslo, and Christian Andersen, who owns an eponymous Copenhagen gallery, June will bring together 14 international enterprises—including Midway Contemporary Art (of Minneapolis), Stigter van Doesburg (Amsterdam), and Mitchell Algus Gallery (New York)—at Riehenstrasse 90B, just a few minutes away from Art Basel’s main site, in a building designed by the hometown architects Herzog & de Meuron. The structure has previously served as a storage facility for the architects, and it once housed the now-shuttered Freymond-Guth Gallery.

In an interview with ARTnews, Rosales said that the impetus for June came from conversations with other dealers, many of whom “were eager to see their galleries in Basel, represented in a new context.”

She explained that June differs from the long-running Basel enterprises, the blue-chip Art Basel and the emerging-oriented Liste, in that it is more an exhibition than a fair. Organized in a largely open plan format, June eschews many of the categorizations that tend to divide exhibitors in larger fairs.

“Concepts like ‘young gallery’—when does that stop being applied?” she asked. “How many fairs must one do before that stops being true?”

“We’re hoping to create something that feels closer to what we do in the gallery every day, which is to make exhibitions,” Rosales said. “Lots of effort has been put into making this possible, but it still feels joyous and lightweight.”

In what Chris Sharp, cofounder of Mexico City’s Lulu, characterizes as a “grass roots structure,” many participants assisted Rosales and Andersen in planning the event. Sharp told ARTnews that it was “a group effort in every respect,” from reaching out to press to calling collectors.

Other dealers exhibiting at June also noted its collaborative ethos. Hannah Hoffman, who will return to Basel for the first time in about four years (she showed in the Statements section at Art Basel in 2015) with works by the artist D’Ette Nogle and the late Belgian poet Marcel Broodthaers, told ARTnews that June “gives both the artists and gallerists an opportunity to think really expansively about how to organize a presentation.” She added, “Because it’s small, there seems to be a sense of community.”

Meanwhile, the Tokyo outfit Misako & Rosen will make its Basel debut at June, showing pieces by Yuki Okumura and Hisachika Takahashi. Cofounder Jeffery Rosen said he sees “the extent to which galleries prioritize the cultural side of their businesses” as a common thread among the participants in the exhibition.

“There has to be a space carved out for commercial spaces that are focusing on their exhibition programs first and foremost and finding contexts outside of their home base to present that programming,” he said.

Though he won’t be traveling to Basel for the exhibition, New York artist and dealer Mitchell Algus will present a film titled Justine and the Boys—featuring appearances by Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, among others—by the multifarious artist Colette. Algus’s own art will also be on view at June.

Algus, who has critiqued art fairs and their deleterious effects on galleries’ business, praised Rosales and Andersen for their efforts to create a new model in which “the art has to make a case for itself rather than the gallery making the case for the art.”

“I’m thrilled that they asked me [to participate] and I admire their perseverance, but I have to put all of my energy into the program here,” Algus said of his decision to remain home during the event. “That’s all I can afford to do.”

FASHION

Nike’s Highest-Selling Soccer Jersey Belongs To The U.S. Women’s Team

Content Courtesy of: huffingtonpost.in

Written by: By Danielle Gonzalez

HuffPost may receive a share from purchases made via links on this page.

The United States women’s national soccer team has been slaying it on the field with record-breaking wins in the World Cup ― but it’s also making waves off the field.

Co-captain Megan Rapinoe has made headlines for her protests and political commentary as well as her personal style, and the collective team’s success has only strengthened the class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation demanding equal pay to their male counterparts.

The team’s home jersey is also now Nike’s highest-selling soccer jersey ever.

“The USA Women’s home jersey is now the No. 1 soccer jersey, men’s or women’s, ever sold on Nike.com in one season,” CEO Mark Parker announced on the company’s earnings call Thursday.

The U.S. 2019 Stadium Home Women’s Jersey is a white, slim-fit shirt with red and blue stripes on the short sleeves and three stars on the back to represent how many times the U.S. has won the world title. It’s made from 100% recycled polyester fabric, half of which is sourced from plastic bottles, and blended with the brand’s Dri-FIT technology for a comfortable and breathable feel. It’s available in sizes XS-XL for $90 at Nike.

The team’s next match is Tuesday, when it plays England in the semifinals. The winning team will advance to the final match on July 7, so there’s still time to get a jersey and show your support.

If a jersey’s not your style, there is a ton of other Nike athletic apparel, sneakers and accessories up to 40% off right now ― including sports bras, which Nike is officially North America’s biggest seller of now. We’ve rounded up a few of our favorite Nike items that you can shop on sale right now.

Women’s Fleece Crew Nike Sportswear Heritage

Women’s 7/8 Yoga Training Tights Nike Dri-FIT Power

Women’s Light Support Yoga Sports Bra Nike Indy

Women’s Mesh Dress

Women’s Cross Training/Weightlifting Shoe Nike Metcon 4

Women’s 7/8 Tights Nike Pro

Women’s Printed Shorts Nike Air

Women’s Cropped Crew Nike Sportswear

ADVERTISING

Nivea responds to ‘homophobic’ allegations after FCB resigns business

Content Courtesy of: campaignlive.co.uk

Written by: Oliver McAteer

‘No form of discrimination, direct and indirect, is or will be tolerated.’

Nivea has responded to allegations of a homophobic comment made on a call with FCB which is believed to have ultimately led to the demise of their relationship.

The agency has resigned its creative business with the Beiersdorf brand, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

A spokesperson for Beiersdorf AG told Campaign US this is “the right time for a new beginning in Nivea’s brand management and creative work.”

While it did not directly address the allegations, Nivea stressed such behavior will not be tolerated.

The spokesperson continued: “We understand that emotions and news interest are intensified when a longtime business relationship comes to an end – however, we ask for understanding that we don’t comment on unsubstantiated speculations around this matter.

“Nonetheless we wish to express our concern on the reported allegations as they do not reflect the values of Beiersdorf, Nivea and our employees worldwide. No form of discrimination, direct and indirect, is or will be tolerated. We are strongly committed to diversity, mutual respect, equal opportunity and tolerance — this stance and belief is shared and lived throughout Beiersdorf.

“We are an international company with more than 20,000 employees with very different genders, ethnicities, orientations, backgrounds and personalities worldwide. Through our products, we touch millions of consumers around the globe every day. We know and cherish  that individuality and diversity in all regards brings inspiration and creativity to our society and to us as a company.”

PEPSI PLANS TO TEST OUT SELLING WATER IN CANS

Content Courtesy of: adage.com

The move comes amid an industry-wide backlash against plastic

PepsiCo Inc., facing an industrywide backlash against plastic, will experiment with putting its Aquafina water in cans.

The beverage giant will begin selling the cans next year, offering them to partners such as stadiums and restaurants, PepsiCo said on Thursday. The company also will try out the repackaged product at some retail stores.

If the new packaging catches on, it would be one of the highest-profile cases of companies ditching plastic. Aquafina is a top-selling water brand in the U.S.—along with Coca-Cola Co.’s Dasani—and it’s nearly synonymous with the clear plastic bottles that have lined supermarket shelves for decades.

Aluminum cans generally contain more reused material than plastic bottles, and consumers are more likely to recycle them. They’re also less likely to float away in the ocean.

PepsiCo also is transitioning its upscale bottled water brand, LIFEWTR, to 100 percent recycled plastic in the U.S. by the end of next year. It’s part of a push to use 25 percent recycled plastic globally by 2025.

And it will stop selling its Bubly sparkling water in plastic bottles. Bubly, a LaCroix competitor, is already primarily distributed in cans, but gas stations and convenience stores now carry 20-ounce bottles, PepsiCo said.

The changes will eliminate more than 8,000 metric tons of virgin plastic, according to the Purchase, New York-based company.

—Bloomberg News

TECH

APPLE’S CHIEF DESIGNER, JONY IVE, IS LEAVING TO FORM AN INDEPENDENT COMPANY

Content Courtesy of: adage.com

Written by: Bloomberg News

Ive is responsible for the look of the company’s most iconic products, including the iPhone

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., left, and Jony Ive, chief design officer for Apple Inc., stand for photographs during an event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California, U.S.

Apple Inc.’s chief designer Jony Ive is leaving after decades at the iPhone maker to form an independent company—with Apple as one of its primary clients.

Ive is responsible for the look of the company’s most iconic products, including the iPhone.

“Jony is a singular figure in the design world and his role in Apple’s revival cannot be overstated, from 1998’s groundbreaking iMac to the iPhone and the unprecedented ambition of Apple Park,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in a statement. “Apple will continue to benefit from Jony’s talents by working directly with him on exclusive projects, and through the ongoing work of the brilliant and passionate design team he has built.”Apple shares slipped about 1 percent in extended trading. The stock closed at $199.74 in New York.

Ive will be replaced by existing Apple designers. Evans Hankey, vice president of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye, vice president of Human Interface Design, will report to Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, the company said.

Dye and Hankey have played key leadership roles on Apple’s design team for many years. They took over day-to-day management of the team when Ive stepped away to focus on the creation of company’s new headquarters in Cupertino, California.

Williams has led the development of Apple Watch since its inception and will spend more of his time working with the design team in their studio, the company added.

Stay cool everyone!

Food

Top trends at Sweets & Snacks 2019

Content Courtesy of: foodbusinessnews.net

Written by: Monica Watrous

CHICAGO — Sprouted mung beans and lotus root crisps are among new formats competing for shelf space in the supermarket snack aisle. Puffed quinoa is popping up in chocolate bars, portabella mushrooms are masquerading as meat jerky, and cauliflower is replacing grains in pretzels and tortilla chips.

Such products may be seen at the Sweets & Snacks Expo this week in Chicago.

“Unusual ingredients, I think, is a bit of a perpetual trend,” said Carly Schildhaus, public affairs manager for the National Confectioners Association (N.C.A.), Washington, which produces the annual event.

An estimated 15,000 industry professionals were expected to attend the trade show, held May 21-23 at McCormick Place, to view and taste new confections and snacks debuting from approximately 825 exhibiting companies.

Collectively representing more than $86 billion in annual U.S. retail sales, the snack ($51 billion) and confectionery ($35 billion) markets are measured as the second and fourth largest consumable categories, respectively, according to data from the N.C.A. Product innovation is key to driving continued growth in the confectionery and snack industries. New products account for nearly 5% of sales in the snack category and more than 6% of sales in the confectionery category, which compares to about 3% of sales for overall consumer packaged goods.

“There are always thousands of new products that debut at the show, and there are a lot of different things we’re seeing in terms of flavors and the products themselves, but what we think is really interesting is the industry leadership as it relates to helping people manage their sugar intake,” Ms. Schildhaus said. “You’ll be seeing a lot of products in smaller pack sizes, specifically package sizes of 200 calories or less… I think we’ll see it more prominently this year than in past years.”

Smart is the new skinny

As consumers shift away from a traditional diet mindset in pursuit of holistic wellness, brands previously marketed as “thin,” “lean” or “skinny” are embracing new descriptors, such as “smart.”

Debuting at Sweets & Snacks is Smart Tart, a better-for-you take on the toaster pastry. Smart Food Co. L.L.C., Costa Mesa, Calif., offers a range of flavors, including blueberry acai, strawberry chia and cinnamon, with 8 grams of protein, 180 calories and 50% less sugar than the average brand, according to the company.

SmartSweets, Vancouver, B.C., is expanding its portfolio of reduced-calorie candies with Peach Rings gummies. Sweetened with stevia, the product has 85% less sugar than traditional candy with no artificial ingredients. Like all other SmartSweets products, which include gummy bears, sour gummies and sweet fish gummies, each serving has 3 grams of sugar and 80 calories.

Susie’s Smart Cookie, Katonah, N.Y., produces breakfast cookies and bites containing omega-3 fatty acids from canola oil, walnuts and ground flax, with oats, dried fruit and eggs.

Beverage flavors are bubbling up

Cocktails, coffee and cola are trending tastes in confections and snacks launching this year.

“We’re seeing a lot of products that are incorporating different drink flavors,” Ms. Schildhaus said.

Soda stars in several new candies. American Licorice Co., La Porte, Ind., is debuting Sour Punch Bites featuring cherry, lime and cola flavors that may be mixed and matched to create new combinations. The company also is introducing Red Vines root beer and orange cream licorice bites. Orange soda flavor is featured in new Sour Patch Kids and Swedish Fish chewy candies debuting from Mondelez International, Inc., Deerfield, Ill.

Other innovations at the show offer new ways to consume coffee. From the creator of Dippin’ Dots, 40 Below Joe, Carbondale, Ill., features frozen beads of coffee and dairy-free creamer in a range of flavors, including french vanilla, hazelnut, salted caramel, mocha and house blend. Tierra Nueva Fine Cocoa, Miami, is debuting Nudge Coffee Butter, a spread made entirely from Italian roast coffee beans.

Tea flavors are brewing in such products as layered matcha cream wafer cookies and a chai chocolate bar.

From Kopper’s Chocolate, Jersey City, N.J., On the Rocks Chocolate cordials contain a liquid center inspired by libations such as vodka and tequila. Wrapped in dark chocolate, the alcohol-free bites are available in Moscow mule, cold-brew coffee, barrel-aged bourbon and strawberry margarita varieties.

Brewhouse Legends from Mount Franklin Foods, L.L.C., El Paso, Texas, is a range of snack nut mixes inspired by craft beer and flavored with hops. Unique Pretzel Bakery, Inc., Reading, Pa., offers Original Sourdough Craft Beer Pretzel Rings made with malted barley and hops.

Next-generation jerky

The meat snack category is expanding with new formats and flavors as brands aim to remain competitive in the crowded marketplace.

Biltong is booming. The air-dried, South African-style meat snack appeals to consumer desire for convenient, high-protein, low- or no-sugar foods. Several exhibitors, including Stryve Foods, Plano, Texas; Ayoba-Yo, Springfield, Va.; and Kalahari Biltong, Cambridge, Mass., focus exclusively on biltong production, while others are adding it to their product lines. Chef’s Cut Real Jerky, Naples, Fla., is introducing biltong in original and spicy chili flavors, with 26 grams of protein and zero sugar.

Meat snack companies also may differentiate with texture. DE.HI Foods, Honolulu, offers crispy beef and pork jerky that “eats like a chip,” according to the company. Land O’Frost, Munster, Ind., recently introduced Gone Rogue, a crispy snack made from chicken that has been smoked, sliced, baked and seasoned.

Yet another take on the premium jerky trend are new vegan varieties made from ingredients such as mushrooms or fruit. Upton’s Naturals, Chicago, is introducing Jerky Bites made with wheat seitan in several flavors, including tamarind pepperoni, pineapple pink peppercorn and tarragon ginger lime. Each serving provides 8 to 10 grams of protein and 90 to 100 calories with a texture and chew similar to that of traditional beef jerky, according to the company.

Making keto convenient

Food manufacturers are launching convenient food and beverage products positioned around the popular ketogenic lifestyle. At Sweets & Snacks, exhibitors offering nutrition bars formulated for the high-fat, low-carb diet include Kiss My Keto, Los Angeles; Dang Foods, Berkeley, Calif.; Riverside Natural Foods, Vaughan, Ont.; and Love Good Fats, Toronto.

Such products are loaded with oils, nuts and seeds to help consumers achieve ketosis, a metabolic state linked with weight loss and performance benefits. Low-calorie sweeteners such as erythritol, stevia and monk fruit are key to keeping sugar low.

Fat Snax, Brooklyn, N.Y., makes low-carb, sugar-free cookies in flavors such as double chocolate chip, peanut butter, chocolate chip and lemon.

HighKey Snacks from Summit Naturals Inc., Blaine, Wash., is a brand of savory and sweet snacks marketed as low-carb and keto-friendly. Products include crunchy cheese bites made with cheddar and egg whites, bite-size cookies and nut butter made with macadamia nuts, pecans, hazelnuts, chia and pumpkin seeds.

Classics, reinvented

Longstanding brands are introducing new formulations and forms to remain relevant to today’s consumer.

“We’re seeing what we’re calling ‘new takes on classics’… whether that’s a line extension… and also reimagining some old favorites,” Ms. Schildhaus said.

Boyer Candy Co., Altoona, Pa., the maker of Clark Bar, is launching Clark Cups, which are peanut butter cups incorporating the century-old chocolate bar brand’s signature crunch.

Boyer, which produces the Mallo Cup, bought the rights, recipes and equipment for the Clark Bar brand in 2018 after its previous owner, The New England Confectionery Co., filed for bankruptcy.

“It is very gratifying to bring the Clark name back to its home state of Pennsylvania, along with giving the classic candy a new twist,” said Anthony Forgione, president and chief executive officer of Boyer.

The Chick-O-Stick from Atkinson Candy Co., Lufkin, Texas, features an updated recipe with simple ingredients and more peanut butter. The product, characterized by its flaky, crunchy combination of peanut butter and toasted coconut, originated in the 1940s. Atkinson said it has removed artificial red and blue coloring in favor of colors derived from turmeric and vegetable juice concentrate.

The Hershey Co., Hershey, Pa., is debuting a new design for its namesake milk chocolate bar for the first time in its 125 years with the launch of its limited-edition Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Emoji bar.

“Our classic Hershey’s bars were made to be shared with others,” said Kriston Ohm, senior manager, Hershey’s brand. “By adding an emoji design to each pip of chocolate, we hope that parents and kids are inspired to share a chocolate emoji and make a connection with someone new.”

Impossible Foods raises $300 million in latest funding round

REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. — Impossible Foods, the maker of the plant-based Impossible Burger, has raised another $300 million in a Series E funding round led by existing investors Temasek and Horizons Ventures. To date, the company has raised more than $750 million since launching in 2011.

Impossible Foods said it will use the proceeds from this latest equity funding round to add a third shift of workers and second production line at its manufacturing plant in Oakland, Calif., with additional expansion announcements coming later this year. The company said it will hire at least 50 new employees at the plant, which currently employs 70 full-time workers.

“We have cracked the molecular code for meat and built an industry-leading intellectual property portfolio and brand,” said David Lee, chief financial officer for Impossible Foods. “Our global financial partners are supporting a technology powerhouse that will transform the global food system.”

The company said it is experiencing unprecedented demand for the Impossible Burger, which began appearing on restaurant menus across the country in 2016. In January, Impossible Foods debuted an upgraded recipe that is made with soy protein instead of wheat protein and may be steamed, seared or flame-grilled. The product is now sold in more than 7,000 restaurants in North America and Asia. Recently, Red Robin added the Impossible Burger to its menu at nearly 500 restaurants nationwide, and Burger King began testing its Impossible Whopper in the St. Louis area with plans to serve the item at all 7,200 U.S. restaurants by the end of the year.

The Impossible Burger is slated to launch in retail outlets later this year.

The latest fundraising round for Impossible Foods marks the largest ever for a plant-based meat company and follows a successful initial public offering by competitor Beyond Meat, El Segundo, Calif., said Bruce Friedrich, executive director of The Good Food Institute, Washington.

“The success of Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat is proof that plant-based meat has arrived,” Mr. Friedrich said. “With these two companies now valued in the billions of dollars, it’s clear that the plant-based meat market is both hot and here to stay.”

Plant-based meat, egg and dairy companies in the United States have raised more than $16 billion in the past decade, including $13 billion in 2017 and 2018, according to research from The Good Food Institute.

“Impossible and Beyond both have a vision of a meat market that puts healthier and more sustainable products in front of consumers,” Mr. Friedrich said. “Because plant-based meat is so much more efficient, the products will be less expensive at scale. That represents a truly massive consumer market — literally, everyone who eats — and so also represents a massive investment opportunity.”

ART

Court Denies Italy’s Request for Return of Disputed da Vinci Work

Content Courtesy of: nytimes.com

Written by: Catherine Hickley

The Swiss court ruled that it was not bound by the Italian law that held the portrait had been exported illegally.

Italy had sought the return of this Renaissance portrait of a noblewoman, arguing it had been illegally exported. CreditCreditCantonal Police of the Canton Ticino

Switzerland has denied a request from the Italian government to hand over an Italian Renaissance portrait that was once attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and offered for sale for more than $100 million.

Swiss police impounded the painting, “Portrait of Isabella d’Este,” in a bank vault in Lugano in 2015, at the urging of the Italian government, which said its Italian owner had failed to acquire the necessary export license to take the painting out of Italy.

Italy’s strict laws set forfeiture as the penalty for illegal export of cultural heritage.

But the Swiss Supreme Court said on Wednesday that the conditions for a handover are not met, overturning a ruling last year by the country’s federal criminal court. The criminal court had called for the painting to be transferred to Italy on the basis of mutual assistance in criminal matters.

The Supreme Court said a request based on international mutual criminal assistance conventions should only be met in the case of activity that is also criminal in the country receiving the request.

“The export of private cultural property out of Switzerland to Italy is not a criminal action under Swiss law,” said Marc Weber, the lawyer for the painting’s owner, Emidia Cecchini.

In 2017, Ms. Cecchini was found guilty by an Italian court of transferring abroad an item of cultural interest without an export license. She served a period of community service as her penalty, her lawyer said.

She has argued that the painting has been the property of her family for more than a century and was kept in Switzerland for decades. She said she only took it to Italy briefly in 2010.

The Italian authorities had brought charges after the discovery in 2013 that the painting, which a scholar had attributed to Leonardo, was being offered for sale and that it had been in Italy three years earlier.

Laboratory tests have dated the painting to between 1460 and 1650. Carlo Pedretti, a former professor emeritus of Italian Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, who died last year, first identified it as a Leonardo but later denied the attribution.

Other scholars have dismissed any attribution to Leonardo.

Isabella d’Este was the Marchioness of Mantua and an important patron of the arts in Renaissance Italy. Reuters reported that Italy’s Justice Ministry declined to comment on the Swiss ruling.

Lutz Bacher, Conceptual Artist Who Hid Much About Herself, Dies at 75

Content Courtesy of: nytimes.com

Written by: Holland Cotter

Lutz Bacher, an American Conceptual artist who, early in her career, adopted that fictional, masculine-sounding name, and who thereafter refused to reveal personal details about her life, died on May 14 in Manhattan. She was 75.

Galerie Buchholz, which represents her work in Germany, said the cause was a heart attack.

Ms. Bacher gave out a variety of birth dates over the years (the real one was Sept. 21, 1943), but she did not say where she was born or provide any information about her family or educational background. All that was generally known was that she began making art in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s, when Conceptualism had succeeded Minimalism as the influential new art movement.

One of its champions, the art historian Lucy Lippard, defined Conceptualism as art “in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized.’ ” Ms. Bacher’s work fit this model, and added to it distinctive degrees of political commentary and personal emotion.

She worked primarily with everyday found materials — objects (snapshots, baseballs), words (interviews, men’s-room graffiti), sounds (film clips, rock songs) — from which she drew resonance by editing them, combining them or uncovering half-hidden details.

“Yamaha, 2010,” an installation by Ms. Bacher, featuring an electronic organ, tin pipes, paint, bamboo and wires.

Credit by: Galerie Buchholz

An early work, “Men at War,” from 1975, consisted of a series of photographs, derived from a single found negative, of American sailors relaxing together on a beach in Vietnam. What’s striking at first is the convivial, mildly eroticized mood of the gathering. But when, in a close-up, you catch sight of a swastika drawn on one man’s chest, a homosocial idyll becomes an image of incipient male violence.

