#the first time since the mid 50s...since before RCA

[lllsaslll]

Today's lil' Elvis Music Gem🙏

Yes, again with more Back In Memphis! But this time we've got "And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind" and the interesting Neil Diamond-filled story of the famed American Sound Studio sessions.

In 1969 just the day after his Elvis' 34th birthday when Elvis was planning his return to music recording, Marty Lacker successfuly convinced Elvis to skip on Nashville and to instead give Chips Moman and his Memphis-based American Sound Studio a chance. When Elvis agreed (without even consulting the Colonel first) but with a tight turn around, Moman had to reschedule the recording sessions of Neil Diamond that had already been set just four days out. "Fuck Neil Diamond, he'll just have to be postponed. Tell Elvis he's on." Moman told Lacker as he called from the front hall phone at Graceland.

Soon after, during a break in recording due to Elvis' cold turning to laryngitis, Elvis and the guys were going through the demos back at Graceland. When realizing the selection of songs being brought in by the Colonel were aweful Elvis made an important declaration; that from then on he would pick his own music. He asked that everyone be bringing in songs, "... from now on I want to hear every song I can get my hands on, and if I've got a piece of the publishing, that's fine, but if I don't and I want to do the song, I'm going to do it."

And the boys got to work, bringing in new music for Elvis to sample beyond the usual songs that the Colonel had special interests in. George Klein having connections with artists through his TV show then immediately got on the phone with Neil Diamond. He may have been kicked from his original recording slot, but Elvis' prior L.A. next-door neighbor agreed to him singing "And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind" when the sessions resumed in late January and February.

#elvis #elvis presley #elvis music #american sound studio #back in memphis #1969 #60s elvis #70s elvis #neil diamond #and the grass wont pay no mind #todays lil hidden elvis gem #seeing the dates all these things happened is insane..the 68 special had just aired at the begining of december and right at the start of #january these sessions are started #and like the majority of elvis' hits from the 70s were picked learned and recorded right then #also how is there so little documentation or interaction between neil and elvis #but most importantly LOOK AT OUR BOY GO not only did he say fuck ur shit songs colonel im gonna play the music i wanna play #AND ANNNDD he makes the decision to change the studio and session musicians hes working with by cutting in memphis instead of nashville for #the first time since the mid 50s...since before RCA #AND AND A N D this is immediately after the 68 special when elvis was finally getting to be creative and call shots and have people from #outside of his usual bubble or the profit obsessed producers of hollywood around him #only thing is it kinda dampers things to hear that lacker was not a fan of anything else elvis really did past these sessions. idk why #he was so obsessed with this studio specifically but idk it reads as bias but idk why he would be to american sound #Youtube

[myrecordcollections]

Harry Belafonte 

Golden Records

@ 1967 Germany Pressing

*****

The German Harry Belafonte compilation Golden Records, released in 1964, was the first major LP collection of the singer's greatest hits and best-known album tracks from the period 1953-1961, issued long before the U.S. got around to doing anything similar. 

All six of Belafonte's U.S. Top 40 hits -- "Jamaica Farewell," "Mary's Boy Child," "Banana Boat (Day-O)," "Mama Look a Boo-Boo (Shut Your Mouth Go Away)," "Coconut Woman," and "Island in the Sun" -- are included, along with eight other songs that were issued as singles ("Matilda, Matilda," "Round the Bay of Mexico," "The Marching Saints," and "Come Back Liza") or included on such successful albums as Calypso, Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean, and Jump up Calypso. The result is an excellent overview of Belafonte's Caribbean folk style, which dominated pop music from the mid-'50s to the early '60s. Since the initial LP release, the American RCA label has finally matched this set with 1978's All Time Greatest Hits, Vol. 1, which contains more chart singles as well as anomalies like "Abraham, Martin, and John." But Golden Records, Vol. 1 is still a good Belafonte compilation for those looking for the basic hits.

#Golden Records #Harry Belafonte #Caribbean Folk #Folk #Germany #W Germany #1967

[holidays-events]

The First Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Was Started by Site Construction Workers

by Justin Rivers

Membit is a new augmented reality app that gives you a way to share the past with the present and a way to share the present with the future. It’s now available from the AppStore. Try It : http://get.membit.co

On December 24, 1931 the first unofficial Christmas tree at the Rockefeller Center site was put up spontaneously by a group of construction workers.

Since 1928 John D. Rockefeller Jr. had been paying Columbia University $5 million a year to lease a 12-acre stretch of land bounded by 5th and 6th Avenues between 49th and 52nd Streets. The history of the land itself is described in the Nomination Form for the National Register of Historic Places:

“Between 1804 and 1811 this property had been developed by Dr. David Hosack as the famed Elgin Gardens. An innovative concept in America, its legacy was to survive in Rockefeller Center’s rooftop and Channel Gardens. In 1811 rising costs led Dr. Hosack to sell the property to New York State. Three years later the nearly 12 acre plot was conveyed to Columbia College (later university) under an aid-to-education act. Located about three miles north of the college campus at Church Street, the “Upper Estate” was leased for residential development, all of which was completed by 1879. By the mid-1920s, however, many of the 298 row houses in this once stylish neighborhood had deteriorated into an unseemly collection of boarding houses, nightclubs and speakeasies on the northern boundary of New York’s theater district.”

Rockefeller planned to turn the area into a cultural center with a new Metropolitan Opera House as its anchor but the 1929 market crash left the opera languishing and he decided to move away from the partnership. By 1930 he invested another $100 million to remove the smaller dilapidated structures on the property and replace them with 14 larger buildings which he envisioned to be a city within a city. It was a risky move that he hoped would make his initial investment finally pay off. Rockefeller promptly renewed the lease for another 23 years and undertook one of the largest private building projects in modern history.

Construction workers waiting to receive their paychecks on Christmas Eve, 1931. They erected the tree spontaneously in gratitude for their jobs. Source: Rockefeller Center.

By December, 1931 most New Yorkers were suffering from the economic devastation caused by the Great Depression. On December 24 the New York Times reported a surplus of unsold Christmas trees since people weren’t able to afford them: “Christmas trees were a glut on the market yesterday…. More than 120 carloads of trees remain unsold.” In contrast the Rockefeller Center project employed close to 40,000 people desperate for work. So that Christmas Eve, the construction workers, grateful to have jobs, decided to pool their money and purchase one of those surplus trees.

They took a twenty foot balsam fir and put it up in the center of the newly cleared work site. The men decorated the tree with various items including tin cans, cranberries, and paper garlands made by some of their families. The tree was not lit, but the foreman placed a small table under it were he handed out the worker’s paychecks before they went home to their families for the holiday.

The first “official” Rockefeller Christmas tree lighting took place in 1933 with a 50 foot balsam fir as a publicity stunt to draw attention to the new RCA Building (30 Rock) which opened the May prior. A publicist from Rockefeller Center said the event would become a tradition calling the tree “a holiday beacon for New Yorkers and visitors alike.”

According to Rockefeller Center’s official website, two trees were lit in 1936 to celebrate the opening of the new ice skating rink on the plaza. During World War II, three smaller trees decorated in red, white, and blue were put up but not lit because of black-out regulations. No materials essential to the war could be used so they were decorated with painted wooden stars and globes.

Since the tree lighting tradition began the tallest tree on record was the 1999 Norway Spruce from Killington, CT coming in at 100 feet. This year’s tree from Oneonta, NY comes in second at 94 feet. It is reported that over 125 million people will visit the Rockefeller Christmas Tree before it is taken down in early January.

Next, read about 5 quirky things you didn’t know about the Rockefeller Christmas Tree. See vintage photos of Christmas Tree lightings around NYC and the Secrets of Rockefeller Center.

https://untappedcities.com/2016/12/15/throw-back-thursday-1931-first-rockefeller-center-christmas-tree-started-by-site-construction-workers/

#Christmas

[savanahdppadillaim10insuran-blog]

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The People Who Defined Visual Culture in 2018

If we were to bury a time capsule filled with vestiges of visual culture in 2018, we would include the work of the following photographers, designers, artists, directors, tech leaders, activists, and influencers. This list goes beyond the art world and into pop culture, internet vernacular, and the wider news cycle. It’s about who is contributing to a more diverse set of voices in art, film, fashion, and beyond. It’s about milestones: the first black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover; the youngest architect to design the Serpentine Pavilion; the first artist to have his work self-destruct mid-auction. And it’s about recognizing visionaries of the past, whose work is imbued with new meaning in our current social landscape, from an underrepresented Baroque painter to the designers of the European Union flag. Here, we highlight the 25 individuals and collaborators who shaped what our culture looks like in 2018.

Donald Glover and Hiro Murai

“This Is America”

A still from Donald Glover’s “This Is America” video. Courtesy of the artist.

A duo creating extraordinary narratives about black American life.

Photo of Donald Glover and Hiro Murai by Curtis Baker. Courtesy of Curtis Baker/FX.

Childish Gambino, “This Is America” album cover art. Courtesy of RCA Records.

Still from Atlanta Season 2. Photo by Guy D'Alema, FX.

Still from Atlanta Season 2. Photo by Guy D'Alema, FX.

This spring, when actor-comedian Donald Glover released the music video for his rapper alter-ego Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” it set the internet ablaze. Glover and filmmaker Hiro Murai, a longtime collaborator, had created an utterly engrossing and disturbing masterpiece. In four minutes, the duo summed up the troubling undercurrent in America’s racial climate in a beautiful but often-brutal spectacle: Violence erupts around Glover as he moves through the video, his gestures and choreography referencing Jim Crow, minstrel shows, and viral internet dances. Glover himself ruthlessly executes witnesses to his performance.

In 48 hours, the video racked up more than 30 million views (to date, it has been watched over 445 million times). Viewers, knowing there was a wealth of symbolism to unpack, were hungry for critical analysis; seemingly every major publication—from The New Yorker and NPR to Dazed and Complex—responded with its own take. When was the last time a music video required such meticulous dissection? Before, Glover had enjoyed a dedicated fanbase for his music, but after “This Is America,” he had everyone’s attention.

The “This Is America” video dovetailed with the end of the second season of the FX show Atlanta, created by and starring Glover, who plays Earn, a man trying to find himself as he manages his cousin’s rap career in the eponymous city. The comedy-drama, which is almost entirely directed by Murai, has solidified its barrier-breaking power.

Atlanta is about black life in America, but it also embraces the uncanny—particularly in this year’s season. In one episode, deep loss and existential dread color rapper Paper Boi’s disorienting journey through the woods; in another, Glover wears whiteface to play the bizarre, wealthy recluse Teddy Perkins, the episode leaning into the same mix of eeriness, humor, and acute racial symbolism that powered the 2017 hit film Get Out. (Someone, not Glover, dressed up as Perkins at the 2018 Emmys, continuing the character’s unsettling narrative.) It’s a world that only Glover and Murai could imagine—their collaboration has been one of the most potent forces in entertainment this year.

