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Fruit Loops: Kellogg’s Threatens Nonprofit Over Use of Toucan Image

  

via Non-Profit Quarterly:

Excruciatingly Dumb Idea Dept.: Kellogg Co. Threatens to Sue Mayan Group for Use of Toucan in Logo

August 23, 2011

August 22, 2011; Source: Detroit News | The Maya Archaeology Initiative (MAI), a cultural-defense project associated with the California-based World Free Press Institute, is being threatened with legal action by Kellogg Co. for using a toucan as part of its logo. Kellogg says that the image is too close to the Toucan Sam image used on its Froot Loops cereal boxes.

In a letter to MAI’s attorney, Kellogg also expressed concern that the initiative’s logo uses Mayan imagery, “given that our character is frequently depicted in that setting.” The fact that that setting is, of course, the home of actual people and a culture and the Toucan in question does not seem to be of any importance to Kellogg, which apparently believes that they have appropriated the bird for all eternity. 

In Kellogg’s defense, the law requires a trademark owner to vigorously police any possible infringement, lest it be deemed to have “abandoned” the mark. But lawyers more acquainted with the real world understand that there is a fine line between trademark policing and bullying. I’m not sure that there is much to be said here that might more clearly illuminate the appalling tone-deafness of the situation. One might wonder if there are no shared values between Kellogg Co. and the Kellogg Foundation, which is now devoting much of its grantmaking to anti-racism work.

As MAI’s Francisco Estrada Belli told the Detroit News, “This is a bit like the Washington Redskins claiming trademark infringement against the National Congress of American Indians.”

What say you, NPQ readers: Could these images be mistaken for one another?—Ruth McCambridge

 

More via Maya Archaeology Initiative:

Watch Kellogg's Froot Loops Adventure

Kellogg’s Threatens Nonprofit On Use of Toucan Image in Logo

21 August 2011

SAN FRANCISCO—Kellogg’s, the maker of Froot Loops and other sugary breakfast products, is taking legal action against the Maya Archaeology Initiative (MAI), a nonprofit that defends indigenous Maya culture, claiming that the use of a toucan in its logo infringes on Kellogg’s Toucan Sam character and games. The MAI logo can be viewed at http://mayaarchaeology.org

“This is a bit like the Washington Redskins claiming trademark infringement against the National Congress of American Indians,” said Dr. Francisco Estrada-Belli, president of the Maya Archaeology Initiative and a globally recognized expert on Maya archaeology and culture.

In a detailed response to the cereal giant, Maya Initiative legal counsel Sarah Mott explained that the toucan in MAI’s logo looks nothing like Kellogg’s cartoon character and said the two entities are not in competition. MAI's logo is based upon a realistic toucan native to Mesoamerica, while Kellogg’s Toucan Sam is a cartoon character with colors that represent Froot Loops’ food coloring.

Mott also challenged Kellogg’s claim that it uses “Mayan” imagery, another reason Kellogg challenged MAI’s logo, and accused the company of sending racist messages to children.

“There is nothing Mayan in [the Froot Loops] Adventure,” Mott wrote to Kellogg’s corporate counsel David Herdman.  “Disturbingly, the villain in this Kellogg’s Adventure—and the only character of color—is a ‘witch doctor’ who cackles malevolently when stealing from children. At best, this is culturally insensitive. I would characterize it as a demeaning caricature of an advanced and ancient civilization.”

“Kellogg’s products are a staple of many Guatemalan households,” said Estrada-Belli, a Guatemalan national whose organization promotes education opportunities for Maya children, archaeological work and defense of the rainforest. “We expect a brand that is so familiar to children to play a role in supporting cultural and racial understanding around the world, rather than undercutting it by promoting demeaning racial stereotypes.”
The company has a history of unsuccessful challenges to others’ use of toucans, claiming to hold a trademark on all images of the Central American bird.