Much of her work points to the arbitrary nature of historical “truth.” For a 1976 installation called “The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview,” she created a set of nine increasingly fractured collages by splicing together photographs of Oswald and her own musings, handwritten and typed, about conspiracy theories related to Oswald and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (The work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was exhibited there last year.)

Beginning in the 1990s, for a kind of video self-portrait, Ms. Bacher asked several people, including family members and artists (some of whom she barely knew), to sit in front of a camera and talk about her as she listened out of sight and pitched questions.

The tapes go on for hours (she published the transcripts as a book) and, in the end, leave only a diffuse and contradictory sense of who she is as a personality and an artist. They suggest that her insistent anonymity — fake name, concealed life — was part of a careerlong strategy to present herself as a Conceptual work.

This not to say that her art felt remote or hermetic. It was notable for its humor, but also for its emotional intimacy. When her charismatic New York art dealer Pat Hearn learned she had liver cancer in the 1990s, Ms. Bacher set up a stationary camera to film her working in her gallery office. When Ms. Hearn died in 2000 at 45, Ms. Bacher edited down hundreds of hours of tape to create a moving 40-minute memorial to her friend.

Ms. Bacher made this image of herself lying on a beach her official portrait, and allowed it to be circulated.

Credit by: Galerie Buchholz

And her contribution to the 2012 Whitney Biennial was memorably poetic. It was conceived in several evocative but enigmatic units.

One, called “The Celestial Handbook,” comprised 84 framed book pages illustrating galaxies, nebulae, comets and other astronomical formations. There was a sculptural piece in the form of a church organ.

And there was a gallery installation consisting of hundreds of old baseballs strewn across the floor and a video, imageless but with a dialogue clip from the 1988 film “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” as a soundtrack.

In the clip, two lovers speak. A woman asks, “What are you thinking?”; the man answers, “I’m thinking how happy I am.” Some people read the work as a tribute to Ms. Bacher’s husband, Donald C. Backer, an astrophysicist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who had died of a heart attack two years earlier. They had been married almost 40 years.

Ms. Bacher is survived by her son, David A. Backer; a granddaughter, Annika Backer; a sister, Jo-Anna Lutz Jones; and a brother, Patrick B. Lutz.

A self-portrait of Ms. Bacher from 2017 showing her reflection in a “surveillance bubble.” It was one element of an artwork titled “Cyclops,” in which she also installed a number of mirrored plastic half-globes that were intended to conceal surveillance cameras.

Credit by: Galerie Buchholz

In 2009, Ms. Bacher had a retrospective, titled “My Secret Life” and organized by Lia Gangitano, at PS1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) in Queens. A two-venue solo show at New York University in 2018 found her working again in a barbed topical mode. At the university’s 80WSE gallery, a display, without commentary, of 100 mass-produced Chinese postcard images of Mao Zedong constituted a study in how a monstrous leader could, by achieving the status of folk hero, become unassailably powerful.

A simultaneous exhibition, called “Open the Kimono” and installed in an N.Y.U. lecture hall, was a slide show of phrases that Ms. Bacher had jotted down from television commercials, radio talk shows and overheard conversations.

Some of the phrases (“I believe in love”) were bland-inane; others (“Face-lift in minutes at home”) were pop-weird; still others (“We are in a post-truth environment”) were direct references to current politics. Together, they added up to the equivalent of handwritten tweets, a random harvest of outtakes from American culture in the present.

In 2013, Ms. Bacher moved from Berkeley to New York City, where she is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery. She appeared in three Whitney Biennials (1991, 2000 and 2012), and in the last decade of her career showed in museums internationally, including the Kunstverein Munich; Portikus in Frankfurt; Secession in Vienna; the Kunsthalle Zurich; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

In 2018, she produced a book version of “Open the Kimono.” An earlier book appeared at the time of her 2009 PS1 retrospective. Titled “Smoke (Gets in Your Eyes),” the book references past work (the Vietnam photographs, the “Do You Love Me?” interviews), but is a nonchronological, nonthematic jumble, interspersed with pornography magazine clips, advertisements, and personal notes. It documents an art that avoids a signature style and an artist who refused a categorical identity.

In an interview, Ms. Bacher once referred to her work as “one big ruin.” It was a ruin she built through a lifetime of self-invention through art.

FASHION

Virgil Abloh Has Designs on High Culture

Content Courtesy of: nytimes.com

Written by: Dan Hyman

CHICAGO — One morning last month, still reeling from a weekend stuffed with international traveling on a private jet and a D.J. gig at Coachella, the fashion designer Virgil Abloh strode into the whirring basement workshop here at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). A team of collaborators quickly surrounded him on all sides, each with a notebook or laptop, as he investigated a metallic clothing rack with equal-parts curiosity and skepticism.

“I’d say this is a good start,” Mr. Abloh, the artistic director of men’s wear for Louis Vuitton and creator of the popular streetwear label Off-White, said while surveying the custom-numbered and monogrammed prototype. It was an object he had workshopped with the museum group over months: Eight racks would display clothing he’d designed over his career, and thread together the narrative for “Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech,” the 38-year-old designer’s retrospective, which opens on June 10. Long believing his talent lies not in creating something wildly original but in altering an existing item by roughly 3 percent to make it new, Mr. Abloh felt the clothing rack needed his personal touch.

“It’s adjusting the world to leave my signature, and it has to be exact,” he’ll tell me later, explaining his precise design strategy. For now, he’s spotted an item to complete the rack: a canary-yellow safety manual encased in a matching metal cage. Stripping it from the wall, Mr. Abloh — a trained architect, graphic designer and artisan — held the cage up to the rack and rubbed his faint beard as he assessed its worth for inclusion.

After a brief silence, Mr. Abloh nodded his head in apparent satisfaction. For the exhibition, the manual would register clothing on display: when it was made, its inspiration and context. “In that way it becomes like an archive,” he told the assembled group, which included several museum employees as well as the fabricator. “It’s not, like, something you’ll actually use. It’s just so you feel like there’s a record of everything on there.”

Custom-designed clothing racks by Rob Tivadar. Racks will display about 70 designs from Virgil Abloh’s collections over a decade, including Been Trill, Pyrex, Off-White and Louis Vuitton.

Credit by: David Kasnic for The New York Times

Mr. Abloh’s finishing touch on the cart was a yellow safety cage, which will hold details of each piece of clothing.

Credit by: David Kasnic for The New York Times

Lately, as he’s prepared for his exhibition, Mr. Abloh has been fixated not only on documenting his life and career but also assessing where, if at all, a self-described “nontraditional” artist like himself fits into the modern art-museum landscape. His Milan-based Off-White fashion label, during the fourth quarter of 2018, trailed only Gucci as the “hottest” fashion brand, according to the Lyst Index, which converts sales and “sentiment analysis” into rankings, but he still considers himself an art-world outsider.

He never expected the art world to validate his practice, and in many ways he still feels museums remain noninclusive and even hostile territory for new-age creators like himself, the sort who wear baby-blue screen-printed hoodies and orange Nike Dunks to meetings instead of black turtlenecks and small round glasses. And yet, Mr. Abloh will tell you, he’s long been concerned with legacy. Museums, for all his issues with whom they choose to exalt, still exist in his mind as “the vault to record what’s happened and to represent it for a lifetime.”

“I hope this work is revered and remembered,” Mr. Abloh recalled thinking back during his teenage years, when he first began maintaining the meticulous archive of his creations that he and Michael Darling, his MCA curator, have scoured for this exhibition. It’s a diverse and dense multidisciplinary collection that encompasses more than 15 years in the fields of fashion, music and all matters of design. Mr. Abloh said he senses that some in the art world might know him only from his recent work with Louis Vuitton but, specifically intent on showcasing an artistic throughline to his content — namely the dissonance between what an item is traditionally labeled and the infinite possibilities of what it could be — Mr. Abloh was intent on stuffing as much as possible into this show.

A piece from Off-White’s Summer/Spring collection, 2014.

Credit by: Enrico Ranzato

A piece from Louis Vuitton men’s collection, Spring/Summer 2019 (“Dark Side of the Rainbow”). Mr. Abloh heads the luxury house.

Credit by: Ludwig Bonnet/Louis Vuitton Malletier

Virgil Abloh’s “You’re Obviously in the Wrong Place,” 2015/19, will be shown in a section of the museum exhibit called “The Black Gaze.”

Credit by: Virgil Abloh

“I need this to jell together the kid that knows every Tumblr post that I ever made to someone who doesn’t even know of Off-White but just knows my name keeps popping up,” Mr. Abloh said. He will repeatedly tell you that there’s an “air of impossibility” to his journey from Rockford, Ill., skate punk to architecture student; from fashion-world self-starter and associate of the rapper Kanye West to the first African-American man appointed to head a French luxury fashion house.

Like its creator, the show is varied in its artistic disciplines: There’s jewelry and chairs and luggage and dresses and turntables and a five-foot plexiglass recreation of the rapper’s 2013 “Yeezus” album cover that Mr. Abloh designed while serving as Mr. West’s creative director. If it’s all a bit overwhelming, well, there’s a low-set skateboarding ramp in the galleries that doubles as a bench.

Mr. Abloh designed the album art for “Yeezus” by Kanye West, released in 2013.

Over the past three years, as Mr. Abloh prepared for the exhibition, he’s come to see his formal recognition by a museum as a positive moment, not just for a self-described “commercial designer” who has collaborated with Ikea and Evian water, but for art museums on the whole — a mark of their cultural progress.

“It’s a sign that the system was out of date,” Mr. Abloh said one evening at Soho House Chicago, the members’ club. His archetypical fan and buyer is often derided as a “hypebeast,” a stereotype of a street-wear-obsessed millennial male with disposable income. Mr. Abloh views this person not as a burden on his artistic credibility but rather an opportunity: If they visit the MCA for the first time to view his exhibition, that’s a win for his generation. “It shows that the kids knew better than the establishment,” he said.

For the exhibition’s duration, a black flag emblazoned with the words “Question Everything?” will stand in the plaza. A working definition of “streetwear” prominently features in the opening section of gallery and together they drive home Mr. Abloh’s belief that his exhibition is itself a form of infiltration. For too long, he added, “there was this lost connection between the museum as a cultural institution supposedly representing what’s happening now versus presenting retrospectives of things that have been celebrated a million times over.”

A blueprint for the exterior of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago as it will appear during the exhibition, showing Mr. Abloh’s “Question Everything Flag, 2018.”

Credit by: David Kasnic for The New York Times

The section of the exhibition Mr. Abloh is most excited about is entitled “The Black Gaze.” It showcases his works that, while never explicitly described as such, he now says center on race: billowy black ballerina-inspired dresses he made with Nike for the tennis star Serena Williams as part of his “Queen” collection; Louis Vuitton campaign photographs featuring African children; a neon sign from a 2016 Off-White runway show reading “You’re obviously in the wrong place.”(It’s a line Beverly Hills’ saleswomen used when Julia Roberts enters their store, in her stripper boots, in “Pretty Woman.”)

Samir Bantal, director of AMO, a research studio set up by the architect Rem Koolhaas, has been helping Mr. Abloh design the exhibition and suggested this section. “I thought it would be interesting to show this political side of him a bit more boldly than having it be more subconscious or hidden,” Mr. Bantal said.

When Mr. Darling reached out to Mr. Abloh in 2016 with the idea for an exhibition, the designer’s name was foreign to many outside fashion circles. “And so it really took us a while to get other museums on board to take the show,” Mr. Darling recalled. (“Figures of Speech” will travel later this year to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the ICA Bostonand Brooklyn Museum in 2020).

Mr. Darling’s sweet spot is exhibiting artists who are, he says, “a bit misunderstood,” including the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, who showed at the MCA in 2017. He recalls how some art critics griped when the MCA brought the exhibition, “David Bowie Is,” from the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2015. Mr. Darling said he expects similar pushback from “art snobs” to Mr. Abloh’s exhibition.

“There are going to be people that turn up their noses at it,” the curator said. “But that’s an exciting thing for me: to prove them wrong and show them how serious and how worthy he is of this.”

Mr. Darling referred to Mr. Abloh as an eager, hands-on student. Those who’ve collaborated with Mr. Abloh are aware that he’s sometimes leaning on them but they hardly mind.

Serena Williams in a ballerina-style dress from Virgil Abloh’s “Queen Collection,” an Off-White X Nike collaboration, at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships in New York, August 2018.

Credit by: Jason Szenes/EPA, via Shutterstock

“Virgil is the type of creator who would devour everything around him and turn it into his nourishment,” Mr. Murakami wrote in an email. He first met Mr. Abloh when the Japanese artist designed Mr. West’s 2007 album “Graduation,” and collaborated with the designer for last year’s joint exhibition, “America Too,” at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery.

Jarrett Reynolds, the senior design director at Nike, who has worked with Mr. Abloh for four years, said that there’s a transactional quality to the teamwork. “We know our strong point is utility and performance whereas Virgil’s superpower is his connection to culture, insight, aesthetic,” Mr. Reynolds said.

Bess Williamson, a professor of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, said Mr. Abloh’s showing at the MCA is not so much a risk as an evenhanded credibility exchange between artist and venue.

“I would fit this into the idea of co-branding,” she offered. Mr. Abloh receives the art world’s stamp of approval; the MCA gets a “cool” bump. Of course, there’s also much money to be made: a custom Virgil Abloh store with exclusive merchandise will live in the MCA over the course of the exhibit. And a pop-up Nike store curated and designed by Mr. Abloh is set to open on nearby Michigan Avenue.

Ms. Williamson noted the inherent paradox of a museum showcasing a designer affiliated with a luxury brand like Louis Vuitton. “There’s a sense of democratizing the museum by having popular work — fashion, music, things that are more inviting and less intimidating for a broader audience — but at the same time it’s the most elite version of that,” she said.

One morning last month, perched on a park bench near the museum, and steps from his idling Mercedes G-Wagon, Mr. Abloh admitted that he’s been reassessing where his narrative intersects with that of contemporary art.

“For so long I didn’t see artists or designers that looked like me in spheres of high art or high fashion so I believed I couldn’t do that,” he said. “But now, in this moment, in a way, I’ve become part of the establishment.”

Mr. Abloh, whose work has been primarily recognized in fashion spaces rather than art, trained as an architect. “Now, in this moment, in a way, I’ve become part of the establishment,” he admits.

 Credit by: David Kasnic

ADVERTISING

Ikea Turned the Living Rooms From Simpsons, Stranger Things and Friends Into Perfect Ads

Content Courtesy of: adweek.com

Written by: David Griner

Ikea never mentions The Simpsons by name, but it’s easy to recognize the cartoon’s iconic living room.

You definitely know the rooms, but how well do you know the furnishings?

A new ad campaign from Ikea in the United Arab Emirates has some fun with three of television’s most iconic living rooms by recreating each one solely with Ikea furniture and decorations—plus some help from 3-D design software.

Created by Publicis Spain, the “Ikea Real Life” campaign took two months to track down all the right pieces that are currently on sale from Ikea. They were then compiled and designed via 3-D software to look as close as possible to the memorable living rooms from The Simpsons, Friends and Stranger Things.

“The Ikea team worked closely with the creatives for months. They went through hundreds of items to find the perfect pieces that would bring those iconic rooms,” says Vinod Jayan, managing director for IKEA in the UAE, Qatar, Egypt and Oman. “It was a great collaborative effort that led up to a stunning result. A true testament of what IKEA represents: a place where everyone can bring whatever idea they see or have to life.”

On a microsite for the campaign, you can see each room and learn more about the furnishings featured in the ads.

In addition to appearing in ads and some editions of the Ikea catalog, the campaign will also make a real-world appearance, with the rooms being brought to life at some Ikea stores in the Middle East.

CREDITS:

Agency: Publicis Spain

Chief Creative Officer: Eduardo Marques

Creative Director: Juliana Paracencio

Creative Director: Luiz Vicente Simões

Art Director: Diego Fernández-cid

Copywriter: Guillermo Laureano Ley Núñez

3-D Artist/Illustrator: Bruno Rodrigo de Miranda

Client: IKEA, UAE

IKEA Regional GM Marketing, Com., Interior Design, Consumer engagement: Carla Klumpenaar

IKEA Regional Marketing Com. Manager: Amer Yaghi

UBER LAUNCHES SUBMARINE RIDES TO GREAT BARRIER REEF

Content Courtesy of: adage.com

It’s a new feature called ScUber—and you only need $2,000

Credit by: Tourism and Events Queensland

The ScUber experience will be available from May 27 to June 18, initially from Heron Island off the coast of Gladstone in the Southern Great Barrier Reef region, and then from the coast of Port Douglas in Cairns, from June 9 until June 18.

For A$3,000 ($2,068), the experience includes being picked up from, and dropped off at, your location via the Uber app, then a helicopter ride to the launch point (either Heron Island or Port Douglas), a one-hour ride in the ScUber submarine, and a half-day of snorkeling and touring the Great Barrier Reef.

The submarine service is designed to support the protection of the coral reef system through Uber’s new partnership with the organization Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef.

Credit by: Tourism and Events Queensland

Uber is no stranger to nontraditional marketing stunts, having previously ventured into ice cream delivery and a service called UberKittens, which allowed customers to request a playdate with kittens to support the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The company is also working to develop a flying taxi via a partnership with Aurora Flight Sciences.

The submarine offering comes after Uber’s initial public offering flop on May 11; shares plunged immediately after trading opened and fell as much as 8.8% from its IPO price of $45 per share by the end of its first day. The stock price is down about 10% from the IPO figure amid flareups in U.S.-China trade negotiations and the recent dismal performance of rival Lyft Inc.

THE NORTH FACE APOLOGIZES FOR ITS WIKIPEDIA HACK

Content Courtesy of: adage.com

Written by: Adrianne Pasquarelli

The stunt was part of a campaign from the sportswear brand’s Brazil office

A North Face campaign designed to hack Wikipedia’s system of disclosing paid advocacy has resulted in an apology from the sportswear brand as well as an unflattering update to The North Face’s own Wikipedia page.

Earlier this week, The North Face’s Brazilian office touted a new campaign in which the brand updated the imagery on the Wikipedia pages of popular outdoors destinations to include pictures of athletes wearing the North Face products. The effort was designed to pull the brand to the top of Google search pages without costing the brand a cent.

But Wikipedia editors and some consumers were outraged at the stunt, which Wikipedia says breaches “the Terms of User for undisclosed paid advocacy.” The North Face issued an apology via Twitter.

Editors of the Wikipedia platform removed the photos, resulting in the North Face’s apology soon after. A spokeswoman for The North Face reiterated the apology and commitment to better Wikipedia training moving forward.

By Thursday morning, the brand’s Wikipedia page was updated with a “Controversies” section. The text now reads, “In May 2019, The North Face’s advertising agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made used Wikipedia to try to promote their products in Google search results as part of an advertisement campaign. Their actions violated Wikipedia’s term of use on undisclosed paid editing.”

TECH

The First Public Schools In The US Will Start Using Facial Recognition Next Week

Content Courtesy of: buzzfeednews.com

Written by: Davey Alba

Next week, a school district in western New York will become the first in the United States to pilot a facial recognition system on its students and faculty. On Monday, June 3, the Lockport City School District will light up its Aegis system as part of a pilot project that will make it broadly operational by Sept. 1, 2019. The district has eight schools.

Superintendent Michelle Bradley announced the move on Tuesday, as first reported by The Lockport Union-Sun and Journal. Bradley described the test as an “initial implementation phase” meant to troubleshoot the system, train district officials on its use, and discuss proper procedures with local law enforcement in the event of an alert triggered by the facial recognition tech.

The Lockport pilot comes amid increased scrutiny of facial recognition’s efficacy across the US, including growing civil rights concerns and worries that the tech may serve to further entrench societal biases. Earlier this month, San Francisco banned police from using facial recognition, and similar bills in the US hope to do the same. Amazon has endured persistent pressure — including from its own shareholders — for its aggressive salesmanship of its facial Rekognition system to law enforcement agencies. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed concern that facial recognition could be used as a form of social control in a congressional hearing on the technology last week.

At the same time, reports and studies of facial recognition’s inaccuracies and mistakes — especially on women and people of color — continue to emerge.

Other schools have considered implementing facial recognition systems, but Lockport will be the first public school district to begin using the tech, the American Civil Liberties Union told BuzzFeed News.

BuzzFeed News has reached out to the Lockport City School District and the maker of the Aegis system for comment.

Lockport resident Jim Shultz, a vocal critic of the school district’s plan to use facial recognition, described the upcoming pilot as “a dicey move”: “I think the district is desperate not to begin another school year with their expensive system just sitting there,” he told BuzzFeed News.

In March 2018, Lockport announced its plans to install a facial recognition security system, which it funded through the New York Smart Schools Bond Act — an act meant to help state schools augment their instructional tech. But instead of buying laptops and iPads, Lockport submitted a proposal for a high-tech security system, and allocated much of the $4.2 million it was given toward adding dozens of surveillance cameras in the school and installing the facial recognition system Aegis, which is provided by Canada-based SN Technologies. To date, Lockport has spent $1.4 million to get the system up and running.

“Aegis is an early warning system that informs staff of threats including guns or individuals who have been identified as not allowed in our buildings,” stated an FAQ distributed to the school’s parents and obtained by BuzzFeed News. “Aegis has the ability [to screen] every door and throughout buildings to identify people or guns. Early detection of a threat to our schools allows for a quicker and more effective response.”

“San Francisco banned this tech, and it’s this major city closest to all the people who understand this tech the best. Why in the world would we want this to come to New York, and in a place where there are children?”

The district’s letter to parents makes the case for facial recognition in light of the specter of recurring school shootings. “Much to our dismay, acts of violence in schools continue to occur in our country,” it reads. “Please be assured that the Lockport City School District continues to make school security a priority.”

According to the FAQ, Aegis will track individuals who are “level 2 or 3 sex offenders, students who have been suspended from school, staff who have been suspended and/or are on administrative leave, any persons that have been notified that they may not be present on District property, anyone prohibited from entry to District property by court order … or anyone believed to pose a threat based on credible information presented to the District.” The Lockport Journal further reported that the object recognition system will also be able to detect 10 types of guns.

The video footage will be kept for 60 days, after which it will be erased from the server, the FAQ says. And while it adds that the system “will not generate information on or record the movements of any other district students, staff or visitors,” previous reporting from BuzzFeed News has shown that in order to effectively flag the faces of “persons of interest,” facial recognition systems must also disregard the faces of persons who are not of interest. In other words, it analyzes them, too.

After Lockport’s initial announcement, the New York Civil Liberties Union investigated the effort and wrote letters to the New York State Education Department, asking it to intervene and block the project. “This is opening the floodgates,“ Stefanie Coyle, education counsel for NYCLU, told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “San Francisco banned this tech, and it’s this major city closest to all the people who understand this tech the best. Why in the world would we want this to come to New York, and in a place where there are children?”

Meanwhile, New York State Assembly Member Monica Wallace has introduced a bill that, if passed, would force Lockport to stop the use of facial recognition for a year while the State Education Department further studied the tech.

But the NYCLU’s Coyle also pointed out that the New York State Assembly’s legislative session is “almost over” — it comes to a close in June. “We’re running out of time for [this bill] to be passed this session. So if it doesn’t pass this session, there’s nothing that will stop Lockport from implementing this facial recognition system in the fall.”

