Varoom! 19: The Taste Issue
Varoom! 19: The Taste Issue
Taste, that most vital idea in image-making and image consumption forms the theme for Issue 19 of Varoom! the award-winning, quarterly magazine which celebrates the cultural, political and social ideas in contemporary illustration from around the world.
The idea of Taste lubricates and directs culture and commerce, from old media lifestyle magazines and Weekend supplements to the new uber-cool social-media tastemakers setting agendas in design, illustration and advertising.
Varoom 19′s menu offers a well-balanced diet, highlighting the idea of Taste as “Sensation”, talking to the illustrators and art directors forging new ideas of Taste, and some classic Taste-defining images.
Varoom 19 stretches the idea of Taste as visual sensation like a ball of strudel dough. The menu includes New Wave Food Mags, Literary and Aesthetic Taste, John Pasche’s Lips for The Rolling Stones, and the question that erupts, like raw chilli on the tongue – who are the new tastemakers for Commissioners? And how do illustrators respond. In his feature ‘Art Directing Taste’, Michael Salu, Artistic Director of Granta is brutally honest – illustration, “might need to do more than vocationalise aesthetics and cultivate a broader palate of profundity for its own survival.
FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE:
NEW WAVE FOOD MAGS
Illustration is reshaping our relationship to food. Nicholas Blincoe explores the hot new FoodCult Magazines – Lucky Peach/ Fool/ Fire and Knives/ The Gourmand, speaking to the Art Directors of food’s New Wave.
LOW-RES FAST MINDS
Spending more time online grazing images is changing how we interpret them argues Bryony Quinn, a change reflected in experimental image-makers such as David O’Reilly and Kolchoz. Working with a stripped-down crunchy aesthetic, they’re challenging visual conventions
ART DIRECTING TASTE
The design of every magazine blends the taste of the Art director with values of the publication. Michael Salu, Artistic director of Granta magazine, reflects on creating a taste for a magazine that combines the literary and the Aesthetic. For reasons that become clear, Salu asks whether the discipline of Illustration should be rethought?
THE INDECISIVE MOMENT – M/M Paris
Working with artists and brands from Balenciaga to Bjork, the image-making of M/M Paris has consistently rethought the relationship between image and world. On the eve of launching a monograph, Mathias Augstyniak and Michaël Amzalag talk to John O’Reilly about the legacy of the French drawing tradition, dada, and the scent of an image.
TAP MY DRAWINGS
With the introduction of the iPad came a new format for illustrative practice, that of the ‘book app’. Yet with this emerging form, image quality has become of secondary concern to the development of interactivity. James Brocklehurst examines why this might be and what solutions are to hand in this issues peer-reviewed paper.
And more….
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