Teaching your high school or college kid to be financially savvy can be like teaching a goat to dance. Good luck. Between dates, friends, shopping sprees and the temptations of college freedom, young adults can have a hard time setting limits for themselves. Luckily, edo Interactive has introduced a new prepaid MasterCard to help curb those youthful spending impulses.

Sure, the idea of a prepaid card for teens isn’t entirely new. The “Facecard” has many of the same features that other prepaid cards have. Kids thirteen and over can use it anywhere that MasterCard is accepted including ATM’s and online. Parents can send emergency funds to their kid’s card and the cash will be available within just fifteen minutes. Both the parents and children can check balances and keep track of spending in real time online. There’s no overspending or going negative since the Facecard is a debit card, and there’s never a maintenance or inactivity fee.

What is unique about the Facecard is that it functions as a financial and social network. Users can create profiles online, set preferences and send each other money. Facecard also has a “prewards” program set up with participating companies who are willing to add cash to the user’s card for having brand loyalty. Kids can preset their preferred preward categories on their profile homepage.

This isn’t just a ploy to get kids to spend more, it’s part of an effort to educate our young adults about spending within their limits and having good credit. Facecard has partnered with other youth-targeted companies for some great causes. Because of Facecard’s efforts, representatives from Bonnaroo in Tennessee will be touring about 50 college campuses starting on Saturday, August 30th to offer information on financial literacy and credit card debt.

Last year, teens in the United States spent over $350 billion collectively. It’s not wonder why college students are one of the most highly targeted groups by credit card companies. According to Project On Student Debt, by the time they graduate, college kids have an average of $19,646 in credit card debt. Making this group a prime target may make sense for credit card companies, but in the long run it brings down our economy. Not only that, but this practice is putting teens in debt before they ever have a chance to get out into the real world where they will need good credit the most.

Burning up the blogosphere recently is Cameron Adams’s Handwritten Typographers, a brilliant sampling of how today’s finest typographers write stuff down on paper. Some of the results are fantastic. Hardly surprising that people devoted to designing type also write in an interesting hand, but Adams asks some further questions:

Do typographers exert some extraordinary control of the pen that laypersons don’t? Does a typographer’s handwriting influence the typefaces they produce? Has the rise of digital communications made handwriting redundant? Do modern typographers, born of digital tools, lack the finesse of their more wizened counterparts? If so, does that change the way their type is designed?

One thing I’ve always been interested in is the conscious development of a handwriting style. Do people (typographers or not) spend time practicing and perfecting a handwriting style? One guess is that any naturally talented designer already has some drafting skill that’s automatically transposed into the more automatic features of handwriting, but I’d like to see a feature that looks at prominent designers who admit to practicing and perfecting their handwritten styles, like an illustrator would perfect his line.

I’d buy a little pocket-book made up of notebook scraps that chronicled the handwriting evolution of, say, 25 famous artists/designers. Yes I would.

Recent experiences in renewing my passport made me reflect that we all probably spend a fair amount of time developing our signature–I’ve got notebooks from my childhood filled with flailing attempts to make my name look cooler on the page, most of which failed.

Ever been forced to sign your name exactly inside a little box, any contact with the page borders immediately invalidating the entire form? There’s a handwriting-consistency test if there ever was one. My shaky hand means the one signature I did manage to get inside the box still doesn’t look all that close to what you’ll see on an average contract or credit card slip. Oh well, it’s only border control, right?

Adams’s experiment struck me as a wonderful spin on the “ask artists how they do what they do” genre, which has always been a wonderful/terrible thing for me. Reading great essays on how, for example, certain novelists do what they do can fill you with inspiration, and then along comes some anecdotal evidence that some of the best living authors of the day, say Philip Roth or Don Delillo, write almost monastically, genius writers hammering away in solitude for 10 hours a day, trying to get something, anything right, and we’re all reminded that you’ve got to put the work in, no matter what you’ve done before. But we’ll save that digression for another day.

There are times I’d rather just see how an artist writes stuff down, or organizes his/her day, than always read about the why. In a unique way, that’s what Adams has done here.

One wonderful new book gaining strong traction in the world of design and advertising is Rob Walker’s Buying In. The weekly columnist for the New York Times Sunday Magazine stands and delivers a book-length meditation on the 21st-century consumer, along with a perfect antidote to any under-researched column or study that tells you marketing “as we know it” is dead, or that the modern consumer is so over-informed and intelligent that all old strategies or ideas have jumped (or must be thrown) out the window.