Amy Sherald

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama

Detail of Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Created the iconic official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama.

Former first lady Michelle Obama and Amy Sherald, right, unveil Michelle Obama’s official portrait at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Monday, Feb. 12, 2018, in Washington. Photo by AP Photo/Andrew Harnik.

Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Photograph of two-year-old Parker Curry admiring Amy Sherald’s portrait of former first Lady Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Courtesy of Jessica Curry.

“Let’s just start by saying ‘wow,’” said former first lady Michelle Obama, standing beside her just-unveiled official portrait, painted by artist Amy Sherald. The February ceremony at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.—which also revealed Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of former president Barack Obama—was the star-making moment for the Baltimore-based painter, whose profile had been on the rise since 2016, following her first solo show at Monique Meloche and an award from Smithsonian.

Demand for Sherald’s boldly colorful, classically posed portraits of black subjects skyrocketed following the unveiling, and, in March, she signed with global mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth. Institutional recognition of Sherald has also been building: Her first major solo museum show is currently on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art after a debut at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in May.

“In her choice to paint black sitters, she firmly and declaratively adds to an art-historical lineage, expanding the notion of who gets to be seen and how,” said Lisa Melandri, who curated Sherald’s St. Louis show and also serves as the museum’s executive director.

But Sherald’s impact on 2018 went far beyond market forces and institutional support. Indeed, her Michelle Obama portrait proved so popular that it had to be moved to accommodate the crowds flocking to see it. One of the viewers, a two-year-old named Parker Curry, stood awestruck in front of the painting, and a photo of the moment went viral. Curry subsequently met the former first lady and dressed as Sherald’s portrait for Halloween, while another trick-or-treater went as Sherald herself at the National Portrait Gallery unveiling, giving credence to Obama’s own prescient speech about Sherald’s painting.

“I’m also thinking about all the young people, particularly girls and girls of color,” the former first lady said, “who in years ahead will come to this place, and they will look up and they will see an image of someone who looks like them hanging on the wall of this great American institution—and I know the kind of impact that will have on their lives, because I was one of those girls.”

teamLab

Mori Building Digital Art Museum

Installation view of teamLab, “Borderless,” 2018, at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, Odaiba, Tokyo. © teamLab. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Opened the world’s first digital art museum.

Installation view of teamLab, “Borderless,” 2018, at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, Odaiba, Tokyo. © teamLab. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Installation view of teamLab, “Borderless,” 2018, at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, Odaiba, Tokyo. © teamLab. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Installation view of teamLab, “Borderless,” 2018, at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, Odaiba, Tokyo. © teamLab. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Installation view of teamLab, “Borderless,” 2018, at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, Odaiba, Tokyo. © teamLab. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Installation view of teamLab, “Borderless,” 2018, at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, Odaiba, Tokyo. © teamLab. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Installation view of teamLab, “Borderless,” 2018, at Mori Building Digital Art Museum, Odaiba, Tokyo. © teamLab. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

In June, the interdisciplinary mega-collective teamLab unveiled its biggest project yet: a 10,000-square-meter digital art museum in Tokyo. Called the Mori Building Digital Art Museum, it’s the first museum in the world devoted to digital art. It also completely defies the traditional art-viewing experience: No maps, guides, or artwork captions are provided, and visitors are encouraged to touch and interact with the art.

Imagine traversing a forest of lamps that change hues as you approach; jumping on a trampoline, creating planets and stars in your midst; or finding respite in a room full of crashing waves. All of this, and much more, is possible inside the exhibition, entitled “Borderless.” Powered by 520 computers and 470 projectors, more than 50 artworks are seamlessly connected, responding to one another and to visitors. Inside the museum, teamLab strives to erase the borders between individual artworks, between art and the audience, and between visitors as they partake in a collective artmaking experience.

TeamLab was founded in 2001 by engineer Toshiyuki Inoko and now consists of over 500 members, from artists and animators to programmers and mathematicians. Though initially shunned by the Tokyo art world, their transportative, technicolor exhibitions have since won popular and critical acclaim, and have been staged in arts venues around the world. But no major cultural institution had the resources to support their installations at a large scale, so they decided to create their own, with support from urban developer Mori Building (founded by the prominent Japanese real estate and art collecting family).

The museum has welcomed over a million visitors in the five months since it opened. Bella Hadid, Abel Makkonen Tesfaye (a.k.a. The Weeknd), Sofia Richie, and Hailey Baldwin all paid visits, sharing selfies in the multicolor glow of the ever-evolving installations. But beyond its status as prime Instagram eye candy, “Borderless” also provides a glimpse of a future in which art, powered by technology, provides a totally immersive, collective experience. TeamLab’s ultimate goal? Turning entire cities into interactive works of art.

Nan Goldin

P.A.I.N.

Photo of Nan Goldin during a protest at the Harvard Art Museums. Photo by TW Collins. Courtesy of P.A.I.N. Sackler.

Brought the fight against the opioid epidemic to the art world.

A protest in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Thom Pavia. Courtesy of P.A.I.N. Sackler.

The atrium of the Harvard Art Museums. Photo by Megan Kapler. Courtesy of P.A.I.N. Sackler.

Photo by Thom Pavia. Courtesy of P.A.I.N. Sackler.

A protest in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by JC Bourcart. Courtesy of P.A.I.N. Sackler.

A protest in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by JC Bourcart. Courtesy of P.A.I.N. Sackler.

Nan Goldin at a press conference for the Comprehensive Addiction Resources Emergency Act in Washington, DC.. Photo by Clare Carter. Courtesy of P.A.I.N. Sacker.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Nan Goldin made a name for herself with hedonistic, drug-fueled depictions of New York City street life. While the struggles of addiction play out in her gritty photographs—and have colored her own life—a near-death overdose in 2017 prompted Goldin’s secondary career as an activist.

A confessional essay published in the January 2018 issue of Artforum detailed Goldin’s harrowing, three-year addiction to OxyContin, and established her opposition to the drug’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, as well as the company’s principal owners, the Sackler family, for their role in fostering and profiting from the opioid epidemic. Soon after the essay was published, Goldin organized Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, or P.A.I.N., with the aim of creating legislation to restrict access to opioids, pressuring Purdue to redirect profits to fund treatment facilities, and, in a lateral move, persuading cultural institutions to stop accepting Sackler money.

The grassroots group meets regularly at Goldin’s Brooklyn apartment to coordinate protests at the many museums bearing the Sackler name. In an interview with Artsy, community organizer Jennifer Flynn Walker of the Center for Popular Democracy, who began working with Goldin and P.A.I.N. this year, said the artistic group’s visual sensibility is a crucial component to its success in an era when protests are increasingly recognized for their slick messaging.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in March, Goldin and her collaborators staged a news-making protest in the Sackler Wing, with participants tossing prescription pill bottles into the pool in front of the Temple of Dendur, while others passed out P.A.I.N.-branded pamphlets designed to mimic the museum’s printed maps. The affair ended with an old-school “die-in.”

“That action was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen—it was powerful, moving, emotional,” Flynn Walker recalled, adding that Goldin approached the action “like a cinematographer.” The resulting photographs of the event that circulated in newspapers and online are remarkably striking, making it impossible to ignore the art world’s complicity in real-world events.

D.W. Pine

Time Magazine Covers

Illustrations by Tim O’Brien for Time. Courtesy of Time.

Created the year’s most impactful magazine covers, commenting on school shootings, violence against journalists, and White House chaos.

Portrait of D.W. Pine in the Time newsroom. Courtesy of D.W. Pine.

The March 5, 2018 issue of Time. Photograph by James Nachtwey for Time. Courtesy of Time.

The April 2, 2018 issue of Time. Photograph by Peter Hapak for Time. Courtesy of Time.

The April 23, 2018 issue of Time. Illustration by Tim O’Brien forTime. Courtesy of Time.

The June 11, 2018 issue of Time. Video still by drone for Time. Courtesy of Time.

The July 2, 2018 issue of Time. Time photo-illustration. Photographs by Getty Images. Courtesy of Time.

The July 30, 2018 issue of Time . Photo illustration by Nancy Burson for Time (Digital imaging by John Depew. Source photographs Trump: Getty Images; Putin: Kremlin handout). Courtesy of Time.

The Oct. 15, 2018 issue of Time. Illustration by John Mavroudis for Time. Courtesy of Time.

In the era of digital media, magazine covers rarely generate the amount of attention they garnered in decades past. Though Time has a long history of delivering powerful news succinctly within its iconic red frame, D.W. Pine, the magazine’s creative director since 2010, has had the unique challenge of keeping the magazine’s cover relevant when most readers don’t buy print subscriptions.

Pine has risen to that challenge. As Time’s director of multimedia, Katherine Pomerantz, has pointed out, his designs this year “have been so iconic that they too have become part of the story.” Consider the magazine’s April 2nd cover featuring the resolute Parkland student survivors behind the word “ENOUGH” in bold sans-serif; the composite portrait of presidents Trump and Putin on July 30th’s cover, their faces morphed together; the four-cover Person of the Year double issue, featuring journalists who have been jailed or murdered; and the three-issue series illustrating the Oval Office in progressively stormier chaos, which won Adweek’s Cover of the Year award. Pine collaborates with a roster of talented creatives to achieve his vision—for those covers, he worked with photographer Peter Hapak, photographer Moises Saman, artist Nancy Burson, and illustrator Tim O’Brien, respectively.

“The current news cycle is so relentless, it is nearly impossible to keep up—this morning’s big story is stale by lunchtime,” Pomerantz explained. “Yet each week, D.W. masterminds a Time cover that makes sense of the chaos, turning complex topics into a visually arresting piece of art that not only informs, but also serves as a catalyst for further inquiry.”

Amplifying the impact of Pine’s Time covers is their ability to be consumed and shared in different forms online. Animated versions are disseminated on social media (in the aforementioned three-part series, Trump is pummeled with wind and rain until, finally, the Oval Office is flooded with water), and behind-the-scenes videos are posted for larger projects, such as the magazine’s drone issue on June 11th that utilized 958 Intel drones to form the image that eventually became the cover in the sky.

Virgil Abloh

Polymathic cultural output

Portrait of Virgil Abloh at the Louis Vuitton headquarters © Alex Majoli/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of Magnum Photos.

Became the first black artistic director at Louis Vuitton.

Backstage at Louis Vuitton Men's SS19 show, 2018, designed by Virgil Abloh. Courtesy of Louis Vuitton.

Virgil Abloh, Off-White Menswear SS19 show, 2018. Courtesy of Karla Otto.

