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TEFAF, Take Two: Skulls, Artists’ Jewelry, and Great Design

Hurry up, please, it’s time. TEFAF favorite Kunstkammer Georg Laue’s offerings included, at right, a Renaissance vanitas cabinet. Lest would-be buyers tarry, the front door of the cabinet opens to reveal a scene with a naked child leaning on a skull with an hourglass at his feet.
Shoppers ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Kanye West have popped into the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF), which runs through Sunday in the Dutch town of Maastricht. No word on Kanye’s haul, but the Met scored “Virgil’s Tomb in Moonlight” (1779) by Joseph Wright of Derby (a poster version is yours for $19.99), Ronald Lauder picked up Picasso‘s “Homme au Chapeau” (1964) for $8 million, and the soon-to-reopen Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has enriched its collection with works including an 1809 Nicolaas Bauer canvas and Antoine Vechte‘s silver “Galathea” vase, created in 1843 for a French nobleman. Meanwhile, 26-year-old TEFAF is looking eastward: the fair’s organizers announced this week that they’re in talks with Sotheby’s to develop an art fair in China, so stay tuned for updates on “TEFAF Beijing 2014.” We’ve still got plenty to show from you from this year’s artstravaganza in Maastricht–check out 25 more must-sees:

Gagosian gallery positioned this 1946 Picasso nearby Rudolf Stingel‘s 2012 photo-realist painting of the artist as young man. At right, L’Arc de Seine’s jaw-dropping stand featured a circa 1930 shagreen-covered desk and chair by Jean-Michel Frank.

The secret to eternal youth? Multiple suitors and frequent ski trips, suggests this first edition from Shapero Rare Books.

Didier Ltd’s assortment of jewelry by artists included this one-of-a-kind silver brooch made by Harry Bertoia during his time at Cranbrook in the ’40s. And what do you get when you combine a fishing float painted black and a gilded beer can? Louise Nevelson‘s 1984 pendant necklace.
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DivShot Interface Builder for Web Apps in Open Beta
ROM goes Portal on its Logo
Guard on Duty During Gardner Museum Heist Talks to CNN
The FBI announced earlier this week that it has identified who was behind the 1990 art heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but–spoiler alert–the Feds aren’t naming names, and the statute of limitations has run out on the crime, so the creeps that swiped masterpieces by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas can’t be prosecuted. This may or not explain why Rick Abbath, one of the night watchmen on duty the evening of the crime 23 years ago, has decided to get chatty. In a segment on last night’s episode of Anderson Cooper 360°, CNN’s Randi Kaye spoke with Abbath about what happened inside the museum that fateful night. Kaye takes a closer look at the famous caper in 81 Minutes: Inside the Greatest Art Heist in History, a documentary that airs on CNN tomorrow at 10 p.m. Eastern.
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Twitter Along with UnBeige

Famed literary critic Lionel Trilling once described Henry James as a “social twitterer.” Sure, he meant it as an insult, but it makes us feel better about having signed up to twitter ourselves. Look to the official UnBeige Twitter feed, for up-to-the-minute newsbites, event snippets, links of interest, design trivia, and free candy (OK, we’re still working on the physics of that last one). The mediabistro.com tech wizards have added to the sidebar at right a handful of our most recent word bursts (limited to 140 characters), but you can sign up to follow all of our twittering, and start twittering yourself at twitter.com.
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Design Jobs: Gannett, Washingtonian Magazine, Spa Week Media Group
This week, Gannett is hiring a senior graphic designer, while Washingtonian Magazine needs a photo director. Spa Week Media Group is seeking a graphic designer, and the American Marketing Association is on the hunt for a graphic designer, too. Get the scoop on these openings and more below, and find additional just-posted gigs on Mediabistro.
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Find more great design jobs on the UnBeige job board. Looking to hire? Tap into our network of talented UnBeige pros and post a risk-free job listing. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.
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Adobe Wins, Loses and Celebrates

