1
VISUAL ARTS: Painting
Exhibition of Paintings by Nancy Jay (see Bishop, Ch 1.)
2
VISUAL ARTS: Painting
1. Picture as Magic
2. Some Concepts
3. How to Talk in Pictures
4. World of Painting
5. Abstraction
6. Formal Elements, Composition
7. How to Look
8. Styles: Types and Traditions3
What is a Picture?
• An Image
• With two dimensions:
– Height + width, but no (or little) depth
• An Icon*
• It’s about depiction and truth, as an
artist or other people may see it.
Byzantine
Icon:
A Sacred Picture
* Icon: Sacred picture; or a
small image or symbol that
represents something A modern icon 4
What are
SYMBOLS?
Signs point to things that
exist
but cannot be seen.
Symbols point to
ideas.
5
What is a Style?
Why do we have STYLEs?
Why do Styles Change?
6
stylus
Some CONTEXTUAL factors
STYLE: distinctive artistic way a subject is handled:
– Individual. Like van Gogh, Monet, or Picasso (who was known for
more styles than most well-known artists)
– Group. Impressionists, Romantics, Abstract Expressionists
– Period of time: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Modern,
Mogul Dynasty, New Kingdom (Egypt) . . .
AUDIENCE to whom the work is addressed, such as: nobility,
middle class, cultural group, self-reflection, etc.
PATRON (client) who commissions (or just buys) art works:
Religious, state, commercial institution . . . individual
Artworks can function, or express responses to cultural
values, beliefs, philosophies, or historical events. 7
Paintings
An alternate way
of seeing . . .
Peche Merle, France
25,000 – 16,000 year old paintings.
Visualization, invocation, expression.
8
Prehistoric Cave Paintings,
Painting:
Media, Materials, and Techniques
MEDIUM: vehicle for
Pigments suspended in:
• Oil paint
• Acrylic
• Egg Tempera
• Watercolor
• Pastel
• Fresco
• Mixed media
– ex.: collage
MATERIALS
• Wall
• Scroll
• Canvas
• Panel
• Paper
• Mural
Techniques-how you
handle media + materials.
9* Pigment: dry, ground up, insoluble substance when suspended
in a liquid vehicle (medium) becomes paint.
SURFACES:
cave walls:
Lascaux Cave,
France.
15,000 BCE.
pigments on stone
Scroll
Painting.
Pigments
on paper.
India
Portrait
Painting.
Pablo Picasso.
oil on canvas
1901.
10
Fresco : a type of wall painting
or �mural.� 2 kinds:
“Dry” fresco (Egypt)
�True� fresco: pigments
chemically bind with plaster
Giotto, The Lamentation, e. 1300s, CE
Pigments painted
on dry plaster.
Artist: anonymous
(unknown)
11
Fresco: origins and use
http://rickbaitz.com/portfolio/film-television/23-fresco-opening/
Painting Tool Kit:
Imagery
3 Types of Pictorial Imagery:
– Representational (also called Figurative)
– Abstract, Abstraction
– Non-Objective (also Non-Figurative)
12
- Representational
- Abstract
- Non-objective
13
Why make pictures?
Popular answer: to depict the world. A picture
mimics seeing. Mimesis, Aristotle called it.
But there’s more, such as to:
Honor / Revere
Reme.
TỔNG ÔN TẬP THI VÀO LỚP 10 MÔN TIẾNG ANH NĂM HỌC 2023 - 2024 CÓ ĐÁP ÁN (NGỮ Â...
1VISUAL ARTS PaintingExhibition of Paintings by N.docx
1. 1
VISUAL ARTS: Painting
Exhibition of Paintings by Nancy Jay (see Bishop, Ch 1.)
2
VISUAL ARTS: Painting
1. Picture as Magic
2. Some Concepts
3. How to Talk in Pictures
4. World of Painting
5. Abstraction
6. Formal Elements, Composition
7. How to Look
8. Styles: Types and Traditions3
What is a Picture?
• An Image
• With two dimensions:
– Height + width, but no (or little) depth
• An Icon*
• It’s about depiction and truth, as an
2. artist or other people may see it.
