It’s Monday morning and must be getting close to 6:00am. The sun is rising around us, the birds are starting to sing and faces around the campfire are coming into view. The music’s still going and the conversation flowing. People lay sprawled across the ripped and battered sofas, some asleep under blankets, but many are still awake and lively. Some are even still dancing by the fire. This is Strummerville at Glastonbury Festival and the party isn’t over yet.

Joe Strummer was a regular at Glastonbury and was a strong supporter of the festival. In fact he lived only a short drive away in the Somerset village of Broomsfield, which is where he passed in 2002.

The following year, festival organiser Michael Eavis and Joe’s widow Lucinda Tait laid a memorial stone on the site. Regularly decorated with a few photographs, Clash memorabilia and surrounded by candles, it quickly became a regular feature in my Glastonbury experience and every year I’d make some time to visit the stone and light a candle in his honour.

I’d never heard of Strummerville until they set up camp near the memorial stone last year. Founded by friends and family, shortly after Joe’s death, Strummerville is a registered charity, dedicated to creating new opportunities for aspiring musicians. They set up camp at the festival and build a huge fire which they keep burning for the full five days.

Joe was infamous for his campfires at Glastonbury and it’s rumoured that he once kept one alight throughout a terrible storm, refusing to submit to the fierce wind and rain. Not only is this the perfect tribute to Joe, but the heart and soul of the festival. When that fire eventually goes out, it’s all over ’til next year.

This is my 8th Glastonbury Festval. My first was in 2000. This was the last year before the ‘super-fence’ was installed and I feel privileged to have seen both sides – the before and after (or the over-the-top and through-the-gate years). People will tell you that it’s not as good as it used to be, that it’s lost its edge. Of course in some ways this is true.

Glastonbury, has become part of middle England’s social calendar. They are a familiar sight around the Pyramid Stage, these days. Sitting on their fold-up chairs, drinking Pimms from their cool boxes and enjoying a ‘magical’ set from Kylie, Lady Gaga or Coldplay.

Despite what the BBC coverage will have you believe, there’s a lot more to the festival than the main stages. It’s in the late hours, after the headliners have played their final encores and the ‘cool boxers’ have returned to the comfort of their B&Bs that the festival really comes to life. Strummerville is just one of many secluded pockets across the massive site that still manages to capture the true spirit of Glastonbury.

When I get back people always ask me “what was your highlight?” I know they’re kind of expecting me to list off a bunch of bands and say how amazing they were live, but Glastonbury is more than just a gig for me. Gorillaz were incredible, one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Toots and the Maytals on a scorching Sunday afternoon, priceless.

But if I had to pick my absolute highlight of this year’s festival, it was sitting around that campfire at Strummerville, listening to bands I’d never heard of, chatting to strangers and watching the sun come up. That’s what it’s all about for me anyway.

www.strummerville.com

It isn’t the first of its kind in the world. Microsoft, Panasonic, HP, Fujitsu and a few others have all done it before. Fujitsu even has a hand held device also called the iPAD!

Apple’s iPad doesn’t have earth-shattering features. It may not be particularly user friendly and the after-sales service may leave a lot to be desired.

So what is all the noise about?

It is the ‘thought’ behind everything Apple does. Every Apple creation has been more than just a device. It’s about benefits as well as features. It’s about the strength of human alignment directly proportional to the length of ownership and experience.

Another simpler way of putting it is that every Apple creation is about the Apple brand. The power within the Apple brand lies in its intuitive ability to gradually build a unique bond with its owner. Not only do you not mind the electronic intrusion into your life you positively adore it. This is branding in its most supreme form.

Interestingly every Apple experience has been designed around the core of Zen Buddhist theology. Steve Jobs is a Zen Buddhist since 1975. He practises it not only in his own life but also in his creations.

These are the definitive, deliberate manifestations which are seen in the Apple brand. They show how the greatest brands can be a powerful manifestation of the human condition.

