How can an exhibition be both boring and interesting?
At the "This will be Boring" Stefan Sagmeister sharing session, he said that book reviewers get more attention, and positive reviews don't get the same effect. He also said that media that report positive news won't last a week.
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However, what he wants to express is more boring than positive book reviews and news. In a nutshell: the world is getting better.
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How to prove this concept? He thinks it can be quantified with data and can be measured. He compares data from 50-200 years ago and hopes that people can see positive energy in an environment that tends to focus on negative information.
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Stefan Sagmeister's ancestral attic is full of antiques that his great-grandparents didn't sell. He painted the antiques, dug some holes, and filled them with lacquered wood or other materials that represent data. When the paintings in his attic were used up, he went to European auction houses to buy works by unknown artists.
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He will try to match the content of the picture with the visualized data, and there is a kind of no-prize guessing experience in the exhibition.
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Can you guess which one is about carbon dioxide content, which one is about the number of people in the United States engaged in the art industry than doctors and lawyers, which one is about the percentage of people who think capitalism must be replaced, and which one is about the proportion of immigrants in the US population? It doesn't matter if you can't guess, there is a QR code on the label of each work, and you will know everything by scanning it.
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With the exhibition ticket, you can choose a poster you like to take away, and the audience's poster is also part of his data statistics.
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I feel that he is also both boring and interesting, which can be seen from the documentary on the second floor of the exhibition hall. The documentary spans 8 years of his life. He uses himself as a control group to reset some projects to see if he has gotten better. For example, one project is to go to the street to comment on a single item on a stranger. The comments are all positive, and an African chrysanthemum will be given.