Backstage at Louis Vuitton Men's SS19 show, 2018, designed by Virgil Abloh. Courtesy of Louis Vuitton.

Backstage at Louis Vuitton Men's SS19 show, 2018, designed by Virgil Abloh. Courtesy of Louis Vuitton.

Backstage at Louis Vuitton Men's SS19 show, 2018, designed by Virgil Abloh. Courtesy of Louis Vuitton.

Off-White's Denim Campaign SS19, 2018, designed by Virgil Abloh. Courtesy of Karla Otto.

Takashi Murakami and Virgil Abloh, Our Spot 1, 2018. ©︎ Virgil Abloh and ©︎ Takashi Murakami.

Backstage at Louis Vuitton Men's SS19 show, 2018, designed by Virgil Abloh. Courtesy of Louis Vuitton.

In 2002, Kanye West anointed then-22-year-old Virgil Abloh as an arbiter of taste when the rapper hired him as a collaborator, eventually becoming his creative director. This year, Louis Vuitton consecrated Abloh when the brand named him its new artistic director for menswear. He’s one of the few black men to helm a major luxury label, and the first at Louis Vuitton. His first collection for the brand debuted this past summer, featuring wallets with bright orange detailing, garments inspired by the Wizard of Oz, and sneakers with high, bright-white midsoles. In the intervening years, Abloh, who is also a music producer and DJ, has infiltrated the worlds of music, art, fashion, and sports with his multidisciplinary practice and ironic, laid-back style.

Abloh began his rise as a fashion icon in 2013, when the native Chicagoan established his label, Off-White. The brand, which also gained ubiquity this year, became famous for garments decorated with text in quotation marks. By printing “foam” on sneaker midsoles or “raincoat” on a raincoat, Abloh reminds his fans not to take themselves, his designs, or fashion too seriously. This summer, he created a series of rugs for Ikea that read “keep off,” “blue,” and “wet grass” in bold lettering. The collection followed collaborations with companies that range from Champion to Sunglass Hut and Heron Preston to Levi’s. Earlier this year, Abloh and Nike united to create a wardrobe for Her Lady of Tennis, Serena Williams.

Given Abloh’s engagement with pop culture and the vernacular, a collaboration with artist Takashi Murakami was a no-brainer. Earlier this year, Gagosian gallery opened an Abloh–Murakami exhibition in Los Angeles, for which the pair created bright, symbol-laden canvases and neons (the gallery also hosted joint exhibitions in its London and Paris spaces, and works by the pair have been a regular feature at art fairs this fall). Next June, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago will honor Abloh with a solo exhibition of his clothing, as well as collaborations with other artists, including Tom Sachs and Peter Saville.

James Monsees and Adam Bowen

Juul

Photo by Nicolas McComber via Getty Images.

Designed the widely popular e-cigarette that achieved ubiquity in 2018.

Photo by Elizabeth Renstrom. Courtesy of the artist.

For an object that resembles an elongated USB drive, the Juul captured an outsize slice of America’s public attention this year. The electronic cigarette, which offers interchangeable nicotine “pods” in flavors ranging from mango to mint and arrives in Apple-esque minimalist white packaging, arrived on the market in 2015, and topped U.S. e-cigarette sales by the end of 2017. But this year, Juul became a cultural phenomenon.

Stanford business school graduates James Monsees and Adam Bowen initially conceived of the Juul during a series of smoking breaks circa 2003, and launched their brand over 10 years later with an upbeat campaign. Filled with bright hues, geometric shapes, and photogenic young people, their ads turned a previously unsexy object into a lifestyle necessity. But Juul’s rapid growth—particularly among underage teen users—has brought regulatory scrutiny. In April, Juul Labs’s marketing efforts were scrutinized by both the Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Congress, with one question at the center of their investigation: Did the company’s advertisements target minors?

Looking at the countless memes the Juul has spawned, it’s easy to understand why one might think so. Many exaggerate how crucial Juuls are to their owners: In one meme, losing a Juul ranks as more traumatic than “failing an exam,” “getting rejected,” and “your dog dying.” In May, writer Jia Tolentino published a buzzy article in The New Yorker that investigated the youth culture of Juuling (yes, the activity has become ubiquitous enough to become its own verb). It and other reports noted that high school students, in particular, are getting hooked on Juuls, personalizing them with stickers and smoking illicitly during class and bathroom breaks.

The company has maintained that its product is intended for adults who want to quit smoking cigarettes, not for underage or non-smokers. Nevertheless, it has already promised $30 million in smoking prevention efforts for the youth. In November, just after the FDA announced plans to enact explicit regulations against e-cigarette sales, Juul revealed that it would cease social media promotions and sales of flavored pods, such as mango and cucumber (excluding tobacco, mint, and menthol), in brick-and-mortar locations. Though the Juul’s regulatory future may appear tenuous, its cultural status isn’t likely to decline any time soon.

Tang Xiaoou and Xu Li

SenseTime

A demonstration of SenseTime surveillance software identifying details about people and vehicles. Image by REUTERS/Thomas Peter.

Helping machines see, in both consumer applications and government surveillance.

Three Chinese companies lead the race to perfect artificial intelligence image recognition: Megvii, Yitu, and SenseTime. But in 2018, SenseTime pulled ahead of the pack, raising $1.2 billion. (It was most recently valued at more than $4.5 billion, the most for any AI company.) Along with the wide range of consumer-facing products that the company’s tech enables, the Chinese government has significantly invested in its tech—which identifies images, objects, and people with startling accuracy—as it seeks novel methods to surveil and control its population.

SenseTime was launched in 2014 by Tang Xiaoou, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 2015, he appointed Xu Li, a Ph.D. candidate, as CEO of the research initiative–turned–company, igniting three straight years of 400 percent year-over-year growth. Now, SenseTime’s technologies power facial recognition–unlocking in many Chinese smartphone brands; Snapchat-like AR photo filters in the popular app SNOW; software that allows self-driving cars to “see” their surroundings; and real-time, customer-specific analytics for retailers, among many others.

Perhaps more notorious, however, are the surveillance implementations of SenseTime’s tech, as the Chinese government begins rolling out its social credit system, with the aim of giving a holistic rating of an individual’s personal and business reputation—like the infamous “Nosedive” episode of Black Mirror. A growing number of local governments and security agencies, including those in Yunnan Province and the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, use SenseTime software to automatically identify faces passing security cameras and track the movements of groups and cars like a virtual panopticon, among other things.

Significant concerns have been raised about how such a system could be used for nefarious purposes; facial recognition and other technologies are already being used to track and control the Muslim Uighur population in the Xinjiang region. However, Tang and Xu are outwardly determined to see their technologies be used for good, having teamed up this February with MIT to launch the MIT-SenseTime Alliance on Artificial Intelligence, with the aim of addressing pressing issues related to the rise of AI that will soon face our world.

Becca McCharen-Tran

Chromat

Chromat’s “Pool Rules” campaign, 2018. Courtesy of Chromat.

Set a new benchmark for representation in fashion.

Chromat’s SS19 Runway Show, 2018. Courtesy of Chromat.

Chromat’s “Pool Rules” campaign, 2018. Courtesy of Chromat.

Backstage at Chromat’s AW18 Runway Show, 2018. Photo by Andrew Toth via Getty Images for Chromat.

Chromat’s “Pool Rules” Campaign, 2018. Courtesy of Chromat.

Chromat’s SS19 Runway Show, 2018. Photo by Frazer Harrison via Getty Images for NYFW: The Shows.

Backstage at Chromat’s AW18 Runway Show, 2018. Photo by Andrew Toth via Getty Images for Chromat.

Chromat’s SS19 Runway Show, 2018. Photo by Frazer Harrison via Getty Images for NYFW: The Shows.

For designer Becca McCharen-Tran, inclusivity isn’t a trend or marketing ploy, it’s an ethos. Since 2010, before mass-market brands like Aerie began showcasing models of diverse ages, sizes, and abilities, Chromat, the swimwear line that McCharen-Tran founded, championed a radically inclusive approach to fashion.

This summer, Chromat’s “Pool Rules” ad campaign laid out McCharen-Tran’s fashion philosophy in a playful but serious way. Instead of listing typical pool rules, such as “No Diving,” the rules included injunctions such as “Food-Shaming Not Permitted,” “All Abilities Accepted,” and “Respect Preferred Pronouns.” Dressed as stylish lifeguards in Chromat’s bright, techy suits, the models—which include activist and amputee Mama Cax, breast cancer survivor Ericka Hart, and trans model Geena Rocero—lounge by the pool and stride shoulder-to-shoulder towards the camera, like a team of superheroes who’ve assembled to fight fashion’s narrow standards of beauty. During New York’s fall fashion week, Chromat sent an equally diverse group of models down the runway, including MMA fighter Mia Kang and art-world influencer Kimberly Drew.

On and off the runway, Chromat continues to set the standard for inclusivity in fashion, offering sizes from XS to 4XL. Perhaps it’s no surprise that McCharen-Tran, who was trained as an architect and has often favored non-traditional fabrics and silhouettes, approaches both business and craft from an uncommon perspective. Yet fashion, however slowly, seems to be following suit.

When Ed Razek, CMO of L Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret, declared in a November interview with Vogue that he didn’t think trans women should appear in the televised Victoria’s Secret fashion show, he came across as profoundly out of touch. In an essay written for Out, McCharen-Tran countered Razek’s remarks, refuting the male gaze in the design and marketing of lingerie. “Chromat has always designed for a wide range of sizes…and for all different bodies, ages, abilities and places on the gender spectrum,” she wrote. “As a queer woman, I do not focus on designing clothes to make the wearer more appealing to men.”

Artemisia Gentileschi

Judith Slaying Holofernes

Detail of Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Holofernes, ca. 1620. Courtesy of Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Represented female empowerment for the #MeToo era.

In late September, after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that then–Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her as a young woman, the 17th-century paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi began to circulate through Twitter and Instagram. Supporters of Dr. Ford showed their compassion and fury through disseminating the Baroque artist’s fierce Judith Slaying Holofernes—two paintings, both from around 1614–20, that have been read as depictions of Gentileschi herself avenging her rapist. (Gentileschi was raped at age 17 by her teacher, artist Agostino Tassi, who was convicted and exiled from Rome, but his sentence was never enforced.)

The Italian painter’s renewed relevance has been steady throughout 2018, penetrating popular culture and the art world. Her striking portraiture and depictions of biblical heroines have surfaced as emblems of female empowerment, resonating loudly in the #MeToo era. It’s a fitting resurgence as the artist was a trailblazing woman in her own day: Gentileschi was the first woman to attend Florence’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno and the only female follower of Caravaggio; she even earned commissions from such notable patrons as the Medicis and King Charles I of England.

