The Vernacular Typography project: documenting the city's disappearing art

One of the ironies of the mass-information internet age is the rise of handcraft. From craft beer to paper-making, from the use of a certain color tint known as "folk-art blue" (even by self-taught outsider artists) to labor-intensive textile creation, the increasing amount of handcrafting is a response to the ubiquity of corporate branding and, even more so, the easy availability of "how-to" information.

What's ironic about the rush to make the old new again is the abandonment of the art that often surrounds us. This is especially true in cities, where hand-made signs and advertising are fast disappearing in the rush to demolish and replace.

This displacement is no longer just in New York City and other major areas known for the swing of the wrecking ball. Yet the vanishing act is more pronounced and noticeable in urban areas: history slowly disappears day by day, without notice or record, especially when it comes to a city's signs and signage. At Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, curator Jerimiah Moss interviewed Molly Woodward about her ongoing project, Vernacular Typography, which documents the city's daily attrition and is now expanding to cities around the globe.

Currently, Vernacular Typography contains over 5,000 images of found typography from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, England, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States. Website materials emphasize that contributions to the Vernacular Typography effort will allow the project to expand to new cities and incorporate new elements into the project (printed matter, interactive maps, video shorts, interviews with signmakers, etc) that are vital to the preservation of visual communication in the built environment.

The NYC typography record includes numbers, ghost signs, hand-painted signage, grammatical errors and fading fallout shelter signs -- reminders of the atomic age. The larger global project hopes to encompass much more. In her own description Woodward hopes to create "a collaborative effort with local typographers and sign-makers to document, map, and preserve these fragile remaining examples of a representative cultural art form that is being swept away by the uniformity of corporate advertising, which ignores and subverts local history and tradition in large and small urban areas: Mexico City, Oaxaca, Kowloon, Melbourne, and Sydney, and in smaller, fringe communities, like Tuxtla Gutiérrez and Alice Springs."

Here's an excerpt of the interview with Molly Woodward at Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, by curator Jeriemiah Moss.

Q: How are you defining "Vernacular Typography"?

 A: I guess it should technically be Vernacular "Lettering," but I define Vernacular Typography as the found lettering that exists in the built environment and surrounds us everyday. It doesn't have to be pretty or use an existing typeface, it's just any visual representation of language. ...

Q: What do we lose when the vernacular typography of the city streets vanishes from sight?

A: A sense of the city's history, and also a precious visual resource. Typography can you tell you a lot about local culture and urban communication and when we don't see it, our sense of the city is diminished. 

Q: What do you think might be the psychological impact of living in a city where the native typography is replaced by homogeneous corporate signage?

A: I think there's less of a personal connection to a specific place. With standardized corporate advertising, signs are no longer representative of a group of people or a neighborhood, just a business that could be anywhere in the world. For natives, connections to the past are lost, so a sense of home or a memory of a place is devalued. And for visitors, there's less of the unique experience you get from traveling someplace new. 

Vernacular typography is such an incredible marker of regional identity, spatial orientation, and even personal history. If we lose it altogether, we not only lose that individual and cultural connection, but also a physical map of the city, which is why documentation and preservation are so important.

Vernacular Typography can be accessed here. (Images from the Vernacular Typography website.)

Ralph Steadman's "Alice" to be part of London's "Books About Town" bench project

While the new UK secretary of education, Michael Gove, erases American literature from the British curriculum, this summer Britain gives its citizens a restful place to read the national classics, profusely illustrated -- and eminently practical. 

The online site of the UK's Made in Shoreditch Magazine reports on this summer's London park project:

This summer, benches shaped like open books will pop up all over the capital for children, families and visitors to find and enjoy. ‘Books about Town’ launched by the National Literacy Trust and Wild in Art brings a unique opportunity for the public to view 50 bench sculptures across the city, created by both local artists and famous names, to celebrate London’s literary heritage and reading for enjoyment. 

.. Axel Scheffler has illustrated a bench which celebrates his work with Julia Donaldson and the characters they’ve created together, including The Gruffalo and characters from their new book The Scarecrow’s Wedding. The bench is being sponsored by Scheffler’s and Donaldson’s publishers: Scholastic Children’s Books and Macmillan Children’s Publishing.

Among the other top artists involved is Ralph Steadman who illustrated Lewis Caroll’s children’s classic Alice Through the Looking Glass in 1973 and has reproduced some of these illustrations on a unique BookBench. Children’s authors Lauren Child and Cressida Cowell have each designed benches based on their own series Clarice Bean and How To Train Your Dragon. Walker Books are sponsoring their very own We’re Going on a Bear Hunt themed BookBench, which will be illustrated by Helen Oxenbury.