The Maya Archaeology Initiative is a project of the California-based World Free Press Institute, a non-profit with a history of defending free expression and challenging repression of cultural heritage issues. The organization has conducted programs for the United Nations, the Ford Foundation and others.

Paul Chan’s New Publishing Venture: Artist E-Books

Off the Page

First published in FRIEZE Issue 139

by Sarah Hromack

Paul Chan’s new publishing venture and the relationship between physical and virtual methods of book production

 

A question of form lies at the heart of the current critical interest in electronic book publishing. The Internet, coupled with a rapid influx of electronic readers and tablets – the Amazon Kindle, Apple iPad, Barnes & Noble Nook – is perceived to pose a threat to an industry reliant on paper. No one mistakes a Kindle for a codex any more than they might an iPad for a canvas – that much is clear. Yet the impact of electronic publishing on the book itself is becoming increasingly relevant to the art world, where the recent advent of art e-book publishing has posed an entirely new set of challenges – technical, philosophical, political and otherwise – to the artist’s book.

In the autumn of 2010, artist Paul Chan launched a publishing venture, Badlands Unlimited, out of his Brooklyn studio as a means of negotiating the rapidly shifting relationship between physical and virtual methods of book production. Aided by a cohort of designers and developers, Chan has since published a small catalogue of books, DVDs and artist-designed ephemera, rendered in both digital and print forms. ‘We make books in the expanded field’, claims the company’s website, a deceptively simple mission statement that belies the implications of re-calibrating an entire process – and by proxy, the history of a genre – in order to broach the digital divide.

E-book publishing complicates the interplay between the image and virtual page; the limitations imposed by code and hardware alone necessitate a somewhat radical re-thinking of that relationship. For an image-heavy e-book to retain its visual legibility across platforms, its author must consider the image in service of the electronically produced book and not the other way around. Hallmarks of a well laid-out publication – a strong correlation between text and image; a sense of visual rhythm; considered choices in typeface, paper stock, printing and binding methods – are impossible to replicate in some cases, and in others elusive at best. Whereas the printed book bears its maker’s mark more readily, the e-book places a comparatively stringent set of limitations on the endeavour from the outset; software and hardware developers dictate the platforms and products that publishers have to negotiate with during the production process.
Badlands Unlimited’s growing catalogue of e-publications confronts these visual and textual challenges in various forms, some of which are more successful than others...

[read full article...]

Of Doritos, Sausages, Replicas and Parrots

via Artopia, John Perrault's art diary (Jan 3, 2010):

Fakes: Have Replicas Replaced Art?

The Doritos Syndrome 
 
If it has never occurred to you how fragile works of art are, start worrying now. Temperature, humidity, and people looking at them can make them age, wrinkle, fall apart. And we can blame artists, too. They persist in playing with time-bound products like fluorescent lights and various video formats; they even distribute and store their art electronically on YouTube. Are YouTube and Picasa eternal? Is The Cloud, located in server forests somewhere in Switzerland or China, invulnerable to time and fortune?
 
Writers, you are not secure either. The New York State Archives recommends that electronic texts have paper backups and that electronic files be copied every three to five years, even to the point of "migrating" them to a new system.
 
But art has been asking for trouble for a long time. Artists of the last century indulged in unstable materials. Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner enjoyed making sculpture out of cellulose nitrate back in the USSR. So much like glass, but lighter, unbreakable and easier to handle; so new.
 
At a 2007 conservation workshop at London's Tate, there were "collective gasps" when an original Pevsner, now looking like a "plate of Doritos," was shown next to an image of a recently constructed replica of what it had looked like in its glory day.
 
Cellulose nitrate is bad enough; think of fat and felt; of earth, blood, semen, garbage. Hot dogs.

Carol Mancuso-Ungaro (associate director for conservation and research at the Whitney Museum) in Conservation Perspectives, the Newsletter of the Getty Conservation Institute, reports the following anecdote offered by her British colleague Herbert Lank:

An auction house had received for sale a construction by Beuys of a German U-shaped knackwurst suspended from a rod by shoelaces. Unfortunately the Dutch owners had taken it off the wall overnight before packing. On returning in the morning to do so, they found that a large chunk had been bitten out of the base: their parrot was lying dead on the floor.