Byzantine
Icon:
A Sacred Picture
* Icon: Sacred picture; or a
small image or symbol that
represents something A modern icon 4
What are
SYMBOLS?
Signs point to things that
exist
but cannot be seen.
Symbols point to
ideas.
5
What is a Style?
Why do we have STYLEs?
Why do Styles Change?
6
3. stylus
Some CONTEXTUAL factors
STYLE: distinctive artistic way a subject is handled:
– Individual. Like van Gogh, Monet, or Picasso (who was
known for
more styles than most well-known artists)
– Group. Impressionists, Romantics, Abstract Expressionists
– Period of time: Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque,
Modern,
Mogul Dynasty, New Kingdom (Egypt) . . .
AUDIENCE to whom the work is addressed, such as: nobility,
middle class, cultural group, self-reflection, etc.
PATRON (client) who commissions (or just buys) art works:
Religious, state, commercial institution . . . individual
Artworks can function, or express responses to cultural
values, beliefs, philosophies, or historical events. 7
Paintings
An alternate way
of seeing . . .
Peche Merle, France
25,000 – 16,000 year old paintings.
Visualization, invocation, expression.
4. 8
Prehistoric Cave Paintings,
Painting:
Media, Materials, and Techniques
MEDIUM: vehicle for
Pigments suspended in:
• Oil paint
• Acrylic
• Egg Tempera
• Watercolor
• Pastel
• Fresco
• Mixed media
– ex.: collage
MATERIALS
• Wall
• Scroll
• Canvas
• Panel
• Paper
• Mural
Techniques-how you
handle media + materials.
9* Pigment: dry, ground up, insoluble substance when
suspended
in a liquid vehicle (medium) becomes paint.
5. SURFACES:
cave walls:
Lascaux Cave,
France.
15,000 BCE.
pigments on stone
Scroll
Painting.
Pigments
on paper.
India
Portrait
Painting.
Pablo Picasso.
oil on canvas
1901.
10
Fresco : a type of wall painting
or �mural.� 2 kinds:
“Dry” fresco (Egypt)
�True� fresco: pigments
chemically bind with plaster
Giotto, The Lamentation, e. 1300s, CE
Pigments painted
6. on dry plaster.
Artist: anonymous
(unknown)
11
Fresco: origins and use
http://rickbaitz.com/portfolio/film-television/23-fresco-opening/
Painting Tool Kit:
Imagery
3 Types of Pictorial Imagery:
– Representational (also called Figurative)
– Abstract, Abstraction
– Non-Objective (also Non-Figurative)
12
- Representational
- Abstract
- Non-objective
13
Why make pictures?
Popular answer: to depict the world. A picture
mimics seeing. Mimesis, Aristotle called it.
But there’s more, such as to:
7. Honor / Revere
Remember
Imagine
Control
Document
Alter / Express
Or, Just paint for itself: Art for art�s sake14
Popular Types of
Subjects:
• Portrait
• Genre (slice of
everyday life)
• Narrative:
– Religious/Mythic/
– Literary/Historical
• Landscape
• Still Life
• Symbolic
• The Nude
• Fantasy
• Abstract
• Protest
15The Skill of Describing
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_pWZBOR4ec
(sfumato)
Leonardo
da Vinci.
Mona Lisa
(Lisa Gherardini)
1503-05.
Portrait. Portraits portray an individual, not a type.
16
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_del_Giocondo
Genre and Still Life
In Holland, in the 1600s
Jan Vermeer-- Interior Willem Kalf -- Still Life
17
Expression. Goya. Third of May. 1808.
Protest Art. Style of
protest--Representational /
Abstract--in tune with the times?
Francisco Goya,
Third of May, 1808, 1814
(oil on canvas, easel painting)
10. (visual elements)
Form’s parts are called: Formal or visual elements
• Dot
• Line
• Shape
• Mass
• Chiaroscuro ->
– (light-dark)
• Color
• Texture 21
Line can create
chiaroscuro
Peter Rubens.
Anatomical
Study.
1601-1605.