“Artemisia Gentileschi’s reputation developed first as a victim of sexual assault and then as one of the most interesting painters of the early 17th century,” noted Judith W. Mann, a curator of European art at the Saint Louis Art Museum and the editor of a 2005 collection of essays on the artist. “Her best works are powerful reminders of the power of women, making her a perfect emblem for these times.”

As interest in the long under-recognized artist has grown, so too has her market. In July, London’s National Gallery acquired Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (ca. 1615–17)—the museum’s first acquisition of a work by a female artist in 27 years. And this fall, her Lucretia (ca. 1630–45) sold at the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna for €1.8 million ($2.1 million), more than twice its presale estimate.

Though Gentileschi’s art has long been inseparable from her sexual assault, the present moment tells us that can change—that her legacy will be tied to her esteem as an artist, and as a force to be reckoned with.

Tyler Mitchell

Vogue’s September Issue

Tyler Mitchell’s portraits of Beyoncé on the September cover of Vogue, 2018. Styling by Kwasi Fordjur. Fashion editor Tonne Goodman. Courtesy of the artist.

Became the first black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue.

Tyler Mitchell, from “Boys of Walthamstow,” 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Tyler Mitchell, from “Boys of Walthamstow,” 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Tyler Mitchell, for Teen Vogue, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Tyler Mitchell, for More or Less, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Tyler Mitchell, for More or Less, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Tyler Mitchell, for Document Journal, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Tyler Mitchell, for Document Journal, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Tyler Mitchell, for Document Journal, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Sharing the spotlight with Beyoncé is no easy feat, but when Vogue’s September cover was revealed in August, 23-year-old Tyler Mitchell found himself doing just that. Overnight, Mitchell went from an emerging photographer (Artsy featured him in The Artsy Vanguard, our annual survey of artists to watch, in May) to the first black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover in the magazine’s 126-year history, capturing Queen Bey herself in a supremely honest and raw light.

In one of his images of Beyoncé (which would become one of two covers), she sits against a draped sheet in the light of the golden hour, wearing a white ruffled dress, a cornucopia of flowers framing her face. She shifts between roles in the series, evoking a matriarch in front of a clothesline and a sun deity draped in gold. Artist and curator Deborah Willis, who taught Mitchell at NYU, noted that the series nods to artists and models of 19th-century Parisian salons, but also “introduces a captivating narrative about beauty and desire.” Willis has been a champion of Mitchell’s, noting that she recognized early “how deeply Tyler was committed to changing existing visual narratives about being black, creative, and young.”

Mitchell’s other work in 2018 included fashion editorials for More or Less Magazine in May and Document Journal’s fall/winter issue. Earlier in the year, Mitchell had a much different assignment for Teen Vogue: taking portraits and video of nine young activists for gun reform, including students Emma González, Sarah Chadwick, Jaclyn Corin, and Nick Joseph, who had survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that garnered national attention in February. In Mitchell’s portraits and video, the students’ determination and vivacity is amplified—these are the young adults who will effect change in policy.

Mitchell was born into the same generation—one that is resolved to uproot the status quo. “There was a ladder for the people who came before me, and there’s a ladder now—it’s just a new ladder,” Mitchell told Vogue in a behind-the-scenes interview about the Beyoncé shoot. “I want to open the eyes of the kids younger than me; show them that they can do this, too.”

Colin Kaepernick

Nike Ad Campaign

Courtesy of Nike.

Lent his likeness and activist message to the iconic “Just Do It” ad campaign.

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When does a man become an icon? Possibly when he files for a copyright of his own profile. In October, Colin Kaepernick, whose name became synonymous with NFL players kneeling during the national anthem as a protest against police violence, filed to trademark a black-and-white image of his face and hair. According to the filing, the image could be used for commercial products, TV and film production, and for providing workshops in self-empowerment and how to safely interact with law enforcement.

A month prior, the former quarterback became the latest in a 30-year history of inspirational athletes who have lent their likenesses to Nike’s iconic “Just Do It” ad campaign. The ad shows a tightly cropped black-and-white portrait of Kaepernick, lips pressed together and eyes meeting the camera with a determined gaze. “Believe in something,” the ad copy reads. “Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

In the days that followed, the ad became a flashpoint for Twitter outrage (where some of Kaepernick’s critics recorded themselves setting their own Nikes on fire), and its format became a popular meme, often with a political bent. “Believe in something. Even if you just made it up,” one meme-maker inscribed across a frowning photograph of the 45th president’s face.

Some questioned the ultimate value of a corporate giant co-opting a social movement, and whether Nike’s progressivism was merely a strategy to engage the younger consumers who make up the majority of the brand’s customer base. Critics also pointed to the company’s own policies and labor practices, which they suggested were at odds with the ad’s progressive positioning. One meme memorably added the campaign’s inspirational copy to a photograph of a woman working in a Nike factory. “Just do it,” read the tagline, “for $0.23 per hour.”

Frida Escobedo

The Serpentine Pavilion

Frida Escobedo in the Serpentine Pavilion 2018. Photo by Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images.

Proved that age, gender, and flash need not dictate the future of architecture.

Serpentine Pavilion 2018, designed by Frida Escobedo, Serpentine Gallery, London. © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura. Photo © 2018 Ste Murray.

Serpentine Pavilion 2018, designed by Frida Escobedo, Serpentine Gallery, London. © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura. Photo © 2018 Iwan Baan.

Serpentine Pavilion 2018, designed by Frida Escobedo, Serpentine Gallery, London. © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura. Photo © Ste Murray.

This year, at 39 years old, Frida Escobedo became the youngest architect to ever design the prestigious Serpentine Pavilion in London. The annual commission to design a temporary structure that sits beside the Serpentine Galleries in Kensington Gardens has been bestowed upon legends like Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Peter Zumthor, and Zaha Hadid. Of the 18 pavilions created since 2000, this was only the second to be designed solely by a woman (Hadid being the first). But Escobedo’s work stands in elegant contrast to the flash and bang of starchitecture.

With her Mexico City–based firm and expertise in both architecture and public art, Escobedo has made her name through thoughtful designs for esteemed cultural centers like the art space La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and a renovation of the Octavio Paz Library in Guadalajara. She has consistently exhibited a reverence for everyday materials, as well as a flair for respecting both local and global sensibilities. Her Serpentine Pavilion, a meditative structure, was made up of straightforward building materials: simple grey roof tiles, like those typical of British houses. The humble cement rectangles were stacked to form walls that allowed sunlight to filter through their perforations, and were situated around a central courtyard—a key feature of domestic architecture in Escobedo’s native Mexico. The tranquil interior featured a triangular pool, which reflected light brilliantly against the mirrored finish of a curved steel roof.

Serpentine Galleries CEO Yana Peel described the structure as “an exquisite intimate public space in the park—a mix of communion and quiet contemplation,” which felt “both local and placeless,” she said. “Frida has said that her buildings are never finished, and this summer, we witnessed the power of performance, discussion, and visitors in their hundreds of thousands complete what she had started.”

Arsène Heitz and Paul M. G. Lévy

The EU Flag

The Peoples Vote March For The Future, October 20, 2018 in London, United Kingdom. Photo by Richard Baker/In Pictures via Getty Images.

Designed the flag that has become a calling card against Brexit and Euroscepticism.

Photo campaign for Souvenir Official’s EUnify hoodie by Søren Drastrup. Courtesy of Søren Drastrup.

Photo campaign for Souvenir Official’s EUnify hoodie by Søren Drastrup. Courtesy of Søren Drastrup.

EUnify Hoodie. Courtesy of König Galerie.

During October’s People’s Vote march in London, nearly 700,000 people took to the streets to demand a second vote on Brexit. The massive crowds, which gridlocked parts of the city, was a sea of blue with points of yellow stars. The EU flag was waved in the air, draped around shoulders, and printed onto T-shirts, protest signs, and banners. Like the pink pussy hat at the 2017 Women’s March, it was the single visual that most clearly unified the crowd.

“Against the blue sky of the Western world, the stars represent the peoples of Europe in a circle, a symbol of unity,” wrote the Council of Europe when adopting EU flag as its symbol in 1955. (The thorny phrase “Western world” was later removed.) “Their number shall be invariably set at twelve, the symbol of completeness and perfection.” The flag’s design was the result of the combined efforts of Arsène Heitz, an employee of the Council’s postal service, and Paul M. G. Lévy, the Council’s director of press and information services at the time.

The EU flag’s continued power lies in its inclusivity. While most flags represent a distinct national identity, the EU flag is a symbol of cooperation between nations. Unlike the American flag’s stars and stripes, the EU’s 12 stars do not signify particular governments (the number of countries in the EU is currently 28), but rather a more abstract notion of unity—a dozen smaller shapes aligning to form a perfectly balanced circle. The flag’s graphic strength has made it both a powerful rallying point and a catnip for streetwear designers. Following the Brexit vote in 2016, the art merch shop König Souvenir, a collaboration of Berlin gallerist Johann König and streetwear brand Souvenir, released the EUNify hoodie, a sweatshirt upon which the flag’s circle of stars is rendered with one star missing—its absence upsetting the balance of the design’s powerful symmetry.

Banksy

Love is in the Bin

Banksy, Love is in the Bin, 2018. Photo by Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images.

Self-destructed an artwork, hijacking the global news cycle.

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. "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge" - Picasso

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Banksy is an anomaly: undoubtedly the world’s most-famous street artist, despite the fact that no one is quite sure who he is. And despite the anti-establishment spirit of Banksy’s favored motifs—kissing cops, giant rats, and protestors tossing Molotov cocktails of flowers—art collectors have continuously shown rabid interest in his work. In October, a small-scale version of his 2006 mural Girl with Balloon, which last year was voted the U.K.’s “best-loved work of art,” sold at Sotheby’s for $1.3 million.

But as soon as the auctioneer’s hammer fell, something very odd happened. Banksy had rigged the frame of Girl with Balloon with a remotely triggered device that caused the work to pass through it like a paper shredder, slowly being cut into ribbons. The shredder stopped midway through the process, in what the artist said was a technical error.

Audiences at Sotheby’s and around the world were alternately stunned and bemused as the story jumped to the top of several major news outlets’ most-read sections. The auction house’s European head of contemporary art, Alex Branczik, quashed rumors that Sotheby’s had advance knowledge of what was to come: “We got Banksy’d,” he said.

Rather than an actual act of self-vandalism, the shredding of Girl with Balloon was recast as a creative act, with Banksy positioning the damaged piece as an entirely new work, which he dubbed Love is in the Bin (2018). And Banksy’s own sales market seems to have gotten an injection of enthusiasm, with an exhibition by Phillips auction house in Hong Kong and an ongoing, somewhat controversial touring show, “The Art of Banksy,” which landed in Miami just in time for Art Basel in Miami Beach. Meanwhile, the shredding itself became a popular meme, swiftly co-opted for ad campaigns by the likes of McDonald’s and Perrier.