Joseph Beuys, when asked about what to do, replied that a new sausage would not be a solution because the original was by then 10 years old, and that the "patina" was an essential element of the work.

"Lank," reports Mancuso-Ungaro, " meticulously restored the missing part.

[read full article...]

Blind Handshake: artwriting 1990-2008

 

ANNOUNCING the book signing and release party for David Humphrey’s long-awaited anthology of art writing, Blind Handshake, with introductions by Alexi Worth and Chris Kraus.

WHERE:

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.  

530 West 22nd Street
New York, NY

WHEN:

Wednesday, December 16th, 6 – 8 PM
Short reading at 7

Blind Handshake is published by Periscope Publishing and distributed by Prestel. Available at St. Mark's Books, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The art criticism of the painter David Humphrey merits an anthology. But neither Humphrey nor Periscope wanted to present his writing as archival documents from 1990 to 2008. We decided it would be more innovative to treat the texts as the starting point for a book that acknowledges and extends the connections between Humphrey s studio practice and his criticism. The outcome is Blind Handshake. It foregrounds the social life surrounding contemporary art the practices and gestures, the dialogues and monologues that determine its place in the world. Organized thematically, the book considers Coupling Dramas, Unknowable Others, Collective Solitudes, Prosthetic Selves, and Good Liars. Artists drawn into the action include Richard Prince, Chris Ofili, Lucien Freud, Mamma Anderson, Tony Oursler, John Currin, Mary Heilmann, Catherine Murphy, and Amy Sillman. The book's designer Geoff Kaplan employed aspects of graphic novels, magazine layouts, and art monographs in translating the writing and illustrations into a mutant creature. Introductions by Chris Kraus and Alexi Worth provide contexts for understanding the book s presentation of the turbulent intersubjectivity that pervades contemporary art.

DAVID HUMPHREY has exhibited his art throughout the United States and curated several shows in New York City. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize and a Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art. His art criticism has appeared in Art in America, Art issues, among other publications.

GEOFF KAPLAN of General Working Group is a graphic designer who teaches at the California College of the Arts. He is currently writing and designing Power of the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter Culture, 1964-1974.

ALEXI WORTH is an artist and a critic published in Artforum and the New York TImes. His art has been featured at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery and P.P.O.W., both in New York City.

CHRIS KRAUS is a writer and filmmaker. Her publications include I Love Dick, Torpor, and Video Green. She founded Native Agents, an imprint of Semiotext(e), to publish work dealing with theories of subjectivity. In 2008, she was the recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather award in art criticism from the College Art Association.

 

ANNOUNCING the book signing and release party for David Humphrey’s long-awaited anthology of art writing, Blind Handshake, with introductions by Alexi Worth and Chris Kraus.

WHERE:

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.  

530 West 22nd Street
New York, NY

WHEN:

Wednesday, December 16th, 6 – 8 PM
Short reading at 7

Blind Handshake is published by Periscope Publishing and distributed by Prestel. Available at St. Mark's Books, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The art criticism of the painter David Humphrey merits an anthology. But neither Humphrey nor Periscope wanted to present his writing as archival documents from 1990 to 2008. We decided it would be more innovative to treat the texts as the starting point for a book that acknowledges and extends the connections between Humphrey s studio practice and his criticism. The outcome is Blind Handshake. It foregrounds the social life surrounding contemporary art the practices and gestures, the dialogues and monologues that determine its place in the world. Organized thematically, the book considers Coupling Dramas, Unknowable Others, Collective Solitudes, Prosthetic Selves, and Good Liars. Artists drawn into the action include Richard Prince, Chris Ofili, Lucien Freud, Mamma Anderson, Tony Oursler, John Currin, Mary Heilmann, Catherine Murphy, and Amy Sillman. The book's designer Geoff Kaplan employed aspects of graphic novels, magazine layouts, and art monographs in translating the writing and illustrations into a mutant creature. Introductions by Chris Kraus and Alexi Worth provide contexts for understanding the book s presentation of the turbulent intersubjectivity that pervades contemporary art.

