Just Fun: Manhattan Office Workers Start a Post-it War, and Stick With It

from the N.Y Times May 17, 2016

By RICK ROJASMAY 17, 2016

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Sticky-note displays in the windows of 200 Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday, the result of a friendly back-and-forth between firms. CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times 

In a noisy and bustling stretch of Lower Manhattan, where cabdrivers blare their horns and pedestrians scurry by with laser focus, people have places to be, it seems, and are disinclined to waste any time getting there.

But every so often, someone walking along Canal Street glances upward and pauses. And then pulls out a phone to take a picture.

On Tuesday, the windows of the office buildings on both sides of the street, near the Holland Tunnel, were covered in sticky notes, recreating Marge and Maggie from “The Simpsons” and a Superman logo that stood as tall as an entire floor. There was a homage to Prince, his symbol depicted in purple Post-its. And there were cheekier messages and references to memes as well: “5pm yet?” and “Bye Felicia.”

The creations are the result of a friendly back and forth between the firms, mostly advertising and marketing companies, on opposite sides of Canal Street.

“Wow, that’s funny,” said Alexa Catania, 19, who stopped when a mosaic of a white ghost against a yellow background caught her eye; she thought she and her friend had stumbled across the offices of Snapchat on their way to lunch. “I was trying to figure out what it was.”

“Only in New York,” her friend Gerald J. Ruland said, as Ms. Catania snapped a picture.

The whole thing started last week, when “Hi” appeared in a window in the building at 75 Varick Street on the north side of Canal. Across the street, in the offices of the advertising company Havas Worldwide, at 200 Hudson Street, someone responded with “Sup.”

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Workers have recreated Maggie and Marge Simpson, above, as well as logos and memes. There’s also a purple homage to Prince.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times 

“That’s how simply things can start, with a little ‘Hi,’” said Toygar Bazarkaya, the chief creative officer for the Americas at Havas Worldwide.

It blossomed quickly from there, with workers sketching out designs and using scores and scores of the adhesive notes in a range of colors to create their displays, many of which have grown far more sophisticated than the initial text-message shorthand.

“It’s cool to see it evolve over six floors,” Jeremy Pagano, who works in account services for an ad company on the north-side building, said while taking a smoke break outside.

“It has really come to life,” his co-worker Angela Donza said.

The back and forth has generated lots of attention on social media, with hundreds of pictures posted on Twitter and Instagram, with hashtags like #CanalNotes and #PostItWar. Even the maker of Post-it notes caught wind of it and has sent the companies involved briefcases packed with a variety of notes in different colors.

Inside the offices, workers have found it exciting to watch everything unfold.

“It’s definitely surprising,” said Kristina Bostley, an editorial manager for Biolumina, a pharmaceutical advertising agency in the building on the north side. “We never really know what they’re planning, and they don’t know what we’re planning.”

It seems unclear where the competition is headed. It started organically, Mr. Bazarkaya said, and he hopes it continues that way. It has been a fun way for workers to have another outlet for their creativity — after work, during lunch or in the occasional lulls during the day, of course.

“We have a day job,” he said.

When Beauty Strikes By David Brooks
New York Times , January 15, 2016

Across the street from my apartment building in Washington there’s a gigantic supermarket and a CVS. Above the supermarket there had been a large empty space with floor-to-ceiling windows. The space was recently taken by a ballet school, so now when I step outside in the evenings I see dozens of dancers framed against the windows, doing their exercises — gracefully and often in unison.

It can be arrestingly beautiful. The unexpected beauty exposes the limitations of the normal, banal streetscape I take for granted every day. But it also reminds me of a worldview, which was more common in eras more romantic than our own.

This is the view that beauty is a big, transformational thing, the proper goal of art and maybe civilization itself. This humanistic worldview holds that beauty conquers the deadening aspects of routine; it educates the emotions and connects us to the eternal.

Vincent Van Gogh  Pollard Willows at Sunset (Saules au coucher du soleil)

By arousing the senses, beauty arouses thought and spirit. A person who has appreciated physical grace may have a finer sense of how to move with graciousness through the tribulations of life. A person who has appreciated the Pietà has a greater capacity for empathy, a more refined sense of the different forms of sadness and a wider awareness of the repertoire of emotions.

John O’Donohue, a modern proponent of this humanistic viewpoint, writes in his book “Beauty: The Invisible Embrace”: “Some of our most wonderful memories are beautiful places where we felt immediately at home. We feel most alive in the presence of the beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul. … Without beauty the search for truth, the desire for goodness and the love of order and unity would be sterile exploits. Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur.”

The art critic Frederick Turner wrote that beauty “is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.”

By this philosophy, beauty incites spiritual longing.

Today the word eros refers to sex, but to the Greeks it meant the fervent desire to reach excellence and deepen the voyage of life. This eros is a powerful longing. Whenever you see people doing art, whether they are amateurs at a swing dance class or a professional painter, you invariably see them trying to get better. “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart,” Vincent van Gogh wrote.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George, 1922

Some people call eros the fierce longing for truth. “Making your unknown known is the important thing,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote. Mathematicians talk about their solutions in aesthetic terms, as beautiful or elegant. 

Paul Klee  Houses by the Bridge

Others describe eros as a more spiritual or religious longing. They note that beauty is numinous and fleeting, a passing experience that enlarges the soul and gives us a glimpse of the sacred. As the painter Paul Klee put it, “Color links us with cosmic regions.”

These days we all like beautiful things. Everybody approves of art. But the culture does not attach as much emotional, intellectual or spiritual weight to beauty. We live, as Leon Wieseltier wrote in an essay for The Times Book Review, in a post-humanist moment. That which can be measured with data is valorized. Economists are experts on happiness. The world is understood primarily as the product of impersonal forces; the nonmaterial dimensions of life explained by the material ones.

Over the past century, artists have had suspicious and varied attitudes toward beauty. Some regard all that aesthetics-can-save-your-soul mumbo jumbo as sentimental claptrap. They want something grittier and more confrontational. In the academy, theory washed like an avalanche over the celebration of sheer beauty — at least for a time.

For some reason many artists prefer to descend to the level of us pundits. Abandoning their natural turf, the depths of emotion, symbol, myth and the inner life, they decided that relevance meant naked partisan stance-taking in the outer world (often in ignorance of the complexity of the evidence). Meanwhile, how many times have you heard advocates lobby for arts funding on the grounds that it’s good for economic development?

In fact, artists have their biggest social impact when they achieve it obliquely. If true racial reconciliation is achieved in this country, it will be through the kind of deep spiritual and emotional understanding that art can foster. You change the world by changing peoples’ hearts and imaginations.

The shift to post-humanism has left the world beauty-poor and meaning-deprived. It’s not so much that we need more artists and bigger audiences, though that would be nice. It’s that we accidentally abandoned a worldview that showed how art can be used to cultivate the fullest inner life. We left behind an ethos that reminded people of the links between the beautiful, the true and the good — the way pleasure and love can lead to nobility.