UPDATE

On Thursday, the New York State Education Department told BuzzFeed News it has asked Lockport to delay its use of facial recognition technology on students.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson said, “The Department is currently reviewing the Lockport CSD’s privacy assessment to ensure that student data will be protected with the addition of the new technology. The Department has not come to the conclusion that the District has demonstrated the necessary framework is in place to protect the privacy of data subjects and properly secure the data. As such, it is the Department’s continued recommendation that the District delay its use of facial recognition technology.

Regulations are in the process of being finalized that will adopt a standard for data privacy and security for all state educational agencies. We recommended in past communication that the District consider reviewing the standard and related materials in developing and refining its data security and privacy program. We will remain in contact with school district officials.”

As first reported by The Lockport Journal’s Connor Hoffman, District Superintendent Michelle Bradley said she made the state education department aware of the district’s intentions to activate its facial recognition system earlier this month, but no one from the department responded at the time — so Lockport assumed it could go ahead with its trial run of the technology.

CULTURE

A Video Game Went Viral Across India. Then Police Started Arresting Its Young Players.

Content Courtesy of: buzzfeednews.com

Written by: Pranav Dixit

Fears about PUBG’s violence and addictiveness led officials in the Indian state of Gujarat to ban the video game. But things didn’t stop there — soon young men were being arrested for gaming.

An effigy of a PUBG character is readied be set on fire as part of the Hindu festival of Holi in Mumbai on March 19. Representations of evil are burned on the holiday. The text on the board below warns people about PUBG’s addictive effects.

Credit by: Himanshu Bhatt

It was 10 p.m. on a sweltering March evening, and Siraj Ansari was perched on a makeshift stool outside Mayur Cafe, a small tea shop in Ahmedabad, a city in the western state of Gujarat in India. Ansari and three of his friends sat glued to their mobile screens along with half a dozen other neighborhood boys, cheap headphones plugged tightly into their ears, and oblivious to the world around them.

They didn’t hear the patrol van pulling up, didn’t hear the slam of car doors, didn’t hear the footsteps clicking toward them, didn’t hear and the boys around them scrambling off into the darkness. When Ansari looked up, a plainclothes police officer glowered at him, and motioned to him to stand up with his baton. Ansari unplugged his headphones slowly and rose, tapping his friends on the shoulders.

You were playing PUBG, the cop said. We saw you. We’ve been watching you.

PUBG, short for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, is a hugely popular, online multiplayer shooting game that’s been topping the charts in countries around the world, including India — but in the second week of March, authorities in multiple Gujarati cities, including Ahmedabad, had banned it, saying it was too addictive and violent. Ansari had heard about the ban in the news, but hadn’t taken it seriously. After all, it’s just a video game, he had thought. What could possibly happen?

Within minutes, the cops had snatched the four boys’ phones, bundled the boys into the van, and sped off to a police station just minutes away, while the boys sat in terrified silence in the back.

Gaming has only become part of India’s still-young digital culture in the last few years as millions of residents who just got their first smartphones suddenly found themselves swept up in phenomena like Candy Crush Saga and Pokémon Go. But nothing — nothing — has come close to becoming as viral as PUBG.

Within months of its launch, PUBG became the top-grossing app on Android in the country and vaulted overnight into the public consciousness. Its popularity has been unprecedented. There was a PUBG-themed wedding photoshoot; a teen racked up a $700 bill for in-app purchases on his dad’s credit card (that’s enough to pay several months of rent in a large Indian city). Even Bollywood jumped in, getting a popular actor to promote a military-themed movie by playing PUBG live in front of signage with the film’s release date.

But the backlash followed just as swiftly. In January, an activist based in Hyderabad demanded a national ban of the game, saying it promoted violence and cruelty. In February, an 11-year-old boy from Mumbai and his mother filed a court petition to get PUBG banned in schools because, she claimed, it promoted “violence, aggression, cyber bullying” and was addicting. And in March, India’s National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights sought a report from the country’s Information and Technology Ministry asking what action it was taking against the game.

No state went as far, however, as the western state of Gujarat. On March 6, police in the Gujarati city of Rajkot banned the game within its city limits.

“From the various sources, it comes to our knowledge that after playing games like [PUBG,] violent traits are shown to be increased in youth and children,” Rajkot Police Commissioner Manoj Agarwal wrote in an official notification. “Due to these games, the education of children and youth are being affected and it affects the behaviour, manners, speech and development of the youth and children.”

Anyone caught playing the game would be jailed and fined under Indian criminal laws, he added, urging people to call the nearest police station if they saw anyone playing it. Agarwal did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ requests for comment.

Playing a video game seemed like dubious grounds for arrest to PUBG fans and free internet advocates, but less than a week later, other parts of Gujarat, including Ahmedabad, the state’s largest city, and Vadodara, the third-largest city, had banned the game, citing similar reasons.

The national hysteria around PUBG is unfurling at a moment when Indians are struggling with fallout from rapid technological progress: the deadly spread of rumors on WhatsApp, rampant harassment on social media, and dangerous misinformation campaigns. People now demand that tech companies grapple with their effects on users — and yet the particular panic around PUBG and the resulting arrests in Gujarat reflect lawmakers’ blunt response when forces they see as destabilizing sweep in. Video game bans are not unfamiliar; but arresting young men for playing them, to safeguard “the education of children and youth,” is a severe and questionable method of protecting the interests of young adults.

Souvik Mukherjee, a professor at Kolkata’s Presidency University who has a PhD in computer games as storytelling media, said digital gaming used to be restricted to a young, urban population in India, “but now, with the huge surge towards mobile gaming, those boundaries have been crossed.” As gaming “is a growing phenomenon and is beginning to have a serious cultural impact” in India, it should be studied more closely “so that such uninformed reactions to games are no longer an issue,” he said.

A young boy plays PUBG on his mobile phone at a restaurant in New Delhi on May 3.

Credit by: Nasir Kachroo

Siraj Ansari and his friends — who asked not to be identified for this story — started playing PUBG in mid-2018, shortly after it was released on smartphones. None of them had played video games before, but were hooked to PUBG’s simplicity, its frenetic pace, and the thrill of playing online in real time with hundreds of people across the country. “Sometimes, we simply hang out in the game and use the voice chat feature to talk to people all over India about their lives, politics, the news,” said Ansari.

The premise of PUBG is straightforward: You parachute onto an island along with 99 other online players with no possessions except the clothes your character is wearing. Once you land, you need to scavenge for weapons and other collectibles, and kill everybody else on the island until you’re the last person standing, Hunger Games–style. You can play solo or team up with your mates, and you can talk directly with your teammates or anybody else on the island in real time simply by firing up your microphone. It’s a battle royale style of gaming that has swept the globe for the last two years. According to mobile market research firm Sensor Tower, PUBG Mobile has made$439 million so far. Bluehole, PUBG’s South Korean developer, first released the game on PCs and Microsoft’s Xbox One console in 2017. But it was only in 2018 when Chinese internet giant Tencent published the game as a free-to-play title on smartphones that PUBG exploded in India.

Juhapura, where Ansari and his friends were arrested from, is a poor Muslim neighborhood located four miles outside downtown Ahmedabad. At night, Juhapura comes alive. Hundreds of people throng its markets post dinnertime, buying meat and vegetables and sipping sweet, milky chai from tiny glass cups served by sweaty stall owners in skullcaps. And ever since PUBG swept the country, the ghetto’s youngsters have taken to huddling outside these shops, shooting the breeze, and shooting down players from across the country by forming tight little teams in-game.

When the cop approached him and his friends, they were puzzled, Ansari said. “We didn’t know what was wrong.” They had heard about the PUBG ban in the news — just a day before, police in the city of Rajkot, around 200 miles away, had arrested 10 people for playing it — but hadn’t taken it seriously. “We thought it was one of those freak stories that doesn’t really happen to normal people,” said Ansari.

Video games have always been controversial. Some, such as Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat, have provoked outrage and been banned in multiple countries around the world. But arresting local youth for playing a video game crosses a new line in India.

Ansari had never been inside a police station in his life. Now, shortly after midnight, he was sitting across the desk from two plainclothes police officers who threatened to throw him and three friends pacing nervously behind him in jail. Of the six people Ahmedabad police eventually arrested for playing PUBG, four were Muslims from Juhapura.

For hours, the young men groveled. They’d be better, they said, they’d never do it again. But the cops said they had been keeping an eye on the boys for days and had evidence against them on video. They refused to budge.

The PUBG Corporation, a South Asian subsidiary of PUBG developer Bluehole, declined to comment. Publisher Tencent did not respond to multiple inquiries from BuzzFeed News.

Mayur Cafe in Juhapura, a popular spot where PUBG players gather to play after dark.

A.K. Singh, Ahmedabad’s police commissioner who signed off on the notification to ban the game in the city, told BuzzFeed News that he took the step because playing the game was reportedly “leading to behavioral change and addiction among the city’s youngsters” as complaints poured in from parents that their kids were becoming more aggressive and isolated. Singh said that the city police had also received multiple representations from concerned parents that the game was too addictive. “We endorse our decision [to ban the game],” he said.

“I’m really not sure what behavioral changes the police are talking about,” said one of the three people who were arrested with Ansari from Juhapura. “We play it purely for entertainment. It’s a stress-buster. Sure, it’s true that a lot of school and college kids play it more than it is healthy for them. But surely the police have bigger fish to fry than arresting them?”

Two hours after groveling with the cops, the boys were finally allowed to make a single phone call. Too scared to call their families, they called Younouzbhai Jambhuwalla, the owner of Mayur Cafe, a short, portly man in his late fifties, whom they knew well. Jambhuwalla had seen the two cops in plainclothes taking the boys away, and he’d already been making calls of his own.

After midnight, he called Kaushar Ali, a tall, stocky man in his early forties who has lived in Juhapura for more than two decades. Ali’s part social worker — pushing authorities for better civic facilities — and part political activist — pushing the ghetto’s Muslim minority to get a foothold in the city’s majoritarian politics. Ali’s connections could help the boys stay out of jail for playing a video game, Jambhuwalla hoped.

India, the world’s most populous democracy, has struggled with aspects of technology flooding across its borders. As mobile devices quickly become ubiquitous, parents and educators are raising concerns about online addiction and the game’s risk of spurring violent behavior and distracting young people from their studies. One minister in Goa said PUBG had become a “demon in every house” and demanded that it be restricted. Doctors at a leading digital addiction clinic in Bangalore said they were seeing several people addicted to PUBG each week. Even Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, seemed clued in. When a concerned mother told him about her son’s mobile gaming addiction at a public meeting in February, Modi immediately replied, “Is that the PUBGone?”

Government responses to perceived online threats have been strong across India at times. There have been more than 300 reported internet shutdowns in the country in the last six years, often in the wake of violent events.

But in particular, Gujarat — a conservative state known for being the home state of Modi, India’s controversial Hindu nationalist prime minister — has been vigilant about curbing the onslaught of not just technology, but all manner of behaviors that officials find offensive (like smearing cake on your friends’ faces at a birthday celebration). It was one of the first in India to block mobile internet in 2014 during a law and order situation, according to the nonprofit Software Freedom and Law Center. Bollywood movies based on a 2002 massacre of Muslims in the state were banned in Gujarat too. And days after India temporarily banned TikTok in April (saying that it exposed minors to pornography), the police commissioner of Rajkot, who arrested 10 people for playing PUBG, requested that Google and Apple remove PUBG from their app stores, saying it was harmful to children (they didn’t).

“I think these bans in Gujarat in particular aren’t really about one particular game or an app,” Ali told BuzzFeed News, sipping a steaming cup of tea at a restaurant late one night in April, not far from where the cops had arrested the four boys. He spoke slowly, drawing out his words. “It’s a way for the state to remind people of its authority every once in a while. It’s a way to show you that if they want to put you in jail for playing a video game, well, they can.”

There are reasons flexing these muscles is easier for authorities in Gujarat, according to Nirjhari Sinha, a human rights activist and the founder of the Jan Sangharsh Manch, a volunteer-led civil rights organization based in the state. After the 2002 Gujarat riots — in which right-wing Hindu nationalists slaughtered hundreds of Muslim men, women, and children in the city over three chilly February days — state authorities have invoked Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code, a Colonial-era law that prohibits four or more people from assembling in a public place together to prevent riots, nearly constantly. It was one of the sections under which several youngsters playing PUBG were charged. “By invoking this section, it’s easy for authorities to pick you up under any flimsy pretext,” Sinha told BuzzFeed News. “You can’t gather in groups, and you can’t protest or hold demonstrations.”

By the middle of March, Gujarat state police had arrested 21 people, most of them college students, for playing PUBG in public. In Ahmedabad and Rajkot, cops in plainclothes patrolled outside college campuses, trendy cafés, and youth hostels, all places where the likelihood of finding young people playing video games on their phones was the highest.

Their strategy was simple, said two police officers involved in the arrests in Ahmedabad who asked not to be named: They swooped down on all groups of boys they saw with their heads buried in smartphones held in landscape mode. More often than not, they struck gold. Some of them were let off with stern warnings. Others had charges slapped against them, were convicted in court, and fined. A 19-year-old college student from Rajkot spent a night in jail before being bailed out the next day.

Singh, the police commissioner, compared the severity of the PUBG arrests to a traffic offense, but to those arrested, the consequences are personal. “I feel tainted by this incident,” one of the boys who was arrested told BuzzFeed News. “My parents were mad I got into trouble with the police when they found out. They’re okay now, but sometimes, my relatives and cousins will still tease me about it and I don’t like that.”

A 20-year-old man who was convicted by the court for playing the game and was eventually let off with a paltry 100 rupees (less than $2) fine, told BuzzFeed News that he was concerned that this conviction was going to remain on his record forever. “I’m about to apply for a passport for the first time in my life,” he said. “What if they deny me one because of this run-in with the cops?”

When BuzzFeed News attempted to contact a 21-year-old in Rajkot about his arrest, his older brother boomed, “Never call my brother again! We’re extremely stigmatized by this incident. Don’t make it worse. Don’t rub salt into our wounds.”

Mayur Cafe in Juhapura.

Credit by: Pranav Dixit 

Soon, the debate about PUBG blew up on air on Gujarat’s FM radio stations.

At the Ahmedabad station of Radio Mirchi, India’s largest FM network, Dhvanit Thaker watched the station’s WhatsApp tip line light up with texts and voice messages from listeners. The day Rajkot police arrested 10 people for playing PUBG, the calls started pouring in. Thaker, who is publicly opposed to the ban, listened patiently as upset parents poured their hearts out about their children’s PUBG addiction.

One mother said her 16-year-old son had become aggressive after playing the game for more than 10 hours each day. “Whenever his little sister asks him for something, he hits her,” she wailed. “He never used to do that earlier. I feel helpless.” Another one applauded the ban. “At least now I have something to tell my son to dissuade him from playing,” she said.

Calls from people who played PUBG also poured in: Some were angry at what they saw as a violation of their personal freedom, others boasted that playing PUBG had improved their reflexes and their ability to multitask. “I didn’t tell people on air to not play the game,” he said. “I merely warned them about the impact that it can have on the mind. I’m not into preaching. I’m a friend.”

After receiving an email from an upset mother who wanted help for her 20-year-old son who had become addicted to playing PUBG and smoking cigarettes at the same time, Dhvanit got a psychiatrist on air, who said that although the ban itself was a gimmick, it was high time that India had a debate about the dangers that video games posed.

Meanwhile, reports were flooding in from around the country: In the Indian state of Karnataka, a teenager failed a test after filling his answer sheet with a walk-through of how to play PUBG instead of answering economics questions, saying he was too addicted to the game to prepare for it. In Telangana, a 16-year-old boy reportedly killed himself after his mother scolded him for playing PUBG too much. And in Maharashtra, two men who were hooked on PUBG and were playing it near railway tracks were run over by a train.

“Whenever a game reaches the kind of mass popularity that PUBG has, you’re bound to find extreme cases,” said Daniel Ahmad, senior analyst at Niko Partners, a market research firm that focuses on the Asian gaming industry. “In countries like India that don’t have a tradition of video games, there’s certain a concern from the older generation and anyone who doesn’t really understand gaming about what it’s doing to young people.” Emerging markets like India need to understand issues around gaming and technology addiction thoroughly before resorting to knee-jerk bans, Ahmad said. “That’s not really a solution.”

On March 15, the Ahmedabad City Police released a statement saying that the authorities would work with experts “to provide psychological help and counselling services to rehabilitate victims and wean them away to healthier recreational pursuits.”

Singh told BuzzFeed News that the department already has a couple of counselors on board as part of a victim support system. Concerned parents can approach the police and be connected with these counselors. “We would like to be a catalyst that rakes up societal concerns,” said Singh. “We believe that by banning the game, we did that, and we intend to have more affirmative action in the future.”

Mayur Cafe in Juhapura.

Credit by: Pranav Dixit 

Kaushar Ali and Younouz Jambhuwalla were able to convince the cops to not press charges against Ansari and his three friends after two hours of cajoling. Instead, the group was let go with a stern warning. As they were leaving, one of the cops who had caught them tapped Ansari on the arm. “Look,” he said. “I get that you like the game. Even I play it, but privately. So play in your house. Don’t play it in public.”

Not long after their arrests, the bans on PUBG were lifted in Ahmedabad. By way of justification, authorities said they were calling off the ban since exams in state schools were over and children no longer needed to focus on their studies. In Rajkot and Vadodara, as well as other parts of Gujarat, the ban was called off due to “demand from youth and representations.” Still, it left behind some traces of pain.

Ansari said that he and his friends still play the game, but they’ve cut back on it. “Each time I play the game, I keep thinking about what happened to me,” he said, but there’s anger in his voice. “You know, if the government really wants to stop people from playing this game, why don’t they ban its servers from the country? Why don’t they make it just stop working here? Don’t harass common people like us.”

And yet, some advocates still challenged what they saw as arbitrary restrictions on people’s liberties in court. On April 8, the Internet Freedom Foundation, a New Delhi–based organization, filed a public interest litigation against the PUBG ban in Gujarat. “For a young student who is worried about his family’s reaction and future career prospects, being arrested by the police can be a deeply traumatic experience. To us, the PUBG ban is fuelled by moral panic, and the harms from video games require scientific studies and non-legal methods of engagement,” wrote IFF on its website. The judges threw out the case in about 10 minutes, essentially saying there was no constitutional right to play video games.

IFF Director Apar Gupta told BuzzFeed News that the rate at which new technology is reaching India’s more than a billion people is putting pressure on the country’s constitutional understanding of citizens’ fundamental rights when it comes to the internet. “We need well-articulated regulatory processes,” he said. “We don’t have the breadth of laws required to understand the internet in 2019, and we don’t have an enforcement framework. So bans are a natural course of action for the government.”

“India is dishing out ham-handed solutions without having a clear direction about what its online space should look like,” he said.

Singh, the police commissioner, has a different take. “Everything has two sides,” he said. “If you’re a concerned parent who is seeing your child’s life getting destroyed because they are addicted to this game, you have a different point of view. If you haven’t experienced that, you care more about freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I think it’s important to take a holistic view on this.”

It’s 2 in the morning and the four boys say they need to head home. Even at this hour, the cramped lanes of Juhapura still bustle with activity. Ansari walks for a few yards, reaches a fork in the road, and then turns around. “You know what, go ahead and use my name in your story,” he says. “I’m looking to immigrate to Oman as soon as I can. I’m sick of the government telling me what to do.”

Jimmy Fallon rips into ‘Game of Thrones’ for the stray water bottle in the finale

Uh oh. Looks like someone left a water bottle under their chair in the Game of Thrones finale.

Jimmy Fallon shared his thoughts on the finale’s parting gift to eagle-eyed viewers.

“First the coffee cup, now water, at this point the Iron Throne should just have cup holders,” he quipped. “I guess we were just one episode way from being introduced to Lord Dunkin’ and Lady Gatorade.”

Guess we’ll never know.

The internet pays tribute to Grumpy Cat

Content Courtesy of: mashable.com

Written by: Marcus Gilmer

Proving once again that there is nothing good about 2019, the internet woke up Friday morning to the news of Grumpy Cat’s passing, the viral pet known for its resting grouch face.

Grumpy Cat’s owners announced on Friday on Instagram that the cat passed away on Tuesday at the age of 7. The internet reacted by sharing their condolences and memories of the famous feline, starting with Aubrey Plaza, who starred in the Grumpy Cat movie, as well as Lil BUB and Nala Cat, two of Grumpy Cat’s internet famous pet peers.

 

FOOD

Burger King plans nationwide rollout of Impossible Burger by the end of 2019

Content Courtesy of: foodnavigator-usa.com

Written by: Elaine Watson

Will plant-based meat go mainstream? It’s early days, but there were some positive signs this morning as Burger King confirmed that trials of the Impossible Burger in St Louis went so well that the chain aims to roll out the plant-based burger nationwide (7,000+ locations) by the year end.

A spokeswoman said: “The Impossible Whopper test in St. Louis went exceedingly well and as a result, there are plans to extend testing into additional markets in the very near future.

“Burger King Restaurants are targeting nationwide availability of the Impossible Whopper by the end of 2019. Burger King Restaurants in St Louis are showing encouraging results and Impossible Whopper sales are complementing traditional Whopper purchases.”

The trial in Burger King which follows launches in Red Robin and White Castle for Impossible Foods and in Del Taco, A&W, and Carl’s Jr for rival beyond Meat is a “major milestone for the plant-based meat industry,” Zak Weston, foodservice analyst at the Good Food Institute (GFI) told FoodNavigator-USA.

This is just the beginning. Burger King has thrown down the gauntlet and we expect to see similar moves from other industry players. Burgers are just the start and we’re likely to see plant-based chicken, fish and pork rolled out on menus and becoming increasingly popular.

“These chains clearly recognize the huge business opportunity here. Industrial animal farming is extraordinarily inefficient and as economies of scale kick in and supply ramps up, the price of plant-based alternatives will plummet to well below that of their animal-based competitors.

“Once this happens, the fact that even Burger King\u2019s taste testers can\u2019t tell a difference will dictate that the Impossible Whopper and other plant-based meats will become the norm. This change can’t come soon enough.”

ART

Notre Dame Cathedral fire: What caused it and what happens next

Content Courtesy of: cnet.com

Written by: Shelby Brown

Officials speculate that a possible electrical short-circuit is responsible for the fire, in tandem with the cathedral’s lack of fire-prevention safeguards.

The world mourned with Paris as a fire tore through the Cathedral of Notre Dame on Monday.

French judicial police believe an electrical short-circuit is most likely what caused the devastating fire that blazed through Paris’ historic Notre Dame Cathedral on Monday. According to the anonymous official who spoke with the Associated Press on Thursday, investigators still aren’t allowed inside the cathedral for safety reasons.

Authorities are still investigating the fire as an accident but are taking the cathedral’s outdated fire-prevention safeguards into consideration, The New York Times reported.

Elements like firewalls and sprinkler systems were reportedly missing from Notre Dame’s attic, where the fire burned, by choice. Electrical wiring reportedly wasn’t allowed in the cathedral’s attic to preserve its original design and to protect the lead ceiling’s timber support beams.