Kazuyo Seijima and Ryue Nijizaha exploring the Serpentine Pavillion

The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion is a unique yearly event in the cultural and architectural calendar of London. A temporary structure designed without a budget and at breakneck speed (6 months from invitation to completion) by an internationally acclaimed architect, designer or artist. Previous pavilions by the likes of Rem Koolhaas with an inflatable glowing space, Toyo Ito with a pristine geometric gem or Oscar Niemayer’s timeless swooping forms, have graced the Serpentines’ lawn for summer.
This year the Japanese couple Kazuyo Seijima and Ryue Nijizaha of Sanaa have conceived an absolutely breathtaking ethereal canopy reflecting the park and the sky above it, a free form characteristic of the oeuvre which is playful as effortlessly elegant. The slim reflective canopy was engineered, as the Serpentine pavilion is every year, by our client Arup, and reflects their innovative and ingenious capacity to consistently deliver outstanding engineering.
As always, the Pavilion will be auctioned after dismantling in the end of summer, so forgo your holidays and place your bid for a unique addition to your home… More info here

The more dramatic the political movement the more dramatic the art. For thousands of years in every civilisation from the ancient Egyptians onwards, political rulers have mounted creative, art fuelled propaganda displays to sustain the loyalty of the citizen. They have constructed buildings; pyramids, palaces, citadels, temples, and triumphal arches. They have painted heroic and instructive pictures demonstrating triumphs, real or imagined. This is of course official art. Art as a component of the national brand. 

Official political art simplifies, distorts and dramatizes events in order to create loyalty and enthusiasm.

Over centuries while the technologies of political art have changed, its intentions have remained the same. The Romans created buildings, erected triumphal arches, built statues of heroic figures and celebrated their military and civic virtues. During the latter part of the twentieth century the Maoist Chinese communist state in China developed the process a lot further. The Great Leader swimming, the Great Leader smiling on crowds, the Great Leader both swimming and smiling. The parades, the statues, the exhibitions and above all the icons, the portraits, the statuettes and the little red books – more and more ubiquitous. The whole point of traditional art as manifested in political power has been to underline the official political system, it has been carved out by official artists and architects supported by the state. It’s an internally directed manifestation of the national brand.

The Che Guevera material is exactly the opposite of all that. Images of Che also capture and encapsulate a political movement but they are subversive and unofficial. They are not from or for the system, they are despite the system and they undermine and threaten it. And they also present a much more individual, even anarchic political view.

The whole point of traditional art as manifested in political power has been to underline the official political system. The really interesting thing about the Che stuff is that it undermines the state and is intended to change the status quo.

The Che material is heavily, cleverly, wittily branded. The Korda photograph particularly, is iconic. It is as grand a piece of art as anything that Jacques Louis David painted for Napoleon, much better than anything created for Hitler, Stalin or Mao – it serves the same kind of purpose – to demonstrate to inspire and to educate. But it emerged spontaneously – and that is its unique strength. And it’s profoundly anti-state, and anti-official. It’s a counter cultural highly contemporary symbol of international revolt. Remarkable!

Literary credit

The above is an extract from a contribution written by Wally Olins for the catalogue Art and Power: Europe under the dictators 1930-45, organised by the Hayward Gallery, London, in collaboration with the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona and the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, 43.

'Black swans are always emerging from everywhere.'

‘It’s a sobering time for number crunchers. From quantitative risk analysis to credit ratings, many financial statistics have revealed more artistic license than resemblance to reality,’ says an editorial in the Financial Times of 30 January 2009. And you can add brand valuation to that list, too. All this number crunching whether it’s risk analysis, GDP projections or brand valuation is part of an attempt to measure areas of activity which are for the most part inherently unquantifiable. The assumption is that people and the organisations they manage, act only out of rational calculation; it’s a natural extension of the economic theories of the Chicago School. These figures are a major part of denial of risk.

At another level they are like a comfort blanket for a child, which makes it feel safe, secure and stable. But all of us know deep down that life isn’t like that. Brand valuation and the other statistical analyses with which it is associated are supposed to be an aid to predicting the future, when as has recently been made clear yet again, the future stubbornly refuses to be predicted. All you can really predict about the future is you don’t know what will happen. Black swans are always emerging from everywhere.

So what does this say about an apparently rational process through which, utilising a series of complex, arcane, and, to a lay mind, more or less incomprehensible statistical measurements, brands of all kinds are given a financial value? Well, in my judgment these figures that are produced and so thoroughly scrutinised are about as meaningful as sticking your wet finger in the wind and shouting out a number.

The truth is that brands jump around all the time. They are in fashion, then they go out of fashion. They are well managed, then they are badly managed. Brand managers become too risk averse or they take too many risks. The list of what can happen to brands is endless. Just look at the performance of some famous, apparently invulnerable financial brands over the last few months.

I don’t know if anyone was asked to value RBS corporate brand in say 2007, but I can tell you what the stock market said then and what it says now. In June 2007, RBS shares were valued at £6.30. Today in February 2009 they are valued at just 20p. What goes for RBS goes for much of the rest of the financial sector. I didn’t notice Lloyds Banking Group (as it has rebranded itself) talking about the value of Halifax and Bank of Scotland brands as it took over the collapsing HBOS Group. I’m not implying that Halifax and Bank of Scotland have no brand value; on the contrary, they are massive brand assets. All I am saying is that nobody can calculate their current financial value as brands because they are badly damaged.

