Design Anarchy Review

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(More customer reviews)Cynical artists disgrunted with society are certainly readers of Kalle Lasn's Adbuster magazines. They might have turned to buy this "Design Anarchy" design guide.
I found the provocative visual slideshow created by each page turn strong in message, but the bravado and ego in Kalle Lasn shows through by him stating that design anarchy, a term for a movement that he coined, is the next movement listed among art and design movements such as Bauhaus, Arts and Crafts Movement, and Post-Modernism. Anti-ads have been around for quite a while. Mad Magazine, which was going strong in the 1950's, is just one example of modern culture parody.
If you are a true anarchist, why do you want a given label such as that? Shouldn't you be just...doing...making noise, anti-art, protests, etc.?
Why not put together a book made of, say, stolen Prozac notepads from your local hospital? In all fairness, he preaches this kind of action, and probably on some level his book inspired me to think of this.
As another reviewer stated, if you look on the last page, you will see that the book is Printed in China. Mr. Lasn looked to find cheap labor to make the most money on this publication, with greedy business savvy just like a large corporation he loves to criticise.
Ah, the seduction of money. Now I'm really cynical.

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This radical new aesthetic vision from the founder of Adbusters Magazine looks unflinchingly at contemporary art and graphic design and implicates their seemingly innocuous practitioners in crimes against our culture and our planet. Design Anarchy pioneers a hybrid graphic/text language that is by turns intimate, anarchic, abstract and accusatory, to explore the responsibility of the visual designer and artist in the pollution and redemption of our mental and physical commons. It makes an urgent call for artists, graphic and industrial designers and architects to reengage with the world. And it includes work from some who have already heard that call: Jeff Wall, Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ryan McGinley, Gregory Crewdson and Barbara Kruger. Kalle Lasn is the founder of Adbusters Media Foundation, and as its head has launched international social marketing campaigns such as Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week, and has pioneered the spoof ads, billboard liberations and TV mind-melters featured here. In the battle for a new kind of meaning, Design Anarchy is a 400 page mind bomb without precedent.

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Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge--And Why We Must Review

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(More customer reviews)If you're looking at this book, chances are you've already come to the conclusion that there's something deeply, seriously wrong with modern American culture. Community is disrupted, economic principles favor the wealthy few over the working many, and government is unresponsive to our demands. The environment is in freefall, education is a joke, and you can't talk to your loved ones because they're too damn busy watching the idiot box. Now you want to do something about it.
This book consistently fails to tell you how.
For the greatest part of the book, public-interest advocate Kalle Lasn holds forth on the problems with our society, from the small (mindless TV addiction) to the medium-sized (allowing fashion companies to dictate our ideals of beauty) to the monumental (destructive, unsustainable economic practices). All this is useful, enlightening stuff to know, but let's be frank, we wanted to read this book because we already had an idea of these facts. Now we want some ideas of what to do about it.
The subtitle on the front cover promises to tell you "How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge." Good luck finding that. Lasn is fond of patting himself on the back for his past efforts in that direction, but he doesn't really tell the reader what an individual, with an individual's budget of money and time, can really do. He says something at one point about things that can be done, but he speaks of really big options. Take media conglomerates to the World Court? If I had that kind of budget and know-how, I wouldn't be reading this book, now would I?
In giving us the detailed information on the flaws of society, we are having the gaps in our knowledge filled in, and that's handy. However, by telling us what's wrong and not what to do about it, it's as though we're being given bullets without a gun. This book is excellent if you're looking for a position piece, an explanation of what Lasn thinks and why, and of course that's always helpful. However, if you actually want to weigh in and suggest what somebody could do about it, you're woefully on your own. Here's hoping this is simply Volume One and more information will be coming later. However, it's been three years without a follow-up. It looks like us would-be revolutionaries are on our own from that side.

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America is no longer a country but a multimillion-dollar brand, says Kalle Lasn and his fellow "culture jammers". The founder of Adbusters magazine, Lasn aims to stop the branding of America by changing the way information flows; the way institutions wield power; the way television stations are run; and the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music, and culture industries set agendas. With a courageous and compelling voice, Lasn deconstructs the advertising culture and our fixation on icons and brand names. And he shows how to organize resistance against the power trust that manages the brands by "uncooling" consumer items, by "dermarketing" fashions and celebrities, and by breaking the "media trance" of our TV-addicted age.
A powerful manifesto by a leading media activist, Culture Jam lays the foundations for the most significant social movement of the early twenty-first century -- a movement that can change the world and the way we think and live.

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