First there was Hevetica, the documentary about the font and typography in general. It was all the rage in art circles for a week and now comes the spiritual sequel Objectified which promises to do the same for industrial design.

Check out the trailer below.

Based out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison “The Onion” is one of the leading, if not now the leading weekly satire publications and has now seen fit to give the spiritual sequel to “The Kentucky Fried Movie” which if you have not yet seen let your fingers do the walking to the nearest phonebook and find a video rental place.
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Holy crap! This show is an instant classic. Richard returns; not only to production duty but also, at long last, to interview duty. Painter and art legend Judy Ledgerwood is our guest. Guest host Tony Tasset joins in on interviewing duties to ask the hard hitting questions. Not to be missed.

The following bio is shamelessly stolen from the Hyde Park Art Center, please don’t sue us:

In the tradition of Modernist painting, Judy Ledgerwood paints monumental abstract compositions that explore light, color, and structure. Her paintings are formal, decorative, and tranquil while simultaneously being highly personal, optically challenging, and inherently subversive. In her compositions, she creates a dialogue that is uniquely feminine but also powerful and authoritative. Early in her career, Ledgerwood began incorporating traditionally feminine pastel colors into her landscape based paintings in an attempt to challenge and undermine the historically male-dominated tradition of gestural abstract paintings. Today her compositions include circular motifs typically associated with the decorative arts tradition. In the 1970s many feminist artists identified and celebrated circular patterns as being connected to female identity. Ledgerwood acknowledges this tradition through her continued use of dot motifs, which she identifies as her form of non exclamatory mark-making. Ledgerwood is the recipient of a Tiffany Award in the Visual Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, an Illinois Art Council Award and two CIRA Grants from Northwestern University. Her work is represented in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Swissbank New York. Her degrees are from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, BFA, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MFA.

If that weren’t enough, crack open a diet coke plus and sit down for Mike Benedetto who is joined by Tony Fitzpatrick as they review the new Jodi Foster Revenge thriller The Brave One during which they use the phrase “Charles Bronson with tits”.

And for you Encyclopedia Brown sleuths out there, allegedly there is a secret message from Tony Tasset hidden somewhere in the show.

If you listen to one freaking episode of BAS this year it sure as hell better be this one.
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Duncan and Terri talk to Carol Becker about the School of the Art Institute, the future of arts education, and her new position at Columbia University.

ALSO: THE INCREDIBLE RETURN OF MIKE AND THE 30 SECONDS MOVIE REVIEWS with bonus seconds.

Dean of Faculty and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She is the author of numerous articles and several books with many foreign editors. Her book publications include: The Invisible Drama: Women and The Anxiety of Change; The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety; and most recently, Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art.

Prelude to published interview taken from the book, Conversations Before the End of Time by Suzi Gablik.
“In 1994, Carol Becker was appointed dean and vice-president for academic affairs of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, having been a former chair of the graduate division before that. She received her Ph.D. in literature at the University of San Diego, where she was a protégé of Herbert Marcuse. A lecturer in women’s studies since the late 1960s, and a writer on psychoanalytic theory and cultural politics, she has been mulling over the obsolete attitudes and strategies of the art world for a long time, particularly the issue of the artist’s responsibility to society, which she claims is a sensitive issue that makes everyone uncomfortable, defensive and insecure. Becker feels that many artists simply refuse to address the issue at all. Artists often choose rebellion, which alienates them from their audience, and then become angry at the degree to which they are unappreciated. In part this is a consequence of the way we educate students in art schools, envisioning the artist as a marginalized and romantic figure who, she claims, operates “out of what Freud calls the Pleasure Principle while the rest of us struggle within the Reality Principle.” Students need to think about their work, she feels, not in isolation, but in relationship to the public and to an audience that has not been addressed in art school pedagogical situations. American art students, like most American college students, Becker claims, have not been trained to think globally or politically about their position in society. In a sense, art has seceded from American culture so completely that it has lost its effectiveness and become a subsidized bureaucracy of self-serving specialists.”
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