Advertising is changing in fundamental ways–this, no one denies–but some rules of the game still remain, and Walker is here to chart the way all the various agents (producers and consumers alike) have adapted.

Besides the immediate appeal to anyone involved in advertising or design, the book has a transcendent draw that comes from its central examination of brand attachment. Walker coined the term “murketing”, to describe a 21st century mix of murky and marketing that he describes as being a two-part system, one which is made up of the “increasingly sophisticated tactics of marketers who blur the line between branding channels and everyday life” and the consciously “widespread consumer embrace of branded, commercial culture.”

Read the introduction to the book here and tell me you’re not hooked by his anecdotal reference to Chuck Taylor’s All-Stars: he says the book “was inspired by the disconnect between what the experts say [about consumer behaviour] and how we really behave,” and the first example comes from his very own experiences. Perfect for me, as I only started wearing All-Stars a year and a half ago, and since then I’ve already bought 3 pairs. Why? Lots of reasons, surely, almost all of them connecting to self/group identification, and (almost) all to be found in this book.

One of the most fascinating parts of Walker’s theory, the pieces of which you can put together through all the entries on his murketing blog or his “Consumed” columns (all available online), is the “Desire Code”, his examination of how we come to desire what we eventually buy, or how logo/brand/product desire is created.

His idea rides on a “fundamental tension of modern life,” one that extends far past marketing and consumerism but is essential to his understanding of it: the tension between the individual and the group. Hardly a new concept, but that’s the point–the game hasn’t changed so much to be unrecognizable, rather all its participants are (apparently) a little more self-aware. A fine sampling:

When I was in grade school, we watched a lot of films. Perhaps they were a relatively easy way to quiet the children down for a while. But remembering this period as an adult, I’m struck by the realization that those films all had one of two themes.

One was: Deep down, each of us is different, unique, and special.

The other was: Deep down, we are all just the same.

For years I shared this observation, for laughs, before it finally occurred to me that this was no joke. In fact, it articulated what is more or less the fundamental tension of modern life.

We all want to feel like individuals.

We all want to feel like a part of something bigger than ourselves.

And resolving that tension is what the Desire Code is all about.

Summer is here, and from anecdotal evidence in various popular magazines, I’ve heard it’s the “reading” season, although reading on the beach does nothing but hurt my eyes. If you, however, can keep yours relatively unsquinted, Walker’s book is an essential purchase.

Pound for pound Lucien Freuds ‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’ is over-abundantly yet gloriously fleshy, with paint gathered in great gobs and whirls, the finite details of his subject picked out in loving virtuosity. A mighty explosion of all things woman, in every possible sense.

Next month, the work, painted in 1995, and now on public view at Christie’s Auction House in London until April 15th, is predicted to become the most expensive painting by a living artist sold at auction, with an estimate of £12.7m-£17.7m. The current record for most expensive piece by a living artist to be sold at auction is held by Jeff Koons’ Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold), which made £11.3m in November 2007.

The portrait’s sitter, Sue Tilley - whom at the time of painting was indeed a benefits supervisor, though has since been promoted to manager of a Jobcentre Plus in central London - is delighted the attention the piece has attracted. “My life’s changed overnight,” she says. “I’m beside myself, but then lovely things are always happening to me. Still, I’m not surprised - in a way, I always thought this might happen. I love that painting.”

When asked by The Gaurdian in the UK: Is it not a little, well, exposing to have one’s magnificently generous breasts and lolling stomach revealed to the world? Tilley laughs: she was nervous, she says, about first stripping off, but quickly got used to it. Though, she adds: “I know it sounds weird, but even though there’d be no one else there I’d get dressed or put something round me just to go to the loo. I didn’t want to become a regular nudist.“

Tilley and Freud were introduced by a mutual friend - Leigh Bowery, one of Australia’s (and later the UK’s) most exuberant yet ingenious fashion designers / performing artists, whom Tilley had met in a nightclub in the early 1980s, and whose biography she wrote. Leigh Bowery was also a sitter for Freud. Bowery’s name for Tilley was Big Sue, and she was one of several sitters the performance artist recommended to the painter.

