As Baghdad Erupts in Riot of Color, Calls to Tone It Down

Multicolored fluorescent lights cover one of the city’s bridges, creating a Hawaiian luau effect. Blast walls and security checkpoints stick out because they are often painted in hot pink.

Baghdad has weathered invasion, occupation, sectarian warfare and suicide bombers. But now it faces a new scourge: tastelessness.

Iraqi artists and architecture critics who shudder at each new pastel building blame a range of factors for Baghdad’s slide into tackiness: including corruption and government ineptitude, as well as everyday Iraqis who are trying to banish their grim past and are unaccustomed to having the freedom to choose any color they want.

“It’s happening because Iraqis want to get rid of the recent past,” said Caecilia Pieri, the author of “Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork 1920-1950.” “They see the colors as a way of expressing something new, but they don’t know which colors to use. The Arab mentality is that you have to be the owner of your building, and you do what you want with it. But there are no government regulations like in Paris or Rome. It’s anarchy of taste.”

For decades, Saddam Hussein’s government ruled over aesthetics in Iraq’s capital with the same grip it exercised over its people. A committee of artists, architects and designers approved the color of buildings as well as the placement of shrubs. With many beige brick buildings, and color used sparingly — most often on mosques — the city’s appearance was uniform and restrained.

But the committee, like Mr. Hussein’s government, fell apart after the United States invasion in 2003. Some years later, when Iraqis started rebuilding as the violence declined, there was no central arbiter. Bright colors started appearing, and places like the Trade Ministry were done up in pink, orange and yellow.

On one corner, the city might gleam like Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich country many Iraqis hope they can emulate. In other places, the look is still muted and tradition-bound. But the reign of riotous color seems to be steadily expanding.

“It’s something to feel ashamed of,” said Qasim Sabti, one of Iraq’s most famous artists. “It is the ugliest the city has ever been.”

Government officials say they do not have strong enough laws to police the look of Baghdad, as Mr. Hussein once did. The officials also contend that many agency leaders, with money to spend on renovations and architectural face-lifts, are hiring the cheapest, most inept contractors and pocketing kickbacks and unspent funds.

“We don’t have a strong enough deterrent to stop it,” said Najem al-Kinany, the official in the Baghdad mayor’s office in charge of design, who formed a public taste committee a year ago after receiving a flood of complaints about the city’s appearance. “Before 2003, the subject of public taste and choosing what was appropriate was much better than now.”

Mowaffaq al-Taey, who designed many buildings for Mr. Hussein, and Mr. Sabti, the artist, blame the decline in taste on the fact that so many Iraqis appreciated the arts were wealthy enough to flee the country.

“Right now, when I have an exhibition at my gallery nobody comes from the government, only the art students and other artists,” Mr. Sabti said. “Taking care of the look of the city has stopped because the people who have come to power were living in villages with animals. So how did they develop their taste?

“Saddam was also a villager,” he continued, “but he was smart enough to depend on the qualified and professional people who understood art.”

Mr. Taey said Iraqis were emulating the architects and designers of the Persian Gulf region.

“They are trying to show they are part of the sophisticated world, but they don’t know what they are doing,” he said. “They want to prove that they are not just from the countryside.”

The tackiness has also invaded the offices of many government agencies, which have become full of plastic flowers, cheap paintings and multicolored rugs and furniture, he said.

Several agencies buy their art from a market in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad. Hussein Ali al-Khafaji, the son of a famous Iraqi artist and the owner of a Karada gallery, said that many officials did not even come to the gallery to buy artwork for their offices.

“What they do is send their bodyguards here,” he said. “Some of the bodyguards take photos of the paintings to show their officials so they can choose a painting.”

Mr. Khafaji said he routinely charged $1,000 for paintings worth only $100, because the officials did not understand art. “They don’t know the difference between a good and bad painting,” he said. “They don’t understand anything, so how can they understand art?”

The officials in charge of the public taste committee said they had had some success in persuading government agencies to tone down the colors, but acknowledged that they had a way to go. Until then, Mr. Sabti said, Baghdad will just have to scuff its way through one of the ugliest periods in its history. “There is no worse era than this time,” he said.

