Blue is the Warmest Color

Pantone Color

By Sabrina Wirth

What does it mean to experience a color? Is there a taste? A smell? A sound? How does a color make you feel? These might not be things that may naturally come to mind when entering a space, but they are precisely the questions that preoccupy the minds of the top color experts at the Pantone Institute of Color on a daily basis. Subconsciously, every color produces an emotional response in the human psyche, triggering sensations such as happiness, anxiety, fear, or calm. As Picasso once said, “Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.” How then, does the Institute determine what the Color of the Year will be? In order to do so, they must collect multiple data points from around the world and distill the overarching global emotions, or “zeitgeist” down to one hue.

“I think sometimes people get the impression that color is a very fluffy kind of a decision,” says Lee Eiseman, Executive Director of the Institute. “And it’s not. It’s so integral to our work, and we justify our decisions, we do a lot of homework that leads us to that specific color.” Pantone, by the way, is responsible for Tiffany’s iconic shade of blue (1837 Blue) as well as the shade of Yellow (Minion Yellow) for the lovable characters in “Minions” and “Despicable Me”.

Lee Eiseman – Executive Director of the Pantone Institute of Color.

Behind every branding choice, there has been a depth of informed investigations into color psychology. To create the Color of the Year, research will usually begin a year in advance, with members of the Institute traveling around the world gathering information on color trends that they see arising organically within different industries. This will include investigations within art exhibitions, films, popular cosmetics, fashion, new technology, and even the automotive industry. They look at whether any particular colors keep reappearing in certain areas of design, and where there is a direction that the color/design scheme seems to be headed.  After the members of the Institute have gathered enough data points, they will meet to discuss the color they have decided on. To Lee’s constant amazement, they almost always conclude with the same shade. This year it is: “Pantone 19-4052 Classic Blue”.

Artech House
The “Submerge” exhibition at the Artechouse in N.Y.C. Picture Courtesy of the Artech House -Twitter Account

“It’s a color that anticipates what’s going to happen next,” said Laurie Pressman, the vice president of the Pantone Color Institute. “What’s the future going to bring as we move into the evening hours?” Specifically, Eiseman says, “the blue is the shade of the sky at twilight when the day is winding down and we’re looking forward to a little bit of peace and quiet.” It is a color that evokes calm and hope in a time when there is a lot of uncertainty around the world. Even the name has symbolism. It “tells you that it’s a color that has some history, that there’s tradition tied into it, but it also is a futuristic color, a color we attach to hi-tech and digital products.” Normally, Pantone will unveil their Color of the Year through multiple press outlets, but this year will mark the first time the Institute has chosen to present the color with an immersive, experiential exhibition that engages not only the visual senses but all the other senses as well. Their partner for this initiative? Artechouse. One of the most innovative museums and artistic production platforms to emerge within New York’s culture scene in the past year. With groundbreaking technology that includes L’ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound with 32 separate sound channels and 18K resolution projectors, Artechouse was the perfect partner to transform the color into an experience. 

Artechouse
Presentation of the “Submerge” Exhibition at Artechouse. Courtesy of Artechouse Twitter Account.

When founders Sandro Kereselidze and Tati Pastukhova received the call from Pantone Color Institute in October, they were immediately enthusiastic about the artistic challenge. “For me,” recalls Sandro, “it was very exciting in the sense that every designer or anyone who’s in a creative field really appreciates the Pantone Institution. And on top of that, for announcing a color, it was, of course, a big honor for us. Right away we said ‘yes, let’s make it happen!” Within a few months, the Artechouse team developed an installation with Mexican based designers Intus Interactive Design that would be debuted for its first, private viewing in December, and a more public, updated viewing in February to coincide with the start of New York’s Fashion Week. The response was better than both institutions had anticipated, resulting in daily sold-out shows, and highly documented stories all over Instagram. For the exhibition “Submerge”, Artechouse converted their space -a former Chelsea Market boiler room- into a dreamlike world where visitors are invited to explore different spaces that induce Classic Blue emotions through sight, smell, feel, and taste. If the first floor is the appetizer in this feast of the senses, with interactive monitors to play with, and drinks called “Resilience”, “Calm”, and “Reflection” available to order at the Augmented Reality bar, the main course is the grand open space below deck. Upon walking down the stairs, one gets the sense of plunging into a borderless space, where images morph in and out of the walls to create a feeling that anything is possible. 