It's been quite the week for Adobe. It began by announcing that it now has more than 500,000 paid subscribers for its Creative Cloud offering, up 153,000 in just three months, with an additional 2 million taking advantage of free or trial versions. Adobe sees most of its customers moving to the cloud by the end of 2015, resulting in 4 million individual and team Creative Cloud subscriptions. Adobe stock gains accordingly led to cigars all round.
That was the good news. Tempering that was the sudden departure of CTO Kevin Lynch, who next week will be working for Apple. Lynch will be remembered as Mr. Macromedia, who after the acquisition became the face of Flash as the solution for just about everything. After Steve "Flash Killer" Jobs led a highly public fatwah against Flash, Lynch was forced to regroup and became the architect and champion of Adobe's Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud. With Jobs now just a memory, there was no barrier left to Lynch's assimilation into the Apple mother ship. Will he be able to turn around the firm's feeble cloud initiatives? One can only hope so, although early reports are that his responsibilities will be in the domain of hardware. Go figure.
And the celebration? Apparently the Photoshop Facebook page has passed the five-million Like mark, and the dev team responded by compiling "some lesser-known facts" about the creation of Photoshop CS6, including the amount of beer consumed during its creation. Here's hoping they that top that for the creation of Photoshop CS7.
PopChar X for Mac Character Selection Enhanced
PDFpen Updated for Editing PDF Documents
Activating Schools without Clichés
Watch This: Jolan van der Wiel’s ‘Gravity Stool’

Jólan van der Wiel‘s “Gravity” stools, tables, candleholders, and bowls appear ripped from an enchanted sea floor–or are they Magic Rocks run amok? At once otherworldly and organic, these moody forms are in fact the products of the Amsterdam-based designer’s “Gravity Tool,” an innovation that earned him top honors at last year’s DMY International Design Festival Berlin. “I admire objects that show an experimental discovery, translated to a functional design,” explains van der Wiel. “It is my belief that developing new ‘tools’ is an important means of inspiration and allows new forms to take shape.” Now, just two years out of Gerrit Rietveld Academy’s designLAB department, he has a “Gravity stool” at London’s Design Museum, as part of the “Designs of the Year 2013” show that opens today. This short film by Miranda Stet provides a luscious look at van der Wiel’s unique process, which is something of a team effort among opposing magnetic fields, the forces of gravity, two-component plastics, and good old-fashioned elbow grease.
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Are You Earning What You Should? Consult Coroflot’s Creative Employment Snapshot
The design-minded datacrunchers over at Coroflot recently released their redesigned and better-than-ever Design Salary Guide, now a rolling (and free!) tool that reports results in real-time. They’ve followed it up with an executive summary of sorts that is tailor-made for designers–in a word, infographics. Check out the just-published “Creative Employment Snapshot” for a visual presentation of the current state of employment in design, creative, and interaction fields–including current and potential earnings. There’s even a PDF version to print out and slip onto your boss’s desk.
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Wacom Announces Cintiq 13HD Pen-on-screen Display for Color-critical Work
Flexible Harsh is the New Sexy Ugly
Toyo Ito Wins Pritzker Prize