�Hatching�
technique
22
Michelangelo. God & Adam. Ceiling Fresco. Sistine Chapel,
Rome.
Forms suggest Lines: “Implied” Lines & Shapes: Silhouettes.
“23
11. Color and Light
• Hue: (color frequency)
• Value (tone, tint)
• Intensity (saturated)
• Palette (color range)
• Light and Dark
- chiaroscuro
24
Color ORGANIZATION
- Primary
- Complementary
- Analogous
- Chiaroscuro
25
COMPOSITION
Arrangement / organization. Major approaches:
Symmetry/asymmetry Suggested Movement
Fore-Middle-Background Contrast & Focus
12. 26
Composition: Static Symmetry,
Asymmetry (=>dynamic),
and Movement
See-saw
Static/still
Diagonals suggest:
imbalance, Movement
27
Composition - Spatial organization:
Foreground, Middle ground, Background
28
Modernist,
Paul
Cezanne,
fooled around
with picture
planes in this
still life.
Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World
13. COMPOSITION: Perspective
Four kinds:
• Linear (geometric)
• Atmospheric (aerial)
• Overlapping forms
• Multiple views
Atmospheric
Perspective ê
29
Linear é
perspective
THE
RENAISSANCE
�Linear
Perspective�
30
Ancient Egyptians identified things.é
Multiple Perspectives.
M.C. Escher: confused reality. ê
Linear Perspective . . . .
14. developed from visual depth cues.
31
Appearance of things near and far.
Artist:
Leonardo da Vinci.
Title: The Last Supper.
Dates: painted between
1495-1498.
Below: Figure Study.
ê Medium: pen + ink on
paper.
Composition: not really.
ñABOVE: The final wall painting today.
Subject: Biblical Narrative.
Medium: wall mural with tempera +
oil on plaster (Not in good shape).
But the COMPOSITION, the
organization of the final image, is
beautifully worked out.
32
PATTERN Tibetan mandala FIELD
Intricate patterns,
Fantastic figures,
15. Emphasis on idea,
flat forms, frontalism,
split representation
Symbolic proportions . . .
Ireland, 7-8th c.
Manuscript
illumination
Jackson Pollock,
Cathedral, 1947
33
C. Monet (1890s) + J. Pollock (1947)
34
Claude Monet (French)
8 of 30 paintings of
Rouen Cathedral, France.
Jackson Pollock (American)
Rouen Cathedral, 1947
Details: Pollock + Monet
Photo of Rouen Cath.
Jackson Pollock (American). Autumn Rhythm. ca. 1950
Story: When artist Hans Hofmann first visited Pollock's
16. studio he was startled by the absence of any models or
sketches. "Do you work from nature?" he asked.
Pollock replied, "I am nature."
FIELD ABSTRACTION. ORGANIC version.
Gestural rhythms instead of geometric patterns.
35
detail ->
Pollock at
Work.
The process of painting
. . . Action painting. . .
Jackson Pollock made a big impression
with his large "drip" paintings, which he
made by flinging, splashing, and dripping
paint onto large canvases placed on the
floor. "New needs demand new
techniques," he said, explaining his
disregard for the brush and easel.
He used to create his art by moving
around the canvas in a sort of dance: thus
came the term Action Painting: "What was
to go on the canvas was not a picture but
an event.�
Jackson Pollock led an intensely fiery
life, filled with bar-room brawls, and other
violence. His life ended abruptly in a drunk
driving crash at the age of 44.
17. 36
�THE GOLDEN SECTION� This ratio (relationship):
“The small relates to the
larger,
as the larger relates to the
whole,”
is found in geometry
and nature . . . . .
A formula developed
by the Greek philosopher
and mathematician
Pythagoras, to define the
idea of natural harmony.
37
COMPOSITION: PROPORTION.
For example:
Golden Section examples:
Paintings and
Photographs
often follow
the Rule of Thirds
which is a rough
estimation of Golden Section
38
18. More you can
discover . . . starting with
The Golden Section to . . .
http://www.constructingtheuniverse.com/Grace.html
See also discussion of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
. . . Fibonacci spirals
In nature and art.
