Week Notes // 8th Jan
Philip Guston’s The Line. 1978
The first week back in the office following the Christmas break. It was nice to get back to some semblance of normality and routine. We’re now past the statute of limitations on enquiring after people’s break and wishing them a Happy New Year.
Work slowly started to trickle into the inbox as the week went on, but CES and the fact that many people were keeping their heads down and re-setting means that relatively speaking, things were quite quiet.
In an austere week, some minor highlights worth remarking on:
Got to see the Philip Guston exhibition at Tate Modern. I had very little idea of what to expect and was pleasantly surprised. An incredible range of techniques across his career. And incredibly funny and witty too, even when dealing with difficult subject matters like the KKK. The magazine stand in the Tate Book shop is formidable. Picked up a copy of the latest issue of Vestoj magazine. Some fascinating thinking on culture and cultural appropriation, which I’m sure I can recycle shortly.
Watched The Killing of a Sacred Deer in anticipation of Poor Things being released. Thoroughly disturbing. Continuing my way through The Curse and Fargo.
Revisted a number of pieces by Jeremy Bullmore in prep for a response to a brief I’m working on. A second hand copy of Behind the Scenes in Advertising has transpired to be amongst the best purchases I’ve ever made. Such incredible wisdom, written with bags of wit and skill.
Met - either physically or virtually - some of my favourite people: David, Andrew, Nick and Neil. Everyone in good spirits coming back to work and looking forward to the year ahead.
Elsewhere, new issue of the newsletter was published. Subscriber graph continues to go up. This week’s issue has raised some interesting questions about the nature of the Linkedin algorithm and the posts it actively promotes vs. the ones it’s trying to limit. Some hypothesis forming and won’t be long before we start to build out a testing framework, i suspect: frequency, synchronicity, imagery, use of comments etc - all seem to have an impact on visibility.
