OPINION
THE WORK
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clunky audio guides and hit-andmiss QR codes, which now feel as if
they come from another century.
Crossing the Atlantic again,
Leo Burnett has run a couple
of great campaigns for The Art
Institute of Chicago. In 2014, its
Unthink Magritte campaign (for the
exhibition “Magritte: The Mystery
of the Ordinary, 1926-1938”) turned
the entire city into a canvas. Starting
with fairly conventional posters,
the campaign got increasingly…
well, surreal. Black bowler hats,
umbrellas and fluffy white clouds
began appearing in store windows.
A giant sculpture of a pair of feet
appeared on a local beach. And
on opening night, visitors could
trade surreal objects—a glass eye, a
plastic scorpion—for free admission
to the show. Once inside, an app
enabled them to share, comment
and find out more about the art.
In February, Leo Burnett
and the Art Institute of Chicago
struck again for a show devoted
to Van Gogh. This time, the
museum partnered with Airbnb
to create a three dimensional,
human-sized reproduction of the
artist’s bedroom — as featured
in his painting “Bedroom in
Arles” — and invited people
to rent it for the night. Imagine
your Instagram followers slicing
their ears with envy as you post
pictures of the ultimate arty pad.
To a certain extent, though,
social media is old news. As we’ve
adobo magazine | July - August 2016
discussed in these pages before,
Virtual Reality is the latest big
thing. So how about using it to
explore Salvador Dali’s brain?
That’s (more or less) what
the agency Goodby Silverstein
did for an exhibition at the Dali
Museum in Florida recently. It
created a VR experience for the
exhibition “Disney and Dali:
Architects of the Imagination”
(which ended in June). You may
not have known — I certainly
didn’t — that Disney and Dali
once worked together on a short
animated film called Destino. Yes,
really. You can find it on YouTube.
Even weirder than the film itself,
Goodby’s VR tour allowed users
to explore a 1935 Dali dreamscape
(“Archaeological Reminiscence
of Millet’s ‘Angelus’”) using an
Oculus Rift. They could float
around the strange sculptures in
the painting, as well as bumping
into other surreal figments of the
artist’s imagination. Frankly, I’m
surprised they didn’t claw the
Oculus from their faces and run
a mile in the other direction.
If you’re an art lover, you may
think it’s enough to simply stand
and gaze at a beautiful painting.
But many of today’s museum
visitors think of themselves as
artists in their own right, so they
want to get closer to the experience
of creation. Museums are happy
to indulge them, especially as it
means selling more tickets.
The Next
Rembrandt,
although it
provoked
controversy, it
was actually
welcomed by
some scholars,
as it unearthed a
few interesting
new facts about
Rembrandt’s
work and life.