Valérie Pécresse, the president of the Île-de-France region in which Paris lies, confirmed Tuesday that the fire was an accident, though officials haven’t elaborated on the exact cause. Paris police said it may be linked to the $6.8 million renovation efforts underway.

In the aftermath of the fire, French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to rebuild the landmark. Experts now plan to fortify what’s left of the 850-year-old structure, and donations have already started coming in from French philanthropists and charities to fund the extensive rebuilding costs.

It took nine hours and more than 400 firefighters to bring the blaze under control and eventually put it out altogether in the early hours of Tuesday. No deaths were reported, but one firefighter was reportedly seriously injured.

Though fire crews initially said they “may not be able to save Notre Dame,” they were able to preserve the main structure including the outer walls and the two bell towers. Photos from inside the cathedral taken Tuesday morning showed debris still smoldering around the altar. On Tuesday, a tweet surfaced showing that the rooster from the iconic spire survived the fire.

Additionally, three beehives — home to about 180,000 bees — located beneath the rose window also survived the fire. Notre Dame’s beekeeper, Nicolas Geant, said he received a call from the cathedral’s spokesperson who said the bees were flying in and out of their hives. Geant posted photos of bees buzzing around one of the gargoyles last week.

People in France and around the world were in mourning over the damage, including the loss of the building’s spire and part of the roof. Artifacts and artwork in the cathedral were saved by Parisian fire services and the city’s deputy mayor for tourism and sports, Jean-Francois Martins, and his team. They were able to salvage the Crown of Thorns, the Blessed Sacrament and other items. The rescued works were transported to the Louvre Museum for safekeeping.

“We made a human chain, with our friends from the church … to get, as quick as possible, to get all the relics,” Martins told CBS News. “Everything is safe and undamaged, and in our really bad day, we had one good news.”

‘Everything is burning’

The fire started shortly after the cathedral closed around 6:45 p.m. local time and grew quickly in windy conditions. The narrow streets, the heat of the flames and the Parisian landmark’s positioning along the River Seine made it difficult for firefighters to get closer.

At around 7:53 p.m., the spire fell amid the flames. Less than 15 minutes later, part of the roof collapsed, Reuters reported. The island where the cathedral is located, Paris’ Ile de la Cité, was evacuated just before 8:30 p.m.

“Everything is burning; nothing will remain from the frame,” Notre Dame spokesperson Andre Finot told CBS News shortly after the blaze began.

Though President Donald Trump tweeted that “perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out,” the civil defense agency of the French government responded that firefighters are using all means to combat the blaze, “except for water-bombing aircrafts which, if used, could lead to the collapse of the entire structure of the cathedral.”

A city united

Images of the fire quickly swept the globe on social media. And in Paris, France 24 reported, people gathered and to sing Ave Maria and Catholic hymns.

“Our Lady of Paris in flames. Emotion of a whole nation. Thought for all Catholics and for all French. Like all our countrymen, I’m sad tonight to see this part of us burn,” Macron tweeted. France 24 reported that Macron is treating the fire as a national emergency.

In a tweet, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said firefighters were working to control the flames from the “terrible” fire and she urged residents and visitors to respect the security perimeter.

Much like after the terrorist attacks on Paris in 2015, politicians, religious leaders and ordinary citizens from around also tweeted statements of support.

Social media also delved into one of its favorite pastimes — conspiracy theories — after a US politician tweeted out unverified information after a friend in Europe told him the fire had been set intentionally.

Christopher Hale, who ran for Congress in Tennessee and writes opinion columns for Time magazine, quickly specified that his friend’s information hadn’t been confirmed and deleted his original tweet, according to The Daily Beast. But that didn’t stop far-right conspiracy theorists from using Hale’s tweet as proof that terrorists had started the fire.

“In retrospect, I absolutely never should have tweeted it in the first place,” Hale told the publication on Tuesday. “I don’t think I had the foresight about how much the worst parts of the internet will grasp for straws in their conspiracy theories.”

French authorities haven’t suggested arson as a cause for the blaze.

On Thursday, firefighters from the Paris Fire Brigade attended a reception in their honor at Macron’s residence, the Élysée Palace. According to The New York Times, there’s an additional ceremony scheduled for later in the day.

The race to save history

While the Gothic cathedral, which dates from the 12th century, is a masterpiece itself with its flying buttresses, breathtaking stained glass windows and carved gargoyles, inside its walls are priceless Catholic relics and artifacts, paintings, statues and other precious artwork. Fortunately, some of the treasures were safely retrieved as the fire unfolded, including a centuries-old crown of thorns made from reeds and gold. And just days ago, copper statues representing the 12 apostles and four evangelists were removed for cleaning as part of the restoration project.

The cathedral’s facade has been the subject of countless paintings and its soaring form also inspired Victor Hugo’s famous novel, Notre-Dame de Paris or The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Aside from being one of the most important religious sights in France, it’s also a symbol of Paris and one of the city’s most visited monuments.

How to see Notre Dame Cathedral

It’s too soon to say when restoration on the cathedral will begin. For now, if you want to visit or relive a trip there, check out these virtual tours both inside the majestic halls and from a birds-eye view of the timeless architecture.

Not to Rush Notre-Dame Restoration

‘Let’s Take the Time to Diagnose’: In Open Letter, Experts Urge Emmanuel Macron Not to Rush Notre-Dame Restoration

Content Courtesy of: artnews.com

Written by: Alex Greenberger

Mandatory Credit Photo by: CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON/
Cathedral of Notre-Dame of Paris fire aftermath, France – 16 Apr 2019

The debris inside the Cathedrale de Notre-Dame following the fire.

After the fire that badly damaged Notre-Dame Cathedral, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, pledged that the structure would be rebuilt by 2024—in time for the city to host the Olympics. The goal struck some as overly ambitious, and now the French newspaper Le Figaro has published a lengthy missive signed by 1,169 academics and curators urging the president not to speed through what could be a very difficult process.

“Let’s take the time to diagnose,” reads the letter, which was published on Sunday. “A number of [experts] can be found in your administration, in the Ministry of Culture. Let us remind you of their expertise, take the right path to find them, and then, yes, set an ambitious deadline for an exemplary restoration not only for the present but also for generations to come.”

Among the signatories are curators and academics from France and beyond. Numerous curators from the Louvre count among them, including Nicolas Milovanovic and Cécile Scailliérez, both chief curators in the museum’s painting department. Also included are officials from the Petit Palais, the Grand Palais, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Musee de Cluny.

American officials who signed the letter include Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Xavier F. Salomon, the chief curator of the Frick Collection; Barry Bergdoll, who formerly served as chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s design department; Davide Gasparotto, the senior curator of the painting department at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and Guillaume Kientz, a curator of European art at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

The rebuilding effort at Notre-Dame has been a subject under close watch within France and internationally. Shortly after the fire was contained, French collector François Pinault and his son François-Henri said they would put €100 million (about $113 million) toward the efforts. Hours later, collector Bernard Arnault announced that he would donate €200 million (about $226 million) to the project.

Some experts have cast doubt on how much a rebuilding project could salvage. Robert A. Maxwell, a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York who signed the open letter, told ARTnews at the time of the fire that certain elements of Notre-Dame, such as pieces of 13th-century wood and stone, might be permanently damaged—“so all that we might one day have learned from them will also be irremediably lost.”

In the weeks since the fire, Macron has said he will hold an architecture contest for the rebuilding project.

The full open letter can be found in French behind a paywall on Le Figaro’s website, along with the list of signatories.

ADVERTISING

YUMI founders on fresh baby food, millennial moms and going viral: ‘Parents love to share recommendations…

Content Courtesy of: foodnavigator-usa.com

Written by: Elaine Watson

New parents are busy, demanding, and sleep-deprived (cranky). But if you make products that solve problems for them, they’re also far more likely than most consumers to tell other people about your brand, which is the kind of free marketing most start-ups would kill for, say the founders of direct to consumer baby and toddler food delivery brand YUMI.

We launched in late summer of 2017 and we’ve been blown away by how much of our growth has been through word of mouth,” YUMI co-founder and CEO Angela Sutherland told FoodNavigator-USA. “We’ve really benefited from people loving our product, becoming fans, and telling their friends.

“There is so much anxiety in that period; parents are always asking other parents and friends about what works for them

“Parents really do like to share recommendations, it’s one of the most viral markets; they are constantly swapping advice,”

​ added Sutherland, a former investment banker who teamed up with business journalist Evelyn Rusli to create YUMI after researching baby food options for her own baby and feeling distinctly underwhelmed.

I went to the store and was asking why would I feed my kids something I wouldn’t personally eat? If I ate shelf-stable applesauce all day long I’d be malnourished. A lot of my friends were making their own baby food, but not because they enjoyed it. Most of us don’t go home after a long day at work and sew pants; they were doing it because the market didn’t have what they wanted.

“Millennial parents are far more demanding: they want organic and fresh foods for their own diets and they want the same for their children, so we started working closely with pediatricians and nutritionists to look at nutrient density in every meal, to improve the fiber to sugar ratio, and ensure we had enough protein and healthy fat.”

‘There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the meal kit category’

But why build a direct to consumer business rather going into retail? Lots of reasons, said Sutherland, one being that prepared baby food lends itself better to the online subscription model than meal kits, as new parents are creatures of habit, no preparation is involved, and the products can be frozen if plans change.

“As a parent, once you find a diaper brand that works, you stick with it. The same applies to baby food, if you find something your baby likes and you’re happy with it, you don’t tend to keep switching.

But the key for Los Angeles-based YUMI – aside from having a differentiated product and appealing brand – has been building a relationship with parents and following them on their journey, so that YUMI becomes a trusted resource, she said.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the meal kit category. Unless you have a very deep relationship with your customer and you build that from the beginning, you’re at risk of being commoditized.

“So from day one we knew that beyond the product – which had to be differentiated – we also had to flesh out the content and experience.”

‘Several customers have been on for more than 50 weeks’

She added: “We have nutrition coaches as part of our customer service department who can provide free advice. People ask us all kinds of questions beyond food that shows we are more than just a food company. We invested quite a bit in customer service off the bat because we wanted to make sure we could build those relationships and deliver on our promises from day one.

She added: “Several customers have been on for more than 50 weeks, which shows that this is something people are sticking with. We started with blends but snacks were the #1 thing our customers were asking us for, so introducing our Tot Box  [bites and puffs] was completing the picture for us. We also find that other members of the family are eating the products too.”

‘We felt there was a big information gap as well as a product gap’

Cofounder Evelyn Rusli added:<em> “We felt there was a big information gap as well as a product gap. Of course we wanted to create better products but we also wanted to support parents with information, so that’s why content is a big part of the YUMI experience, so we talk about how the nutrients we deliver correlate to the development of your child.”

Sutherland explained: “So we’ll say, your child is now crawling and it’s the first time your baby’s bones will support weight, so you should support this period of growth with calcium, to create strong and healthy bones. We’re helping parents to connect the dots, and as a direct to consumer business you have the unique ability to have a conversation with your customers over time.”

* Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAP) displaces oxygen with inert gas to ensure food stays fresh for longer.

YUMI which has raised $4.1m to date from backers including August Capital and Brand Foundry Ventures, ships its fresh organic chilled baby food in modified atmosphere-packed* BPA-free recyclable plastic containers on a weekly basis to parents in the Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York areas in insulated packaging designed to keep it cool for up to 48 hours in transit.

The blends – which feature names such as papaya buckwheat bowl and kiwi chia pudding – include a wide range of fruits, legumes, greens, grains, root vegetables, spices, and healthy fats, and will stay fresh in the fridge for seven days (or two months in the freezer).

YUMI’s average jar has a 3:1 sugar to fiber ratio, while the average squeeze pouch on the market has a 12:1 ratio, claimed Sutherland, who chose sorghum rather than rice for her new cauliflower puffs owing to its higher protein and fiber content.

“You can start for as low as $35 a week and it goes up from there based on how many meals you want.”

​All of the products are free of the top eight allergens, said Sutherland, who acknowledged that experts now advise of allergens such as eggs, peanuts and milk, but said she wants parents to be in control of this process.

“We provide materials to parents about the importance of delivering allergens to children early, but we want to give them control to do this and add in things like nut powders if they want to and when they want to.”

The decision to opt for plant-based products was also born out of a desire to give parents the option of adding meat or fish if they wish, she said: “Parents tell us that it’s easy for them to incorporate a little bit of meat.”

Interested in what we’re feeding our babies and children? Or whether you are what your mother ate? Join us at the second in Chicago on November 18-20.

7 of the most controversial ads of our time

Content Courtesy of: thedrum.com

Written by: Emma Mulcahy

With so much competition for attention today, controversial ads are becoming more commonplace. Brands have to be bold to be heard – and sometimes they cross the line with outrageous work.

Some agencies have even gone so far to create work they know will get banned to garner maximum publicity with minimum marketing spend. Others have absolutely no idea the impact their work will have when it plays in the wider world.

While fortune can favor the brave, the ad industry is littered with examples of bold ads that have backfired.

Here The Drum looks at some of the most controversial ads of recent times and examines why they succeeded… or failed.

Pepsi: ‘Live for Now’ (2017)

Arguably the biggest advertising flop of recent times, Pepsi’s ‘Live For Now’ ad was pulled by the soft drink retailer in less than 24 hours of its premiere. The two-and-a-half-minute-long video sees an ethnically diverse, color-coordinated crowd of young people staging a protest against… we don’t know what, before supermodel Kendall Jenner steps in with her can of Pepsi to stop police brutality and save the day. Cue jaws dropping the world over.

The ad sparked widespread derision, and there was genuine offence caused by Pepsi’s insensitive handling of the topic (the ad appears to emulate a Black Lives Matter protest and invites a direct comparison between Jenner and protester Iesha Evans, who was arrested for her protest).

The production was condemned by everyone from Madonna to the daughter of doctor Martin Luther King. Produced by Pepsi’s in-house marketing team, the brand issued an apology to both the public and to Jenner. Kendall, however, did not address the issue publicly until the season 14 premiere of ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’, where the model broke down to cameras and expressed that she has never felt “so fucking stupid”.

To mark the 30th anniversary of Nike’s legendary marketing slogan, the sports giant chose to run a series of ads featuring athletes that had overcome huge personal and physical opposition in order to rise to the top of their profession. One such athlete was the NFL’s Colin Kaepernick, a former 49r who sparked national debate in 2016 by kneeling during the national anthem as a protest against the racial inequality that continues to pervade North America.

In a divisive creative decision, Nike chose to have Kaepernick star in and narrate its ad for ‘Just Do It’ and it certainly polarized the sportswear brand’s audience. While many applauded Nike for backing Kaepernick, who the brand has endorsed since 2011, others denounced the move as unpatriotic and threatened to boycott its products. Before long, social media was awash with #JustBurnIt and #BoycottNike hashtags, accompanied by images of destroyed or burned Nike clothing and trainers. Despite evidence of a decrease in business shares the day after the ad dropped, Nike’s sales went up 31% over the Labor Day weekend in the US.

This is not the first ad by Nike that has spurred national discussion. The same year, Nike released the ‘Nothing Beats a Londoner’ ad to mixed reviews. While the ad has been widely applauded for its positive and mobilizing message, particularly for young people, it has experienced criticism from outside the UK capital. Groups have argued that the tagline ostracizes people from the rest of the country who already feel underrepresented in the cultural sphere. Nonetheless, the ad’s production, along with its adept use of athletes like Mo Farah and musicians such as Skepta and AJ Tracey, has drawn acclaim.

Both ads were made by creative powerhouse Wieden + Kennedy.

Signaling a departure from its long-established ‘The Best a Man Can Get’ tagline, in 2019 Gillette decided to offer up its two cents on the #MeToo campaign.

Its ‘We Believe’ ad aimed to tackle the trending topic of toxic masculinity and encourage men to be the best they can be, by tackling everyday sexism and the institutionalized machismo latent in a “boys will be boys” mindset. Instead of promoting the all-American, white male model archetype, this ad offered up a more diverse, multi-dimensional image of the modern man. While this change in direction has been applauded by many, it has also prompted a backlash from a wide range of people, including some of its target audience who feel disgruntled with the less-than-flattering portrait of the 21st man.

Similarly, it has come under fire from feminist groups who question the razor brand’s commitment to the #MeToo cause, since its female grooming products cost more than the male equivalent. Despite the negative backlash, there has yet to be evidence released that suggests Gillette’s market performance or sales have been negatively impacted.

The campaign may seem like a bolt from the blue, but due to rising competition from online razor companies, Gillette had to rethink its marketing strategy. The likes of Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s have been making progress in the sector with their own marketing promoting inclusivity. Dollar Shave Club’s latest campaign starred drag queens while Harry’s recently released an ad with England striker Harry Kane, proclaiming he is ‘Not Afraid’ to go against traditional male stereotypes. As brands offering newer and cheaper alternatives to Gillette, it is easy to see why the shaving giant must evolve.

The ad was produced by Grey New York and was directed by This Girl Can’s Kim Gehrig.

Protein World: ‘Are you beach body ready?’ (2015)

Seeking a larger audience for its niche product, in 2015 Protein World released a series of ads on the London Underground. One of its posters, bearing the headline ‘Are you beach body ready?’, provoked public outrage and vigilante acts of vandalism.

The public took to social media to proclaim their disdain for the ad and accused it of promoting an unhealthy body image. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority received 378 complaints regarding the campaign, a petition to have the ads removed was launched and there was even a small demonstration held against it in Hyde Park. Looking to profit from the publicity surrounding the campaign, Carlsberg weighed in with the parody: ‘Are you beer body ready?’. However, despite the ad’s controversial nature, Protein World stood by its in-house produced campaign and elicited even more ire with its responses on social media; the brand called dissenters #fattysympathisers and took a shot at feminists that voiced their objection to the ad.

In the weeks to follow, the chief marketing officer of Protein World alleged that the outcry around the ads actually benefitted the company and that the £250,000 it had spent on the campaign resulted in over £1m in sales. Ultimately, the ASA did not uphold the complaints against Protein World regarding offense or social responsibility, but it did ban the ad on the grounds of making unauthorized health and nutrition claims.

However other body image ads have not been so lucky, illustrated by Jameela Jamil’s takedown of Avon’s anti-cellulite serum. Jamil, a former model and TV presenter, attacked the brand for what she saw as irresponsible advertising and body shaming of women, which triggered a major backlash against the cosmetics company on social media. Avon apologized for the offence caused by the ad and removed it.

Lush: ‘#Spycops’ (2018)

From its inception, Lush has positioned itself as a brand which supports anti-establishment thinking and social activism. This image, bolstered by its politically acerbic campaigns, has earned the brand a league of liberal followers. However, Lush’s 2018 campaign ‘#Spycops’, which looked to draw the public’s attention to alleged illegal behavior by undercover police, did not go down so well.

The cosmetics brand found itself in the eye of a Twitter storm, with outraged users calling for a boycott of Lush’s products and starting the hashtag #flushlush. The campaign was also criticized by the UK’s home secretary, Sajid Javid. In response to these complaints, Lush issued a statement to say that its campaign was not aimed at regular police officers but instead was leveled specifically at the undercover unit that infiltrated homes and created false relationships with political activists. Nonetheless, reports of police officers and members of the public intimidating Lush staff in their places of work led to the owners deciding to remove the window dressings.

In spite of the social media backlash, Lush was not impacted negatively by the reaction to its campaign. Lush is a business built on its reputation for social activism, highlighted by its various other campaigns such as ‘Error 404’, which called out the loss of internet access in some countries. BrandWatch even reported that sales increased after its supposed PR crisis.

Dove: Facebook misfire (2017)

The champion of ‘real beauty’ has come under fire recently for what some consumers have dubbed “whitewashing”. In a Facebook ad for Dove body wash, the brand chose to portray a black woman removing her top and metamorphosizing into a white woman after using the product. This sparked outrage among the brand’s social media followers, who slammed the business with hashtags like #DoneWithDove and called for a boycott of its products.

The ad was removed by Dove and the brand publicly apologized for its misdemeanor. This misfire is not the first of its kind for the beauty brand; there are a series of accusations of whitewashing that date back to 2011 in previous skincare campaigns, as well as the controversy caused by its Real Beauty bottle designs in 2017. Despite these setbacks, Dove has scored success with GirlGaze and Getty Images, in a move to create the world’s largest photographic stock library created by women and non-binary individuals. This move will hopefully protect the brand from further critique by guaranteeing equal representation in its future advertising.

Dove is owned by Unilever and has worked with the likes of Ogilvy & Mather in producing ad campaigns.

The fast-food retailer experienced massive public backlash after it released an ad for its Filet-o-Fish burger which its UK audience deemed as using child bereavement to sell burgers.

The public took to Twitter, with users calling the advert “shameless” and “icky”. After the ASA received 100 complaints from viewers, McDonald’s decided to pull the ad. The burger chain apologized publicly for their misjudgment of the ad’s insensitive nature, with a spokesperson insisting that: “It was never our intention to cause any upset.” The brand also came under fire from a number of UK bereavement charities including Grief Encounter, who reported having received “countless calls” from grieving children and partners over the advert. The ASA launched an investigation into the ad, but no further action was necessary.

The ad was created by McDonald’s long-standing creative UK agency, Leo Burnett.

INSTAGRAM NOW MAKES IT EASY FOR USERS TO SHOP DIRECTLY FROM CELEBRITY POSTS

Content Courtesy of: adage.com

Written by: Olivia Raimonde

The platform’s “shopping from creators” expands a program used by brands

FOOD

The Creator Of Jelly Belly Released A Line Of CBD-Infused Jelly Beans

Content Courtesy of: delish.com

Written by: MAYA MCDOWELL

Regular jelly beans are a fun, fruity treat, but how about CBD-infused ones? David Klein, the genius behind Jelly Belly jelly beans, has given the chewy candy a 2019 makeover with Spectrum Confections—a line of jelly beans infused with cannabidol (CBD). Now these are some jelly beans I’d want to find in an Easter egg!

Klein sold his rights to Jelly Belly in 1980, according to Cannabis Aficionado, but candy has still been on his mind. After recently realizing the benefits of CBD, he asked himself “is anybody doing a jelly bean with CBD?” he told the outlet. He couldn’t find any, and he saw an opportunity to create candy again that could help people.

Spectrum Confections, Klein’s company, produces CBD-infused jelly beans in 38 different flavors. He says that strawberry cheesecake is one of his favorites and other flavors include toasted marshmallow, piña colada, cinnamon, spicy licorice, and mango. According to the website, each jelly bean has 10 mg of CBD and is sanded with dextrose to mask the CBD flavor.

The beans come in sugar-free and sour varieties, too. Klein is definitely onto something here, because the CBD jelly beans are currently out of stock. The website says to use the contact form or email the company for information on where to buy the Spectrum Jelly Beans.

In a reply to a comment on Facebook, Spectrum Confections wrote, “we are the manufacturer and only sell bulk units to distributors. We are seeing our vendors sell for approximately $2.00 per jelly bean with 10mg.” So, keep your eyes peeled for the CBD jelly beans!

We reached out to the company for more information regarding availability and when the jelly beans may be back in stock online. We will update as we hear back.

ART

A Leonardo Made a $450 Million Splash. Now There’s No Sign of It.

Content Courtesy of: nytimes.com

Written by: David D. Kirkpatrick

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The Louvre Abu Dhabi might seem to have all you could ask for in a world-class museum. Its acclaimed design shades its galleries under a vast dome that appears to hover over the waters of the Persian Gulf. Inside are works by Rembrandt and Vermeer, Monet and van Gogh, Mondrian and Basquiat.

