Japanese ARTS and BUSINESS - New Year's Cards or nengajo

Have you ever seen New Year’s Cards made in Japan? Now here is an idea for business, if you are thinking of starting one from the scratch. Like we are.

New Year's Cards Promotion 2012

© ShashinBako

Check this out: New Year's Cards, as many as 4.1 billion are printed and mailed by the Japan Post every year, according to wasabipress blog. For a population of about 130 million people, we get to an average of 31 cards purchased by each person. Individuals buy packages of 50 or 100 cards, corporations get much more for their partners and employees. Photo and Printing businesses are in charge of personal information, databases of names and mailing addresses. They do the digital input, the editing and the printing. The Japan Post delivers.

We can think of a few reasons why this system would not work as nicely someplace else. But maybe you can bring a change. Think about it. Get your numbers right. Multiply 4.1 billion cards by 90 yen per card, and you get a nice amount of 369 billion yen, a rough 306 million GBP, 369 million EUR, or 480 million US dollars turnover, or revenue. Dare say that profits are not bad. Interested?

We got a bunch of leaflets in the mail these past few weeks and we did not pay much attention to any of them. They were actually all headed for the rubbish bin this morning when we discovered the promotion for New Year’s Cards, a belated discovery. Why does any of these matter? Well, it is all related to practicality, inventiveness as opposed to a humanities degree. Or better: how to use your knowledge on arts and poetry to make business.

 

The launch of 2012 is for some of us just the right time to get practical: we decided to show you something quite Japanese: practicality. For a little while we are going to set aside How to find a career with your Humanities degree in 126 days, a relevant, smart, straightforward book written by James from selloutyoursoul.com , and start storytelling about New Year’s Cards, also known in Japan as the nengajo 年賀状. We scanned some stuff for you and searched some important arts databases.

First, is there a need for improvement in the greeting cards industry? We started getting a bit tired of getting e-cards that will not open, and when they do, they can be rather impersonal. We searched google for Western rivals to the Japanese cards. We could not find any. Instead we found these Jingle Bells greeting cards and we thought of them as boring: 

Google Images search for

"greeting cards" (today)

The home-made cards are obviously a step forward, yet something is still missing:

Google Images search for

 "homemade greeting cards" (today)

In order to engage into a comparative, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, multimodal Intermedialitaet approach to Greeting Cards Studies, we are showing you first a sample of Japanese envelopes, as a sign of exquisite taste. We reckon that previous research in Envelope Studies has ignored many important aspects of a field that should receive proper attention in the analytic tradition. Have a look.

Japanese envelopes with financial gifts

 for the bride and groom

The Japanese Greeting Cards do not need envelopes, because unlike the Royal Mail, the Japan Post can be trusted. But you have got to understand the taste first, since without it, there is no 369 billion yen result. This is the promotion from Fujifilm for this year:

New Year's Cards Promotion 2012 © Fujifilm

What you can see here are various examples of cards, calligraphic, photographic. And a form to fill in should you be interested in any offer (the image on the right side). We have got more samples from ShashinBako Printing:

New Year's Cards Promotion 2012 © ShashinBako

Ink-splashed writing is still very common. Sweets, too. Noticed the Japanese cookies? Those pink little flowers in the middle. You can promote a cookie business with these cards. Children can choose their own cards to send to friends, see image No.4. Do children send cards anymore these days? There is plenty of room for improvement in children's lives and adult lives as well. Call it tangibility.

Naturally, Japanese calligraphy cannot simply be replaced with alphabet. Is there anything that can be done to make English text look beautiful?

Is seems complicated, but perhaps it is easier than you imagine. Japanese Calligraphy is a form of art, and like any form of art, it could have stayed behind locked doors in archives, museums and temples. But no, Japanese Art escaped from Archives and National Treasures and moved forward, to why not, BUSINESS. This is a National Treasure from Kyoto, see the poems transcribed on paper, these handscrolls look beautiful, but they do not bring money to businesses. Nevertheless, these handscrolls made the New Year's cards 369 billion yen business possible. Bloody brilliant !

Poems from Wakan Roeishu

© Kyoto National Museum

read more on the e-museum website

Ink has a long history, just like charcoal does. 15th century painter Sesshu reduced the whole landscape to an ink-splashed primordial Breath, and this is not totally unrelated to that card in the middle image of the Fujifilm promotion above, the fleeting ideogram containing the whole space within. Ideas are there where you do not look.

