A Sign of the Times – in today’s Post
[ by Charles Cameron — on skilled design, and on choosing to purchase influence, elegance or beauty ]
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There’s something very neat about this front page:
Okay, okay, Jeff Bezos has bought the Washington Post. But what intrigues me about this front page of today’s digital edition as it appeared on my screen this morning was the way a color photo of Bezos sneaks in (left) below a larger black and while photo of Katharine Graham (center) — while an ad for the China Daily (right) takes up a third of the real estate (right), to be read, mark you, on Bezos’ own Kindle.
So we have today’s future, to coin a phrase, with the “pivot to Asia” and the “pivot to Bezos” right there together — and the “pivot to digital” pretty much a done deal.
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The price of the Post was $250 million, and plenty of people have talked about what Bezos could have bought instead — and while we’re on the topic of neat design, I couldn’t help but notice that there’s a $250 million penthouse under construction in Monaco, described by HiConsumption as The World’s Most Expensive Penthouse, and that one of the numerous architectural illustrations provided also features a striking lesson on graphics:
What catches my eye here is the parallelism between the window with its center divider and balcony rail (left) with the geometry of the painting on the wall (right) — that’s a brilliant design choice, as the photographer well knows.
In my dreams I’d prefer my own choice of art-work, frankly — and if I only had $250 million to play with, I’d go for a small craftsman cottage in Pasadena, perhaps — with that luminous $250 million Cezanne to grace one of my walls…
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That — and the digital Post on Kindle, I suppose.
August 6th, 2013 at 8:51 pm
Charles, I think that painting on the wall is a flat screen television reflecting the scene outside. Mirrors and parallelism: go figure! (Check the photo right below that photo at the site….)
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But maybe you were talking about the wall covering, which is either carved or painted on? (Can’t tell.) In another of the pictures, this of the bedroom, you can see a different wall behind the bed that also uses a similar effect, although this time squares.
August 6th, 2013 at 10:28 pm
I do believe you’re right — so the honor belongs to nature, not some artist or photographer!
August 7th, 2013 at 1:38 am
I believe I’ve seen a similar piece of art
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