Yet the work that the Louvre Abu Dhabi once promised would anchor its collection is conspicuously absent: “Salvator Mundi,” a painting of Jesus Christ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

Few works have evoked as much intrigue, either in the world of art or among the courts of Persian Gulf royals. First, its authenticity as the product of Leonardo’s own hand was the subject of intense debate. Then, in November 2017, it became the most expensive work ever sold at auction, fetching $450.3 million from an anonymous bidder who turned out to be a close ally and possible stand-in for the ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Now, the painting is shrouded in a new mystery: Where in the world is “Salvator Mundi”?

Although the Abu Dhabi culture department announced about a month after the auction that it had somehow acquired “Salvator Mundi” for display in the local Louvre, a scheduled unveiling of the painting last September was canceled without explanation. The culture department is refusing to answer questions. Staff of the Louvre Abu Dhabi say privately that they have no knowledge of the painting’s whereabouts.

New York Art Galleries: What to See Right Now

Gilles Aillaud’s portraits of zoo animals; Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s homoerotic photographs; Christina Forrer’s paintings on a loom; and the BRIC Biennial’s third South Brooklyn Edition.

 

“Cage aux Lions” (1967) is among the animal paintings by the French artist Gilles Aillaud.CreditEstate of Gilles Aillaud, ADAGP/Paris; via Ortuzar Projects, NY

 

Gilles Aillaud

Through May 11. Ortuzar Projects, 9 White Street, Manhattan; 212-257-0033, ortuzarprojects.com.

For decades, American art students have learned that the years around 1968 saw the triumph of conceptual art, process-based sculpture, environmental interventions and body-oriented performances — and only now, at half a century’s distance, are we admitting that figurative painting had its place too in the late-60s art world, especially in Western Europe. Gilles Aillaud (1928-2005) was a central actor of Narrative Figuration during Paris’s years of student revolt, as well as a set designer at Europe’s top avant-garde theaters. But “Paintings 1964-1976,” with eight coolly composed portraits of animals in zoos, is the first showcase of his works in New York since a show at Gladstone Gallery in 1982.

Aillaud and two other young painters stormed to scandalous prominence in 1965 with the collective series “Live and Let Die, or the Tragic Death of Marcel Duchamp,” which pictured the young French artists assassinating the father figure of the avant-garde. (They were also, by symbolically murdering a Frenchman who’d become an American citizen, spitting on contemporary Parisian envy of the New York School.) By 1967 Aillaud had turned to zoos, and before and after the student uprising he painted tortoises, rhinos, porcupines and pythons under heat lamps or beside industrial pipes. In a bare blue cage we see two soporific lions, their eyes vacant, their fur painted with aloof strokes of white. Two hippopotamuses, their thick skin evenly rendered in bronze and burnt umber, float in an aquarium like corpses. The animals never do anything in these zoo paintings. They don’t even meet our gaze; they just laze about on concrete and cinder blocks. It is a stifled view, conversant with the 19th-century tradition of animalier painting, but stripped of any allegorical comfort.

Back in left-wing Paris 50 years ago, Aillaud’s silent, unconsoling art appeared as the antithesis of gestural American abstraction, offering the most alienated view of an industrial capitalist society. They may be more moving today, in an era of climate emergency, when no distinction holds between the natural the man-made. JASON FARAGO

Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Through April 13. Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street, Manhattan; 212-279-9219, teamgal.com.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s “Darkroom Mirror” (2017) in his show “The Conditions” at Team Gallery.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya is experiencing a flush of success right now, and his new show — “The Conditions,” at Team Gallery — demonstrates that it is well deserved. His work appears on the cover of Artforum’s March issue and will be included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Mr. Sepuya is not an overnight sensation, however; over a decade of working, exhibiting and returning to art school to study with the great photographer Catherine Opie at the University of California, Los Angeles helped him to arrive at a distinctive and timely amalgam of portraiture and conceptual photography.

Mr. Sepuya’s photographs are like visual puzzles. He appears in many of them, but in fragmented form and usually with a camera in hand. Some of the works show multiple hands holding cameras, suggesting that authorship is always some sort of collaboration. Pushing that out further, you, the viewer are reflected against the dark backdrops in the picture and if you photograph Mr. Sepuya’s works (as I of course did), your hand and camera end up nestled surprisingly amid the gesturing fingers of him and his subjects.

“The Conditions” could refer to lighting, studio setups, or social conditions. Mr. Sepuya’s photographs have often been categorized as “queer” (that is, within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender cosmos), but they feel more universal to me: Multifarious shades of melanin are represented, and he has included images of women in this show. And while the history of representing bodies in photography — particularly nude ones — is fraught, Mr. Sepuya charges intrepidly into the mire, offering what feel like new, smart conclusions on how to represent power or vulnerability, as well as the unwavering desire to look at such images. MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Christina Forrer

Through April 13. Luhring Augustine, 531 West 24th Street, Manhattan; 212-206-9100, luhringaugustine.com.

Christina Forrer’s “Untitled (green background),” from 2018.

Making pictures on a loom, as the Swiss-born, Los Angeles-based artist Christina Forrer does, instead of on canvas or paper, checks a couple of interesting boxes automatically. It invokes the serious feminist art project of reclaiming “women’s work” and at the same time it lampoons the contemporary art world’s infatuation with digital media. A tapestry is a reminder that French artisans mastered pixelation, as well as a kind of analog coding, a good 500 years before the internet.

The way Ms. Forrer does it, flinging loose clusters of marauding, Muppet-like figures across backgrounds of bold color and complex pattern, also tempers the pictures’ importance as pictures. Not that you don’t still look first at the purple girl with enormous green eyes in “Three Awake,” for example. It’s just that the rich patch of indigo you’ll subsequently notice in the piece’s upper left corner is equally significant.

Another way to put it would be to say that Ms. Forrer’s woven sprites and the rich but indistinct worlds they inhabit all seem of a piece, which lends her scenes of giddy mayhem an appropriately dreamlike quality. Some of the nearly 20 characters that inhabit the 10-foot-tall “Untitled (brown background)” issue from others’ mouths, and it’s impossible to tell whether the whole bunch of them are meant to be flying, falling or frozen in place, whether they’re fighting one another to the death or just desperately holding on. WILL HEINRICH

BRIC Biennial: Volume III, South Brooklyn Edition

Through April 7. Gallery at BRIC House, 647 Fulton Street, Brooklyn; 718-683-5600, bricartsmedia.org.

Installation view of the BRIC Biennial. In the foreground, “Chasing Their Ponytails” (2016-18) by the sisters Lisa and Janelle Iglesias, a.k.a. Las Hermanas Iglesias.

In 2014, the arts organization BRIC inaugurated its biennial, an attempt to survey Brooklyn artists by neighborhoods. Flawed though it is, with a focus on geography that can seem arbitrary, the endeavor has proved valuable at spotlighting some of the borough’s abundant creativity.

“BRIC Biennial: Volume III, South Brooklyn Edition,” which features 19 artists and six satellite shows, is a satisfyingly cohesive rumination on dislocation. Katya Grokhovsky focuses on her 93-year-old Jewish grandmother, who survived World War II and immigrated from post-Soviet Ukraine to Australia. She tells her stories in Ms. Grokhovsky’s absorbing video, “The Future Is Bright,” (2018) which screens opposite a sculpture whose explosiveness suggests the impossibility of encapsulating a life.

Other artists take a more formal approach. Jordan Nassar collaborates with traditional Palestinian embroiderers on patterned landscapes that delicately entwine his Palestinian and American identities. The sisters Lisa and Janelle Iglesias, a.k.a. Las Hermanas Iglesias, live on different coasts and worked back and forth on the sculpture “Chasing Their Ponytails” (2016-18), which looks like a quirky contraption for decontextualizing everyday items.

In Brooklyn, any exhibition about displacement would be incomplete without confronting harsh realities. Fortunately, Connie Kang and Danielle Wu, two members of An/Other, an arts advocacy group for Asians, have curated “Virtual and Real Estate,” a small but mighty show in an adjacent gallery. The centerpiece is Betty Yu’s deeply researched inquiry into the gentrification of Sunset Park. Her earnest urgency is counterbalanced by bitingly clever contributions from Daniel Bejar and Pastiche Lumumba, whose “Woke Gentrifyer Starter Pack” (2019) skewers the New Yorker-reading, nonprofit-working, dog-owning liberal. For many Brooklyn art viewers, this may be where the BRIC Biennial hits closest to home. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

ADVERTISING

Hot And Newest Commercials On Tv From Google, Bodyarmor, Bank Of America And More

Content Courtesy of: adage.com

Every weekday we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the TV ad measurement and attribution company. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time yesterday.

A few highlights: Bank of America says it is “proud to support women in their journeys on and off the course” in a golf-themed spot that calls attention to its partnership with the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. The Beatles’ “Help!” serves as the soundtrack for a Google ad. And Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck and Angels’ center fielder Mike Trout engage in, no kidding, a disco battle for Bodyarmor.

Ralph Lauren Features A Same-Sex Couple In A Campaign For First Time

Brand is trying to attract new generations of consumers

Content Courtesy of: adage.com

Written by: Adrianne Pasquarelli

Ralph Lauren is finally getting woke to diversity. The apparel brand checks all the boxes in a new ad campaign that features an Asian family, a black family, multiple generations of ages, and a lesbian couple. This is Ralph Lauren’s first campaign featuring a same-sex couple, according to a spokeswoman.

The move follows in the footsteps of marketers that have been featuring a diverse cast of characters for quite a while. Ikea made an ad with a same-sex couple more than two decades age. More recently, same-sex couple have been in ads from Gap, Tiffany & Co., Wells Fargo and Lucky Charms. David’s Bridal ran its first commercial with a lesbian bride earlier this year.

“We live in a world where the meaning of family is bigger, broader and more personal than it has ever been before,” Jonathan Bottomley, chief marketing officer at the New York retailer, said in a statement. “We believe that family is one of the most positive forces and powerful unifiers for all of us today,” he added, noting that the campaign is a “fresh expression of that idea.”

The 52-year-old company has been trying to attract younger consumers. In the most recent third quarter, Ralph Lauren increased its marketing investment by 18 percent compared with the year-earlier period. Net revenue for the quarter was $1.7 billion, a 5 percent rise over the year-earlier period.

All of the eight families featured in the brand’s new “Family is who you love” campaign are real people, not paid actors. The campaign, which includes outdoor, print, digital and social marketing, was created internally. It will run from April through June.

 McDonald’s African-American Marketing Gets Biggest Overhaul In 16 Years

The messaging refresh kicks off this weekend in sync with the NAACP Image Awards

Content Courtesy of: adage.com

Written by:  Jessica Wohl 

McDonald’s newest ads aren’t about some value meal, fancy burger or the ability to order for delivery via a mobile app. They’re the kickoff of the biggest overhaul to the restaurant chain’s African-American marketing in 16 years.

The Golden Arches on Friday is set to unveil “Black & Positively Golden,” an effort so broad it isn’t calling it a campaign but rather “a campaign movement.”

The updated marketing and community outreach show how the largest restaurant chain aims to deepen its ties with African-American customers, particularly millennials. A spokeswoman declined to reveal how much the chain will spend on the effort but called it “one of our biggest priorities of this year.”

“What we’ve done is really refresh the approach to the engagement in order to be more resonant with the African-American consumer today,” says Lizette Williams, McDonald’s USA’s head of cultural engagement and experiences. Black & Positively Golden, she says, “focuses on stories of truth, power and pride and really is a celebration of black excellence.”

Black & Positively Golden, which is focused on education, empowerment and entrepreneurship, replaces the 365Black platform that McDonald’s began using in 2003.

It includes a 60-second spot set to air twice during the March 30 broadcast of the 50th Annual NAACP Image Awards. The spot was directed by longtime commercial and film director Joe Pytka and is meant to have a bit of a documentary or “fly on the wall” feel, says Williams. It features people including a Black Marine and feel-good moments such as a woman receiving a giant check for a $10,000 college scholarship from the brand. McDonald’s will also give out a Black & Positively Golden award at the NAACP Image Awards, the first time it has had a branded award and gets to select the recipient.

The social media push will be through a new Instagram channel, @wearegolden. The prior program hadn’t posted to its @365Black Twitter account since December when it celebrated Herman Petty, who became the chain’s first African-American franchisee in 1968. There are now 300 African-American franchisees running more than 1,500 McDonald’s restaurants.

Print ads will run in publications including Essence. Radio ads are also part of the push.

McDonald’s is seeing solid sales growth but needs to get more customers into its restaurants. Sales at longstanding U.S. restaurants rose 2.5 percent last year, despite a 2.2 percent decline in visits to those locations. Williams joined McDonald’s in early 2018 in a new role as the company tries to build brand devotion among multicultural customers. Last year, for example, it expanded its Hacer scholarship program for Hispanic students to 30 winners from five.

McDonald’s is broadening its support of the YWCA on a national level after offering some local support. The push includes a year of financial support for the YWCA’s Women’s Empowerment 360 Program, which helps women of color who aspire to be entrepreneurs. On Friday, it’s hosting an event at a YWCA in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park neighborhood, where participants can help complete a mural by artist Enkone, and see actress Yvonne Orji (Molly on HBO’s “Insecure”) and a performance by singer Normani.

McDonald’s also says it will continue to provide scholarships for students attending historically black colleges and universities through its partnership with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.

Burrell Communications, which has worked with McDonald’s on campaigns featuring African-Americans since 1972, developed and worked on 365Black is now working on Black & Positively Golden.

Along with Burrell, Walton Isaacson is handling activations including the brand’s presence at BETX and Essence Festival. Other plans include the continuation of the McDonald’s Inspiration Celebration Gospel Tour, which brings the brand to venues including African-American churches. Faith Based Communications is working on the gospel tour.

TECH

New Apple’s Credit Card

Content Courtesy of: engadget.com

Written by: Saqib Shah

Apple is teaming up with Goldman Sachs to launch a credit card as it looks beyond mobile payments, according to a new report. The card will be available to the masses later this year, following a trial run with Apple staffers, reports The Wall Street Journal. The tech giant is currently in the process of rolling out Apple Pay to even more countries, but the physical card would reportedly offer it a bigger slice of revenue from swipes.

Of course, the Apple Pay card will integrate with Apple’s Wallet app bringing with it extra features including money, debt, and rewards management tools. Execs may borrow visuals from Apple’s Health app, including “rings” that track your daily spend and notifications that alert you if you go over your set money targets.

Goldman, meanwhile, is hoping the venture will attract Apple’s loyal fanbase to its Marcus online bank. It’s reportedly splashing $200 million on the card’s back end infrastructure, from customer-support call centers to an internal system to handle payments. Cardholder perks will apparently include cash back of about 2 percent on most purchases and possibly even more on Apple’s devices and services, which the tech giant is set to expand courtesy of an incoming news subscription service and a video streaming platform. The card will use Mastercard’s payment network, which is second only to Visa in the US, according to WSJ.

CULTURE

One Small Step For Man, But Women Still Have To Leap

Content Courtesy of: bbc.com

Written by: Chris Bell

Nasa has cancelled plans for its first all-female spacewalk this Friday, citing a lack of available spacesuits in the right size.

There are not enough suits configured on the International Space Station for both Christina Koch and Anne McClain to go out at the same time, so male astronaut Nick Hague will replace Lt Col McClain.

Last week, Lt Col McClain went on a spacewalk with Col Hague and learned that a medium-sized spacesuit fitted her best.

However, Nasa said in a statement: “Because only one medium-size torso can be made ready by Friday 29 March, Koch will wear it.”

For many women working in science, a choice between using equipment designed for men or missing out altogether is all too familiar.

Jessica Mounts is a biologist. For more than a decade she worked in freshwater fisheries science for the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism. She is now the executive director of the Kansas Alliance for Wetlands and Streams.

She noted Nasa’s missed milestone with disappointment, but she was not necessarily surprised.

“Representation matters everywhere,” she told the BBC.

“The first female spacewalk was both historically significant and inspiring to young girls, like my 10-year-old niece, who dreams of eventually going to space.

“If we can’t provide women the equipment they need to do their jobs as astronauts, scientists or first responders, how can we expect to make progress towards equal representation?

“How can women represent a full range of career choices to the next generation of young girls, when we’re held back by something as simple as equipment and clothing that fits?”

Pink trim

Jessica’s work means she is frequently in rivers or lakes, in all weathers, to monitor and evaluate fish populations. She has often been, she says, “the only woman on the boat”.

“Most of the equipment I’ve used has been designed for men. The problems caused aren’t simply an annoyance – they all go back to personal safety.

“Clothing that is too loose gets caught in moving equipment. Boots that are too big mean tripping and falling.

“The alternatives that are ‘designed for women’ are frequently more expensive, have smaller pockets, are still ill-fitting and most likely have just been copies of the male version with a little pink added to the trim.”

Jessica shared her frustrations on Twitter and she was far from alone in her experiences.

There was the biostatistician with a PhD in quantitative genetics, who could not find safety goggles that fit properly when working in the lab with chemicals.

Jessica was also tweeted by a biologist who could not get the steel toe-capped boots she needed for field work outside, and a neuroscientist who said she “passed out from overheating” because the only surgical gowns available for teaching were in “six-foot tall man” sizes and had to be wrapped around her three times.

And it is not only the scientific world where women must frequently make do. Caroline Criado Perez is a feminist, journalist and author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

“We don’t collect data on women and therefore we don’t design things for women,” she told the BBC’s Jeremy Vine show on Wednesday.

“We think of male bodies and typical male life patterns as the default for humans overall, and so women are disadvantaged as a result.

“Spacesuits are the tip of the iceberg. When you look at personal protective equipment – stab vests, safety goggles, safety boots, all those kinds of clothes and tools that people are supposed to use to protect themselves at work, a lot of the time they don’t fit women.”

Jessica says things are improving, but the pace of change is slow.

“As more women enter the field, things have improved marginally.

“Waders made in women’s sizes are now available and there are some designs of personal flotation devices made to accommodate breasts. That said, we have a long way to go.

“Historically, science and similar fields have been dominated by men and the systemic culture of our society continues to support that narrative.

“When only men are allowed to work, the only equipment available is made for them. When women want to work, the equipment isn’t there and is a tangible symbol of the greater issue of systemic sexism in a society designed, in general, by and for men.”

K-Pop is a reality

Content Courtesy of: bbc.com

Written by: BBC News Staff

US toymaker Mattel has unveiled a collection of BTS dolls and it is fair to say the response has been mixed.

Fans of the K-Pop super group have set the internet aflame with fevered discussion of the South Korean boy band’s miniature effigies.

Since the first images of the dolls were released on Monday, the online army of BTS fans have propelled the toymaker’s name into the top global Twitter trends.

And while much of the reaction has been supportive, more than a few are less than happy with what they have seen.

Mattel had been teasing the dolls’ release for weeks, but their introduction to the world left some a little underwhelmed.

And the reaction memes kept on coming.

Most complaints seemed to centre around the dolls’ hair.

Others were remarkably concerned with the boy band’s bottom line, keen to discourage criticism and avoid putting off “future investors”.

Many fans simply felt the criticism was rude.

While some compared them favourably to another high-profile boy band doll partnership.

Mattel’s collaboration with BTS was announced in January.

“BTS is a pop-culture music phenomenon that transcends age, culture and language,” Sejal Shah Miller, Mattel’s senior vice president and global brand manager, said.

“Through this partnership, Mattel will offer a new way for millions across the world to engage with the band.”

There’s certainly been plenty of engagement online.

Bohemian Censored

Content Courtesy of: bbc.com

Written by: Chris Bell and Kerry Allen

Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody was released in China on Friday, but references to the Queen singer’s sexuality and AIDS diagnosis were censored.

Several minutes of footage were edited out of the film, including scenes of two men kissing and the word “gay”.

There has been significant reaction to the film’s release online. More than 50,000 users have posted reviews on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like micro-blogging platform.

Though some users complained of “half watching and half guessing” as a result of the deleted scenes, others were pleased the film had been released at all.

What was removed?

In the Chinese version of the film, several scenes have been amended or deleted.

Explicit and implicit references to Mercury’s sexuality were edited out, including an important scene in which he comes out to his then-girlfriend.

Other scenes to be removed include a close-up of Mercury’s crotch as he performs, interactions with his male partner Jim Hutton and the entire sequence in which the character and his onscreen band-mates recreate Queen’s iconic music video for 1984 single I Want to Break Free, in which they dress in women’s clothes.

What was the reaction?

Thousands of Chinese social media users have been sharing reviews of the film online.

Most have been positive, with more than 80% of social media users to post reviews on Weibo awarding the film five stars out of five. However, there has been notable criticism of the revisions.

“If there were no deleted scenes it would have been better,” one Weibo user wrote.

“Why is it necessary to delete gay-related content? Doesn’t a person’s life… deserve to be complete?”

“It’s really good that Bohemian Rhapsody is being screened in the mainland,” said another. “But the plot was broken because of deleted scenes.”

Why was it censored?

Homosexuality has been legal in China for more than two decades and the Chinese Society of Psychiatry removed it from the country’s classification of mental disorders in 2001. But the movie’s censorship was widely anticipated.

In recent years, Chinese authorities have embarked on a campaign to purge content it deems inappropriate. Explicit references to same-sex relationships are banned under Chinese regulations. Gay content is frequently removed or censored by Chinese media anxious to ensure compliance.

In February, broadcaster Mango TV’s Oscars coverage was heavily criticised after it amended a reference to homosexuality in the acceptance speech of Rami Malek, who plays Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. The same outlet was condemned in 2018 for censoring rainbow flags and tattoos in its broadcast of the Eurovision Song Contest.

At the beginning of this year, another streaming service, iQiyi, was mocked for blurring the earlobes of men wearing earrings in what many observers interpreted as a heavy-handed attempt to perpetuate “traditional” gender roles.

Photography

22 Of The Most Powerful Photos Of This Week

Content Courtesy of: buzzfeednews.com

Written by: Gabriel H. Sanchez

From the felony charge filed against Jussie Smollett to the stunning Super Snow Moon over New York City, these are the most striking and memorable pictures from this past week.

Credit by: Tannen Maury / REX / Shutterstock

Empire actor Jussie Smollett emerges from the Cook County Court complex after posting 10% of a $100,000 bond in Chicago, on Feb. 21, 2019. Smollett was charged with felony disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false police report claiming he was attacked in an incident that has drawn national attention.

Credit by:  Go Nakamura / Reuters

Protesters hold signs during a demonstration against President Donald Trump in New York City on Presidents Day, Feb. 18.

 Credit by: Go Nakamura / Reuters

Honduran migrants cross the Rio Grande toward the United States on Feb. 16.

Credit by: Drew Angerer

Rev. Al Sharpton and Sen. Kamala Harris, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, talk while having lunch at Sylvia’s Restaurant on Feb. 21, in Harlem, New York City.

Credit by: Brian Snyder 

Sen. Cory Booker, a Democratic 2020 presidential candidate, talks to 9-year-old Alex Pringle during a campaign stop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Feb. 16.