Imagine what this project could suggest in the future for public statuary based on sci-fi, fantasy, and romance fans. A park fountain in the form of Lucy from Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, anyone? Visit Made in Shoreditch for more info and links about this summer's "Books About Town." Burgess' Korova Milk Bar maiden supplying drinks laced with synthemesc and drencrom will have to wait for another summer season, apparently.

"Vernacular Typography": preserving the ghost signs of the city

One of the ironies of the mass-information internet age is the rise of handcraft. From craft beer to paper-making, from the use of a certain color tint known as "folk-art blue" (even by self-taught outsider artists) to labor-intensive textile creation, the increasing amount of handcrafting is a response to the ubiquity of corporate branding and, even more so, the easy availability of "how-to" information.

What's ironic about the rush to make the old new again is the abandonment of the art that often surrounds us. This is especially true in cities, where hand-made signs and advertising are fast disappearing in the rush to demolish and replace.

This displacement is no longer just in New York City and other major areas known for the swing of the wrecking ball. Yet the vanishing act is more pronounced and noticeable in urban areas: history slowly disappears day by day, without notice or record, especially when it comes to a city's signs and signage. At Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, curator Jerimiah Moss interviewed Molly Woodward about her ongoing project, Vernacular Typography, which documents the city's daily attrition and is now expanding to cities around the globe.

Currently, Vernacular Typography contains over 5,000 images of found typography from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, England, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States. Website materials emphasize that contributions to the Vernacular Typography effort will allow the project to expand to new cities and incorporate new elements into the project (printed matter, interactive maps, video shorts, interviews with signmakers, etc) that are vital to the preservation of visual communication in the built environment.

The NYC typography record includes numbers, ghost signs, hand-painted signage, grammatical errors and fading fallout shelter signs -- reminders of the atomic age. The larger global project hopes to encompass much more. In her own description Woodward hopes to create "a collaborative effort with local typographers and sign-makers to document, map, and preserve these fragile remaining examples of a representative cultural art form that is being swept away by the uniformity of corporate advertising, which ignores and subverts local history and tradition in large and small urban areas: Mexico City, Oaxaca, Kowloon, Melbourne, and Sydney, and in smaller, fringe communities, like Tuxtla Gutiérrez and Alice Springs."

Here's an excerpt of the interview with Molly Woodward at Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, by curator Jeriemiah Moss.

Q: How are you defining "Vernacular Typography"?

A: I guess it should technically be Vernacular "Lettering," but I define Vernacular Typography as the found lettering that exists in the built environment and surrounds us everyday. It doesn't have to be pretty or use an existing typeface, it's just any visual representation of language. ...

Q: What do we lose when the vernacular typography of the city streets vanishes from sight?

A: A sense of the city's history, and also a precious visual resource. Typography can you tell you a lot about local culture and urban communication and when we don't see it, our sense of the city is diminished.

Q: What do you think might be the psychological impact of living in a city where the native typography is replaced by homogeneous corporate signage?

A: I think there's less of a personal connection to a specific place. With standardized corporate advertising, signs are no longer representative of a group of people or a neighborhood, just a business that could be anywhere in the world.

For natives, connections to the past are lost, so a sense of home or a memory of a place is devalued. And for visitors, there's less of the unique experience you get from traveling someplace new.

Vernacular typography is such an incredible marker of regional identity, spatial orientation, and even personal history. If we lose it altogether, we not only lose that individual and cultural connection, but also a physical map of the city, which is why documentation and preservation are so important.

Vernacular Typography can be accessed here. (Images from the Vernacular Typography website.)

Halloween greetings from Bellemeade Books: a new edition of the "Codex Seraphinianus "

The "Codex Seraphinianus" has been published in a new edition by Rizzoli.  The book first appeared in the 1970s, a phantasmagoria of strange images and the artist's own made-up language, and has since created a reputation as "the most mysterious book in the world."  The website Dangerous Minds has posted an interview with Rizzoli's Charles Meyers, who confirms that the author is still very much alive with homes in Rome and Milan. He also confirms that Luigi Seraphini is "absolutely a real person and he speaks very good English," and that he is still drawing his mysterious images.

Seraphini (his website is currently a blank page, whether by artful intent or mythic accident) contributed new drawings and text in the new edition, as well as a DeCodex, in which he states that a stray white cat that joined him while he created the book in Rome in the 1970s was actually the real author, telepathically guiding Serafini as he drew and “wrote."

