Little plug today: Justin Kropp did a little interview with me at his site A Structuralist Collective.

Artist Fritz Haeg was recently interviewed on his “Edible Estates” project for Studio 360, and I found his ideas on provocation in art very interesting. He said, “I’m ultimately just really interested in this contrast between taking something that’s really primitive and old-fashioned and almost kind of ‘grandma,’ like a vegetable garden, and making it provocative. Because I don’t think it’s interesting anymore to be provocative with violence and sex and all of those things that are very easy to turn off. We don’t respond to them any more because we see them so much, but I think there’s more subversive ways to be provocative. Today it seems like it’s with knitting and gardening and things like that. They go against our highly mediated and commercialized society.” As digital things become the norm in our culture, I wonder how this trend situates the analog things Haeg is interested in, the kitting, the vegetable gardens, etc, along a more subversive and provocative axis of activity.

Above: I ♥ NJ buttons as seen on Flickr, from Triborough’s photostream.

Eye Magazine editor-in-chief John Walters recently wrote to ask a few questions about the idea of a graphic design canon for Eye 68. Our dialogue follows below. —RG

EYE: What do you think is meant by “the canon of graphic design history?” For example: The Bauhaus? Beck’s Underground diagram? Alvin Lustig book covers? Swiss Modernism? George Lois’s Esquire covers? Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet? Glaser’s “I ♥ NY?” Barney Bubbles? Ray Gun? Do you ever think about it, or buy design history publications?

G+S: To be quite basic about it, the canon is a group of individual works generally agreed upon by practicioners and historians to be demonstrative of key concepts, techniques, or philosophical shifts in the profession. As a result, these works will be endlessly reproduced as the profession’s history is argued, augmented, and disseminated to new practicioners. These works suggest a kind of map for how the profession sees itself and invite those interested from the public to see its terrain in a similar fashion.

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“I am a critical spirit and an architect at the same time, and I do not feel obligated to constantly validate my own theories in my specific work. There are contradictions, and the possibilities we have at our disposal today provoke such contradictions.” Rem Koolhaas interviewed in Der Spiegel (via DO).

From the newly-designed Thinking for a Living blog comes this great clip of Bill Evans pretty much summing up jazz, the universe, and everything in just a few minutes. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 on YouTube. Highly recommended.

Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould (via Textism).

“Smashing a [Starbucks] window is a lifestyle choice now, so you might as well go full circle: buy a fucking latté, sit down and have a think.” Artist Nick Relph in a 2003 interview with Frieze.

Reporter Matt Vella from BusinessWeek and I recently exchanged emails about the complex branding implications posed by the Delta/Northwest merger. Some of our exchange found its way into Matt’s article on the merger, but I thought it was worth sharing the rest of it here. —RG

Matt: What, if any, opportunities does the merger of two tarnished brands present for “starting over”?

Rob: I’ve recently flown Delta and was really underwhelmed. But, when Delta’s low-cost airline Song was around, I flew Song and had a wonderful experience. I think this speaks to the power of what a little updated branding can do. The employees were behind that brand. They were proud of it. Yes, Delta folded it, but that had more to do with Delta’s going into bankruptcy than with Song’s failure as a brand. After Song was folded, Delta’s CEO at the time, Gerald Grinstein, noted that having an airline-within-an-airline was a difficult prospect within the industry. But everything Song was as a brand was what Delta needed to learn from and import. I don’t think that was done.

Nevertheless, brand-wise the situation is far from dire for either airline. Air travel is a difficult experience to brand because, especially recently, it has become such a uncomfortable and taxing experience. But Delta and Northwest have been around for a long time and customers know the names of these companies. So while it may not be the best time in the lives of either company, there is still a lot of brand equity and recognition there.

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Big Think is a You Tube-like site that hosts video interviews with major public intellectuals, thinkers, and personalities. It just kicked off but so far they’ve got some pretty great people involved, including New Yorker Editor David Remnick. More about the project in this article from NYT.

Dexter Sinister have done a great interview with design critic/curator Emily King that touches on a many aspects of their practice, including their adoption of the “just-in-time” (JIT) production model popularized by Toyota from the mid-1950s on. But it was the American carmaker Henry Ford who first articulated the process in his 1926 book Today and Tomorrow. Toyota executive TaiiChi Ohno, who brough JIT to Toyota, says of the book “I, for one, am in awe of Ford’s greatness. I believe Ford was a born rationalist—and I feel more so every time I read his writings. He had a deliberate and scientific way of thinking about industry in America. For example, on the issues of standardization and the nature of waste in business, Ford’s perception of things was orthodox and universal.” For Ford at his most quotable, his autobiography My Life and Work, is available online free at Project Gutenberg.