One way to make use of a miserable London early-summer day (temperature: 5 degrees!) is to stay indoors and explore one of the museums. Did that yesterday, visited the Surrealism exhibition at V&A yesterday.
Surrealism seems to be very interesting; somewhere between contemporary and modern art, it can be best defined as fantasy bound loosely by reality. Think of the old woman-young woman whom do you see picture; that is surrealism. But so is a lot more things. And this exhibition takes you the stages of development nicely. On the exhibition home page link above is the photo of the lip sofa; a sofa in the shape of lips deliberately made as glassy as possible by Salvador Dali, the biggest name of the surrealist movement. There’s also the arm chair (chair with the back’s edges in the shape of arms), lobster home phone (old-style circular dial phone with a lobster as the talking piece) and jewelery representing lion’s face sprawling out diamonds.
What I really liked was how surrealism was commercialized in interesting ways; by patrons yes, but also by advertising agencies, fashion designers and interior decorators.
And then today, I put myself to work for the marketing research assignment by Bruce Hardie, one of our really-good marketing professors. Gosh, he has made me sceptical about everything! I mean everything, I wonder if I will ever believe a market research result again. But beyond all that, an interesting bit of info for those who didn’t know (I surely didn’t before this class): Research findings by Forrester, the famous and oft-quoted technology market research firm, is not believed by serious academics and professionals because they do not publish the methodology undertaken to collect the data. Only when you know the methodology can you identify biases (talking to a non-representative sample) and sampling errors (not taking a large enough sample size for the given confidence) in research, and if you can’t do that, how do you believe what they say. So much for my using their data in many, many presentations over the last two years! Oh well, well-learnt for my future.