"Ex Libris: The Art of Bookplates" illustrates a disappearing art

The bookplate is one of the unrecognized losses of the print empire (like a once-mighty imperial force, the artforms of type and the book are retreating before the digital demands of a new order). Where first-editions and beloved books in a personal library were at one time marked as belonging to an individual through bookplates, the internet no longer requires an Ex Libris stamp.

That leaves the collecting of antique bookplates -- a print adjunct dating back almost to the age of Gutenberg -- to a vigilant group of bibliophiles, who occasionally share their finds with the world at large -- if the contemporary world, at least, might see these miniatures as works of art.

Ex Libris: The Art of Bookplates (Yale University Press), by Martin Hopkinson, presents 100 examples of the book-owner's pride, mostly from the early 1900s when printing and mass-distribution made the ownership of books affordable to many. The idea of a private library (once only a luxury) also reflected ideas of education and a growing amount of leisure time in the middle class.

The bookplate became a personal expression of the book-owner's interests and passions. In one, for the scientist experimenting with rats at the University of Rochester, the artist Stephen Gooden drew an owl proudly claiming his rodent prize. When Ethel Luce-Clausen saw the bookplate he had designed for her, Gooden explained simply, "the rat crept in when I wasn't looking."

Most bookplates are more sedate reflections of their owner's personality, although one from the 1970s included in a slideshow at the Guardian UK might give Aubrey Beardsley a start. The bookplate may be a diminished art but one that retains its small beauty in this digital age. It's good to have Hopkinson's collection (from the British Museum) to remind readers that there are advantages to print that the world of ones-and-zeroes can never replace.

Dada, "a new tendency in art": the manifesto, read July 1916

Read at the first public Dada soiree in Zurich on July 14, 1916. 

Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means "hobby horse". In German it means "good-bye", "Get off my back", "Be seeing you sometime". In Romanian: "Yes, indeed, you are right, that's it. But of course, yes, definitely, right". And so forth.

An International word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada m'dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.

How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world's best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr Rubiner, dada Mr Korrodi. Dada Mr Anastasius Lilienstein. In plain language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality.

I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It's a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz's words are only two and a half centimetres long.

It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.

Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.

As creative revolutions go, Dada succeeded on all counts, provoking confrontation and, sometimes, riotous reactions from both proponents and detractors. The "Dada Manifesto" as it came to be known, read by Hugo Ball, precipitated an unexpected storm of confusion, anger, and support by a generation of artists shattered by the brutality of the war in Europe. 

Dada mutated quickly, as various factions seemed to choose sides in the creative chaos, but the movement never seemed to lose a flair for the confrontational. Thomas Christiansen states on his blog about an event held on July 6, 1923:

"Soirée du 'Coeur à barbe' (The Bearded Heart)" Dada event at the Théâtre Michel, with films by Hans Richter and Man Ray; music by Satie, Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Georges Auric; cardboard costumes by Sonia Delaunay and Theo van Doesburg; and a performance of Tristan Tzara's three-act play Coeur à gaz. During course of evening someone shouts: "Picasso dead on the field of battle!" (referring to the death of Cubism), which shocks André Breton into jumping to the stage to come to Cubism's defense. During the commotion Breton hits the actor Pierre de Massot with his cane, breaking his arm and precipitating a full-scale riot that continues until the police, called by Tzara, arrive to restore order.  

Above: costumes by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Theo van Doesburg, 1922.

"Gravely Concerned": the last stops of a Southern literary tour

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.
(Mark Twain, 1898)

Much like the recent unpleasantness between the states from 1861-1865, the topic of death has an unshakable hold on the Southern imagination. Maybe that fascination springs from the rural tradition of long-told family stories: of ghosts and haints, lost relatives and ne'er-do-wells, and other human mysteries that make this conscious life only a pause on eternity's long road. In the South death takes on a mythical stature unparalleled elsewhere in America. People do talk about their long-gone ancestors as if those ancient folk were sitting, here today, on the porch having a glass of tea.