Submerge Artechouse
From the “Submerge” Exhibition at Artechouse. Courtesy of Artechouse Twitter Account.

Looking back at the work that went behind creating this cutting-edge narrative around Pantone’s Color of the Year, Sandro likened it to a “miracle”: “We have the idea and the knowledge of how it should be done but until it comes to life, it’s impossible to know the end result. That’s the beauty of being a creative – is that you really don’t know what to expect. And it’s always a beautiful surprise in the end… It just comes out as a miracle”.

Artechouse’s third installation “Intangible Forms” opens on March 3rd. 

Transformation VS Trash-Formation – The Pop-Porno of Beauty

Kim Kardashian
Close-up – Kim Kardashian lensed by Jean-Paul Goude, on the cover of Paper Magazine, 2014

We’ve just left the Creative Pois-On October month dedicated to the theme of Transformation. We fathomed the subject in all its different declinations, from a cultural perspective to a business one, from folklore to fashion, iconography and the perks of reinvention. Pop culture is another one of those arenas where Transformation plays a big role. And reflecting on the transformation of the Criteria of Aesthetic Beauty, an image kept on popping into my mind… the 2014 Paper Magazine cover of Kim Kardashian… and I couldn’t help but wonder: either if you are horrified by it or not, either if you Like it, or not, are we in the presence of a Trash-formative Aesthetic Fact?

By Tommaso Cartia

In 2014, at one of the heights of her public overexposure, Kim Kardashian posted on her Instagram profile the artistic picture below, (I guess that is how she would describe it); shot by the well-known, well-respected photographer Jean-Paul Goude. She is all smiley and proud of graphically showing off all the splendor of her full-frontal body hyperbolic bum, oiled and retouched by the Photoshop genius for the occasion. 

Paper Magazine
Jean-Paul Goude “Break the Internet – Kim Kardashian Paper Magazine, 2014”

The post immediately hit over a million of engagements, it went vertiginously viral, generating converts and desecrations, intrepid emulations and thousands of comments all over the social media, newspapers, TV shows: it was a case. Now, as long as you want to ignore the umpteenth excessed of the Reality TV star par excellence, you can’t ignore the fact that this image, like many others bombarding our eyes with daily, incessant rhythm, is definitely an aesthetic fact. This picture is certainly not more provocative than others, and also, is not an original concept. It’s indeed a remake of an old Goude’s photo-shoot, But it certainly got under the skin and subliminally deep into the conscience of the millions of people who commented it and discussed its aesthetic criteria of Beauty, with the modern criteria of today: I Like it. I Don’t Like It. I Heart It. I Don’t Heart It.  Beauty. 

Carolina Beaumont
Jean-Paul Goude “Break the Internet – Kim Kardashian Paper Magazine, 2014” / Jean-Paul Goude “Carolina Beaumont, New York, 1976” (1976)

Considering all the hearts she collected with the post, did she equally receive the same amount of love? It is sort of a paradox in fact; if you go through the comments and behind the profiles who wrote them, most of the time you get a negative comment from the ones who hearted it. We should assume that liking is fundamental than, either if you like something or not. So, is it still possible today to contemplate absolute criteria for aesthetic Beauty? 