Credit by: Alex Wroblewski

Roger Stone, former adviser and longtime associate of President Trump, arrives at the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, DC, on Feb. 21

Credit by: Shamil Zhumatov

Former US Marine Paul Whelan is held in a courtroom cage on suspicion of spying in Moscow, on Feb. 22.

Credit by: Nam Y. Huh

Vicente Juarez’s daughter, Diana Juarez, cries at a makeshift memorial on Feb. 17, in Aurora, Illinois, near the Henry Pratt manufacturing company facility, where her father and several others were killed last Friday by a gunman.

Credit by: Drew Angerer

Leanne Simonsen, wife of fallen NYPD Detective Brian Simonsen, is escorted by officers as her late husband’s remains are carried out of the church following his funeral service on Feb. 20, in Hampton Bays, New York. Simonsen was killed by friendly fire while responding with fellow NYPD officers to a robbery at a store in Queens last week.

Credit by:  Frederick Florin

French President Emmanuel Macron looks at a grave vandalized with a swastika during a visit at the Jewish cemetery in Quatzenheim, France, on Feb. 19.

Credit by: Nazeer Al-khatib

Rawan, an 11-year-old Syrian girl, poses on a destroyed tank with her stuffed bear near the village of Yazi Bagh on Feb. 19.

Culture

15 Super Awkward Moments From The 2019 Oscars

Content Courtesy of: buzzfeednews.com

Written by: Ryan Schocket

1. Well, there was no host.

The Oscars offically Won’t Have A Host This Year After The Kevin Hart Controversy

2. Glenn Close got caught making these faces (!!!!) in the background:

3. Bradley Cooper couldn’t hear on the carpet:

4. Ryan Seacrest and Rami Malek had this awk dab/hug/whisper to each other combo handshake:

5. Ashley Graham did this move with Jason Momoa:

6. Irina Shayk sat between Bradley and Lady Gaga and everyone was like 👀👀:

7. Rami Malek’s bowtie was very crooked during his red carpet walk:

Don’t worry, Lady Gaga came to the rescue and fixed it 🙂

8. The winners of Best Hairstyle and Makeup had some trouble with their speech:

9. Hannah Bleacher called out Jay Hart for stepping on her dress:

10. Pharrell wore shorts:

11. Spike Lee didn’t have the best reaction when Awkwafina mentioned being star struck by him:

12. People thought Irina Shayk had evil in her eyes during Bradley and Gaga’s performance of “Shallow.” It spawned memes:

13. Frances McDormand didn’t feel like talking:

14. Everyone thought Glenn Close was going to win her first Oscar, but in a huge upset, Olivia Colman won:

15. A Green Book producer’s mic was cut while he dedicated his Oscar to Carrie Fisher. We could hear it, but attendees couldn’t:

Fashion

Karl Lagerfeld, Designer Who Defined Luxury Fashion, Is Dead

Content Courtesy of: nytimes.com

Written by: Vanessa Friedman

Karl Lagerfeld, the most prolific designer of the 20th and 21st centuries and a man whose career formed the prototype of the modern luxury fashion industry, died on Tuesday in Paris.

Though his birth year was a matter of some dispute, Mr. Lagerfeld, who lived in Paris, was generally thought to be 85. His death was announced by Chanel, with which he had long been associated.

“More than anyone I know, he represents the soul of fashion: restless, forward-looking and voraciously attentive to our changing culture,” Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, said of Mr. Lagerfeld when presenting him with the Outstanding Achievement Award at the British Fashion Awards in 2015.

Creative director of Chanel since 1983 and Fendi since 1965, and founder of his own line, Mr. Lagerfeld was the definition of a fashion polyglot, able to speak the language of many different brands at the same time (not to mention many languages themselves: He read in English, French, German and Italian).

In his 80s, when most of his peers were retiring to their yachts or country estates, he was designing an average of 14 new collections a year, ranging from couture to the high street — and not counting collaborations and special projects. “Ideas come to you when you work,” he said backstage before a Fendi show at age 83.

His signature combinations of “high fashion and high camp” attracted admirers like Rihanna; Princess Caroline of Monaco; Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund; and Julianne Moore.

Mr. Lagerfeld was also a photographer, whose work was exhibited at the Pinacothèque de Paris; a publisher, having founded his own imprint for Steidl, Edition 7L; and the author of a popular 2002 diet book, “The Karl Lagerfeld Diet,” about how he had lost 92 pounds.

Mr. Lagerfeld in 1954, after winning the coat category in a design competition in Paris.

His greatest calling, however, was as the orchestrator of his own myth.

A self-identified “caricature,” with his dark glasses, powdered ponytail, black jeans, fingerless gloves, starched collars, Chrome Hearts jewelry and obsessive Diet Coke consumption, he achieved such a level of global fame — and controversy — that a $200 Karl Barbie doll, created in collaboration with the toymaker Mattel, sold out in less than an hour in 2014.

He was variously referred to as a “genius,” the “kaiser” and “overrated.” His contribution to fashion was not in creating a new silhouette, as designers like Cristobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior and Coco Chanel herself did.

Rather, he created a new kind of designer: the shape-shifter.

That is to say, he was the creative force who lands at the top of a heritage brand and reinvents it by identifying its sartorial semiology and then pulls it into the present with a healthy dose of disrespect and a dollop of pop culture.

Not that he put it that way exactly. What he said was: “Chanel is an institution, and you have to treat an institution like a whore — and then you get something out of her.”

This approach has become almost quotidian in the industry, but before Mr. Lagerfeld was hired at Chanel, when the brand was fading into staid irrelevance, kept aloft on a raft of perfume and cosmetics, it was a new and startling idea.

That he dared act on it, and then kept doing so with varying degrees of success for decades, transformed not only the fortunes of Chanel (now said to have revenues of more than $4 billion a year) but also his own profile.

And it cleared a new path for designers who came after, from Tom Ford (who likewise transformed Gucci) to John Galliano (Dior), Riccardo Tisci (Givenchy, Burberry) and Tomas Maier (Bottega Veneta).

Mr. Lagerfeld showing one of his ball gowns in 1979.

A ‘Fashion Phenomenon’

Those who wanted to dismiss Mr. Lagerfeld referred to him as a “styliste”: a designer who creates his looks by repurposing what already exists, as opposed to inventing anything new. But he rejected the idea of fashion-as-art, and the designer-as-tortured genius. His goal was more opportunistic.

“I would like to be a one-man multinational fashion phenomenon,” he once said.

Indeed, his output as a designer was rivaled only by his outpourings as a master of the telling aphorism — so much so that his quotations were collected in a book, “The World According to Karl,” in 2013.

Some choice excerpts: “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat,” and “I’m very much down to earth. Just not this earth.”

Whether his statements were true was immaterial (anyway, it was conceptually true, or true at that moment). The truth could be a fungible concept to Mr. Lagerfeld, who was fond of taking creative license with the past. Sources have differed on his birth year, for example. Was it 1938, as Chanel believed, or 1933, as a book by the writer Alicia Drake asserted? Or was it 1935, as he told the magazine Paris Match in 2013? (The Hamburg Genealogical Society says he was born on Sept. 10, 1935.)

His personal proclivities were a constantly mutating collection of decades, people and disciplines. His one great fear was of being bored. His conversations (or monologues) could, in almost one breath, bounce from Anita Ekberg romping in the Trevi fountain, to how rich women in the 1920s slept under ermine sheets, and then to the Danish fairy tale illustrator Kay Nielsen. His one blind spot was his own mortality, which he refused to acknowledge.

As he said in the 2008 documentary “Lagerfeld Confidential”: “I don’t want to be real in other people’s lives. I want to be an apparition.”

Karl-Otto Lagerfeld was born in Hamburg to Otto Lagerfeld, a well-off managing director of the German branch of the American Milk Products Company, and the former Elisabeth Bahlmann. His mother was Otto’s second wife, and Karl had both an older half sister, Thea, and an older sister, Martha Christiane.

Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

His mother was, by all accounts, the single most formative influence on her precocious son, who often reported that he had disliked his childhood. His father moved his family to a small town in the north of Germany during World War II, and Karl, who was given to wearing a formal suit and tie to school, did not exactly fit in.

“When I was 14 I wanted to smoke because my mother smoked like mad,” he was quoted as saying. “But my mother said: ‘You shouldn’t smoke. Your hands are not that beautiful, and that shows when you smoke.’ ”

She was responsible, he said, for his fast-forward manner of speech and voluminous conversational references. In an onstage interview at Lincoln Center in 2013, he told the actress Jessica Chastain that when his mother had asked a question, he “had to answer quickly, and it had to be funny.”

“If I thought of something to say 10 minutes later,” he said, “she would slap me.”

Karl escaped to Paris as a teenager, and though he did not go to art school or receive a classic fashion education, he entered, in 1954, a fashion competition called the International Wool Secretariat (now reborn as the International Woolmark Prize) and won the coat category; Yves Saint Laurent, also a young designer, won in the dress category that year.

Mr. Lagerfeld was hired at the couture house of Pierre Balmain and remained there for three years until he left for Jean Patou. He stayed at that house for five years, until deciding to trade the more rarefied environs of the couture for a freelance career in the emerging world of 1960s ready-to-wear.

He went on to do freelance design work for Krizia, Ballantyne, Charles Jourdan and Chloé, where he stayed for over 10 years and became close to the founder, Gaby Aghion, developing his trademark irreverence for style’s sacred cows.

The approach could also be seen at Fendi, starting in the mid-1960s, when Mr. Lagerfeld was brought in by the family to transform the brand from boring bourgeois furrier into hip fashion name.

Mr. Lagerfeld in New York in 2002, when he received a lifetime achievement award at the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s 40th awards gala.

And Now, ‘Fun Fur’

He refused to treat such luxury pelts as mink and sable too preciously. Instead he shaved them, dyed them, tufted them and otherwise created the concept of “Fun Fur,” which gave the brand its enduring double F logo.

Silvia Fendi, the only member of the third generation still engaged with the brand, said that even as a child, “when Karl came” she knew “something special was going on and I should pay attention.”

He also started collecting: furniture, books, magazines — even apartments. He would delve deep into decades and their aesthetic movements, from Art Deco to Memphis, the Bauhaus to the space age, and then discard them, auctioning off his carefully curated acquisitions without nostalgia or emotion. (It was a characteristic of his personal relationships too, according to those who knew him.)

Mr. Lagerfeld left Chloé in 1982 and took on Chanel — returning first to the haute couture and, the next year, to ready-to-wear. It proved an alchemic combination of designer and brand, given the house’s rich iconography (ropes of pearls, camellias, bouclé, Cs), which Mr. Lagerfeld treated like toys that were his for the twisting.

A photograph of the original supermodels — Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington — as a motorcycle gang in pastel colored Chanel bouclé minisuits and biker caps captured his iconoclasm. Women were breaking glass ceilings and refusing to play by the old rules, and Mr. Lagerfeld transformed Chanel into the armor they could wear to do it.

His work so clearly expressed the ethos of the moment that his early “muse,” the model Ines de la Fressange, was later chosen as the model for a new bust of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic — at which point Mr. Lagerfeld, incensed at the idea of having to share her, ended their professional relationship. (They made up years later.)

Celebrities flocked to Chanel, and to Mr. Lagerfeld, who seized on the marketing possibilities. He teamed up with the movie director Baz Luhrmann and the actress Nicole Kidman to make short promotional films; Mr. Lagerfeld later directed the actresses Cara Delevingne and Kristen Stewart and the singer Pharrell Williams in his own minifeatures about Chanel.

<

Mr. Lagerfeld in Berlin in 2015 with a painting of Choupette, his Birman cat.

As social media exploded, Mr. Lagerfeld understood early on how widely disseminated images had the power to transform a show for the trade into a show that would resonate in the digital wilderness. He trucked in a 265-ton iceberg from Sweden for one collection, and built an airplane hangar, a brasserie and a supermarket (stocked with Chanel dishwasher powder and Chanel pasta) for others, all in the confines of the Grand Palais, his Parisian presentation venue of choice.

A Cat in the Lap of Luxury

While his professional life became ever grander, however, his personal life remained a mystery. Mr. Lagerfeld lived alone in a Left Bank apartment crowded with books and clothes, sharing it only with a Birman cat called Choupette, who became as famous as her master, with her own maids, pillow, diamond necklaces and Instagram account.

He estimated his library at 300,000 volumes, and he told Susannah Frankel of the British newspaper The Independent that he had more than a thousand of his signature white Hilditch & Key shirts.

He traveled with an ever-shifting entourage, though his godson, Hudson Kroenig, was something of a constant in recent years. Hudson’s father is Brad Kroenig, one of Mr. Lagerfeld’s favorite male models (Mr. Lagerfeld used to accessorize his Chanel shows with the occasional man), and Hudson would often appear on the runway with his godfather to take a bow.

Ironically, though he started his own brand in 1984, the Lagerfeld line never found the same success or popularity as Chanel and Fendi, leading naysayers to suggest that Mr. Lagerfeld worked best within the framework of someone else’s vision. His partisans said he simply did not have enough time. (His brand changed ownership a few times; investors included PVH, Apax Partners and Tommy Hilfiger.)

Though rumors often circulated that Mr. Lagerfeld was sick and about to retire, he never did. He had a lifetime contract with both Chanel and Fendi, and he exercised it. If he stopped, he would say when asked, he might as well stop breathing.

Mr. Lagerfeld was responsible for so many shows, stores and events that in 2017, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, awarded him the city’s highest honor, the Medal of the City of Paris, for services to the metropolis.

Toward the end of his career, fashion was troubled by questions over whether it was demanding too much of its designers, but Mr. Lagerfeld had no truck with any complaints.

“Please don’t say I work hard,” he said to Ms. Frankel of The Independent. “Nobody is forced to do this job, and if they don’t like it they should do another one. People buy dresses to be happy, not to hear about somebody who suffered over a piece of taffeta.”

His pretensions were not to the eternal, but to the ephemeral. In the end, however, with the personal brand that was Karl Lagerfeld, he may have achieved both.

Mr. Lagerfeld with the singer Rihanna at a Fendi dinner in New York in 2015.

KARL LAGERFELD LIVES ON THROUGH HIS FINAL COLLECTION FOR FENDI, FALL 2019

Content Courtesy of: fashionista.com

Written by: MARIA BOBILA

The Italian house’s moving tribute to the designer and his 54-year-long tenure was immediately felt among showgoers.

Looks from the Fendi Fall 2019 collection.

Outside of the Fendi runway show on Thursday in Milan was the usual crowd of bottlenecking lines, loiterers and a group of anti-fur protesters, but inside was a whole different story. As soon as guests entered the venue, the Italian house’s tribute to the late Karl Lagerfeld and his 54-year-long tenure as creative director was immediately felt: Above the catwalk’s entrance was his handwritten signature in lights; at every seat was a touching tribute card that commemorates his death; and show notes came with sketches of Lagerfeld’s final collection for Fendi.

It’s no secret that Lagerfeld was not only incredibly prolific, but also a master of his craft. The Fall 2019 collection introduced new takes on some of Fendi’s design signatures, including the newly relaunched Baguette bag, which is currently undergoing a large push from the luxury house with an aim to recapture its nostalgic magic. This season, the handbag is updated in an embossed pillow patent faux leather and a multi-strap utility harness — both of which you’ll surely see all over Instagram sooner rather than later.

While plenty of street style stars wore their best Fendi logomania from seasons last to the show, they’ll need to switch gears come fall: Lagerfeld revived his curling “Karligraphy” double-F monogram, which appears on everything from stockings and socks to turtleneck bodysuits, shirts and fur coats.

What Lagerfeld does best is balance modernity with refinement: Tailored garments were strong-shouldered and nipped in at the waist. Dresses were adorned with large bows in the back, and outerwear boasted laser-cut leather or zipper embellishments. As many tributes from figures throughout the industry can attest, Lagerfeld’s design genius will not soon be forgotten.

The runway finale was emotional to say the least. David Bowie’s “Heroes” played as models (some who appeared to be on the verge of tears) made their last lap across the catwalk and the crowd gave a standing ovation for creative partner Silvia Venturini Fendi. After, the room went dark and a video featured a not-too-long-ago Lagerfeld sketching his first-ever design all the way from 1965, showing that at Fendi, his memory will always live on.

See Fendi’s Fall 2019 collection in full in the gallery below.

Summer is coming, what to wear

38 Bathing Suits You 100% Need For Your Next Vacation

Content Courtesy of: buzzfeed.com

Written by: Abby Kass

We hope you love the products we recommend! Just so you know, BuzzFeed may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. Oh, and FYI — prices are accurate and items in stock as of time of publication.

1. A solid one-piece to help you live out your Baywatch dreams.

Promising review: “Great price, great fit, quality material, and true to size. I was a little concerned at first when I didn’t see any form of support but it fits great. I feel like everything is in place and secure. It’s a bit cheeky, so if you’re on the modest or conservative side you may need a cover up or shorts. I’m thinking about ordering it in another color. I’m 5’7″, 170 lbs., and wear a C/D cup. For me, the medium was a good fit.” —Channie Price

Get it from Amazon for $19.99+ (available in sizes S–2X and in 15 colors and patterns).

2. A crocheted monokini that’ll give you an edge but still keep boobs girls supported (because that’s important too).

Promising review: “I never leave reviews, but this is by far the best swimsuit I have ever had. I have DD boobs and normally wear a size 8. I did what the other reviewers suggested and got a size down (so I purchased a size 6) and it fits perfectly! Also with having large boobs and chasing a toddler around, I was worried about the boob area not being supportive enough but this is the ONLY swimsuit I have worn that completely supports my boobs. It also came with two sets of straps with two places to put them. Overall, this is a great, cute, sexy, and supportive one piece.” —Hope Brown

Get it from Amazon for $19.99+ (available in sizes 2-16 and in six colors).

3. A velvet lace-up you can wear to the pool (then you can add a skirt to wear for a night out).

Get it from Stardust Swim on Etsy for $119 (available in sizes S–XL).

4. A mesh front one-piece you’ll look and feel so good in, that it will inspire a beach photoshoot. I can already see it being one of your top Insta posts of the year.

Promising review: “I love this swimsuit! It’s perfect. It looks just like the picture and the material is very nice. If you’re considering this suit, just go ahead and buy it! My confidence level sky rocketed after wearing this. 😍” —Haylee Mendenhall

Get it from Amazon for $23.99+ (available in sizes XS-2X and in five styles)

5. A zip-up sleeved suit to help protect you from the sun as you partake in all those fun water activities.

Promising review: “Can I say how much I am in LOVE with swimsuit! I am a size 18/20 depending on the item, and I ordered this in a 2XL. It fits perfectly, allows you to choose the level of appeal you want with the zipper, and the print is AMAZING. I feel like going to the pool right now just so someone can see me in it!” —Mrs. M

Get it from Amazon for $3.89+ (available in sizes S-2X and in 11 colors and styles).

6. An underwire high waist bikini that’ll make you feel like you’re in Hawaii, even if you’re at the local beach.

Promising review: “I followed the measurements, and it fits my body amazingly! I’ve never felt this good in a swimsuit, and I haven’t wore a bikini since I was a little girl. This is hands down the best swimsuit I have ever purchased. Plus, it’s great quality! I revive so many compliments on it!” —SaraB

Get it from Swimsuits For All for $36 (available in sizes 6-24).

7. A one-piece with extra coverage perfect for diving around while playing beach volleyball.

Promising review: I was looking for something with more coverage and more support and this suit gives me both. I ordered the size I usually wear in pants and tops and it was perfect. I love the style and colors on this suit. With the price and quality being so good I may just have to get another one!&quot; —fonts29Get it from Amazon for $22.99+ (available in sizes XS-4X and in 11 colors and styles).

Promising review: “I was looking for something with more coverage and more support and this suit gives me both. I ordered the size I usually wear in pants and tops and it was perfect. I love the style and colors on this suit. With the price and quality being so good I may just have to get another one!” —fonts29

Get it from Amazon for $22.99+ (available in sizes XS-4X and in 11 colors and styles).

8. A suit to let everyone know what your ~vibes~ are for your whole vacation.

Promising review: “I love this one piece! It was the staple of my whole vacation! I took previous advice and ordered a size up and it was definitely a good decision. I have a hard time finding swimsuits to fit right but this one did not disappoint. I’m 5’9″, 140 lbs., and 32D. I don’t have much of a booty but this piece was still pretty ‘bootylicious.’ I got so many compliments on this and cannot wait for an excuse to wear it again, or buy another one in a different color!” —Amazon Customer

Get it from Amazon for $15.99+ (available in sizes S-2X and in 19 colors and styles).

9. A bikini underwire top and bottom to mesh with your plans of not buying another suit. After seeing this beauty, you know you can never have too many in your life!

“Get them from Walmart: $17.88 for the top (available in sizes S-XL) and $17.88 for the bottom (available in sizes S-XL).”

10. A tropical bikini top and bottom you can pair perfectly with that Piña Colada you’ll sip on while lounging by the pool.

“Ahhh, I can already feel my stress melting away. Get them from H&amp;M: $17.99 for the top (available in sizes 32A-36A, 32B-38B, 32C-38C, and 34D-36D) and $14.99 for the bottom (available in sizes 0-8, 14, and 18).”

Ahhh, I can already feel my stress melting away.

Get them from H&M: $17.99 for the top (available in sizes 32A-36A, 32B-38B, 32C-38C, and 34D-36D) and $14.99 for the bottom (available in sizes 0-8, 14, and 18).

11. A retro one-piece that’ll have you showing everyone your true ~stripes~.

Promising review: &quot;After reading reviews and seeing similar body types to mine, I decided to take the big leap and buy this suit. I&#x27;m about 200 lbs., wear a 16–20 depending on the brand. I have a VERY difficult time finding bathing suits that fit the way I want. I took the advice of other reviews and purchased the 3XL or otherwise labeled as a US 12/14. HOLY HECK, THIS ONE BLEW ME OUT OF THE WATER!!! The fit is perfect. I&#x27;m very glad the bust area had more fabric! I may just buy this in every color.&quot; —Emma MassGet it from Amazon for $24.99 (available in sizes S–3X and in 24 colors and patterns).”

Promising review: “After reading reviews and seeing similar body types to mine, I decided to take the big leap and buy this suit. I’m about 200 lbs., wear a 16–20 depending on the brand. I have a VERY difficult time finding bathing suits that fit the way I want. I took the advice of other reviews and purchased the 3XL or otherwise labeled as a US 12/14. HOLY HECK, THIS ONE BLEW ME OUT OF THE WATER!!! The fit is perfect. I’m very glad the bust area had more fabric! I may just buy this in every color.” —Emma Mass

Get it from Amazon for $24.99 (available in sizes S–3X and in 24 colors and patterns).

12. A glam two-piece you’ll definitely be feeling yourself in.

Promising review: “I wish I could give this six stars! To my curvy ladies, this bathing suit is an absolute must! I’m about to buy it in every color it’s so perfect! The quality feels super expensive, and the colors are vibrant and just straight-up stunning. I’m 5’6″ and weight about 195 pounds, with a 39D-DD bust and usually wear a size 12-14. The 3XL fit perfectly.” —HoneyEyes0012

Get it from Amazon for $23.99 (available in sizes S-4X and in 19 patterns and 4 solid colors).

 13. An underwire one-piece that’ll be your go to when you’re in a ~cinch~ and need a suit that won’t do you any wrong.

Get it from Aerie for $30 (available in sizes XXS-XL and XS Long-XL Long).