The first work had her posing, in great discomfort, with her backside on the cold studio floor - “and he made me look so horrible. I’m shaking now as I think of it.“

For Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, however, Freud bought the sofa for her to rest on. “It was lovely and comfy, and I just lay on it, really, for nine months.” she continues “Sometimes he’d take me out for lunch, which I liked, and we’d work again in the afternoon. It was quite exhausting, just lying there. I know it sounds silly, but it was.“

Frued’s Model Sitters

Freud has had the opportunity to immortalize a myriad of people, from all walks of life; including the Queen of England and Kate Moss, to name a few.

Harry Diamond Freud’s friend featured in Interior in Paddington (1951), part of the Festival of Britain. Though he complained about sitting, Freud painted Diamond several times.

Francis Bacon Bacon had painted a portrait of Freud in 1951, and in the following year Freud painted Bacon’s portrait in oils on a small copper plate.

His mother Freud painted his mother many times, and the day after her death he drew The Painter’s Mother Dead.

Leigh Bowery A transvestite performance artist, Bowery was an experienced model, and he sat frequently.

The Queen Freud’s portrait created controversy among the media and the public. Sittings happened at St James’s Palace in 2001 and 2002. Freud asked that the Queen wore the diamond crown seen on banknotes and stamps.

Kate Moss Moss is one of the few Freud models who have suggested themselves for the job, which she did in a magazine article. ..continued below

Lucien Freud - Girl with a white dog.

About Lucien Freud

Uncompromising, intense, even brutal - just some of the words used to describe the work of Lucian Freud

“The greatest living realist painter”

Whether painting the Queen in her finery or himself in the nude, Freud applies the same unwavering scrutiny to his subjects, and the stark results have brought him international renown. Still working as he approaches 80 and described by art critic Robert Hughes as “the greatest living realist painter”, Freud enthrals and disturbs in equal measure.

As the grandson of psycho-scion Sigmund Freud, any analysis of the artist’s inner turmoil must surely be old news. Nevertheless, the facts are that young Lucian was abruptly uprooted from his Berlin roots when his family fled Nazi Germany in 1933. Installed in England, he rejected education but developed an interest in art.

Bacon influence

Encouraged by his father, Lucian enjoyed a formal training at both the East Anglian School of Painting and the Central School of Art in London. His famous name gave him a golden ticket to the broadest echelons of London society, and his strong charisma didn’t hinder him. He was soon a leading light of the city’s bohemian art circle, where he encountered the already established Francis Bacon.

The pair formed a close, if competitive, friendship, and Bacon has been cited as the man who liberated Freud’s style. Impressed with the fluidity of the older man’s art, Freud dared to abandon his own meticulous technique. He also turned his full attention to the depiction of human life.

In a poignant postscript to this formative era, Freud’s portrait of Bacon was stolen over a decade ago from a German gallery. Freud designed a “wanted” poster for the painting and, until its recovery, will allow no reproduction of it to be made. ..continued below

Lucien Freud - Reflection (Self portrait)

Complicated private life

Freud has been as creative away from the easel, with the complicated private life of a true artist. His girlfriend Emily, more than 50 years his junior, is the subject of some of his recent work, but over the years, few of his extended family have escaped his professional gaze.

Instead of berating their often absent father, Freud’s children celebrate their time as his subjects. His daughter Bella describes the luxury of “hearing him talk, on almost any subject, and asking him questions”.

“A great searchlight of intelligence”

Members of the aristocracy are equally impressed. Of his sessions sitting for the artist, the Duke of Devonshire recalls “being in the presence of a great searchlight of intelligence”.

Never sentimental, his lifetime of work attests to his enduring interest in the human condition. His mother was the subject of a remarkable series of portraits, where his warmth for her pervaded the canvas. In one self-portrait, he is wearing just boots to protect himself from the paint.

The artist is notoriously private, insisting that all we need to know about him is in the art. Lucian Freud may be famously brutal with his brush, but his compassion and vulnerability are part of every stroke.

Earlier in the week we wrote about the Milan Design Week listing the Top 100 ‘not to miss shows’, including some of the smaller & less recognized brands. One showing we failed to include however, was Reflections an exhibition of works produced by Marko Macura & Jacco Bergonje.

From the 16th - 21st of April, Marko Macura will premiere his new designs in the Zona Tortona area of Milan, in a shared exhibit with Jacco Bregonje called Reflectons. The Sulla Luna Bench, previously available in brass or aluminium, will be presented in two metres of black, along with the Nebula lamp and Mimi after the jump.

