Andy Warhol would have been 85 today. The Art Institute blog is paying fitting tribute with a series of animated GIFs constructed from latter-era Warhol Polaroids. Oddly enough, they don't seem strange at all but perhaps a format that Warhol, who liked to play with the shifting gaze and recognized that modern life produced short bursts of fame, might have appreciated.
By this point, you've seen the strange Vines, and probably heard some snark about Jay Z's six-hour performance at the Pace Gallery in lower Manhattan. The result of the much-covered surprise video shoot was released this past weekend on HBO in the form of a performance art film. Director Mark Romanek managed to cut down the show to a much more reasonable runtime of just under 11 minutes. The video's up on Jay Z's Life + Times YouTube channel plus a few minutes of interview footage from what looks like a few moments before and after the marathon spit session.
Head to Pitchfork for a long list of the cameos, and check out the video below.
We've been following the Greats Brand hype on Instagram for a minute, so we're thrilled to finally see the online shop go live. Greats is a direct-to-consumer men's footwear company promising us a high quality shoe at a fair, even "disruptive" price—no middleman, you see. Greats's site says its shoes are designed in Los Angeles, handmade in Leon, Mexico from materials from Tokyo with some soles originating in Italy—and, might we add, to be worn by influential #menswear bloggers in NYC. Greats sells The Wilson (a canvas lowtop, available in red, white, and blue) for $59 and The Royale (a deerskin upper sneaker with Italian Margam sole available in grey, brown, and black) for $99.
The Greats is live and taking pre-orders. Our advice is to order soon as Greats predicts a sell-out.
No knock on the quality of the iPhone camera, but its images don't always translate well to print—and why would they? Photojournalism is a craft with a long history and practice, in which the resulting images are just the last stage in an a creative journalistic process. It's not the same thing as taking a one-handed snap of your third Negroni Slushie or a dude in a funny T-shirt. Dave Nuttycombe's blog makes the point more humorously with its famed photos from history as if shot by iPhone.
Like us, you've seen that Bleu logo showing up on one of your chums around town and you're curious about Bleu de Paname. Well, now is the time to pop. If you're in the market, the affordable, French-made label has just released its Fall 2013 shirts in red and blue chambray as well as indigo. We're digging the curved hem, which upgrades this infinitely wearable basic to a must-have.
Bleu de Paname Standard shirt is $105 at TheEnd.com.
When Annie's new video for "Back Together" caught our eye last week, we traded emails with producer Richard X's Black Melody Studios who confirmed the graphics aren't original Amiga, but instead sampled from "The ITV Chart Show" sometime around 1991. The production team reportedly chose to use imagery from the show because it was one of the first places to play early rave tracks from the UK and Europe. The rest of the background visuals were assembled with found VHS graphics, and processed images from the artwork for Annie's new A&R EP.
A&R is out now on Pleasure Masters.
Brandon Bird, the artist who painted the modern day classics "No One Wants to Play Sega with Harrison Ford" and "Lazy Sunday Afternoon," the latter depicting Christopher Walken spending a leisurely day building robots in his garage, has just launched a Kickstarter campaign to paint "the greatest Sears stores in the country." He's seeking funding for a 30-day road trip starting from his home base in Los Angeles sometime in the fall in order to produce a total of ten new Sears paintings. Rewards include prints of various sizes, the original oil paintings, and at the very top level, a custom painting of a backer in front of their hometown Sears.
Seventy-eight might be an inauspicious anniversary to celebrate, but ad agency Leo Burnett is evidently staffed in part by fervent music geeks who just can't help themselves. To commemorate the 78th of the agency founded in Chicago in 1935, the agency commissioned the pressing of an actual 78 rpm record—music curated by the Numero Group with graphics designed in-house as seen below. It also asked Numero to put together a playlist of Chicago tracks—you can download that mix online. It also invited Chicago creatives to design spaces within the office for the anniversary—and sent them one-of-a-kind hand-painted invitations on 78 rpm records to do so.
You can find out more about 78lb at 78lb.leoburnett.com.
MGMT's third LP, the self-titled MGMT, will see release in just about a month and a half, but this morning they've shared a new clip for the second track we've heard from the album, "Your Life Is A Lie." The Tom Kuntz-directed clip is a series of pretty amazing scenes with some impressive recurring visual rhythms. If the surreal visual language of the video looks familiar, director Tom Kuntz is also responsible for Old Spice's "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" spot. Check out both clips and some of our favorite scenes from "Your Life Is A Lie" below.
MGMT is out September 17 from Columbia Records.
Old Spice's "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" 
The MAPS project by Kim Asendorf isn't the kind you bookmark for a roadtrip. It has little information; in fact, no instructions at all. Rather, her project takes Google Maps data and creates abstract images from it on a url with a similar structure. The images change somewhat when the user zooms or changes the position, so stick with it a while and see what transpires. You can save that roadtrip for another time.
Visit the maps project at maps.kimasendorf.com