DAVID HUMPHREY has exhibited his art throughout the United States and curated several shows in New York City. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize and a Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art. His art criticism has appeared in Art in America, Art issues, among other publications.

GEOFF KAPLAN of General Working Group is a graphic designer who teaches at the California College of the Arts. He is currently writing and designing Power of the People: The Graphic Design of the Radical Press and the Rise of the Counter Culture, 1964-1974.

ALEXI WORTH is an artist and a critic published in Artforum and the New York TImes. His art has been featured at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery and P.P.O.W., both in New York City.

CHRIS KRAUS is a writer and filmmaker. Her publications include I Love Dick, Torpor, and Video Green. She founded Native Agents, an imprint of Semiotext(e), to publish work dealing with theories of subjectivity. In 2008, she was the recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather award in art criticism from the College Art Association.

Upping the Socially Networked Museum: Whitney.org Redesign

"To the museum’s credit, the sensibility of openness that leads to the collection concept works on both sides of the site database – content is added and edited using a distributed, wiki-style content management system (CMS) unique to Linked by Air, the design firm responsible for the new Whitney site. [...That ] part of the goal of the new site [... is to allow] a broad range of museum employees to contribute directly to it assures currency, accuracy – and staff ownership."

Philip Bump offers some insight and analysis.

via MEDIAite:

The Whitney’s Re-Design: Web Done (Nearly) Right

by Philip Bump | 10:27 am, November 12th, 2009

» 1 comment

I don’t envy those who have to redesign the website for a museum – balancing institutional structure and needs with the requirement that it reflect the appropriate aesthetic. Moreover, the process of transitioning a sensibility to the web in itself requires decisions about what the organization represents – a staid, classical collection would justifiably be nervous about embracing an open engagement of the general public.

The Metropolitan Museum, for example, probably won’t be holding a contest on YouTube any time soon. Its website, which looks like it was created by a medium sized corporation in 2002, is staid, muted, and tucked behind a splash screen. The Museum of Modern Art’s website, by contrast, is, well, modern, with a palette and structure that would bore Mies van der Rohe. It’s the Obama of websites – so cool, it’s dull.

Late last night, the Whitney Museum of American Art, known for its modern and contemporary exhibitions and its Biennial, unveiled the latest example from this world. It’s a great improvement over what was there yesterday, though that’s a low hurdle to conquer. Yesterday, the site was a card catalog. Today, it’s a website.

What establishes the Whitney’s new site as a success is not the aesthetic revamping with which, frankly, I’m not impressed. Various elements are laid in a casual grid, anchored by the logo, nice and big, at the top. The navigation is awkward, with elements jumping to the head of the line to show additional options once clicked. The background is either black or white, in order to accommodate a conceptually interesting feature in which it changes when the sun in New York rises or sets. (That would be at 4:41 this afternoon or 6:40 tomorrow morning for those wanting to witness it.) As I said – conceptually interesting. In practice, though, it tends to make the site feel a bit flat, and perusing the collection is negatively impacted by the black background. (White borders would do wonders.)

That’s particularly a shame, because said perusal and its accompanying tools are the real hook to the site. The collection itself is easy to navigate and well indexed. Every page, one notices, has at the bottom a small dot which, when clicked, adds an item to your “custom collection” (assuming you take advantage of the free registration, which you ought to do). This is not unique – the afore-mentioned MoMA site has a similar function – but the Whitney takes it further. When, above, I said every page, I meant every page. In addition to works of art, you can add artists, site elements, upcoming exhibits, even the contact page. Collections are an opportunity to interact with more than the art – you can in essence create your own museum website.

[read full article]