One more time: The Sponsored Candidate

Nice to see this idea surfacing again. Thomas Friedman, who gives a hat tip to "the blogosphere," on banking and the finance sector's influence on politics:

U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from.

Serfican Ozcan in 2010:

And 2006:

Shepard Fairey offers free Occupy downloads

As Hyperallergic runs down Occupy Wall Street–related art -- including Rachel Schragis' Mark Lombardi-esque diagram, The Declaration of the Occupation of NYC -- Shepard Fairey has made several downloadable designs available on his site. A sampling:

Walker Art Center gets a black-metal logo

When I interviewed Christophe Szpajdel, "the Paul Rand of Metal," last week for an upcoming video as part of the Walker Art Center exhibition Graphic Design: Now In Production, I asked the UK-based artist if he could create a black-metal logo for the museum. He returned today, and after showing off some 50 new logos he created in the past week -- for bands like Jucifer, Human Remains and Powerlord -- unveiled his Walker black metal logo.

Bits: 10.19.11

• A student at Cambridge in 1979, artist John Devlin was forced to move home to Canada after a year due to mental illness, and ever since he's been obsessed with the university's architecture -- the beauty and mathematics of it; the new book NOVA CANTABRIGIENSIS features Devlin's renderings of reimagined and reconfigured Cambridge buildings as they appear on his imagined utopian island of the same name in Nova Scotia's Minas Basin.

• In his book Pig 05049, Christien Meindertsma tracked all the products made from a single pig -- the title is its tracking number, of sorts -- which ranged from ammunition and photo paper to heart valves and chewing gum. The project is part of the Walker exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production, which opens Saturday.

• In a similar vein, photographer Dacia Pierson explores the meat industry, noting that a half million chickens are killed for food each hour in the U.S. "Within the American food system, this process is largely hidden by the USDA and willfully ignored by consumers," she writes. "The project aims to create more transparency in this system."

• The Guggenheim diversifies... into house paint.

• What I've been writing at my day job: "The Hippocratic Oath of a Photographer," "Aesthetic Apparatus’ ‘Monotonous’ Poster Installation and ‘Waterfall’" at the Walker, " and "The Art of Letterhead," among others.

• Bookmarkable: The ACLU on the rights of photographers.

• Walker director Olga Viso (full disclosure: my boss) on what the Istanbul Biennial is lacking: "an indefatigable spirit of generosity and faith in the potential of art to not only transcribe the exigencies of the present moment but transcend them too."

• Urban farming... on wheels.

• Your moment of hobo skull nickels.

Bike-lane stencil: "You look good."

Spotted in Northeast Minneapolis.

NY intervention: "What is essential..."

Via Social Design Notes.