This embrace of the past, indeed the near-physical presence of the departed, is a romantic idea expressed in the over-use of the word Gothic when applied to the Southern sensibility. There is no mistaking the haunting tales of Edgar Allan Poe as anything but Southern, and the Gothic continues to be a part of the regional feel. As Howard Bahr, writing from Jackson, Mississippi, remarks in the book's foreword as if a plume of one of W.J. Cash's Cavaliers were still in his hat:

I believe that a walk through a cemetery is no intrusion but first, a sojourn into the past and, second, a glimpse into the future of our ephemeral selves. I see no possible harm in walking over a grave, and I think it proper that a man should sit on a tombstone, smoke his pipe, and contemplate his own mortality while the mockingbirds sing in the oaks. I believe the dead, so far as they may be aware, find such occasions enjoyable: footsteps of a visitor from the world they left behind come to acknowledge them as fellow travelers, no different from us but only gone ahead. ... This, I have found, is the artist's view as well.

Graves of Robert Penn Warren and his wife Eleanor, Stratton VT.

Which makes John Soward Bayne's new book Gravely Concerned(Clemson University Digital Press) a regional celebrity-search of the famous and infamous writers who had much to do with creating the unique Southern imagination. The book is less haunted by morbid curiosity than it is an evocative visual record of where many writers associated with the South have chosen to spend eternity.

In some cases a choice was not offered: in 1973 Alice Walker determined the resting site of Zora Neale Hurston by calling out "Zora, where are you?" in an Eatonton, Florida cemetery to locate the writer's unmarked grave -- in itself an absolutely fitting Southern tale.

In other cases these sites, some elaborate and others more simple, reflect the reputations of the writers themselves in their lifetime and (one presumes) in the life beyond. They become points of pilgrimage for fans and the curious: Margaret Mitchell in Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery, William Faulkner (and his brothers) in Oxford Mississippi, Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore, whose Poe Toaster tradition as of 2009 may be nevermore.

Yet there are many more -- regional writers whose legacies are less well known but whose fictions are part of the Southern fabric. Bayne began his photography project in 2003 with a mathematician's exactness and a reading fan's zeal, sometimes traveling by Greyhound overnight through Alabama and Mississippi and the Carolinas to locate a particular site.

Over the course of pages the book becomes a treasury of Southern names: John Trotwood Moore. Abbie Mandana Holmes Christiansen. Beatrice Whitte Ravenel. William Tappan Thompson. Thomas Holley Chivers. Douglas Southall Freeman. John Peale Bishop. Hubert Creekmore. Katherine Drayton Mayrant Simons.

It's understood if the casually curious may only be interested in tracking down Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, but where does one go to seek the disputed last rest of Truman Capote? That eternal gadabout may be buried in L.A.'s Westwood Memorial Park (a final cocktail party of sorts, surrounded by celebrities) -- or his ashes may be scattered at Crooked Pond near Bridgehampton, NY.

Many Southern writers are buried here, but not all. Although Mark Twain's grave is featured on the book's cover, in a recent discussion Bayne said he doesn't really consider Twain a Southern writer: born in Missouri, lived in Connecticut, he married a Yankee girl from Elmira NY and wrote several of his novels during 22 summers there. The serial bankrupt Clemens is buried in his wife's family plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira. At Woodlawn, driving directions are posted Mark Twain next left, as if it were a kind of final and continuing receiving line for the humorist -- or an eternal advertisement posted by his admirers.

On the other hand, there is the resting place of James Agee(Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) marked by an large and unchiseled boulder on his farm, also in upstate NY.

Eudora Welty gravesite, Jackson, MS

Monuments with their names and dates chiseled in stone offer many writers the opportunity for a final parting shot, or piece of wisdom on view for eternity. In his preface Bayne offers these: Among the best are T.S. Stribling's 'Through this dust these hills once spoke" and Ben Robertson's "I rest in thy bosom, Carolina, thy skies over me, thine air above and around me. Among my own and in my own country I sleep.'
Not all are quite so serious; some epitaphs are examples of the special Southern wit. On April 20, 2008, a monument was unveiled on the overlooked and presumed grave of George Washington Harris, with a new epigraph from the humorist's own fictional creation, "Parson Bullen's Oration Over the Corpse of Sut Lovingood": Let us try and ricollect his virtues -- ef he had any -- and forget his vices -- ef we can. For of such air the kingdom of heaven!"

John Soward Bayne

Bayne himself was born in Lenoir City, Tennessee, grew up in Anderson, South Carolina, and holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Clemson University, impeccable Southern bona fides on the Gravely Concerned website. So it's no surprise that his book, in its elegiac tone, suggests a certain urgent prompting to the procrastination of aspiring Southern writers and other present-day scribblers:

So, pilgrim, pass by. Be not reluctant at your author's grave. Look at the name indited in stone: what lies beneath the name is only dust, of course, but what lies behind it is the record of the artist's suffering and the true monument that is his or her work. Remember that this person once walked the earth, felt the compulsion to create, suffered rejection and frustration, just as you will do, have done, if you have chosen the writer's craft. Ask your questions; you may be astonished at the reply.