Sesshu, Broken-ink Landscape, 1495

© Tokyo National Museum

see the entire scroll on the e-museum website

Ideogram or Kanji for "Dragon"

New Year's Cards Promotion 2012 © Fujifilm

And when you find them, you have got to put them into practice. Master Shuseki (1946-2007) spent his life making a business by carving ideograms into wood. If you have a better look at Sesshu's painting above, you will notice a red seal in the lower left corner. These are seals with ideograms pressed on paper, and there is no paper in Japan without them. They are replacing signatures and represent proofs of identification. 

Master Shuseki engraving a square seal

virtual tour of his atelier here

This story was about New Year's Cards in Japan. This might inspire you to start a business. It might not. Let us figure it out together. Leave a message, get in touch.  



And if you went all the way to the Degree Zero of hope due to a humanities PhD that messed up your life and killed your dreams, visit SHM-ltd, a company based in London, where humanities grads teach business to businesses, and you will find people like Sarah Tyler from Goldsmiths (fluent in French and Italian), or Nigel Shardlow, who holds a doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford, and works as

an experienced consultant and senior manager with a broad skill base encompassing qualitative research, marketing communications, new product development, strategy and planning, and change management.

SHM-ltd, a company based in London

humanities grads teaching business to businesses

Learn from them. Learn from James. There must be something we can do to have the life we always wanted.

Cheers,

The Bosa Bosa Review 

Unzipped Humanities: Learn about - Marcel Broodthaers

Welcome to the collection of The National Museum of Art, Osaka.

This post is about Marcel Broodthaers, a Belgian poet who has most probably lived terrified by the idea that he would die in poverty muttering chaotically from Mallarme, never, will never, if, as if, it was, it would be, nothing, perhaps, the number... He was a dreamer like many of us. And his poems did not sell.

This is a tale of artistic survival and intelligent choices for dreamers. From 1963.

When you feel life so intensely that you can almost 

breathe words,

you might sadly have to admit that 

you were born in the wrong era,

then cut all words out,

embed them in plaster,

and exhibit,

so that you can survive.

in other words

...if you have no voice: SCREAM;

...if you have no legs: RUN;

...if you have no hope: INVENT.

Alegria, Cirque du Soleil (Sydney, 2001)
 tassiocoimbra1's uploaded video

Welcome to the museum's collection:

Marcel BROODTHAERS La signature Serie 1. Tirage illimite. (1969)

We do not sign these posts in order to control online exposure. We fancy you trying to enjoy the texts and the images and that thought makes us feel very pleased. Yet by not signing these posts, their value drops. Marcel Broodthaers created a number of signature-style artworks. Simple branding strategy.

We have been working on La signature Serie 1. Tirage illimite, for the collection catalogue.

collecting data

capturing the shadows

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Marcel Broodthaers (28 January 1924- 28 January 1976) was born in Belgium, and lived in Bruxelles, Paris, Dusseldorf, London, Berlin. Broodthaers studied chemistry in Bruxelles, then devoted himself to writing poetry. In 1957 he published his first volume of poems Mon livre d’Ogre, made his first film Le clef de l’horloge. Un Poeme Cinematographique en honneur de Kurt Schwitters.

Marcel Broodthaers, Mon livre d'ogre (1957)

Unsuccessful as a poet, in 1963 Broodthaers turned to visual arts. He embedded the unsold, still partly wrapped copies of Pense-Bete, his forth and last volume of poetry, in plaster, and exhibited them as a sculpture. Installation, if you please.

Marcel Broodthaers, Pense-Bête (1964)
© Frieze Magazine

He had his first exhibition in 1964 in Bruxelles, won the Jeune Sculpture Belge award and had some other seventy solo exhibitions in the following 11 years. His main references are Magritte, Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud. Many of his “poem-works” seem to celebrate his favourite poem, Mallarme’s Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hasard. He died in Koln.

Stephane Mallarme's Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897) is an extraordinary piece of writing and is available online for your kind reference.

A.S.Kline uploaded the French original and the English translation in 2007 here.

Sumio Akiyama made a very good Japanese translation in 1966. Enjoy the poetic typography in all languages.