Robin Hammond

National Geographic Race Issue

Robin Hammond’s photo for the cover of National Geographic’s Race Issue, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Illustrated National Geographic’s critical special issue on race.

Robin Hammond, for National Geographic’s Race Issue, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Robin Hammond, for National Geographic’s Race Issue, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Robin Hammond, for National Geographic’s Race Issue, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Robin Hammond, for National Geographic’s Race Issue, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Robin Hammond, for National Geographic’s Race Issue, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Robin Hammond, from “Where Love is Illegal,” 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Robin Hammond, from “Where Love is Illegal,” 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Robin Hammond, from “Where Love is Illegal,” 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Robin Hammond, from “Where Love is Illegal,” 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

This year, New Zealand–born photographer Robin Hammond was assigned the groundbreaking April cover story of National Geographic’s Race Issue. It was an especially important edition, as the editor-in-chief, Susan Goldberg, apologized for the 130-year-old publication’s past coverage, which often promoted stereotypes of marginalized people.

The Race Issue also had a declaration—that race has no scientific basis. Skin color “is not a binary trait,” as geneticist Alicia Martin is quoted in the cover story. “The 21st-century understanding of human genetics tells us that the whole idea of race is a human invention,” writer Patricia Edmond concludes.

Shooting the historic issue fit neatly into Hammond’s larger career, which has been marked by his dedication to social issues. He spent much of this year photographing for the ongoing campaign Where Love is Illegal, launched in 2015 by his own nonprofit, Witness Change. The campaign features photographs and testimonies of LGBTQI+ people in countries where they are oppressed; many of the subjects are pictured hiding their faces.

For The Race Issue, Hammond photographed two powerful stories. For the cover, he featured British fraternal twins Marcia and Millie Biggs, who do not share the same skin tone: Millie is black, and Marcia is white. Likewise, his second shoot, documenting the incredible diversity of various distinct communities in Africa, reinforced the idea that race is not a biological dividing line. In fact, as the writer, Elizabeth Kolbert, stresses, among humans, “the deepest splits” aren’t between people who are black, white, Asian, or Native American. They’re within African populations, “who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa,” she writes.

Hammond’s images of African people of all ages are stripped-down, classical portraits taken against a white backdrop, with soft lighting. Unlike the magazine’s older coverage, which Goldberg acknowledged “pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché,” Hammond focuses on their beauty and individuality, letting their features shine.

The Women of Time’s Up

#WhyWeWearBlack

Meryl Streep, Ai-jen Poo, Natalie Portman, Tarana Burke, Michelle Williams, America Ferrera, Jessica Chastain, Amy Poehler, and activist Saru Jayaraman attend 19th Annual Post-Golden Globes Party, 2018. Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images.

Organized all-black dress codes at major red-carpet events in a show of solidarity.

Costume designer Ane Crabtree attends the Costume Designers Guild Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 20, 2018 in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images for JumpLine.

Zoey Deutch at the 2018 Film Independent Spirit Awards, 2018. Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images.

Leading up to the 75th Golden Globe Awards this January, stylists were tasked with a last-minute dress code: Actresses were opting to wear black, and black alone. Time’s Up, a volunteer-run movement founded by women in Hollywood to fight sexual harassment in the wake of #MeToo, organized a red-carpet blackout.

Actresses, and a handful of actors, took to social media to spread the word with the hashtag #WhyWeWearBlack. “We wear black to symbolize solidarity—that the death knell has struck on abusive power, and that it’s time to celebrate each other, not just the nominees on our film and television screens, but our storytellers who have bravely come forward and courageously shared their personal stories, which have liberated so many of us,” actress Rosario Dawson shared in an Instagram post. A few brands that dressed the stars also acknowledged their support, no doubt recognizing the power of “woke” marketing in 2018.

The visual impact of the protest was amplified by the presence of prominent activists like Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and Tarana Burke, founder of #MeToo, who, among others, were invited by actresses as their guests. Whereas red-carpet conversations usually begin by asking stars what designer they’re wearing, this year, the conversation largely centered around women’s empowerment. “We feel emboldened in this particular moment to stand together in a thick black line dividing then from now,” actress Meryl Streep told reporters.

As with any convergence of fashion and politics, the blackout wasn’t without controversy, with some questioning the efficacy of a sartorial gesture organized by privileged women. But the goal of the night was to use the spotlight of the Golden Globes—and the platforms of famous women—to send a message of collective power. Time’s Up, launched by 300 volunteers, has since continued to stage red-carpet blackouts at other award shows, like the BAFTAs and the CDGAs, while working toward effecting real change. These efforts include a legal defense fund providing assistance to working-class women—which has since become the most successful GoFundMe campaign in history—and a “50/50 by 2020” project to reach a gender balance among entertainment leadership roles in the next two years.

Jason Ballard, Alex Le Roux, and Evan Loomis

Icon

Icon's 3-D Home and Vulcan Printer. Courtesy of New Story.

Developed a 3D-printed home that could help solve global homelessness.

It’s hard to get a sense of how many people in our world do not have a roof over their heads. The most recent global survey by the UN estimated that 100 million people were homeless in 2005; this century, the number of people living in slums passed 1 billion. Solving global homelessness is a weighty task, but the founders of Austin, Texas–based startup Icon are making every effort to usher in an era of 3D-printed dwellings as the solution.

All three founders had co-founded companies before forming Icon—Jason Ballard and Evan Loomis started the sustainable home-improvement company TreeHouse in 2010, while Alex Le Roux co-launched Vesta Printers, a manufacturer of 3D printers for construction projects, in 2016. Together, they designed the Vulcan, a mobile printer that will be used by San Francisco nonprofit New Story to print homes in Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia, where the organization is currently active.

The team at New Story had already begun building homes in developing countries, but it took several months and thousands of dollars to construct each one. With the Vulcan, it will be monumentally faster and cheaper: In March, a prototype, running at just a quarter of its projected power, printed a 350-square-foot home in Austin in just 48 hours. (As with most 3D-printed homes, roofs, windows, doors, and plumbing require additional installation.) Armed with the real Vulcan running at full speed, Icon says it will be able to print a 600- to 800-square-foot home in a single day, each costing around $4,000. That will be put to the test in early 2019, when the company plans to print 100 homes with New Story.

With the Vulcan ready to begin printing, Ballard, Loomis, and Le Roux are looking to the future. Their investors include U.S. homebuilder D.R. Horton and leading Middle Eastern developer Emaar, and they secured $9 million in funding this year. If things go according to plan, we may be seeing first examples of the small, technology-powered homes that could replace the slums of the world.

Ruth E. Carter

Black Panther

Still from Marvel Studios’ Black Panther, featuring M’Baku (Winston Duke). Photo by Film Frame. Courtesy of and ©Marvel Studios 2018.

Merged African history with Afrofuturism in her costumes for the billion-dollar box-office blockbuster.

Still from Marvel Studios’ Black Panther, featuring Shuri (Letitia Wright). Photo by Film Frame. Courtesy of and ©Marvel Studios 2018.

Still from Marvel Studios’ Black Panther. Left to right: Ayo (Florence Kasumba), Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and Shuri (Letitia Wright). Photo by Film Frame. Courtesy of and ©Marvel Studios 2018.

Black Panther costumes concept art. Courtesy of Ruth E. Carter.

Black Panther costumes concept art. Courtesy of Ruth E. Carter.

Black Panther costumes concept art. Courtesy of Ruth E. Carter.

In a career spanning more than 40 films, costume designer Ruth E. Carter has established a reputation for foregrounding clothing as a vital marker of black identity. The effort is especially evident in her collaborations with director Spike Lee, from the statement-making slogan T-shirts in Do the Right Thing (1989) to the title activist’s iconic suit in Malcolm X (1992). In her work for period dramas like Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) and Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), Carter artfully brought real events of the past into the present.

But it’s her designs for the billion-dollar box-office blockbuster Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler, that catapulted Carter to superstar status—a rare feat for a costume designer. Tasked with imagining the garments of fictional Wakanda—a diverse, technologically advanced nation untouched by European colonization—Carter drew upon traditional tribal garb alongside current fashion trends. Indeed, clothing plays an outsize role in shaping the film’s world, and the characters’ dramatic costumes impart important messages of both individual and community identity.

Modern updates of indigenous tribal designs and materials abound: W’Kabi, leader of the Border Tribe, dons the Wakandan version of a Lesotho blanket; Queen Ramonda’s magisterial headgear is inspired by a traditional hat worn by married Zulu women; and the Dora Milaje warriors’ costumes borrow from the beadwork of the Turkana and Maasai tribes. But Carter also wanted to represent the modern, cosmopolitan spirit of the fashion of Africa and its diaspora; to that end, she looked to the sartorial elegance of Congolese sapeurs and the transgressive Afropunk festival, even collaborating with vanguard fashion designers like Ozwald Boateng, Ikiré Jones, and Duro Olowu.

In advance of the film’s release, “What are you wearing to the Black Panther premiere?” became a trending topic on social media, with enthusiastic black Twitter users sharing memes and outfit inspiration. The influence of the film’s costumes have inspired a traveling exhibition, and this February, the Costume Designers Guild Awards will honor Carter with the Career Achievement Award. Such accolades recognize the uncharted territory she entered with Black Panther by bringing the political power of black fashion to the mainstream.

John Moore

Undocumented

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

Photographed the front lines of the U.S. immigration crisis.

A member of the migrant caravan watches as a fellow immigrant is searched by Guatemalan police at a highway checkpoint en route to the border with Mexico on October 18, 2018 in Palin, Guatemala. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

Families of immigrants, part of a migrant caravan of more than 1,500 people, rest for the night in a community gym on October 16, 2018 in Chiquimula, Guatemala. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

Isidra Larena Calderon hugs her son Jonathan Leonardo on August 7, 2018 in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), officers frisk undocumented immigrants after detaining and bringing them to an ICE processing center on April 11, 2018 at the U.S. Federal Building in lower Manhattan, New York City. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

A caravan of more than 1,500 Honduran migrants moves north after crossing the border from Honduras into Guatemala on October 15, 2018 in Esquipulas, Guatemala. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

It was nighttime in June, and photojournalist John Moore watched as a U.S. Border Patrol unit apprehended women and children on the banks of the Rio Grande. One Honduran woman, who was breastfeeding her two-year-old in the headlights of the patrol vehicles, told Moore that she and her daughter had been traveling for a month. The next day, one of the photographs that Moore took of them—an image of the daughter crying as her mother was searched by the agents—went viral. Moore’s image came at a time when tensions over immigration in the U.S. were at a breaking point, following the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, enacted in April, which had separated thousands of children from their parents after they crossed the border. Though it was later confirmed that this young girl was not taken from her mother, the image of her fear seemed to encapsulate the feelings of horror that the policy elicited from many across the political spectrum.