You can check out the exhibition at Studio, Via Novi 2, Tortona, 28 Milano; and if you’re Press they’re open for previews the night before. We’ve included some of his pieces below, he produces some gorgeous pieces in our view.

Preview

Mimi

Nebula for Antique Mirror

Sulla Luna Lumas

About Marko

Born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1971, he moved to New York at the age of 10 completing his undergraduate studies at the “Rhode Island School of Design” in 1989. A year later, his education continued in Switzerland at the “Art Centre College of Design” (Europe) where he graduated with honours in 1994.

Marko later joined Philips Design in the Netherlands where he worked on visionary and strategic projects. Though in 2002, he established his own studio, ‘Marko Macura Design’, in Eindhoven. The studio focuses on creative design solutions for the furniture and lighting industries as well as on interior and consumer electronics design.

He states that the mission of ‘Marko Macura Design’ is a pursuit of distinct and original ideas, objects and spaces that are inspired by our background, experience and cultural exposure. It echoes Marko’s views and sensibilities shaped by the diverse settings in which he lived during his formative and professional years. A red thread of narrative and cultural inspiration, and humour and functional ideas rather than a formalistic style characterizes his body of work. The studio helps industry and clients innovate and differentiate through an understanding of materials and production processes.

In 2007 Marko was awarded the first prize from Alcantara Lab for the design Angolo created in collaboration with Ingeborg van Uden under the chairmanship of Giulio Cappellini. Upcoming 2008 projects include new limited edition series, interior projects, as well as new furniture and accessory designs. Marko also devotes a part time schedule as a strategic design consultant for Philips Design as well as devoting time to teaching. He boasts an impressive client list including BRF italy, Sputnik/IDEE Japan, Chi Ha Paura…?, Droog Design, Reuge, emr design and Felicerossi.

Other Marko Macura pieces we love

Spotnik Lamp for IDEE

BRF’s Smile Arm Chair

Felicerossi Oros Sofa, Bench and Chaise Lounge.

In the latter years of the 19th century, Joseph Pulitzer stood out as the very embodiment of American journalism. Hungarian-born, an intense indomitable figure, Pulitzer was the most skillful of newspaper publishers, a passionate crusader against dishonest government, a fierce, hawk-like competitor who did not shrink from sensationalism in circulation struggles, and a visionary who richly endowed his profession.

Each year these awards are made in his honor, and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists are:

JOURNALISM:

Public Service: The Washington Post for exposing the mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital. Finalists: The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer for reporting on the effects of the mortgage crisis; Newsday of Long Island for investigation of dangerous gaps on railroad platforms.

Breaking News Reporting: The Washington Post staff for its coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. Finalists: The (Boise) Idaho Statesman staff for its coverage of the Sen. Larry Craig scandal; The New York Times staff for coverage of a fire in the Bronx that killed nine people, eight of them children.

Investigative Reporting: Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker of The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune staff. The Times won for stories on toxic ingredients in medicine and other products imported from China; the Tribune for exposing faulty regulation of toys, car seats and cribs. Finalist: Miles Moffeit and Susan Greene of The Denver Post for reports on the destruction of evidence in criminal cases.

Explanatory Reporting: Amy Harmon of The New York Times for her examination of the dilemmas and ethical issues that accompany DNA testing. Finalists: Beth Daley of The Boston Globe for coverage of how global warming affects New England residents; the staff of The Oregonian in Portland for reports on a breakthrough in producing microprocessors.

Local Reporting: David Umhoefer of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for stories on the skirting of tax laws to pad pensions of county employees. Finalists: Chris Davis, Matthew Doig and Tiffany Lankes of the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune for exposing predatory teachers; Jeff Pillets, John Brennan and Tim Nostand of The Record, Hackensack, N.J., for a probe of favoritism and questionable state loans in a plan to build luxury housing on old landfills.

National Reporting: Jo Becker and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post for their exploration of Vice President Dick Cheney’s influence on national policy. Finalists: The New York Times staff for stories about CIA interrogation techniques criticized as torture; Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune for his examination of racial issues in America.

