Artist Philip Toledano has launched America: The Gift Shop, an online installation that “reflects the current foreign policy in the fun-house mirror of American commerce. We buy souvenirs at the end of a trip, to remind ourselves of the experience. What do we have to remind us of the events of the last eight years?”

I was a little nervous when first clicking on this one: it’s really easy to screw this stuff up, to let art surrender its power to simple ideology or sloganeering. It’s especially easy when your subject isn’t something with a lot of room for nuance. If this was a piece on how “personal circumstance affects the political”, I wouldn’t be hesitant, because that’s a topic with some weight behind it, one that demands a subtle approach.

Subtlety is necessary because pointing out just how things have gone wrong outside America’s borders since 2001 has been done by many many people, and it’s a double-edged sword: the problems are big, and thus easy to refer to in a slogan, but the sheer quantity of them means the clarity of the message can get lost in the explanation. And that’s just the political aspect of it. Trying to turn that kind of criticism into art? It’s a tall order.

That’s why I really like Toledano’s approach, which highlights his strange souvenir-based approach without sliding into lazy criticism of commercial culture. No blustery text about the ‘blind consumerism’ of America and its tenuous connection to foreign policy: he simply says “my palette is the vernacular of retail. The more familiar it is, the better host it becomes for the idea.”

In other words, this isn’t a critique of the foreign policy itself, but a comment on how the most famous aspects of that policy (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Shock & Awe) were digested and normalized by the public until they resembled familiar figures on a store shelf somewhere. Works for me–I know my repeated exposure to the hooded & wired Abu Ghraib figure has certainly dulled whatever my initial reaction was to it, and now that deadening process has been mapped out through visual art, getting me to think about the original image all over again.

And here’s another election-period piece of art/comedy for you, just ’cause: A New Electoral Map by Chris Harris and Stephanie Chen.

Damn does that Obama campaign know what it’s doing. Whether it’s typographic consistency and appeal, unprecendented use of the internet as a fund-raising source, innovative volunteer organization, or even advertising in video games, the general consensus is that this is the best and smartest-run presidential campaign in history.

Obama has an unprecedented amount of art and free publicity being generated by some very talented people on his behalf. Some of the best stuff was actually comissioned by the campaign, who clearly know what they’re doing when picking agencies. Look at this insane blog: it’s a deluge.

Instead of doing a roundup of the billion Obama posters out there, let’s focus on a couple of unique ones in more detail. If you want a big, comprehensive collection, head over to that aforementioned blog, or Design For Obama for a great overview.

First up is this recent example by Larry Roibal, who over the course of several days has posted all the components that go into his word-based poster. Comissioned by the campaign, he made a poster entirely of words–all issues central to the candidacy. Larry says:

An ad agency working on the Obama campaign called me a few weeks ago. They saw my drawings over words and my drawing with words posted here and asked if I would be interested in doing a drawing for a campaign poster. They wanted a portrait of Barack Obama made from a list of issues most important to the Senator written out to form the portrait. I employed this technique once before when I was so frustrated with the media coverage I thought it an appropriate way to show the subtext.

Larry does some good stuff–check out his recent, quick drawing of Colin Powell superimposed over an article about his recent endorsement.

My other favourite example comes from one of the absolute best poster artists working today: Scott Hansen. He’s also known as Tycho when he records, and his whole enterprise goes under the name iso50. He’s got an amazing post on the workflow for his Obama poster, also comissioned by the campaign for a fundraising effort:

The message of the print had to center around a handful of concepts that the campaign was using, “Hope”, “Progress”, “Change”. Shepard Fairey had already created two prints for the campaign that each featured an image of Obama so I knew I wanted to pursue another theme for the imagery. The fact that this was a fund raising poster and not intended as a campaign poster also made it easier to interpret the imagery more liberally. My initial idea was to metaphorically represent the core themes of the campaign in a collage, some more literally than others. I also wanted to vaguely communicate the concept of peace by configuring the main elements into a somewhat subdued peace symbol and working off of that shape for the core structure of the image.

His final result is fantastic, although unfortunately sold out. Besides giving us a great poster, Scott managed to get online something I always love: an in-depth, thorough post about the creative process that goes into a beautiful design.

On that note, if you missed the video on our front page a few days back that linked to Bob Staake’s workflow for the recent New Yorker cover (the politics issue), check it out here. The best thing about it: he’s still proudly using Photoshop 3!

The National Design Museum (also known as Cooper-Hewitt) gives out some design awards every year, and since 2006 they’ve also been holding a public contest in which people on the internet are asked to both nominate and vote for the best ‘design’ of the year. 

The umbrella is pretty large on this one, so we see both the Obama logo, Al Gore’s ‘we’ Logo, and the Design Observer website (which is, of course, quite worthy of whatever award it gets).

Helvetica: The Movie is also up there, and a whole lot of other worthwhile nominees, but the one that I find the most interesting is the Design Awards are So Over t-shirt. It’s just another snarky slogan of dismissal slapped across a chest, but the writeup tries to make some amends: 

This is a real campaign created to spur discussion. Why not here, one of the most prestigious institutions dedicated to design? Are design awards good for design or just designers? Why not let the public decide?

I thought about this a bit after the nobel prizes were announced the other day, and especially after both Philip Roth and John Updike weren’t awarded anything in literature. There was a certain amount of expectation leading up to the nomination, plus a widely circulated article about how American literature isn’t very ‘relevant’ anymore, but then the awards were announced and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won. A few people said who?, and then we moved on.

David Kenner had a good comment about the nobel process, and I think his last paragraph is relevant to these Cooper-Hewitt design awards. We all know awards ceremonies are sort of BS, and we know “people’s choice” awards don’t generally fare much better, either. But both are mainstays in every industry, including design.

The Literature Prize is awarded by a committee selected by the Academy, founded by the Swedish King Gustav III in 1786, while the Peace Prize is awarded by a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament. In any other context, the idiosyncratic tastes and political beliefs of these elite Scandinavians don’t exactly make headlines. Why the entire world pauses to honor the selections of an otherwise unknown group of people remains a mystery.

In the end, the Nobel Prize reveals more about society’s collective obsession with honorifics than it does about the world’s great leaders and writers.

Awards give us a framework, however arbitrary and irritating it may be, to talk about the merits of a piece of work. A group of people vote and decide “this is #1, this #2, and so on,” and then we immediately disagree and get down to clarifying our reasons why, at least for the time being. Will we always have random juries voting on the strengths of one thing or another, or will aggregators like metacritic, with their algorhithms of critical weight and coverage, eventually automate the job for us? 

Some kind of metacritic awards ceremony would be counter-productive, of course, as we can see the results build online. There’s no real surprise, and that’s probably the ultimate point–waiting and wondering whether a certain big piece of work is goign to get an award or not is almost the entire point. Whether marshalling every corner of the world’s creative class into a quest for ‘honorifics’ is a worthwhile pursuit–well, that’s another story.

Details on the Cooper-Hewitt People’s Design Award:

Every year, Cooper-Hewitt gives out design awards chosen by a jury of distinguished design gurus—but do you agree with the experts?

Now you can make your design voice heard by voting for the 2008 People’s Design Award. Whether it’s handmade or mass produced, high end or low brow, if it’s an example of good design, we want to know about it! On this site, you can browse and search for designs that have already been submitted, or nominate something new.

Cast your vote for your favorite design before 6:00 p.m. EST on October 21, 2008, and check back on this site on October 23 at 10:00 p.m. EST to see the winner announced live at the National Design Awards gala in New York City.