The image spread like wildfire on social media and made the front page of the New York Times, while an edited version graced the cover of Time magazine. It’s just one of the thousands of images Moore has taken that communicate the human side of immigration policy. Now based in New York, Moore has spent nearly a decade traveling to the border and to immigrant communities. In March, he released a book, Undocumented, that shows a more complete picture of his ongoing coverage.

It would be hard to find an immigration story this year that didn’t feature Moore’s images. While spending six days with ICE in New York, he captured the fear that undocumented immigrants live with daily. He captured the joy and relief of nine Guatemalan children who were reunited with their parents after months of detainment. He has also photographed both of the recent caravans of migrants making their way to the border after arduous weeks-long journeys on foot.

Though many photographers are covering the immigration crisis, Moore has set the benchmark, and our news is better for it.

Jon M. Chu

Crazy Rich Asians

Film still from Crazy Rich Asians. © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Kimmel Distribution, LLC. Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Directed the first Hollywood film to feature an all-Asian leading cast in 25 years.

Lisa Lu and Jon M. Chu on the set of Crazy Rich Asians . © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Kimmel Distribution, LLC. Photo by Sanja Bucko.

Awkwafina as Peik Lin in Crazy Rich Asians. © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Kimmel Distribution, LLC. Photo by Sanja Bucko.

Jimmy O. Yang as Bernard in Crazy Rich Asians. © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Kimmel Distribution, LLC. Photo by Sanja Bucko.

Ronny Chieng, Remy Hii, and Fiona Xie in Crazy Rich Asians. © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Kimmel Distribution, LLC. Photo by Sanja Bucko.

A scene from Crazy Rich Asians. © 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Kimmel Distribution, LLC. Photo Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

When #OscarsSoWhite went viral in 2016, Jon M. Chu had a moment of reckoning. Asian-Americans were increasingly demanding greater on-screen representation, and Chu realized he needed to play a part in the cause. Directing Crazy Rich Asians (2018)—an adaption of the best-selling 2013 novel by Kevin Kwan—presented the perfect opportunity.

Crazy Rich Asians was not only the first Hollywood film in 25 years to feature an all-Asian leading cast, it also became the top-grossing romantic comedy in the U.S. in a decade. It represented a breakthrough moment in an industry that has historically either stereotyped Asian characters or cast white actors in their roles. “To see them play all the roles…not just the villains or the side characters—and to see them in such glorious complexities: that’s a huge contribution to Hollywood’s representation of Asians and Asian-Americans,” said sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, the author of Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism.

Many of the themes addressed in the film—feeling caught between cultures; the struggle between love and familial duty—are topics that struck a chord with Asian-American viewers, and with Chu. Chu was born in California, the son of first-generation immigrants who own and operate a popular Chinese restaurant in Los Altos, California. The director has been candid in interviews about his previous reluctance to explore his Asian heritage in film. “I didn’t want to be seen as this ‘other’ thing,” he has said. “I didn’t realize that came from a place from what society was telling me and that I had a responsibility to the people who’d carried me to this place.”

The success of Crazy Rich Asians, as with any project, of course, can’t be attributed to one person alone. Fans of the film have followed the cast—from Michelle Yeoh of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame and Fresh Off the Boat actress Constance Wu to cinema newcomer Henry Golding—as they’ve become a family of sorts, and a collective force in the fight for diversity in Hollywood. Together, they are inspiring a new generation of Asian creatives to make their voices heard.

Caroline Criado-Perez and Gillian Wearing

Millicent Fawcett Sculpture

Millicent Fawcett, 2018. Photo by Garry Knight, via Flickr.

Created the first statue of a woman in London’s Parliament Square.

Only five public sculptures in New York City depict real, historical women, according to a recent NPR report. Not 50 percent, nor even 5 percent—just five in total. (Imaginary women such as Greek goddesses, towering symbols of liberty, and dancing nymphs don’t count.) This absence ignores vital contributions made by women to history, social progress, and civic life.

But this missing history is not unique to New York, and municipal governments are finally beginning to take action. The initiative She Built NYC will begin commissioning public monuments that honor historical New York women, beginning with a statue of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in Congress. San Francisco also announced a new ordinance this year, mandating that at least 30 percent of public statues of historical figures must be women.

In London, Caroline Criado-Perez, a feminist activist who helmed the successful campaign to add Jane Austen’s portrait to the £10 British banknote, led the charge to have a statue of British suffragist Millicent Fawcett added to the all-male array of figures in Parliament Square. Criado-Perez’s petition to include Fawcett, who fought for votes and higher education access for women, was endorsed by Mayor Sadiq Khan and Prime Minister Theresa May. Both leaders were present at the statue’s unveiling in April.

Created by Turner Prize–winning artist Gillian Wearing, the Fawcett statue is both the first sculpture of a woman and the first sculpture by a woman to grace London’s Parliament Square, where it joins the figures Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and Mahatma Gandhi, among others, in an exclusive coterie that overlooks the houses of British government. Depicted at age 50, the bronze figure of Fawcett has a gravitas equal to that of her male neighbors. She has a lined brow, a determined gaze, and holds a banner that reads what might be viewed as a rallying cry for communities everywhere to bravely address the underrepresentation of women in civic art: “Courage calls to courage everywhere.”

Sean Combs

Past Times

Portrait of Sean Combs by Kevin Mazur/WireImage.

Set a significant, new high mark for black artists’ markets when he purchased the Kerry James Marshall painting.

Kerry James Marshall, Past Times, 1997. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

On May 16th, Kerry James Marshall’s Past Times (1997) sold at Sotheby’s for $21.1 million, with fees. The result nearly doubled the previous record for an artwork by a living African-American artist, itself only set months before at Phillips’s March sale in London, when Mark Bradford’s Helter Skelter I (2007) sold for £8.6 million (nearly $12 million). The Marshall’s new owner? None other than Sean “Diddy” Combs, the Grammy-winning music producer and entrepreneur.

The increase in prices for black artists’ work has been one of the most significant art market narratives of 2018. In the same May auction where Combs purchased Past Times, records for the late portraitist Barkley L. Hendricks and the 35-year-old painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby were also set. And record-setting works by 60-year-old Henry Taylor, the late modernist painter Jacob Lawrence, and Jack Whitten, who passed away in January, were among the November auctions’ best performers. This market momentum has been brought on by increasing institutional recognition of work that was often overlooked by those same institutions when it was originally produced, as well as a steady influx of black collectors like Combs into the very white art world.

“We are going through a moment where there is a rewriting of art history to include women and black artists, as well as the peers of other critically acclaimed and celebrated artists,” and collectors are following in tow, said Jacqueline Wachter, vice president of private sales at Sotheby’s, who bid on behalf of Combs in the sale. “Black collectors are a big part of this shift in focus and expansion of the market. As a broader variety of collectors enter the game, the market is starting to expand our definitions of ‘great,’ ‘important,’ and ‘masterpiece.’”

The Marshall record may only be less than a quarter of that set for a living artist by David Hockney in November, when his Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) (1972) sold at Christie’s for $90.3 million. But it’s clear that this is just the beginning of a sea-change for the art world—and contemporary art as we know it.

Emily Heyward, JB Osborne, and Simon Endres

Red Antler

Red Antler's branding designs for Burrow on the New York subway. Courtesy of Red Antler.

Created branding that’s helping fuel the direct-to-consumer retail revolution.

Red Antler's branding designs for Casper at Penn Station, New York. Courtesy of Red Antler.

Red Antler's branding designs for Brandless. Courtesy of Red Antler.

Red Antler's branding design for Allbirds. Courtesy of Red Antler.

In 2018, direct-to-consumer brands continued to chip away at the market share of their legacy competitors. With consumers tending to make more purchases online and on mobile, these new brands are responding to the move from the shelf to the feed. Gone is the loud, cluttered visual landscape of products promising “New and Improved Formula!” or “30% More Free!” compared to their competitors sitting inches away—it’s since been replaced by a more minimalist aesthetic that emphasizes a sense of the brand’s narrative in a way that content-hungry millennial and Gen-Z consumers crave.

The creative agency Red Antler, founded in 2007 by Emily Heyward, JB Osborne, and Simon Endres, has, along with equally formidable competitor Gin Lane, helped craft this transformation, creating the top-to-bottom brand strategy of some of the most iconic direct-to-consumer brands, such as Casper, Allbirds, and Birchbox. “People used to view a brand as a logo, font, and colors. Red Antler knows that a brand is literally everything you do,” said Ben Lerer, a partner at the venture capital firm Lerer Hippeau, a number of whose portfolio companies have tapped Red Antler early on to help craft a compelling brand for today’s marketplace.

He explained that these companies are often pre-launch—they’re a seed of an idea with a small, highly capable team, but none of the wrapping that will initially draw customers in. “From positioning and naming these businesses to creating the storytelling, visuals, and the full consumer-facing experience, Red Antler brought these companies to market in a magical way, which allowed them to grow massively out of the starting gate,” Lerer said.

While not part of Lerer’s portfolio, one such company is Brandless, the consumer packaged-goods company known for each of its 400 products only costing $3. Red Antler developed the brand’s minimalist and fact-forward packaging to respond to health-conscious millennial consumers wary of traditional marketing messaging. In April, Brandless was named startup of the year by Ad Age, and in July, the company announced that it had landed $240 million in fresh funding from the SoftBank Vision Fund—a significant vote of confidence that the honest, no-nonsense branding Red Antler developed could go head-to-head with Amazon and win.

Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman

For Freedoms

Make America Great Again with Spider Martin in Pearl, MS, 2016. Courtesy of Wyatt Gallery/For Freedoms.

Mounted the largest collaborative creative project in U.S. history.

Lawn sign activation at University of North Carolina at Greensboro which asked students and community members about a time when they felt free, or when they felt their freedom had been taken away, accompanied by their portraits. Courtesy of UNC Greensboro.

With Democracy In The Balance There Is Only One Choice with Carrie Mae Weems in Columbus, OH. Courtesy of Wyatt Gallery/For Freedoms.

Shinique Smith, Portrait of Shinique as a Bundle on Rodeo Beach (3 months before Cosco oil spill), 2007, billboard in Baltimore, MD. Photo by Justin Gellerson.

The Nov. 26, 2018 issue of Time. Photo-Illustration by Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur–For Freedoms. Courtesy of For Freedoms.