 14. A two piece with a flounce crop top even ruff-led water can’t stop you from looking and feeling amazing in.

“Promising review: &quot;I really love this swim suit. My honeymoon was here before I knew it, and I needed a last minute swim suit, so I took a chance on this one, and It was perfect. I swam in it, I wore it on the beach, I snorkeled in it, and I even used the top as a crop top. I just LOVE this suit. The prime shipping made it easy to choose to buy and the quality of the suit is great. I want it in every color now. I also really loved the little waist strap. I was not so sure of it but it was so cute, and I did not even feel it. 10/10!!&quot; —Taylor GalasGet it from Amazon for $16.99+ (available in sizes S-2X and in 20 colors and patterns).”

Get it from Amazon for $16.99+ (available in sizes S-2X and in 20 colors and patterns).

15. A zip-up bikini you better be prepared to be stopped in every five minutes (every other beach-goer is going to want to know where you got it).

Promising review: “This is a great bathing suit! I got stopped several times to ask where I got it! I ordered the next size up as the reviews suggested, and the fit is perfect.” —RL.

Get it from Amazon for $14.99+ (available in sizes S-XL an two styles).

 16. A wrap tie one piece so beautiful, it’s basically worthy of an installation in a museum. Van Gogh on and try to tell me otherwise.

Get it from Free People for $198 (available in sizes XS-L).

 17. An adjustable striped style that’ll help you ~wrap~ up any past feelings you had about one-pieces not being cool. We aren’t in high school gym class anymore.

Promising review: “This fit great and definitely worked with my 20-weeks-pregnant belly. The white fabric didn’t turn see-through even when wet, and the suit has held up well! One note for nursing mothers — the tie on the side is a working tie and can be undone for easy access if the baby needs to eat. I didn’t use that feature, but I know it’s a bonus when you’re in that stage of life!” —cougs4life

Get it from Amazon for $28.99 (available in sizes S-XXL and three patterns).

strong>18. A simple two piece with a sporty feel to make everyone think you’re super athletic when (in reality) you can’t remember the last time you made it to the gym.

Get it from Amazon for $25.99 (available in sizes S-2X and in 10 colors and prints).

Promising review: “I actually feel confident in this. Like WOW. I bought this on a whim because I really love the style, but I’ve always been way too scared to actually try something like it. I’m a size 12, have stretch marks, and honestly I’m very self-conscious. But I’m going to say that 2018 is the year of the thick girl. This will make you look bomb whether you have all the curves or none of them.” —Christino

 19. A lace trim suit you can rock at the pool, or the beach, or even a waterpark. This baby is versatile!

Promising review: “To say I love this suit is an understatement! It’s amazing!!!! I’m 5’6″ and weigh about 145 pounds. I like to be covered, but I still want something fun. This totally did the trick and cost wayyyy less than an Anthropologie look-alike!” —Gina masucci

Get it from Amazon for $28.99+ (available in sizes S-2X and in five colors and styles).

 20. A geometric print suit – you don’t have to solve an equation to know that you + this suit = perfect match.

Promising Review: “This bathing suit is actually comfortable to wear. It looks just like the image. I can honestly say this suit makes me feel more confident than traditional swimsuits. The material is good, and feels like it will last.” —W.

Get it from Amazon for $17.99+ (available in sizes S–2X and two styles).

21. An embellished one to truly make you stand out from the crowd. You’re one of a kind, darling, and you should let the world know just how unique you are.

Get it from ASOS for $27 (originally $60; available in sizes 0-14).

 22. A cutout one piece you can throw in your carry-on bag to have it ready immediately upon reaching your destination. There’s really no use waiting to wear this.

Get it from Amazon for $28.99 (available in sizes S-2X and in three styles).

 23. A tassel two-piece nobody will believe you got for less than $20. Come on! That’s a steal.

Promising review: “Fast shipping, quality material, and matched the size chart. If you’re stuck between two sizes, I’d say go with the larger. Fringe is shorter than the photo, but still covers the gap. Absolutely worth the money, as plus size two-piece suits can be kind of pricey. Definitely recommend.” —dayna

Get it from Amazon for $12.99+ (available in sizes L–4X and 10 patterns).

 24. A bandeau bikini top and bottom that’ll help you shine like the ray of sunshine you are.

Get them from Aerie: $20 for the top (available in sizes XXS-XXL) and $20 for the bottoms (available in sizes XXS-XXL).

25. A retro one piece to help you complete that pin-up girl look you’ve been trying to achieve.

Promising review: “Ummmm. Wow. I’m a 16/18 DD, and love this. I feel so pretty in it. It fits lovely and is very supportive. I know it is very reasonably priced, but feels like its great quality. If it can last two vacations this summer, I will be happy. Curvies: this is for you! Cups are supportive, and it ties at the neck. I’m sure this will hurt after a while, but something about this cut and color is so pretty. This bathing suit is seriously a great value and a great fit.” —Christina Nagy

Get it from Amazon for $13.99+ (available in sizes M–5XL and 32 colors, patterns, and styles).

26. A string bikini – sometimes simple is the best way to go. Wear it alone or throw on a fun coverup to complete the look!

Get it from Amazon for $17.99+ (available in sizes XS–XL and 39 colors and patterns).

Promiising review: “Hell yeah! Finally a body-hugging bathing suit that is true to size and fits over my big butt! Suit is cheeky, but in a sexy way. It fits perfectly! My boyfriend loves this suit, and the baby pink color is adorable. The material is good, and is comparable with my Victoria’s Secret bathing suits that cost me $80. I’m planning to buy this in another color! :-)” —Lauren

27. A halter one that’ll keep you far from the shallow—the shallow end that is. You’ll want to dive right in wearing this baby.

 

Get it from ModCloth for $85 (available in sizes XS-XL and in navy and orange).

 28. A strappy binkini to help you seas the day on your trip.

Promising review: “If I could leave more than 5 stars for this swimsuit, I WOULD!!!! I want to scream from the rooftops about how amazing the fit and feel of this beautiful set are. I put this on and immediately felt like a million dollars. The top boasts padded cups and adjustable everything, making it fit well no matter your size. I generally have a hard time staying in bikini cups, and I was able to tighten the back AND sides of this suit for a perfect fit. Well-made, well-loved, and I will wear this suit to EVERY beach and pool party from now on!!” —Annie Hinz

Get it from Amazon for $16.90+ (available in sizes M-3X and in four colors).

 29. A cut-out one-shoulder suit – all your friends will say “Beach, please” when you tell them how much you paid for it.

 

Promising review: “This is such a cute suit! It’s unique and fashionable. I was a little worried about the white being sheer, but the fabric is actually thick and durable and provides great coverage. I’ve received so many complements.” —Nicole Soukup

Get it from Amazon for $28.99 (available in sizes S-2X and in yellow/white, grey, and brown).

 30. A skirted one-piece with mesh inserts so you can show a littleskin!

 

Get it from Nordstrom for $135 (available in sizes 6-14).

31. A deep-v one piece with enough stretch you can wear it before, during, and after your pregnancy. Now that’s something I can get behind.

Promising review: “By far the best thing I’ve gotten off Amazon. I normally don’t buy clothes off the internet because I never know if what I’m buying is actually what I’ll get. This totally exceeded my expectations!! Fits so well and made with really good material. It’s better than any bathing suit I’ve bought in a store!” —Amazon Customer

Get it from Amazon for $10.99+ (available in sizes S–3X and in nine colors and styles).

 32. A striped suit people will be ~lining~ up to compliment you on.

Get it from Amazon for $18.99 (available in sizes XS-XL and in four colors).

33. A shimmer one piece you’ll ~shine~ in every single time you wear it.

Get it from ELOQUII for $119.95 (available in sizes 12-28).

34. A floral print off-the-shoulder bikini that doesn’t need to grow on you. You’ll be in love with it as soon as it arrives at your door!

Get it from Amazon for $17.99+ (available in sizes S-XL and in eight colors and styles).

Promising review: “I was very nervous to buy this product as I have had some bad experiences with clothing online. But the price and the customer pictures were too much to pass up. I am so glad I purchased!! It fit well, and it is super cute! It’s not top of the line quality but a far better product than I expected for the price. It might be an issue for someone who is busty as it doesn’t have any support. Otherwise, I would highly recommend it, and I can’t wait to take it out to the beach!” —Megan Nicole

35. A nautical swimsuit dress more than 2,000 people have given five-star reviews, so you know it has to be great.

Get it from Amazon for $29.99 (available in sizes 6–22 and12 colors and styles).

Promising review: “I love this bathing suit! I’m tall and curvy, and let me tell you this suit really makes me feel very sexy. It’s hard to find a bathing suit in stores because they always turn out too short, but this fits. I can’t wait to wear it out to the beach! I feel confident.” —W.

 36. A monokini to help ~color~-block all the haters who say you don’t need another swimsuit. You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life.

Get it from Swimsuits For All for $86.40 (originally $108; available in sizes 4-18).

37. A peplum push up bikini because you shouldn’t waist your time wearing suits from years ago that you don’t feel comfortable in anymore.

Get it from Amazon for $26.99 (available in sizes S-3X and in five colors and patterns).

 38. A tank and short set with a little more coverage, but not so much that you feel like you’re wearing a big sack.

“Promising review: &quot;I love this bathing suit. I am not one to show too much skin, so I was looking for a new bathing suit I would feel comfortable in while in Hawaii. The bottoms are cute little high rise shorts that fit nicely. The top has a fun flowy look that allows me to feel comfortable but look cute at the same time. It also was a nice top to just wear while walking along the beach and shops. I definitely recommend this for those looking to stay comfy and not worry about showing off too much skin!&quot; —KassyGet it from Amazon for $21.99+ (available in sizes XS-2X and in six colors and patterns).”

Promising review: “I love this bathing suit. I am not one to show too much skin, so I was looking for a new bathing suit I would feel comfortable in while in Hawaii. The bottoms are cute little high rise shorts that fit nicely. The top has a fun flowy look that allows me to feel comfortable but look cute at the same time. It also was a nice top to just wear while walking along the beach and shops. I definitely recommend this for those looking to stay comfy and not worry about showing off too much skin!” —Kassy

Get it from Amazon for $21.99+ (available in sizes XS-2X and in six colors and patterns).

Advertising

Serena Williams tells women to ‘Dream Crazier’ in new Nike ad

Content Courtesy of: mashable.com

Tech

The best tech of Mobile World Congress 2019

Content Courtesy of: mashable.com

Written by: RAYMOND WONG

Mobile World Congress returned in full force with the most interesting mobile innovations we’ve seen in years.

Foldable phones and 5G stole the show in Barcelona. It was all but impossible to escape these two big trends at the year’s largest mobile event.

As expected, Samsung and Huawei dominated MWC with phones like the Galaxy S10 and foldable Mate X. No surprise, considering these tech titans are also the two largest phone makers in the world. We were also treated to a few surprises like Microsoft’s HoloLens 2.

After years of the same old, mobile is exciting once again.

Without further ado, here’s Mashable’s top picks of MWC 2019. As always, we’ll continue to update the list throughout the show, so be sure to check back for new additions.

The biggest trends at MWC 2019 were foldable phones and 5G.

Raymond Wong/Mashable

Samsung Galaxy S10

Samsung’s Galaxy S10 family loomed large at MWC and for good reason: the S10e, S10 and S10+ check all of the boxes. Samsung’s packed more into every millimeter of the phones: larger and sharper screens, bigger batteries, faster performance, more cameras, and reverse wireless charging. Even though they were announced a few days early, the Galaxy S10’s were the phones to beat at the show.

Nokia 9 PureView

While every phone seems to be going with three rear cameras this year, Nokia leapfrogged everyone with the Nokia 9 PureView’s five rear cameras. Billed as the most powerful smartphone camera system ever, the Nokia 9 PureView’s five cameras collects up to 60 megapixels worth of data to create stunning photos with more detail and dynamic range. Is this the camera phone that’ll finally kill real cameras? Could be!

Microsoft HoloLens 2

MWC’s primarily a phone show, but that doesn’t mean new phones are the only gadgets to see. Case in point: Microsoft’s HoloLens 2. The new mixed reality headset still isn’t ready for consumers (it’s designed for business and enterprise), but Microsoft’s fixed many of the original’s biggest flaws. HoloLens 2 is sleeker, lighter, comfier to wear, more powerful, and has a field of view that’s over 2x greater than the first HoloLens. The headset’s also cheaper: $3,500 compared to the original’s $5,000.

Huawei Mate X

Huawei’s Mate X was hands-down the best foldable phone at MWC. Compared to Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, the Mate X has larger screens, a prettier design, and faster 5G connectivity. It’s a gorgeous glimpse of a future where phones transform into tablets and vice versa, and the most promising device of this form factor yet. The only kicker is it’ll cost you a whopping $2,600 when it launches in June. Nobody said owning the future would be cheap.

Oppo 10x optical zoom

If there’s any phone maker that’s obsessed with optical zoom, it’s Oppo. The Chinese tech giant stunned MWC attendees a few years ago with a 5x optical zoom camera system and this year the company returned to show off a 10x lossless optical zoom technology. We tried it and it definitely lets you zoom much closer to subject with greater clarity. The crazy zoom tech still needs polish, but even so this kind of mobile photography innovation deserves recognition.

5G was everywhere at MWC, but most 5G networks and devices won’t be ready until 2020.

Raymond Wong/Mashable

Huawei MateBook X Pro (2019)

One of the best laptops of 2018 is even better this year. Besides unveiling the Mate X foldable phone, Huawei also refreshed the MateBook X Pro. The second-gen Windows 10 laptop is still as thin and light as before and the keyboard, trackpad, pop-up webcam, and touchscreen as lovely as well, but inside is all new. With faster Intel 8th-gen processors, more powerful NVIDIA graphics, and new ways to quickly transfer files over from a Huawei phone with a tap on the palm rest, the revamped MateBook X Pro could once again be one of the best laptops of the year.

Samsung Galaxy S10 5G

5G phones were everywhere at MWC, but the best one was easily Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G. With a larger 6.7-inch screen, a fourth rear camera, a massive battery, and of course 5G connectivity, the S10 5G is a beast of a phone that just screams future. The best part is it’s coming out in the second quarter of the year.

LG V50 ThinQ

At a time when everyone’s launching foldable phones, LG decided to go a different route by equipping its upcoming 5G flagship, the V50 ThinQ, with a detachable screen (sold separately). It sounds gimmicky and it definitely isn’t as sexy as a foldable phone, but LG positively surprised by actually putting some effort into the secondary screen. For example, you can slide content from one screen to the other using a three-finger swipe. It’s strange trick and yet it’s really satisfying to do.

Sony Xperia 1

The Xperia 1 is Sony’s best phone in years, but only because it doesn’t look like every other phone at MWC. It doesn’t have a notch or a hole-punch in its display and it doesn’t have 5G or a foldable design. But it does have a 4K HDR OLED ultra-wide 21:9 display. The screen’s super tall and there’s three cameras on the back and, well, it’s just weird enough (but not too weird) that it works.

Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 5G

If you thought you’ll have to fork over at least a thousand dollars for a 5G phone, think again: Xiaomi’s Mi Mix 3 5G is one of few 5G phones announced at MWC with a price, and an acceptable one at that: about $680. The device is a revamped version of the Mi Mix 3 and upgrades the processor from the original Snapdragon 845 chip to the more powerful Snapdragon 855.

SanDisk Extreme 1TB microSD card

You may not need it, but you’ll want it: A microSD card with a whopping 1TB of space. SanDisk’s new card is the holy grail of smartphone storage, and it’s pretty fast, too. Is it overkill? Absolutely, but if you’re gonna record life in 4K and fill up on mega-sized games, the memory card might be worth it. The cost of equipping your phone with so much storage? Only$450.

Advertising

‘Life Has Changed Very Dramatically.’ Meet the ‘Fiji Water Girl’ Who Became the Star of the 2019 Golden Globes

Content Courtesy of: times.com

Written by: RACHEL E. GREENSPAN

Kelleth Cuthbert walks by as Heidi Klum kisses her fiancé Tom Kaulitz at the 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 6, 2019 at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, California.

Kelleth Cuthbert is having a pretty good week. In just a couple of hours, the Los Angeles-based model became the Internet crowned Fiji water girl sensation for holding water bottles at the 76th Golden Globes. But if you’ve been on social media recently, you already know that.

Pictures of the “Fiji water girl” in the background of celebrity red carpet photos have been circulating at an impressive pace since Sunday’s broadcast. Though she was just doing her job as one of Fiji’s brand ambassadors at the event (responsible for keeping all the stars hydrated), she ended up in photos with Tony Shalhoub, Idris Elba, Dakota Fanning and even Heidi Klum lovingly kissing her fiancé, which Cuthbert tells TIME was one of her favorite photos of the night.

“I’ve worked with Fiji before, but this has never happened,” Cuthbert says.

Originally from Toronto, Canada, Cuthbert has been working as a fashion model and commercial actress for twelve years, so she is certainly no stranger to Hollywood. “I think it’s fun to work the red carpet and look at the fashion, but I never get starstruck,” she says.

Cuthbert says her Instagram following was around 53,000 before Sunday’s event. At press time, she has 189,000 followers—more than 256 percent increase. Though she’s still working on trucking through all of the emails, messages and comments she’s gotten since the Globes, she’s already been featured on the Late Late Show with James Corden.

And she’s gotten her fair share of marriage proposals on Instagram.

But because Cuthbert herself has gone viral, Fiji inevitably has, too. This marketing ploy was more than successful: Marketing analytics firm Apex Marketing Group estimates that Fiji would have had to spend $12 million for the same amount of brand exposure. But this wasn’t the first time the brand has worked with models in a similar fashion. Cuthbert has worked with Fiji at other events, including the Emmys. This one, luckily for both the brand and for the model, just happened to have some incredible photo-ops.

Despite working in the industry for more than a decade, Cuthbert isn’t quite used to her newfound fame. “Just a couple days ago, I was walking my dog with no makeup and sweatpants on—maybe even had my pajamas on. Life has changed very dramatically,” she says. But as for what’s next, she’s excited. “I just have to sift through everything and figure out what offers are good, but I definitely would love to do more acting, more modeling, and just to be really busy—really productive.”

Culture

Zendaya Got Her Wisdom Teeth Out and It’s a Whole Journey For Twitter

Content Courtesy of: wmagazine.com

Written by: Elizabeth Logan

New year, new mouth! Zendaya just got her wisdom teeth out, practically a rite of passage for young adults, and posted the hilarious results on social media. Make-up free and fuzzy from painkillers, Zendaya still looks great, but blessedly un-glamorous as she tells the camera about how her mom had to take the day off of work to take care of her. And while the rest of Hollywood gets as gorgeous as possible in preparation for this weekend’s Golden Globe awards, it’s honestly refreshing to see a star looking just a little puffy, the way we mortals sometimes do. Does everyone have to be rage-inducingly pretty at all times? What hath Instagram wrought?

Zendaya had the surgery on January 3, but only blessed us with footage of the aftermath on Friday, first tweeting, “Debating on whether or not I should post this wisdom teeth video on ig, cause I look a hot ass mess…” and then giving us a preview of her post-op lewk:

And while still feeling “weird but better,” she recorded some Instagram Stories that are now saved as a highlight, so you can go watch them any time.

Highlights include her mother realizing that she’s talking to her phone, Zendaya touching all parts of her face to check where she is numb, and an iconic discovery: “my lips are hella soft though…shout out to moisturization.”

Later, she took a nap with her dog and woke up feeling more clear-headed. And if you’re about to complain that Zendaya isn’t as high as your typical viral video victim, well, maybe that’s just part of the joke. As she wrote, “Posted my update on ig stories but there’s a couple more vids from right after the surgery that are cracking me up…I’ll post them later. It’s not as funny as the ones you see on here usually cause I’m actually making sense, but still, it’s funny to me lmao…Coming soon lol”

Causes

Ben & Jerry’s to eliminate plastic from all Scoop Shops

Content Courtesy of: dairyreporter.com

Written by: Beth Newhart

Following the example of many other high-profile companies, Ben &amp; Jerry’s has announced plans to combat the environmental effects of single-use plastic. It will be removed from its Scoop Shop locations worldwide by the end of 2020.

In the last year, plastic straws came under fire with the public for being damaging to the environment. They are not easily recyclable and are harmful to wildlife when left in landfills.

This led to Starbucks making an announcement that it would pull plastic straws from all 28,000 global locations by 2020. It was followed closely by similar promises from Disney, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola Australia.

Ben &amp; Jerry’s, known primarily for ice cream packaged in cardboard pints sold in grocery stores, is now working to eliminate all single-use plastic from its brick-and-mortar Scoop Shops.

From the 600 global locations, Ben &amp; Jerry\u2019s estimates that it gives out 2.5 million plastic straws, and 30 million plastic spoons per year. Straws and spoons will be phased out in early 2019, and the company has plans to replace plastic cups and lids used to serve ice cream by the end of 2020.

Jenna Evans, Ben &amp; Jerry’s Global Sustainability Manager, “We’re not going to recycle our way out of this problem. We, and the rest of the world, need to get out of single-use plastic”.

Ben &amp; Jerry’s started the initiative in August 2018 when it made plastic straws available by request only. The transition to wooden spoons and paper straws is expected to complete by April 9, 2019.

Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said, “Single-use plastics are a pollution threat unlike anything we’ve seen before. Across the globe, discarded plastics are choking our environment and threatening wildlife. The only solution is to stop using them.

“Over the past year, we have begun an intensive effort to find a biodegradable and compostable coating that meets our product quality requirements,” u200b Evans said.

In the short term, eliminating plastic straws and spoons is not going to save the world. But it’s a good start toward changing expectations. We’re committed to exploring additional options to further reduce the use of disposable items.

Response from\u00a0Greenpeace USA Oceans Campaign Director John Hocevar: Ben & Jerry’s is taking an important step by eliminating throwaway plastics throughout its more than 600 shops globally. While other companies have delayed efforts to phase out single-use plastics for years, Ben & Jerry’s has set clear, short-term targets to end its reliance on these plastic items.

“Ben & Jerry and forward-thinking companies around the world are starting to prioritize the reduction of plastics, rather than relying on additional recycling measures that keep the flow of plastics coming. It\u2019s time for Ben &amp; Jerry’s parent company, Unilever, to show the same urgency with time-bound commitments to reduce its reliance on single-use plastics. With concern about plastic pollution growing every day, getting rid of plastics is quickly becoming a no-brainer for countless economic, environmental, and health reasons.”

Food

California residents can now earn rewards for buying milk

Content Courtesy of: dairyreporter.com

Written by: Beth Newhart

The California Milk Processor Board (CMPB) has announced a new loyalty program that will allow California residents to accrue rewards from buying fluid milk products. ‘Moo Money’ will run through April.

This milk rewards program is the first of its kind from a major dairy organization, and will accommodate milk purchases made at participating retailers as well as online. Consumers must first register on the Moo Money website to take part in the program.

The CMPB said that any gallon, half-gallon, quart or non-standard pack size of fluid dairy milk purchased within the state of California qualifies. For in-person purchases, customers are instructed to take a picture of their receipt and submit it online to earn points.

Points can be converted into Virtual Reward Cards, delivered to participants via a link to a Virtual Reward Card PDF. They can be used anywhere MasterCard is accepted up until June 1, 2019.