International Reporting: Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post for his series on private security contractors in Iraq that operate outside most of the laws governing American forces. Finalists: The New York Times staff for coverage of the U.S. military’s efforts to reduce sectarian violence in Iraq; The Wall Street Journal staff for reports on the dismantling of democracy in Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Feature Writing: Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post for chronicling the violinist Joshua Bell as he played beautiful music in a subway station filled with unheeding commuters. Finalists: Thomas Curwen of the Los Angeles Times for an account of a grizzly bear attack and the recovery of the two victims; Kevin Vaughan of the Rocky Mountain News, Denver, for a retelling of a school bus-train accident that killed 20 children in 1961.

Commentary: Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post for columns exploring the nation’s complex economic ills. Finalists: Regina Brett of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, for columns on alienated teenagers in a dangerous city neighborhood; John Kass of the Chicago Tribune for columns on the abuse of local political power and other topics.

Criticism: Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe for his command of the visual arts, from film and photography to painting. Finalists: Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post for movie reviews and essays; Inga Saffron of The Philadelphia Inquirer for architecture critiques.

Editorial Writing: No award. Finalists: Maureen Downey of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for editorials on harsh sentences for consensual sex by teenagers; Rodger Jones of The Dallas Morning News for editorials calling for mandatory roll call votes on statewide legislation; the (Madison) Wisconsin State Journal staff for a campaign against abuses in the governor’s veto power.

Editorial Cartooning: Michael Ramirez of Investor’s Business Daily for what the judges called his “provocative cartoons.” Finalists: Tom Batiuk of King Features for a sequence in “Funky Winterbean” portraying a woman’s struggle with breast cancer; and Clay Bennett of The Christian Science Monitor for cartoons “marked by sharp focus and pungent simplicity.”

Breaking News Photography: Adrees Latif of Reuters for his photograph of a Japanese videographer, sprawled on the pavement, fatally wounded during a street demonstration in Myanmar. Finalists: Mahmud Hams of Agence France-Presse for a picture of a missile falling on a target in the Gaza Strip while Palestinians scramble for safety; and the Los Angeles Times staff for photos of wildfires devastating parts of California.

Feature Photography: Preston Gannaway of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor for her chronicle of a family coping with a parent’s terminal illness. Finalists: David Guttenfelder of The Associated Press for photos of Vietnamese children affected by toxic Agent Orange decades after the war; Mona Reed of The Dallas Morning News for pictures of disadvantaged Texans hidden amid the state’s prosperity.

ARTS:

Fiction: “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” by Junot Diaz (Riverhead Books). Finalists: “Tree of Smoke” by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and “Shakespeare’s Kitchen” by Lore Segal (The New Press).

Drama: “August: Osage County,” by Tracy Letts. Finalists: “Yellow Face” by David Henry Hwang; “Dying City” by Christopher Shinn.

History: “What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815-1848,” by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford University Press). Finalists: “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power” by Robert Dallek (HarperCollins); “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War” by the late David Halberstam (Hyperion).

Biography: “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father,” by John Matteson (W.W. Norton). Finalists: “The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein” by Martin Duberman (Alfred A. Knopf); “The Life of Kingsley Amis” by Zachary Leader (Pantheon).

Poetry: “Time and Materials,” by Robert Hass (Ecco/HarperCollins) and “Failure,” by Philip Schultz (Harcourt). Finalist: “Messenger: New and Selected Poems,” 1976-2006″ by Ellen Bryant Voigt (W.W. Norton).

General Nonfiction: “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945,” by Saul Friedlander (HarperCollins). “The Cigarette Century” by Allan Brandt (Basic Books); “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century” by Alex Ross (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

MUSIC: “The Little Match Girl Passion,” by David Lang, premiered Oct. 25 at Carnegie Hall, New York. (G. Schirmer, Inc.) Finalists: “Meanwhile” by Stephen Hartke (ELR Music Publishing Inc.); “Concerto for Viola” by Robert Sierra (Subito Music Publishing).

SPECIAL CITATION: Bob Dylan, “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”

Celebrating its 30th year, the Pritzker Prize has been awarded to french architect Jean Nouvel named the 2008 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, architect’s highest honor. A prize granted in previous years to other industry heavy weights such as Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne, I. M. Pei, and Frank Gehry, to name a few.

The 62-year-old Nouvel will receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion at the Library of Congress, which convenes June 2. His completed projects–a list of over 200–include the Institut du Monde Arabe (1989); the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis (2006), the 75-story Tour Verre in New York, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris (1994), and Expo 2002 in Switzerland.