Dante's "Divine Comedy" gets a graphic novel & video game: good news for swaggering hero-poets

Bowler hats, tommy guns, and spats: illustrator Seymour Chwast's updated Dante's Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation looks like a 1930s Hollywood detective movie, telegraphing Dante's ultimately hopeful message in cinematic black-and-white. If Chwast's version of theDivine Comedy begs no comparison to the art of illustrator Gustave Doré, well, it's a safe bet the 19th century engraver never imagined Dante as a Dashiell Hammett character, either.

Chwast's first graphic novel is full of innovative and clever images, although high-school Miss Grundys may wail at the simplified story. "Captain" Charon's lake is now a neon-lit chasm he zooms across in a speedboat and floozies of Florence lounge in cocktail dresses. The damned wear Yale varsity sweaters. Dante still searches for the truth with the poet Virgil, now as his guide in a tuxedo and bowler.

Some things, however, stay true to the original: for most readers, as well as the artists that have illustrated the Comedy over centuries, the torments of Hell are still more thrilling to depict than the transcendence of Heaven -- and for Chwast make for much wittier visuals.

Not to be trumped by mere words and pictures on a page, Electronic Arts has developed a videogame of Dante's Inferno that ratchets up the action to make Dante a fallen crusader swaggering his way through hell, battling Satan himself for the love of Beatrice.

"He fundamentally mapped hell with this poem," says Jonathan Knight, the game's executive producer. "He's created a visual topography, and there's a tremendous amount of structure, geography, weather — and monsters."

A graphic novel and a videogame based on the work of a 14th-century visionary seem a victory of sorts for the image of fearless and swashbuckling hero-poets, if not for truth in literature. It's unlikely there'll be corresponding releases for Purgatory or Heaven -- spiritual redemption is less exciting for gamers, presumably. Who knows -- that still leaves the battle for Heaven in Milton's "Paradise Lost" for some enterprising game company to try.

"Kitsch" (1968), edited by Gillo Dorfles: the fascination of bad taste

For whatever reason, some books just stay with you. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste by Gillo Dorfles is one of those books.

It's long out of print, but years ago I found a second copy, "profusely illustrated with more appalling pictures than you can shake a stick at," as the New York Times reviews with typical understatement. Newsweek puts it more succinctly: "This compendium of corn is guaranteed to contain something to offend everyone." The familiar figure playing the violin on its cover demanded I pay her one-dollar price at a book sale.

It replaces a copy I left behind in college thirty-five years ago. This was the book I would turn to on rainy days to pass the time between classes, and in upstate New York there was a lot of bad weather. Mr. Dorfles and a wide-ranging group of art critics rack their brains (and twist ours) trying to describe what makes kitsch so appallingly bad. Some, like Herman Broch, are afraid they may pose more questions about bad art than they answer. But a ten-minute look inside at the kaleidoscope of images in Kitsch will open eyes to the avalanche of junk that makes up popular culture.

The titles in this collection of essays, photos, and illustrations, published in 1968, indicates, really, that bad taste knows no bounds. "Death," "Christian kitsch," "Tourism and nature," "Politics," and "Pornokitsch and morals" are just a few of the topics surveyed. The reader will also see more creative uses for the swastika of the Third Reich than one could imagine possible after 1945.

Also included is Clement Greenberg's essay "The Avant-Garde and Kitsch," published originally in 1939, tracing the rise of art in the service of totalitarian regimes. In this case, one photograph of Mussolini and Hitler at the Borghese gallery speaks volumes. The palpable disdain on their faces as they survey the half-nude reclining figure of Napoleon's sister on her couch makes it clear: Il Duce and Der Fuhrer will soon put an end to the decadence of the Little General's age of neo-classicism. Tomorrow the world.
Kitsch -- "trash" or "cheap finery" in German -- has become a universal term for much of the things consumers see, admire, or desire. Mass production has made kitsch an unavoidable part of contemporary culture; it's so pervasive that most of us see elements of kitsch everywhere, yet would have a difficult time separating the art from the artificial.

Let's face it, no one goes to Disney World expecting an adventure in high art, but now that Times Square in New York has been "imagineered" by Disney, who can say where the kitsch fantasy ends? Dorfles states that kitsch "threatens to become the most pervasive style of our times." Considering the book was written forty years ago, the relentless, artificial tide has only increased.