Steve James, executive director of the California Milk Processor Board, said, “For 25 years, we have connected with our consumers in meaningful ways through some of the most iconic ad campaigns”.

“Now, we are thrilled to be able to give back to all the families in California that recognize that fresh and all-natural dairy milk, the original farm-to-table food, offers great taste and wholesome benefits. We are launching ‘Moo Money’ to thank and reward California families for their loyalty.”

Moo Money points can be earned now through April 28. Only verified California residents over the age of 18 can participate.

The CMPB created the ‘got milk?’ campaign in the 1990s and, according to the CMPB, the ad has more than 90% recognition with Americans.

CMPB recently revamped its website to appeal to millennial parents who grew up with the got milk? ads.

The CMPB is funded by all California milk processors and administered by the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

Art

Peter Paul Rubens Drawing Sells for Record-Setting $8.2 M. at Sotheby’s

Content Courtesy of: artnews.com

Written by: Annie Armstrong

Peter Paul Rubens’s drawing Nude Study of Young Man with Raised Arms (1608) sold for $8.2 million on Wednesday at an Old Masters drawings auction at Sotheby’s in New York. The piece blew past its high estimate of $3.5 million, and it has now set a record for a Rubens drawing at auction.

Rubens created the piece in Italy while he was working on one of his best-known works, an altarpiece titled The Raising of the Cross. In a statement, Gregory Rubenstein, the head of Sotheby’s Old Masters drawings department, said of the work, “Created at such an important moment in the artist’s life, there was a real sense of immediacy to this drawing—a sense of looking over the artist’s shoulder as he works.”

Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Nude Study of a Young Man with
Raised Arms, 1608. Estimated at $2.5 million to $3.5 million, it sold for $8.2 million.

Since the 19th century, the piece has been owned by the family of King William II of the Netherlands. (A representative for the auction house declined to name the seller of the work.) The drawing was auctioned today to a buyer who remained unidentified by the Sotheby’s.

While Nude Study of Young Man with Raised Arms has set a new record for a Rubens drawing, it is far from the most expensive work by the artist. In 2012, Rubens’s painting Massacre of the Innocents, sold for $76 million at Sotheby’s London, setting a record for an Old Masters work at auction.

Best Art of 2018

Content Courtesy of: nytimes.com

Written by: Roberta Sith, Holland Cotter and Jason Farago

Some highlights of the year included, from top left, Hilma af Klint, Bruce Nauman, Huma Bhabha, Antonio Canova, Charles White and Eugène Delacroix.

The art critics of The New York Times tell you what rocked their worlds this year: notable art events, works in museums and galleries, emerging artists and how they found beauty in unexpected places.

ROBERTA SMITH

Winners and Losers

A series of Altarpieces in “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” at the Guggenheim use ascending and descending triangles set against energized orbs. Mysticism informed her pioneering abstraction.CreditGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times

When the going gets rough, there’s always art. It can soothe and teach you, and arm you with new tools and perspectives with which to face the world. This year had some great winners and obvious losers.

Winner: Art History, Refigured

One of the most thrilling winners was European and American art history. Magnificent exhibitions at three museums advanced new research in areas that had seemed thoroughly explored. The Guggenheim Museum offers a revisionary chapter about the start of modern abstraction in its current headliner, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” introducing works that this Swedish artist and mystic made in 1906-7. Suddenly, the most sacred genesis tale of Modernism — the invention of abstract painting — has acquired a female actor who actually got there several years ahead of the revered triumvirate of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Af Klint’s joyous paintings, with their radical palette, scale and openness, push abstraction toward the future. (Through April 23.)

Another gauntlet landed with “Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet and Matisse to Today,” at the Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University. Partnering with the Musée d’Orsay, the Wallach has combined some great paintings (by Manet, Bazille, Degas, Matisse and Bearden) with fascinating ephemera, bringing new detail about the plight and presence of black women in late-19th-century Paris life and art, and following this theme through the Harlem Renaissance into the present. (Through Feb. 10.)

In Washington, the Smithsonian American Art Museum unveiled “Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor,” a stunning retrospective of this once-unknown outsider genius (1853-1949), a former slave and tenant farmer who spent the last decade of his precarious life making drawings on the streets of Montgomery, Ala. Effortless in their fusion of narrative and form, Traylor’s images distill memories harsh and pleasant into taut silhouettes on found cardboard. They now count among the greatest works of 20th-century American art, and thanks to a magnificent catalog, the artist is obscure no more. The show will not travel, so plan a trip to Washington soon. (Through March 17.)

Loser: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Blinks, Twice

Everyone who likes art, except residents of New York State, lost when the Met persuaded New York City officials to replace “pay what you wish” with an egregious mandatory fee of $25. With this, the immensely wealthy Met sacrificed one of its most honorable features: the broad accessibility offered by libraries. The loser is visual literacy.

In the fall, financial anxiety led the Met to back out of the last three years of its eight-year lease of the Met Breuer and reabsorb its department of Modern and contemporary art into its main building. The program at the Met Breuer has been surprisingly good and getting better, but attendance hasn’t been high enough. It certainly didn’t help that the Fifth Avenue museum remained the staging ground of big-draw contemporary shows like the David Hockney retrospective or the recent display of gifts from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.

Winner: Van Gogh Again

Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh in “At Eternity’s Gate,” a film directed by Julian Schnabel.

Credit By: Lily Gavin/CBS Films

The year brought an outstanding movie about a painter: Julian Schnabel’s “At Eternity’s Gate,” an intimate, atmospheric treatment of the last days of Vincent van Gogh. Such endeavors rarely attain credibility, and yet this century now boasts two, the other being Mike Leigh’s lavish “Mr. Turner” (2014). “At Eternity’s Gate” is carried by its star, Willem Dafoe, whose gripping performance is aided by his uncanny resemblance to the artist. Mr. Schnabel’s stated goal was to desensationalize the story of van Gogh — usually depicted as a mad artist who killed himself and died in obscurity. The movie makes a good case against each of those points, starting with its plain, unsensational style. What we get is an impassioned, articulate artist who adored nature and painting it and had a touchingly codependent relationship with his younger brother Theo. Mr. Schnabel also sides with those who argue that van Gogh did not commit suicide and proposes that he was killed by two youths playing with a gun.

Winner: A Genre Revitalized

Former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama elevated a dreary academic ritual — the official White House portrait — making a routine post-presidential event an instance of change. Seeing advantage in the renewed liveliness of figure painting, the couple chose a well-known painter, Kehinde Wiley (for Mr. Obama’s portrait), and a lesser-known artist, Amy Sherald (for Mrs. Obama’s). The depictions at the National Portrait Gallery are more than good enough — and the better for being such distinctive, explicitly human departures from a fossilized tradition that, with luck, will never be the same.

Winners: The Citizens of Chicago

Kerry James Marshall’s beloved mural about the power of books, “Knowledge and Wonder,” will remain at the Chicago Public Library’s Legler branch.CreditCity of Chicago

A much-loved public mural by the painter Kerry James Marshall is staying put. Called “Knowledge and Wonder,” it was commissioned in 1995 for the Chicago Public Library’s Legler branch, on the city’s West Side, and celebrates the library as a source of mystery and wonder for children. With Mr. Marshall’s profile and his prices on the rise, the city decided to sell it at Christie’s, hoping to raise $10 million to fund an expanded library and a new public-art program. But with rising prices come increased clout, and when Mr. Marshall objected to the sale of his 10-by-23-foot work, the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, reversed course.

Loser: An Auction Low

The British street artist Banksy put up a work at Sotheby’s auction house that half-destructed as the gavel came down, thanks to a remote-control shredder built into its frame. (It sold for $1.4 million.) The audience seemed genuinely shocked; those behind the podium, not so much. Banksy’s clever trick is sure to earn him a footnote in auction history, which is no stranger to stunts (most involving chandelier pricing). Still, this one did give rise to a slender hope that if such tricks become an auction house staple, serious people might go back to buying art the old-fashioned way — from galleries. But not yet. Everyone was back at the madness the following week, bidding up a Hockney and a Hopper to record prices.

HOLLAND COTTER

Best in Show

Installation views of “Afro-Atlantic Histories” at the São Paulo Museum of Art.

Credit By: Eduardo Ortega

In 2018, a politically shuddersome year, the international art world was both out to lunch and on the alert. Art fairs and auctions continued to serve as conveyor belts for investment capital. Cheerleading and celebrity chat passed for discourse. At the same time, a spirit of resistance was building, and some critical projects came to pass.

ART

Smoking pipe, razor and revolver removed from Van Gogh sculpture in London’s Brixton

Content Courtesy of: theartnewspaper.com

Written by: Martin Bailey

Controversial items relating to the artist’s life were scrapped from original design over fears they could be linked to drug, knife and gun crime

A model of the original design for Anthony Padgett’s Van Gogh sculpture in Brixton, London

A statue of Van Gogh in Brixton had to be modified, in order to avoid any perceived links with crime in south London. The original sculpture was to have been mounted on a base which included a still life with objects relating to the artist’s life.

Along with tubes of paint, they included Van Gogh’s trusty pipe (which is depicted on the chair of his painting in the National Gallery), a cut throat razor (of the type which the artist used to mutilate his ear) and a revolver (similar to the one with which he shot himself). These objects, including the paint tubes, highlight the mixing of creativity and destruction.

Anthony Padgett, a Lancashire artist, has recently made the sculptured head on a still life base for many of the places where the artist worked—in Britain (Ramsgate and Isleworth), Belgium (Borinage), the Netherlands (Nuenen) and France (Arles). But in Brixton the objects on the base were regarded as more problematic.

The modified Van Gogh sculpture just unveiled in Brixton

Padgett informally discussed the still life with local officials and whether the pipe, razor and gun might be associated with “drug, knife and gun crime”. He was never told that planning permission would be refused if the objects were included, but was gently advised it would be easier if they were not. Padgett, who appreciated these concerns, agreed to drop this part of the still life. Lambeth council subsequently gave planning permission for the statue for at least 15 years.

Last Friday the sculpted head was installed in Van Gogh Walk, a pedestrianised garden area close to 87 Hackford Road, where Van Gogh lodged. Padgett’s work there includes non-controversial elements of the still life base—several books of Van Gogh’s letters and two sunflowers—but the more contentious objects are missing.

“The Hackford Road area is lovely, but the pipe, razor and gun could nevertheless be seen as a concern in a city where there is a high incidence of these crimes”, Padgett says. He adds: “Concerns over these objects show the power they still have and help convey the reality of the suffering that Van Gogh endured”.

INNOVATION

SpaceX, we have a problem

Content Courtesy of: theartnewspaper.com

A rendering of Trevor Paglen’s diamond-shaped sculpture, attached to a tiny satellite 

Credit: Nevada Museum of Art

The delay of today’s widely anticipated launch of a SpaceX rocket in California was a disappointment to more than just the average space fan. The Falcon 9 rocket was due to carry two works of art—a reflective Suprematist-inspired sculpture by the artist Trevor Paglen and a bust of Nasa’s first African-American astronaut by the artist Tavares Strachan—along with dozens of other satellites. But SpaceX announced in a tweetthis weekend that the planned launch from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base would be cancelled “to conduct additional pre-flight inspections”. A spokeswoman at the Nevada Museum of Art, which is sponsoring Paglen’s project, says lift-off will therefore take place “sometime after the Thanksgiving Day holiday”. Paglen, who had flown in to watch the launch, is philosophical about the delay. “This is definitely par for the course in terms of doing things in space,” he says. “We’re trying to roll with the punches and accept those things you cannot control.”

POP CULTURE

The Legend Who Created Legends Says God Bye

Content Courtesy of: fairobserver.com

Written by:  Knowledge@Wharton

In this opinion piece, Knowledge@Wharton’s technology and media editor, Kendall Whitehouse, looks back at the career of comic book writer, editor and publisher Stan Lee, who passed away at age 95.

Stan Lee was the most famous individual in the history of comic books — a testament to his talent as a writer and editor, his longevity and his skills at self-promotion. His writing and editorial approach to the superhero genre created a universe of enduring fictional characters, elevated comic books from children’s entertainment to adult fare, and helped to establish Marvel Comics as a publishing powerhouse.

In conjunction with artists and visual storytellers like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck and others, Lee was instrumental in the creation of many of the comic book characters that populate the Marvel universe: the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man and hundreds of other superheroes, villains and supporting characters.

Lee’s career spanned nearly the entire history of comic books, starting in 1940 at the dawn of what would become known as the Golden Age of comics, serving as a driving force in the rebirth of the superhero genre in the Silver Age of the 1960s, and remaining as a figurehead in the industry as chairman emeritus of Marvel Comics until his passing. Widowed by his wife of nearly 70 years, Joan Lee, in July 2017, Lee is survived by his daughter, J.C. (Joan Celia) Lee, and his brother, Larry Lieber.

Born Stanley Martin Lieber on December 28, 1922, Lee began his career in comic books at age 17 when he was hired by his relative by marriage Martin Goodman, publisher of Timely Comics (the company that would later become Marvel Comics), to be an office assistant for editor Joe Simon.

When given his first chance to author a story — a short text piece that appeared in Captain America #3 in 1941 — he signed his name as “Stan Lee.” As Lee later explained it, he wanted to reserve his real name for when he would write serious literature. But his future lay not in becoming a novelist, but as a writer, editor and publisher of comic books.

Through his writing, Lee introduced a new level of complexity and sophistication to comic book characters. Although dark, angst-ridden heroes are now the norm, that wasn’t the case at the dawn of the Silver Age of comics in the early 1960s. The urbane stories Lee penned helped to expand the audience for comic books beyond its traditional audience of pre-teen children to include older teenagers and college students. 

Complex Characters

While the Fantastic Four was likely modeled after rival DC Comics’ Justice League of America, unlike DC’s noble and stolid characters, the members of the Fantastic Four had quirky personality traits. They bickered with each other. Youthful Johnny Storm is a teenage hothead (who is transformed in the Human Torch). Surly Ben Grimm — the Thing — hates what he has become and spends much of his energy attempting to get rid of his super-human strength (and freakish appearance).

Other Marvel comics in the early 1960s continued this trend of psychologically complex characters. While Spider-Man is a successful crime fighter, his teenage alter ego, Peter Parker, is taunted by his schoolmates, frets over the health of his widowed aunt May, and often doubts his own abilities and motivations.

While the superheroes in DC Comics inhabit fictionalized locations – Superman in Metropolis, Batman in Gotham City and so on — Lee placed his characters firmly within the real world. The Baxter Building, the headquarters Fantastic Four, is in midtown Manhattan. Daredevil arose out of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. Spider-Man’s Peter Parker lives with his aunt May in the Forest Hills community of Queens, New York.

In an amusing metafictional moment in The Fantastic Four #11, the titular team arrives at the local newsstand to pick up a copy of their comic book to find a long line of eager fans queued up to get the latest issue. Unwilling to wait in line, the gruff Ben Grimm says, “What’s the big deal? We know how the stories end!”

This grounding in reality also meant the stories in each comic book existed in the same universe. Characters from one title would often cross-over to meet the characters in another. Under Lee’s direction, the comic books laid the foundation for the “Marvel Universe,” in which each comic book is but one view into a larger world. Comprehending the full narrative required reading multiple comic book titles – a strategy of increasing relevance in the present world of transmedia marketing as the Marvel characters expand beyond comic books to include movies, television shows and more.

Lee is credited with developing what became known as the “Marvel method” of comic book production. In contrast to the conventional approach in which the writer develops a detailed script for the artist to render, Lee would often provide his visual collaborators with little more than an outline containing a few story elements. The illustrator would then plot the details of the story through the artwork — often including notes in the margin to explain the action to the writer. Lee would add the final dialog to the completed sketches before they were inked and printed.

Designed primarily to accommodate the crushing amount of work that needed to be accomplished, in giving more creative control to the artist, the Marvel method also helped to advance visually exciting works. Illustrators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko created dazzling works of illustrated art under Lee’s editorship. This unusual division of labor between writer and artist would later call into question who was the “creator” of the some of the characters once they became multimillion-dollar properties featured in motion pictures and licensed merchandise.

Lee was a skilled promoter — of his company, his work and himself. As Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon document in Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, Lee wasn’t averse to mythologizing his own life story to make it more dramatic.

The issue of how much credit is due Lee for the success of many of Marvel’s characters is hotly debated among fans and detractors. In one awkward moment in an interview with British talk show host Jonathan Ross, Lee avoids giving artist Steve Ditko full credit as co-creator of Spider-Man stating, “I think the person who has the idea is the one who creates it” rather than the artist who gives visual expression to the idea.

Lee eventually parted ways with his early artistic collaborators such as Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, often clashing over artistic differences or the credit for their joint creations.

Some of Lee’s later initiatives were not as successful as his work at Marvel Comics. Stan Lee Media, formed in 1998 (as Stan Lee Entertainment), with partner Peter F. Paul, went public in 1999 but closed operations a year later and declared bankruptcy in 2001 amid scandals of stock manipulation on Paul’s part. In 2001 Lee bounced back, co-founding POW! Entertainment with partners Gill Champion and Arthur Lieberman, which went public in 2004 with Lee as chairman and chief creative officer. In 2017, POW! Entertainment was acquired by China’s Camsing International Holding.

In his later years, Lee was associated with a wide range of publications and products, over which his creative involvement is uncertain. As “Stan the brand,” his name would attract attention and his enthusiastic boosterism was an asset to his business partners.

In the final year of his life, allegations arose of financial mismanagement and exploitation by close associates. Lee initially rejected the claims he was a victim of elder abuse.  “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” he told The New York Times. “Nobody has more freedom.”

Lee continued to make appearances at comic book conventions and fan festivals until earlier this year. His brief cameo appearances were a popular feature in the movies based on Marvel Comics’ characters.

Lee leaves a rich legacy of stories and a durable imprint on the industry he helped to build. He was instrumental in elevating comic books from being perceived as frivolous entertainment for children to a major art form. The characters he created continue to resonate throughout today’s comic books, motion pictures, television series and popular culture.

MUSIC

November Top Hits Playlist (10 OUT OF 100)

Content Courtesy of: youtube.com

FASHION

27 Tech Gifts for the Loveable Nerds in Your Life

Content Courtesy of: elle.com

Written by: Justine Carreon

The new iPhone Xr might be the hottest phone on the market, but there are other tech gifts to go around. From Amazon-approved ring lights for the burgeoning beauty vlogger and an actual cyber pooch to vapes because it’s 2018 and they’re literally inescapable, here are the best tech gifts of 2018.

You don’t want to discourage his dangerous relationship with french fries, but steer them in a healthier direction with an air fryer.

This gadget will keep their coffee warm at their desk all day long.

I’ll be the first to admit that I thought Air Pods belonged to tech bros who left you on read, but I’ve changed my tune. AirPods are life-changing.

Speaking from personal experience, this belt carries my giant iPhone with ease during the most intense HIT workouts.

A phone’s flash is never enough.

This is for someone new to tracking their health. It will monitor their steps, distance, activity time, and even calories burned.

Portable speakers are a dime a dozen, but this version is so much more stylish.

This console is still a top gift for all ages, which allows players to play alone or with a buddy.

If your BFF is allergic to dogs but still has puppy fever, Sony’s “autonomous companion robot” is for them. It’s a high-key Tamagatchi for the top-tear techie.

A projector makes binge-watching Making a Murderer so much more intense.

Noise-canceling bluetooth headphones are ideal for zoning out.

If they’re new to tech timepieces, this one retains the classic Michael Kors style beloved by many.

Nervous parents will feel relief with this smart baby monitor that lets parents watch, listen and chat with their baby in the next room.

The new kindle only needs to charge once a month, which means she really doesn’t need to put her newest book down.

Some of us don’t lazily reach down from our bed to find an iPhone charger. Some, like the person who deserves this dock, would rather charge their phone on a marble pedestal instead.

The Pixel’s camera really is that much better. New features in the third iteration—including a wider view to enable group selfies—make it a must for the person who won’t. stop. snapping.

Drones are fast-becoming the toy of the decade. This one is intended for amateur users who want to feel like a Jedi, with sensors that respond to hand motions from the air.

There are a ton of new instant cameras available today (the Fujifilm Instax is my fave), but old-school photographers would prefer this refurbished antique.

Have a friend that constantly thinks their flatmate is breaking into their room and stealing their clothes? This will help their anxiety.

You’ll never have to hear about their spotty WiFi connection again thanks to this device.

Rarely does one buy themselves a flashy phone case. That’s where you come in.

This discreet pen is perfect for the vaping newbie…one who lives in a state where marijuana is legalized, of course.

If your BFF tracks every detail of her athletic life, then she’ll appreciate this smart rope that will track her jumps.

A food scale is essential for any baker, but this one helps fix your mistakes by adjusting your recipe’s measurements to counter over-pouring.

Beautiful home decor is just as important as sound quality to them. This turntable will offer both.

He can easily stream his music from anywhere by plugging this simple-to-use gadget into a set of speakers.

This sleek ring has all the benefits of a smart fitness tracker, but looks like regular jewelry.

ADVERTISING

John Lewi’s Christmas Ad “Some Gifts are more than just a gift”

Content Courtesy of: youtube.com

John Lewis’ Christmas Ad Is a Lovely Ode to Elton John’s Career, and How It All Began

Content Courtesy of: adweek.com

Written by: David Griner

The holiday angle isn’t obvious at first, but it’s worth the wait

The retailer’s highly anticipated holiday spot rewinds Elton John’s life to his childhood as Reginald Kenneth Dwight.

Credit by: John Lewis & Partners

With Elton John’s whirlwind farewell tour spanning the globe and his music seemingly more omnipresent than ever, one might be tempted toward disappointment upon hearing that U.K. retailer John Lewis’ highly anticipated Christmas ad is dedicated solely to the legendary singer-songwriter.

ART

Banksy Painting Self-Destructs After Fetching $1.4 Million at Sotheby’s

Content Courtesy of: nytimes.com

Written by: Scott Reyburn

LONDON — The British street artist Banksy pulled off one of his most spectacular pranks on Friday night, when one of his trademark paintings appeared to self-destruct at Sotheby’s in London after selling for $1.4 million at auction.

The work, “Girl With Balloon,” a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby’s “Frieze Week” evening contemporary art sale. After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby’s.

“Then we heard an alarm go off,” Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. “Everyone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame.”

The painting, mounted on a wall close to a row of Sotheby’s staff members, had been shredded, or at least partially shredded, by a remote-control mechanism on the back of the frame.

A photo posted on the private Instagram account of Caroline Lang, the chairman of Sotheby’s Switzerland, showed a man in the salesroom operating an electronic device hidden inside a bag. Ms. Long said that she later saw a man being removed from the building by Sotheby’s security staff.

“We’ve been Banksy-ed,” Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in Europe, said at a news conference afterward.

“I’ll be quite honest,” Mr. Branczik continued, “we have not experienced this situation in the past, where a painting is spontaneously shredded upon achieving a record for the artist.”

Mr. Branczik added that he was “not in on the ruse.”

Sotheby’s has not named the client whose $1.4 million purchase was destroyed. International auction houses do not divulge the identities of their buyers unless the person requests it.

But Sotheby’s said in a statement on Saturday: “The successful bidder was a private collector, bidding through a Sotheby’s staff member on the phone. We are currently in discussions about next steps.”