Portrait by Yoshiaki Tsutsui. The photo at right is Iwan Baan’s “Tokyo #1″ (2006), part of a project to celebrate the opening of Ito’s Mikimoto Ginza 2 building. See more of Baan’s work in a solo exhibition on view through April 13 at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in Los Angeles.
“Firmness, commodity, and delight.” These are the three words–cribbed from Vitruvius, who considered “firmitas, utilitas, venustas” to be the fundamental principles of architecture–that appear on the Louis Sullivan-inspired bronze medallion that is awarded to each laureate of the Pritzker architecture prize. This year the coveted hardware goes to Toyo Ito, who’ll receive it along with $100,000 at a ceremony in Boston on May 29. Ito is the sixth Japanese architect to receive the prize, which has previously been awarded to Kenzo Tange, Fumihiko Maki, Tadao Ando, and SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.
Ito was selected by a jury that included Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who lauded the 71-year-old for “improving the quality of both public and private spaces,” and 2002 Pritzker laureate Glenn Murcutt, who praised Ito’s dogged, shape-shifting pursuit of excellence. “His work has not remained static and has never been predictable,” notes the Aussie architect. And for Ito, that’s exactly the point. “I have been designing architecture bearing in mind that it would be possible to realize more comfortable spaces if we are freed from all the restrictions even for a little bit,” said Ito upon learning of his award. “However, when one building is completed, I become painfully aware of my own inadequacy, and it turns into energy to challenge the next project. Probably this process must keep repeating itself in the future. Therefore, I will never fix my architectural style and never be satisfied with my works.”
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Walker Art Center Welcomes Letman: Watch Tonight’s Live Webcast and Lettering Demo
The amazing Letman (a.k.a. Job Wouters) will be on hand tonight at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to discuss and demonstrate his eye-popping approach to the alphabet–think illustration meets grafitti meets graphic design. The Amsterdam-based designer’s talk and hand-lettering demo, which will be webcast live at 7 p.m. EST, is part of the Walker’s “Insights” series of design lectures that earlier this month welcomed Geoff McFetridge and Eike König, and next week features Wouters’ fellow Mokummer, Luna Maurer. Each of the designers has been commissioned to create a project for the Walker, and Wouters is at work on mural. While you await tonight’s webcast, enjoy his 2003 video, “”abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” (below), in which Wouters and his then four-year-old nephew, Gradus, practice their penmanship.
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Lori Greiner Discusses ‘Oprah Effect,’ What Inventors Need to Succeed
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Lori Greiner knows firsthand the power of Oprah Winfrey to sell product.
In part two of our conversation with Greiner, the “Queen of QVC” and regular on ABC’s “Shark Tank” tells SocialTimes editor Devon Glenn what happens when one of your products makes the list of Oprah’s favorite things, how every inventor thinks they have the greatest thing in the world and what they need to do to make sure they’re right.
For more videos, check out our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV
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In Brief: Met Museum Admission Fee Kerfuffle, Swiping at Pictures, Fashionable Philanthrophy
• Elsewhere in museum thievery news, Gerald Jones, a disgruntled former employee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art–who insists he is not disgruntled but a whistleblower (someone’s been watching Englightened!)–is speaking out about the museum’s tactics for getting visitors to pay the suggested $25 admission fee. “I arranged for security officers to forcibly remove the museum visitors who demanded entry without paying,” Jones told the NY Post.
• How has technology reshaped contemporary life and what does it mean for photography? Curator Christopher Y. Lew considers “Swiping at Pictures” in an online-only essay commissioned to accompany Aperture‘s boldly redesigned spring 2013 issue.
• Fashion powerhouses such as Donna Karan, Michael Kors, Diane von Furstenberg, and Zac Posen are serious about philanthrophy. Gotham goes inside the minds of “6 Designers Who Give Big.”
• The selection of a new pope prompted Norma Kamali to consider how much the Catholic church has influenced her career in fashion. “The tapestries and brocades, the candles, and the bar reliefs, and sculptures, and the holy water. Every one of my senses was a part of the experience,” she wrote in a recent “Note from Norma.”
• And speaking of fashion influences and pyramid schemes, Vince Camuto has ripped off Valentino’s wildly successful rockstud heel. Camuto’s “Mikhal” model is priced at $118, while the Italian original goes for around $950.
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Break in Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist: Thieves Identified, Says FBI
Exactly 23 years after the stunning heist of masterworks from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, FBI officials announced today that they have identified the thieves (“members of a criminal organization with a base in the mid-Atlantic states and New England” is all they’ll say, dashing our hopes that Thomas Crown, Steve McQueen, and/or Pierce Brosnan was involved) and determined where the 13 artworks had traveled in the years after the robbery (Connecticut! Philadelphia!), but the hunt is still on for the pilfered trio of Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a portrait by Edouard Manet, and sketches by Renoir, among others. Check out the FBI’s newly released video (above). There may be a $5 million reward in it for you.
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