viz.

Can you guess why these two are so happy?

Is it because

A. Online recipes are the best recipes?

B. The white powder in that bowl isn’t flour?

C. They have a standby electrical generator, so while everyone else in their neighborhood is cold and powerless, they can still surf the web and set their lights to supernova?

If you are teaching advertising in the visual rhetoric section of your course, you will probably be interested in Donald Gunn’s 12 Categories of Advertisements. Slate’s Seth Stevenson has recently posted a slideshow demonstrating them all.

Slate has posted a slide-show essay by Mia Fineman on the work of photographer Ryan McGinley. [This link may not be suitable for work.] Fineman makes the argument that McGinley’s work has been coopted by advertisers because he “has essentially created a successful lifestyle brand—a stylish fantasy of youth, beauty, and hedonistic fun” which they find appealing. The photos and analysis could be the start of a fruitful discussion of commercialism and art.

Jerome Krase at BrooklynSoc.org passed along a photo gallery comparing an artist’s rendering of the Fulton Street Mall in Brooklyn versus the mall itself.

The people at Project Hamad (who I mentioned a few days ago in this post) have a poster campaign with a stylized image of Mr. Hammad reminiscent of the “André the Giant has a Posse” stencils.

Although this story has been in the news a while, I thought it was worth comment because of the recent visual response that has been generated on the internet.