An interpretation of Freedom from Fear by For Freedoms, in collaboration with Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur. Courtesy of For Freedoms.

For Freedoms town hall on Freedom of Speech and creative expression at Aspen Ideas Fest. Courtesy of Aspen Institute. Photo by Leigh Vogel.

Titus Kaphar, Behind The Myth of Benevolence, billboard in Louisville, KY in collaboration with 21c Hotels. Photo by Mary Carothers.

Install shot (from left to right) of past Light Work artists-in-residence Karl Baden, George Awde, and Pacifico Silano from “Be Strong and Do Not Betray Your Soul,” For Freedoms' 50 State Initiative exhibition in partnership with Light Work. Photo by Victor Abraham Rivera/Light Work.

Install shot of Charlottesville from Alexandra Bell’s “Counternarratives” series shown at For Freedoms 50 State Initiative exhibition “cit.i.zen.ship: reflections on rights,” at New York University Tisch Department of Photography & Imaging. Courtesy of NYU Tisch.

For Freedoms began in early 2016 as a super PAC aimed at increasing civic engagement. The organization, founded by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, mounted billboards in 10 states, as well as an exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery for Super Tuesday that year. The efforts garnered attention in the art world, but were overshadowed in wider conversation by the theatrics of the presidential campaign. Thomas and Gottesman redoubled their efforts ahead of the 2018 midterms, launching the 50 State Initiative, which For Freedoms claims is not only the largest public art project, but also the largest creative collaboration in U.S. history.

The group has organized talks, panel discussions, exhibitions, and town halls in locations across the country, with at least one event in every U.S. state, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. They mounted billboards in all 50 states with messaging and imagery designed by a diverse set of artists like JR, Rashid Johnson, Trevor Paglen, Stuart Sheldon, Carrie Mae Weems, Awol Erizku, and Christine Sun Kim. And they released a series of 82 images, created by Thomas and photographers Emily Shur and Wyatt Gallery, that reimagined Norman Rockwell’s iconic 1943 series “Four Freedoms”—which gave the group its name—in a more inclusive light, reflective of America in 2018. Just after the midterms, Time picked up one of the images for its cover.

In the divisive and polarized environment that is American politics today, For Freedoms’s emphasis on breaking down entrenched political dichotomies is refreshing. “We’re not non-partisan—we’re anti-partisan,” said Gottesman. “We’re trying to challenge these binaries of left and right, red and blue, black and white.” Thomas said the goal isn’t to form some kind of consensus, but to instead celebrate the fact that American history has been built upon honoring different viewpoints. “If there’s no tension, then we become stagnant and dead as a society,” he said. “We may not agree with each other, but we need to recognize our differences—that there is as much value in conserving some things as there is in progress elsewhere.”

To achieve that, the pair intentionally involved collaborators from both sides of the aisle. “We don’t agree with all of the artists we work with,” he said. “That’s the fundamental root of the project.” As Gottesman put it, fundamentally, their goal is to push forward the idea that creativity—and the gray areas that art allows us to inhabit——can help bridge the gap.

Visual design by Wax Studios.

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

[cryptobully-blog]

The stock market crash of 1929: what you need to know

https://cryptobully.com/the-stock-market-crash-of-1929-what-you-need-to-know/

The stock market crash of 1929: what you need to know

Hulton Archive /Getty Images

The stock market crashed in 1929, plummeting into a correction.

Margin buying, lack of legal protections, overpriced stocks and Fed policy contributed to the crash.

There are ways to protect investors can protect a portfolio from downturns.

On October 16, 1929, Yale economist Irving Fisher wrote in the New York Times that “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Eight days later, on October 24, 1929, the stock market began a four-day crash on what became known as Black Thursday. This crash cost investors more than World War I and was one of the catalysts for the Great Depression. Irving Fisher’s declaration went down as the worst stock market prediction of all time.

Before the 1929 stock market crash: Risks and warning signs

Hindsight is always 20/20 but in the Roaring Twenties, optimism and affluence had risen like never before. The economy grew by 42% (real GDP went from $688 billion in 1920 to $977 billion in 1929), average income rose by about $1,500 and unemployment stayed below 4%. In the wake of World War I, the U.S. was producing nearly half of global output and mass production made consumer goods like refrigerators, washing machines, radios and vacuums accessible to the average household. Investing in stocks became like baseball – a national pastime. As newspaper headlines trumpeted stories about teachers, chauffeurs and maids making millions in the stock market, concerns about risk evaporated.

Everyone wanted to get in on the action and credit was readily available. In particular, businesses and individuals borrowed money to buy stocks “on margin.” Buying on margin meant that an investor could put down 10-20% of their own money and borrow the rest from their stock broker. This type of leverage was extremely risky because if the stock price fell below the loan amount, the stock broker could issue a “margin call,” requiring immediate repayment of the loan. Despite this risk, even banks were buying stocks on margin, and, since no law prevented it, some used their customers’ deposits to do so. The chart below shows the Dow Jones Industrial Average (a measure of stock market performance) from 1920 to September 1929 and how, for close to a decade, the stock market had consistently gone up.

Value Walk

On March 25, 1929, the stock market corrected, falling 10% from its 52-week high. Margin calls were made and investors panicked initially but reassurance from a group of bankers that their banks would continue to lend assuaged concerns and the market recovered. Bankers would try to reassure markets the same way after Black Thursday but to no avail.

Other warning signs began to appear but were largely ignored. Steel production, car sales and homebuilding all slowed. Several banks failed. Nevertheless, most economists shared Irving Fisher’s optimism about the market outlook, although a few outliers did warn of a downturn. Yet as stocks hit new highs in the summer months, investors ignored pessimistic predictions entirely and appeared justified in doing so when the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a record high of 381.17 on September 3, 1929, up 27% from the previous year. After the crash, the Dow Jones would not return to its peak until 1954.

Black Thursday and Black Tuesday

Over the next few weeks, stock prices began to slide downward. By October 23, 1929, the Dow Jones was down nearly 20% from its high and in the last hour of trading that day, stock prices took a sudden plunge. The market closed amidst confusion and concern. The next day would go down in history as Black Thursday. At the opening bell on October 24, 150,000 shares of oil company Cities Service were traded for $8.4 million. It was the largest block trade ever made. By mid-morning, blue-chip stocks were falling as much as $10 with every trade and by noon, big-name stocks RCA Corporation and Montgomery Ward had plummeted 35% and 40%, respectively. To stem the rising panic, Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange and lead broker for J.P. Morgan bid $10 higher than the previous per-share bid for 25,000 shares of U.S. Steel. The strategy worked and the market rebounded. Montgomery-Ward for example had opened at $83/share, hit a low of $50/share and closed at $74/share. At the closing bell, the Dow Jones had fallen 11% and nearly 13 million shares had exchanged hands, triple the normal trading volume. Transactions were printed on ticker tape, which could only produce 285 words per minute. The ticker tape didn’t stop running until four hours after the market closed.

On Friday, markets appeared calmer and trade volume receded to six million shares. Investors spent a tense weekend assessing their portfolios, and when markets reopened on Monday, prices plunged and trade volume spiked again. Unlike on Black Thursday, there was no eleventh-hour recovery.

On Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, investors were in a full-blown panic. Three million shares were traded in the first thirty minutes alone. As investors tried desperately to communicate with their stock brokers, phone lines jammed and Western Union telegrams tripled. False rumors that investors were jumping out of skyscrapers fueled the panic. Fistfights broke out on the trading floor. Stock brokers called in margins and sold the stocks of investors who couldn’t immediately repay the 80-90% they had borrowed, wiping out life savings in a matter of seconds. When the market finally closed, the Dow Jones had fallen 12%. It took 15,000 miles of ticker tape to record the 16.4 million shares that had been traded. To put that in context, the distance from Manhattan to Sydney, Australia is a mere 9,931 miles. The market had officially crashed.

Value Walk

What caused the stock market to crash in 1929?

The stock market crash of 1929 did not have one single catalyst. Multiple factors contributed, including:

Margin buying

Before the crash, nearly 40 cents of every dollar loaned in America was used to buy stocks, typically through margin buying. When the market started to take nosedives, brokers began to make their margin calls and borrowers were often unable to pay up. When that happened, brokers simply sold those stocks, wiping out savings and increasing panic.

Lack of legal protections

The legal protections we have today on bank deposits and securities transactions didn’t exist in 1929. After the crash, banks were only able to honor 10 cents on the dollar because they had used customers’ deposits to purchase stocks without their knowledge. Additionally, investors had no recourse to recover funds if their brokerage firm went out of business. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) were founded in 1933 and 1934, respectively, as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to restore confidence in the markets under the New Deal.

Overpriced stocks

Overpriced stocks are often cited as a key reason for the crash of 1929. However, there is not a lot of evidence to support this. Stocks increased by 120% between 1925 and the third quarter of 1929, an average annual increase of about 22%. This is a big increase but in the context of a period of tremendous economic growth, it is not unreasonable. Price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios also do not indicate overvaluations. In 1929, the average P/E ratio of stocks was around 15. In January 2018, the S&P 500’s P/E ratio was just under 23. It may be more accurate to say that it was the perception of overpricing that contributed to the crash as public figures and news headlines expressed this view.

News headlines

In early October 1929, newspapers stoked concerns with sensational headlines. Most notably, on October 3, 1929 Britain’s finance minister, Phillip Snowden, called the U.S. stock market a “perfect orgy of speculation” and the next day, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times ran stories agreeing with him. The New York Times’ page one headline blared “Year’s Worst Break Hits Stock Market.” On October 17, The Washington Post ran a headline “Crushing Blow Dealt to Stock Market” following a market dip the previous day. Associated Press stories – which were picked up by other outlets and therefore widely read – focused on the poor performance of public utilities, which generated significant worry among investors. Public utilities stocks were more than triple their book value in 1929 so these headlines did generate valid concerns. In the run up to Black Thursday, major newspaper headlines continued to focus on market dips, the lack of alarm among Washington officials about these dips, and the rising panic of investors. Newspapers cannot be faulted for reporting the news but the headlines certainly heightened people’s fears. The effect of these news headlines was roughly the equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theatre.

Trouble in London

On September 20, 1929, the London Stock Exchange suspended shares of the Hatry group after its founder, Clarence Hatry, was found to have purchased United Steel Companies with fraudulent collateral. The Hatry group collapsed, costing investors billions and sending the London Stock Exchange into a tailspin. This news put US investors on edge.

Federal Reserve policy

Economists and historians have long argued that Federal Reserve policy contributed to the crash. In 1928 and 1929, the Fed raised interest rates in an effort to limit securities speculation. Higher rates caused economic activity to slowdown in the US. The Fed’s actions also had unintended global consequences. Because of the international gold standard, foreign central banks were forced to raise their interest rates as well, and this monetary tightening triggered recessions in several countries and caused global commerce to contract. In 2002, Ben Bernanke (then a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors) publicly acknowledged the Fed’s role in the crash, saying that the Fed’s mistakes contributed to the “worst economic disaster in American history.”