For Mr. Taey, the best hope may be a plague of sandstorms.

Then, he said, “all of these colors will be hiding because of good old dust. It will at least reduce the bad taste, and maybe that’s God’s gift to correct our mistakes.”

Tim Arango and Jack Healy contributed reporting.

 

Advertising: Tales of Reading in Reintroducing a Color Device

Make that Nook Color, the e-reading tablet that Barnes & Noble is hoping to reintroduce to consumers in an advertising campaign that begins on Monday.

In gently singsong language that evokes Dr. Seuss — sure enough, “The Cat in the Hat” makes a brief appearance later in the ad — a commercial makes a general pitch for reading as it depicts people, old and young, utterly absorbed in their books while the world goes on around them.

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A series of dreamy sequences shows a dark-haired boy in a hoodie sweatshirt, reading in a park and blissfully paying no attention as two other boys and a dog noisily brush past him. A young girl sits cross-legged on a dining-room rug, a Nook in her lap, as she absentmindedly tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. A couple is stretched out in bed, locked in their own worlds, she with a Nook and he with a book. Four people sit, still as statues, reading, on the stairs of a public building as passers-by rush down the steps.

One print ad bears the tagline “Read Forever,” with a picture of a small boy curled up on a window seat gazing at the screen on his Nook.

The hopeful message? Reading is changing, but it’s not going away.

There are no Barnes & Noble stores in the ads, a nod to the transformation that is under way in the publishing industry. As e-books have taken off, foot traffic in brick-and-mortar stores has decreased, a sure sign that more consumers are doing their book-shopping from home. (Or wherever they and their e-readers happen to be at the moment.)

Barnes & Noble, which operates the nation’s largest chain of bookstores, is hoping many of those purchases will happen on the Nook Color, the $249 tablet that the company introduced last year as an addition to its original Nook, a black-and-white reader whose versions are currently priced at $149 and $199.

There are dozens of e-readers and tablets on the market, and many more are expected to arrive this year. But the most prominent players for devices that focus on reading e-books are Barnes & Noble and Amazon, with its popular Kindle.

Amazon still has a significantly larger share of the e-reading market, but Barnes & Noble has surprised many people in the industry with the gains it has made with its Nook, and the two retailers are locked in a battle for e-reading customers.

Barnes & Noble spent more than $30 million on advertising in 2010 but was seriously outgunned by Amazon, which spent more than $150 million, according to Kantar Media, which tracks advertising spending.

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Last year, an initial campaign to introduce the Nook Color opened on a picture of a Barnes & Noble store, the camera zooming through the entrance and landing on a Nook Color, while Sarah Jessica Parker narrated the voice-over.

This campaign, which was created by Mullen in Boston, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, was an effort to attach some emotional power to reading and to the Barnes & Noble brand. Mullen was hired as Barnes & Noble’s new agency of record in February.

“We really wanted to reach out to all the readers and get the message out about how wonderful reading is,” said Sasha Norkin, the vice president for digital and channel marketing for BN.com. “The world changes, technology changes, but people love to read, and we’re giving them the best way to read.”

The Nook was first introduced in 2009, two years after Amazon began selling its Kindle. Last year, Barnes & Noble added the Nook Color, a device featuring a seven-inch screen with a backlit LCD display, suitable for reading books, magazines and newspapers, as well as browsing the Web, playing games and listening to music.

The first commercial in the campaign will run on Monday, and a longer 60-second spot will run during “American Idol” on Thursday. Print ads will run in The New York Times and USA Today. On the company’s Facebook page, users will be invited to share their feelings about reading.

Barnes & Noble declined to disclose the total spending on the campaign.

To add authenticity, casting agents were dispatched to find people reading in public places like bus stops and cafes. Some people were recruited to do voice-overs and appear in the commercial, which was shot in naturally lighted locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They eventually numbered more than half of the people on screen, while the rest were actors.

“It transcended age, race, gender,” said Tim Vaccarino, the group creative director for Mullen. “We wanted to find a collection of people who represented this community of readers.”