And it doesn’t only happen in the financial sector. Scandal destroyed WorldCom and Enron, which in turn brought down the Andersen brand, the greatest name in audit and accounting. Accenture, its former sister, was only saved from disaster because it had changed its name from Andersen Consulting a few years before in response to a legal ruling requiring it to do so.

The brand valuation process ignores tempest, turbulence and volatility. It is deliberately designed to create an entirely illusory impression of permanence and stability. So why is this profoundly misleading activity rapidly growing as a service offering of branding consultancies and accountancy companies?

Tangible assets like buildings and plant machinery have always had a place on the balance sheet. Traditionally intangible assets haven’t, although in recent years this has been changing. Intangible assets like intellectual property, in the form of patents, brands and so on, are becoming increasingly valuable.

Over the years, many sensible companies have paid a great deal of money for brands. So it isn’t surprising that accountants and some branding consultancies and other specialists have created complex econometric formulae both to value brands in the short and medium term and to justify a significant place for them in the corporate balance sheet. The idea behind all this is that they fit into the corporate financial accounts in a way that is logical, rational and above all susceptible to numerical analysis. All this is entirely understandable and I am most sympathetic to companies attempting this task, particularly if they happen to be a Coca-Cola or a Virgin, when it is clear the brand is by far their most significant asset. So although brand valuation is pretty much worthless as a technical tool, it does have the apparent advantage that it makes companies with brands feel good and improves the appearance of their balance sheet.

The truth of the matter though is that brands have no objective, absolute value. Whether it’s a T-shirt or a huge financial institution, there’s only one way to establish the value of a brand and that is to see what people will pay for it. All the rest is, as the Financial Times put it, artistic licence, or – putting it a shade more honestly – smoke and mirrors.

The ephemeral pavilion, designed to move across continents and pop-up in the capitals of capitalism (cities with the highest Chanel handbag per capita), started its journey in the UK where it was built. It then was shipped to Hong Kong where, like a spacecraft, it landed on top of a building. Tokyo followed before appearing in New York’s Central Park. It is now off to Moscow, London and Paris.

Both the container and its contents exude very expensive and progressive sophistication. For example, the pavilion employed new materials and explored innovative construction techniques for each piece had to fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle to be transported in 55 sea containers. The interior is a carefully managed multi-sensorial exercise that includes a soundtrack-guided tour. The selection of artists is correct lacking something extraordinary with only a few truly remarkable pieces.

As a brand observer, I couldn’t help to see this initiative as a formidably subtle product placement done in a refined way that retorts to the overexploited but lucrative formula of art + commerce. In Chanel’s case this formula makes wonders, delivering Chanel’s brand story through a masterful combination of thought-provoking art, avant-garde architecture, cosmopolitanism and glamour. A perfect execution of cobranding that pushes the boundaries between commercial brands like Chanel and cultural brands like Zaha Hadid or Yoko Ono.

Chanel’s big aspiration to understand and shape the zeitgeist is admirable. But, inevitably it makes you wonder how one of the most radical and interesting brand initiatives of these days could quickly become an exercise of intellectual irrelevance? The answer is self-absorption. A mindset many brands are familiar with. In these dire times with the world’s worst food crisis since the 1970s, an economic meltdown of epic proportions and unemployment rates soaring in the US, austerity and frugality are rapidly pervading our thoughts and behaviour. One of its harshest critics, Nicolai Ouroussoff from the New York Times puts it bluntly in this paragraph: “Yet if devoting so much intellectual effort to such a dubious undertaking might have seemed indulgent a year ago, today it looks delusional”.

Ironically, this sentiment was also reflected in one of the art pieces exhibited – Yoko Ono’s wish-tree – where visitors would tie their petitions to a tree, a lot of which were condemning the lavishness of the event as an insensitive display of excess and conspicuous consumption. It was here where I had a laugh. My personal ‘contribution’ to the art world was a typographic reinterpretation of the brand’s iconic logo, the interlocked Cs. This is a refined version of my sketches:

The visit to this shrine lasted 40 minutes, and at the end of it I couldn’t help but think what a beautiful visual metaphor it was of the bubble most luxury and fashion brands live in.

Juan Pablo Ramirez, Juan Pablo Ramirez,