The book was first published in Italy and many of the photographs and illustrations are from European sources. Yet the sentimental and commercial pull of kitsch, with its tug at the heartstrings and purse-strings of millions, is universal. Anyone who thinks of The Lone Ranger or Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when listening to "The William Tell Overture" by Rossini has been influenced by kitsch.

While the line separating art from kitsch is exceedingly fine, one man's trash is still saved from being another man's treasure by context, or more rightly kitsch's complete lack of it. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa appears much less inscrutable on a plastic shower curtain. Mass production has made the irony of "authentic reproduction" available on a grand scale.

Some of the academic essays have not aged well, even if the gently tortured Italian-into-English translation has its own charm: "And obviously before long (and even now in fact) we will witness the anti-family kitsch, the kitsch of hippies and long-haired youths, the kitsch of addicts and beatniks," writes Dorfles -- foretelling Nirvana's cover version of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" by a good 20 years.

Fascinating, funny, and full of hideously bad art, this book is a wonderland of the high-brow, the low-brow, and the no-brow of taste. In a pop-culture blender that makes no such distinctions, how else can you explain the fascination of Honey Booboo?

The Vernacular Typography project: preserving urban art

One of the ironies of the mass-information internet age is the rise of handcraft. From craft beer to paper-making, from the use of a certain color tint known as "folk-art blue" (even by self-taught outsider artists) to labor-intensive textile creation, the increasing amount of handcrafting is a response to the ubiquity of corporate branding and, even more so, the easy availability of "how-to" information.

What's ironic about the rush to make the old new again is the abandonment of the art that often surrounds us. This is especially true in cities, where hand-made signs and advertising are fast disappearing in the rush to demolish and replace.

This displacement is no longer just in New York City and other major areas known for the swing of the wrecking ball. Yet the vanishing act is more pronounced and noticeable in urban areas: history slowly disappears day by day, without notice or record, especially when it comes to a city's signs and signage. At Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, curator Jerimiah Moss interviewed Molly Woodward about her ongoing project, Vernacular Typography, which documents the city's daily attrition and is now expanding to cities around the globe.

Currently, Vernacular Typography contains over 5,000 images of found typography from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, England, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States. Website materials emphasize that contributions to the Vernacular Typography effort will allow the project to expand to new cities and incorporate new elements into the project (printed matter, interactive maps, video shorts, interviews with signmakers, etc) that are vital to the preservation of visual communication in the built environment.

The NYC typography record includes numbers, ghost signs, hand-painted signage, grammatical errors and fading fallout shelter signs -- reminders of the atomic age. The larger global project hopes to encompass much more. In her own description Woodward hopes to create "a collaborative effort with local typographers and sign-makers to document, map, and preserve these fragile remaining examples of a representative cultural art form that is being swept away by the uniformity of corporate advertising, which ignores and subverts local history and tradition in large and small urban areas: Mexico City, Oaxaca, Kowloon, Melbourne, and Sydney, and in smaller, fringe communities, like Tuxtla Gutiérrez and Alice Springs."

Here's an excerpt of the interview with Molly Woodward at Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, by curator Jeriemiah Moss.

Q: How are you defining "Vernacular Typography"?

A: I guess it should technically be Vernacular "Lettering," but I define Vernacular Typography as the found lettering that exists in the built environment and surrounds us everyday. It doesn't have to be pretty or use an existing typeface, it's just any visual representation of language. ...

Q: What do we lose when the vernacular typography of the city streets vanishes from sight?

A: A sense of the city's history, and also a precious visual resource. Typography can you tell you a lot about local culture and urban communication and when we don't see it, our sense of the city is diminished.

Q: What do you think might be the psychological impact of living in a city where the native typography is replaced by homogeneous corporate signage?

A: I think there's less of a personal connection to a specific place. With standardized corporate advertising, signs are no longer representative of a group of people or a neighborhood, just a business that could be anywhere in the world.

For natives, connections to the past are lost, so a sense of home or a memory of a place is devalued. And for visitors, there's less of the unique experience you get from traveling someplace new.

Vernacular typography is such an incredible marker of regional identity, spatial orientation, and even personal history. If we lose it altogether, we not only lose that individual and cultural connection, but also a physical map of the city, which is why documentation and preservation are so important.

Vernacular Typography can be accessed here. (Images from the Vernacular Typography website.)