Un coup de des, French original

Un coup de des, in Sumio Akiyama's Japanese translation (1966)

Un coup de des, in A.S. Kline's English translation (2007)

Un coup de des, by Marcel Broodthaers

(published on the occasion of the Exposition Littéraire autour de Mallarmé show

@ Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp1969) 

ABOUT THE ARTWORK:

Curatorial night beat @ The Bosa Bosa Review

with La signature Serie 1. Tirage illimite. (1969)

La signature Serie 1. Tirage illimite. is a signature-style artwork from 1969 (silk screen on tracing paper, 53.5x73.5cm. Courtesy The National Museum of Art, Osaka) showing the artist’s “M.B.” initials in the classical Pop art style, as a series of repetitive representations of goods in a consumer society. The initials “M.B.”are replacing the content of the work with a nominalization. The “subject” of the work is the “signature” itself, the name of the author, therefore what really matters is not the author but the authorship (obviously~).

Being the “subject” of the work, the “authorship” is also seen as “object” of the art market and institutional systems. Broodthaers criticises the art market and makes an artwork he eventually sells on the art market. Like most criticisms, Broodthaers’ work becomes precisely what it initially criticised. La Signature Serie I has been created the very same year Foucault has published his essay What is an author?, which has become an essential reading on the topic of “authorship”. The author is seen by Foucault as a mere function attracting the empty assumptions and academic convictions governing the production, circulation and consumption of texts. The author is indeed dispensable, he could disappear and if he did, his disappearance would curiously not affect the work in any way. The subject of the work as independent from its author had been previously challenged by Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author (1967)

MB MB MB, Poeme. Partie I and Poeme. Partie II. are two other examples of signature-works by Broodthaers.

MB.MB.MB. (1968)

Courtesy Michael Werner, New York

from Flash Art XLIV, No 276, Jan-Feb 2011, pp 74-75

MB MB MB, is an earlier signature-style artwork from 1968 (oil, enamel on canvas, 65x115cm. Courtesy Michael Werner, New York) showing the artist’s initials “M.B.” scrawled in subtle gradations of colour from dark red to light pink, on a black picture plane.

Poeme. Partie I.      Poeme. Partie II.  (1973)

Courtesy Communaute francaise de Belgique

Poeme. Partie I and Poeme. Partie II are two signature-style works from 1973 (silk screen on paper, 97.5x67.5cm. Courtesy Communaute francaise de Belgique). In the first work showing “Gedicht. Poem. Poeme” as a header, the author’s initials “M.B.” are used repetitively and symmetrically in blocks on the page where they replace the verse expected in a poem. Broodthaers even counts the frequency of the “M.B.” initials for each block and writes the frequency number as a “value-number”.

Whether comic or tragic, classic or surrealist, the possible content of the poem, the text itself has no value, the value of a work, its “price” is a number decided by something else than the content: the name. The second work showing “Change. Exchange. Wechsel” as a header, will present the initials “M.B.” repetitive and symmetrical in columns where they become an opportunity for the exchange of numbers and foreign currencies into one another. The power of words. Ironical for a failed poet, is it not?

Useful French-Japanese-English glossary

Marcel BROODTHAERS, “La signature Serie 1. Tirage illimite” 

マルセル・ブロータース　　『署名、シリーズ I』

”The Signature I. Unlimited Edition”

“Mon livre d’Ogre”

『人食い鬼のような、わたしの本』

"My Ogre Book"

“Le clef de l’horloge.  Un poeme Cinematographique en l'honneur de Kurt Schwitters”

『大時計の鍵（クルトシュヴィッタースに捧げる映像詩）』

"The Key to the Clock. A cinematographic poem in honour of Kurt Schwitters"

“Pense-Bete”

『備忘録』

"Reminder"

Stephane Mallarme “Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hasard”

ステファヌ・マラルメ『骰子一擲いかで偶然を破棄すべき』

 "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance"

“Poeme. Partie I” , “Poeme. Partie II”

『詩。両替１』・『詩。両替２』

"Poem I", "Poem II"


Related links

You might consider Marcel's works in the Tate Collection :

the showing at Milton Keys Gallery (UK) and Martin Herbert's Frieze article (2008) :

Exhibition at Milton Keys Gallery, UK

 © Milton Keys , Photo Andy Keate

the film-installation at Marian Goodman Gallery (New York) and Media Farzin's Art Agenda article (2010) :

Installation © Marian Goodman Gallery, NY

the MoMA Collection :

Marcel Broodthaers, White Cabinet and White Table

from the MoMA collection page

Le Corbeau et le Renard film (1967) on youtube :

film uploaded on youtube by NegativeWisper on 29 Dec 2009