What happened to investors’ portfolios in 1929?

From 1927 to just before the crash, market returns grew exponentially. In 1928, stocks returned a whopping 43.8%. Here’s a look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1927 to 1932:

As much as markets fell in the crash, they still had a long way to go before finally bottoming out in 1932.

Value Walk

During the period from August 1929 through March 1933, the total return of a portfolio that was 60% stocks and 40% bonds was -50.2%. During that same period, the S&P 500’s total return was -74.6% and the 10-year Treasury’s total return was +15.3%. The 60/40 balanced portfolio remain a popular option for investors today.

60/40 Historical Returns 1926-2016

Value Walk

Could investors have avoided catastrophe?

John Maynard Keynes didn’t see the crash coming and was nearly cleaned out in 1929. In fact, he was so shaken by the crash and ensuing depression that he changed his strategy, deciding that the “animal spirits” of the market could not always be trusted and that irrational behavior on the part of investors played a role in determining stock prices regardless of fundamental valuations.

If Keynes was unable to avoid the crash, it seems entirely unreasonable that the average investor could be expected to do so. The market was incredibly difficult to time in 1929, particularly because stock prices rallied before larger crashes on multiple occasions. This made it virtually impossible to tell when the crash was over. Some investors correctly read warning signs and sold their stocks ahead of Black Thursday only to buy back in at bargain prices the next day and suffer even bigger losses on Black Tuesday.

Is it possible to avoid losses in a stock market crash?

The bad news is that stock market crashes are a reality of investing. Black swan events can and will happen. The good news is that while it is virtually impossible to reliably time the market, investors can still protect their savings from a crash.

One way to minimize the risks from a potential market crash is to capture a moderate amount of upside market growth while ensuring that savings are fully protected over the long term.

Markets

[mokatechgq-blog]

Overlooked sound organizations: The flexi circle The shoddy, lightweight "Soundsheet" once graced magazine covers in its millions.

The flexi circle has, for a physically feeble arrangement, a staggeringly various foundation, and its story consolidates everybody from the Beatles, David Bowie, and ABBA, to Alice Cooper and substantial metal. As far as retail it sprung up with National Geographic, in a million-dollar McDonalds crusade, and on the fronts of various adolescent magazines. It wound up squeezed into illicit underground market X-beams in the Soviet Union, and even helped the prominent liar Richard "Dubious Dicky" Nixon move toward becoming US president in 1968

Flexi plates (not "flexidiscs") sold in their many millions amid the 60s, 70s, 80s, and the mid 1990s—preceding for all intents and purposes vanishing from the substance of the earth for 10 years and a half. In any case, as befits an item in view of a ceaseless winding scratch, that was not exactly the end...

Other "melodic postcards"— rough furrows squeezed into card—had been around and offering erratically since route in 1950. What's more, some vinyl flexi circles appeared in Britain in the last 50% of the 1950s, albeit the vast majority of these were of extremely low quality, in fact talking. The refined flexi plate was created, protected, and presented by the American organization Eva-Tone Incorporated a couple of years after the fact, in 1962, and was at first called "the Eva-tone Soundsheet." This new child on the piece had a few favorable circumstances over its "folks": the singing postcard and the first winding stylus-groove item we know as the vinyl record.

Eva-tone's Soundsheet flexi without a doubt sounded superior to the card forms that went before it, and since flexis utilized just a small amount of the measure of vinyl that consistent records did, it implied that they were far less expensive to press, store, and transport. Frequently the procedure really included polyvinyl chloride instead of pelleted vinyl, which made it less expensive still. On top of this, the way that these items were really adaptable implied they could be sold on the fronts of or inside magazines, booklets, and daily papers. They were genuinely solid, as well, not at all like the 78rpm shellac circles which could without much of a stretch crack into pieces if dropped from, say, a seat, or vinyl 45s which, while more grounded than shellac pressings, could likewise be snapped unintentionally.

One slight issue

It appeared like a win-win circumstance at the same time, as with its quick British antecedents, there were dependably a couple of downsides with Eva-tone's flexi circle. For a certain something, 12-inch or even 10-inch LPs were difficult to make on the grounds that flexis were so lightweight: a regular flexi circle single or EP would generally weigh in the vicinity of 4.5 and 6.5 grams—the same as maybe a couple sugar 3D shapes. The paper or card sleeves that they came in would regularly be heavier than this, at around 9g. Contrast that and the 40g weight of an ordinary vinyl single—or the 200g of numerous 78rpm shellac singles—and you perceive how much crude material was being spared.

At that point there was the way that heavier cartridges on numerous turntables would truly granulate the flexi's playback to an end. In ordinary conditions there were just two routes out of this: play the flexi while it was on top of a typical vinyl single, or place a coin or two some place close to the focal point of the plate—some later Soundsheet pressings really contained a hover set apart out for where the coin, or coins, ought to best be put. At times you even needed to attempt both traps in the meantime to get a record to play.

There were two other, more insoluble, issues with this new super-thin record. Initially, in spite of the fact that to less recognizing ears the sound quality may have showed up a nearby adversary to standard vinyl on the initial few plays, flexis never had the total recurrence scope of full-weight 45s, or 7.5-inches-per-second tape recordings. Proficient use in, say, a radio station was not feasible unless there were actually no different renditions of the track being referred to. The other aggravation was the way that flexis blurred quicker: their shallower, shaped depressions implied expanded surface commotion, while scratches seemed all the more rapidly and came through louder, so skipping and bouncing soon turned into a noteworthy issue for any circle that got more than few plays.

Defining moments in flexi history

For the greater part of the above reasons, the utilization of the Soundsheet rapidly ended up noticeably limited to three primary—yet extensive—ranges: band promos, kids' records, and giveaways for magazines, which were typically, however not only, music papers.

A normal case came when The Beatles conveyed flexi circles to their fan club in 1964; the one underneath elements a strange singalong and some individual messages to their followers.The Fab Four did it again in 1967, in spite of the fact that the conveyance was barely less whimsical and all the more slapdash, in spite of the fact that this time there was no less than a tune attached.A year later, Richard Nixon won the 1968 US decision with a very much financed battle that utilized the Soundsheet in its crusade materials. Over a million were conveyed to voters in key states, denoted "Nixon's The One!" and including a discourse by the man himself.

Yet, they were cheap(ish) and happy, and deals kept on standing their ground all through the late 1960s. A special recording from the mid 1970s shows the amount of an industry the flexi had moved toward becoming; take note of that the circle appeared in the connection beneath is really a square sheet—proper for the configuration's unique name—a shape which most American squeezing plants remained with till the end. As an aside, in the US "soundsheet" has dependably remained a more famous term than flexi disc.In Britain, vinyl squeezing organizations, for example, Lyntone authorized the improved assembling process from Eva-tone and settled on the more engaging name of "flexi circle," as it was felt that the expansion of "plate" strengthened the association with vinyl records, while the first US name would make music beaus mistake it for sheet music. Industry insiders were likewise doubtlessly tired to death of that old music lobby joke: "Do you like sheet music? 'No, I simply like the well done… '"

David Bowie was aided by the guideline if not simply the genuine plate, when his leap forward collection The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars ended up plainly one of the quickest movers amid the mid year of 1972. RCA records, his music name at the time, was stressed that they couldn't get enough vinyl to stay aware of the colossal deals request—a speedy million merchant was a major ordeal for a UK collection in those days—and it expected that flighty high school pop fans would purchase something else if compelled to sit tight possibly 14 days for conveyances to the vinyl stores, a dread that was maybe not absolutely baseless even in those days. So RCA Records utilized the Dynaflex circle for a huge number of Ziggy Stardust pressings, utilizing a thin section of vinyl that was better than the flexi however which measured 25 percent not as much as the standard collection.

RCA Records completed its pressings in time, Ziggy remained in the collection graphs and was soon essentially living at Number One, and Bowie had turned into a true blue star.Cutting expenses and selling burgers

Some vinyl specialists have, notwithstanding, dependably loathed this move by RCA. As the oil emergency hit the west in 1973 and the cost of vinyl rose, these sorts of circle soon turned into a route for marks to spare cash by cutting collection weights and in this manner, eventually, lessening sound quality. The thicker and heavier the collection, the better the sound generation is—subsequently the vogue among hello there fi enthusiasts for plates that convey a 160g to 200g weight.

It was around this time Britain's driving music paper New Musical Express gave away an elite Alice Cooper track, a really decent Elvis Presley pantomime called "Smooth Black Limousine." On the other side were bits from his prospective "Billion Dollar Babies" collection. This squeezing remained a prized thing among Cooper fans for quite a long time, until it at last started to show up on bootlegs.Swedish pop sensations ABBA were additionally inclined to the odd selective freebie; their "ABBA/Live 77" was an uneven gold-hued flexi that highlighted cuts from that year's Australian visit. It was just accessible as a present for the youthful children who were offering books, papers, and magazines way to-entryway at Christmas for the Jultidningsförlaget distributing company. At the flip side of the pop-social range, in 1978, the spearheading electronic British band The Human League gave away a flexi circle entitled "Flexi Disk" with their 12-inch single "Nobility of Labor," however it was later reissued on their "Multiplication" collection. Fittingly enough for a gathering then thought to be exceptionally aesthetic, their flexi circle chiefly comprises of them talking about, er, flexi plates, and whether they ought to do one.

In the interim, in the USA in the 80s, McDonalds utilized flexi circles—and in a few states cardboard records—to convey a redo of the moronically enchanting curiosity hit "Life Is A Rock (however The Radio Rolled Me)" from 1974, for its $1,000,000 Menu Song moment win promotion.This was a sickeningly fruitful rivalry battle that extended more than 1988 and 1989. A few distinct forms of the tune were recorded and squeezed onto an amazing 78 million flexis, which were then attached onto advert embeds and slipped into a considerable lot of America's every day papers. Each one of the recordings highlighted a session artist, or in some cases an individual from the general population, endeavoring to sing "Life Is A Rock" before committing an error, and soon thereafter the track would end. McDonalds had shrewdly squeezed one single flexi circle on which the melody was finished appropriately. Whoever discovered this irregular squeezing was regarded to be the champ of one million dollars. After numerous, numerous months, amid which a few pessimists pondered so anyone can hear whether the genuine "Life Is A Rock" flexi sheet really existed or not, it was in the long run found by one Charlene Price, of Galax in West Virginia, who right away did what many individuals long for doing: she purchased the late-night shop where she worked.