One sure thing is that the Kardashian’s, is definitely a pop image and an even more a pornographic one in its most artisticassumption. It’s the so-called aesthetic of the Pop-Porn which is deeply rooted in the progressive deconstruction of the conforming paradigms of the bourgeois society throughout the 20th and 21st century. However, the ground-breaking turning point of our contemporary days is how viral these pornographic images can go and the possibility not only to process them at the speed of light but to be ourselves authors of those images, selfie-portraitists and post-artists of our own pornographic images, of our own ravenous voyeurism. 

If I were the curator of the Museum of the Pop-Porn, I would expose one next to the other these grand masterpieces: Ingres’s Grand Odalisque, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a pop-art Marilyn, a Grace Jones shot by Goude himself, a Madonna, a Lady Gaga, a Miley Cyrus and a Kardashian. 

Marilyn Monroe
From the left: La Grand Odalisque, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Grace Jones, Marilyn Monroe
Madonna
Madonna’s famous cone breasts outfit
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga’s cover art for The Fame Monster album
Miley Cyrus
Miley Cyrus – Wrecking Ball

The subtle transformation between these images of Beauty leads to a progressive abandon of the subject, of the Ego and its symbolic world. La Grande Odalisque is a subject of sophisticated eroticism and an icon of a still timid female emancipation just right after the dogmatic veto imposed on the unveiling of the human body by the Catholic Church in the sacred depictions. The grotesques Demoiselles unnerve the eye and investigate the meta- dimensional metamorphosis of the human being. The advent of pop art transfigures and objectifies the images which don’t refer to profound identities anymore, they refer just to themselves; but here the individuality of the Ego is not totally dead yet because there will be who will dress up this pop aesthetic to customize, in provocative trends, their own identities: Grace Jones, David Bowie, Madonna, George Michael among others. 

David Bowie
David Bowie – Aladdin Sane

Lady Gaga – the personage that Miss Germanotta constructed at the beginning of her career – is still a symbolist. It’s a well thought conceptual mask, shimmering and grotesque, but here the individuality of the Ego is undone, you don’t see almost anything of the woman underneath the mask. But Gaga is still an artist of the Self. From who covers up everything to who shows everything, it is time for the pop-pornography that has its own muses and incarnations: Miley Cyrus in the era of her wrecking bum, Kim Kardashian and many others of that kind. What is left of the Ego, what is left of the Self? Now the image is just functional to the fattening of a viral hysterical aesthetic that doesn’t relate anymore to a Criteria of Beauty but to a Criteria of Cool or to one of its subcategories: Trash. Beauty can be marvelous like a Monet painting or disturbing like a Francis Bacon one, Cool is just Cool or eventually, Trash, the Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit.

Perhaps, the plasticity of these empty carcasses still hides and muffles the Munch’s Scream of our subconscious crisis. This profanation of the persona and of the intellect that diverts our attention from the preoccupation of our wandering in the darkness of a society of fragmented individuals, buries or maybe sadly amplifies in this necromancer’s process, our troublesome mysterious Ego, that more than being lost, it seems at times, like it had never existed in the firs place. 

Piero Manzoni
Piero Manzoni – Artist’s Shit

The tool of this aesthetic of Cool is the plastic hyperrealism of Photoshop, a fatal chisel that shapes everything it touches into Influencers Barbies and Kens. And what is Goude’s Kardashian image if not a Pop Porno Barbie, and her bum an alive metonym of its vacuum shell? Kim Kardashian here is a victimized offender of her own eagerness to display and a naïve victim of an artistic offense perpetrated against her by the genius of Jean-Paul Goude who immortalized with a similar motif the iconic and revolutionary Grace Jones. But there is really nothing gracious about this reinterpretation by Kim Kardashian. These Pop-Porn images are freed from their essence, they are reproducible merchandise, ironical paradoxes, a simulacrum of their lack of contents: sexy bodies, provocative, sacrilegious, that passively play, unaware of playing, with archetypical symbols but displacing them, draining them out and hybridize them into something mute and inconsistent. 

 “Profanation is not a negation of mystery, but one of the possible relationships with it” (E.Levinas