“Of the many phrases that might be used to describe the career of architect Jean Nouvel, foremost are those that emphasize his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field,” said Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of the Hyatt Foundation, quoting from the jury citation.

The Pritzker Architecture Prize was launched in 1979 as tribute to a living architect “whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.”

Nouvel is the second laureate from France — Christian de Portzamparc took the prize in 1994.

At a sunset performance on at beach in Ishikawa Prefecture, western Japan, the 66-year-old Yamashita, wearing a firefighter’s uniform, recently played an improvised jazz piece before about 500 spectators seated in a wide semicircle around him.

No sooner had he begun playing, the piano burst into performance for a full ten minutes before all the strings were burnt out or snapped and the piano went quiet.

“I did not think I was risking my life but I was almost suffocating from the smoke that was continuously getting into my eyes and nose.

“I had decided to keep on playing until the piano stopped making sounds, so though I did not mean it but it ended up having a life-or-death battle between the piano and myself,” said Mr Yamashita.

This extraordinary piano performance was not the first experience for him.

He did it 35 years ago when he was a fledgling pianist but then it was not his idea, it was for a film by a Japanese graphic designer named Kiyoshi Awazu.

Marclay’s fascination with music, or more specifically sound, has produced a rather interesting exhibition showcasing her latest body of works.

From attaching a guitar to the back of a pick-up truck (Guitar Drag, 2000) to a quad of continually holstering guns set on four walls of a square room (Crossfire, 2007), vinyl covers, cut and collaged to form meticulously reassembled Frankenstein figures (Recycled Records, 1980-86) to an orchestra playing improvised music from a series of pictorial playing cards (Shuffle, 2007) Marclay explores the recesses and possible limits of making and presenting sound in unconventional ways.

His latest work, Solo, was given its first screening at the Whitechapel Art Gallery as the climax to TOD’S Art Plus Film party. Moving away from found material, which forms the matter of his previous works, Solo is the first time Marclay himself has directed and filmed the footage used for the final piece. It features an actress, Tree Carr and an electric guitar (the guitar, signed by both was auctioned at the party) and plays with the very many symbolic associations attached to the latter.

Over 20 minutes Carr plays the guitar not with her hands but her body and clothes, simultaneously undressing so that she’s left naked but for the guitar by the end. The resulting combination of visual and audio is mesmerising, not just in a voyeuristic sense, but in the extraordinary feeling of possibility and spontaneity. Carr is not a guitar player and with each second one isn’t sure what she might produce, which creates a sense of connection between her and the viewer.

The allusions are plenty given the female-phallic shape of the electric guitar together with the historical and cultural associations we have with the music it produces but as a whole, Solo goes further than the sum of its symbolic references. It’s a comment on the way we view and the way we hear simultaneously and in turn how these two senses are affected by our own cultural responses.

Viktor Schreckengost, who died late Saturday night in Florida, aged 101, was a prolific industrial designer, artist, and teacher who managed in a 70-year career to produce everyday objects from ceramic dinnerware and frying pans to metal lawn chairs for Sears, and everyone’s childhood favorite—the banana-seat bicycle.

Schreckengost was born on June 26, 1906 in Sebring, a commercial pottery town near Youngstown, Ohio, that at one time was known as the “Pottery Capital of The World.” His interest in design began by making things as a boy, when he and his brothers molded tiny sculptures of soldiers and football players out of the clay his father brought home from his job as a potter. After attending the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Kunstgewerbeschule, in Vienna, Schreckengost began working at the Cowan Pottery Studio, in Rocky River, Ohio. One of his first commissions, in 1930, was a large punch bowl for Eleanor Roosevelt. The “Jazz Bowl”, with its jazzy, cubist style, depicts skyscrapers, neon lights, the Cotton Club, and Radio City Music Hall, and has become one of the signature pieces of American Art Deco. In 2004, a later version of the bowl sold at Sotheby’s auction house for $254,400.

When asked what advice he would give a young designer, he said: “Always get back to the function of the object. The aesthetics, the marketing, and whatever you want to worry about all comes in on top of that. Let’s take the costs out of it so that everybody can afford good design”—something that still resonates today.

For more information about his life and work, read Back to the Future or visit www.viktorschreckengost.org.