Stained glass window design
39
http://www.constructingtheuniverse.com/Grace.html
ILLUSIONS and IDEAS
Illusions in painting
Suggest ways we understand the physical world:
Space Mass/solids Textures
Popular IDEAS about art:
•Realism, likeness: �mimesis� (Aristotle)
•Idealism: --> perfection (ex., beauty)
•Alteration: change from likeness
– Picture -- Expression -- Painting
– Art for Art�s Sake
•Issue: Uses of art. Ex. Icon -- Iconoclasm 40
19. Many people demand beauty. It’s an idea.
Not everyone agrees on what beautiful is, but
we can develop and enrich �the eye of the beholder�
What are those views of beauty?
Halle Berry,
publicity photo.
Plato�s �inspiration� was the divine muse.
àWhat’s the Inspiration for movie star beauty?
More than one kind of Beauty can be appreciated
in traditional Japan: Kitagawa Utamaro, A Beauty. 17531806
(Delicate lines, flat, details, accessories)
<- and also “Wabi Sabi”
(Irregular, natural shapes, contrasts,
qqq interesting imperfections, character).
41
American artist Mary Cassatt
found beauty in style elements of
Japanese prints.
The Bath, 1863 ->
Subject: Genre.
Notice the
Bold shapes,
color contrasts,
20. flattened space,
high point of view.
Unlike Utamaro: FOCUS / DOMINANCE,
blurry and sharp areas. 42
Utamaro. Midnight: Mother w Sleepy Child
(print. late 1700s)
Next: Visual Perceptions . . .
What do you see?
Perception.
43
44
Going West. Oil on canvas. Jackson Pollock
Can you find hidden images? Mythical symbolism?
STYLE: Western history of
Types and Traditions
• Prehistoric
• Early
Cultures/Civilizations
• Classical
22. Expressionism
• Post-Modernism
(our era)
46
Post-Modernist Movements
• Pop Art
• Super Realism
• Environmental art
• Installation art
• Computer art
Secular icon: one of Andy Warhol�s
Pop portraits of Marilyn Monroe, 1960s
47
Chris Ofili,
b. 1968 British.
Princess of the Posse, 1999
Post-Modern Style
(playful, challenges
authority, patchwork/
eclectic)
Medium + Materials:
Mixed Media:
23. Acrylic, collage, glitter,
resin, map pins, and
elephant dung on
canvas.
96 in. x 72 in.
Collection SFMOMA
48
How to Look at a Picture
• Get up close
• Take a step back
• Then think. Try another
angle. Do this process
for a while.
Perception/Conception:
- Hemispheric Asymmetry,
�gestalt�
- Imitate (mimesis)
perceptual, psychological
- Idealize (perfect):
conceptual, symbolic
• First, respond with your own
observations, ideas, and feelings
AND then, for a critical perspective, it
helps to Learn about the Context (the
bigger picture)
- Read the label, to start expanding
24. beyond your perceptions and
conceptions, by discovering and
using evidence and reason to come
to your conclusions / evaluation of art
works.
- Do some research to help answer
your questions, but mainly use your
own words to observe, analyze,
define, and comment on others’.49
Getting to know Your
Tendencies and Develop
Your Own
“Aesthetic”
This is Your philosophy of values
in the arts,
and in living --
Traditionally, involves such ideas as
the good, the true, the beautiful, the
just, and the sublime (experience
beyond everyday emotions) . . . 50
51
An Experiment.
Take a quick look
25. at the next slide.
52
53
Draw what you remember seeing. Don’t go back to check.
Hemispheric asymmetry. Gestalt. 54
55
M.C. Escher.
A painter's original function may have been to record reality
faithfully.
M.C.
Escher.
56
Value and Meaning:
Cave paintings--Graffiti tags.
Differences?
57
26. Now: SUBWAY drawings?
58
Art and Ideas:
SEMIOTICS:
THEORY OF SIGNS
Keith Haring
1958-1990
Organic Pigments
59Iris Amaryllis
Best Buy Page 1 of 6 09.21.2018
Best Buy Should Be Dead, But It’s Thriving in the Age of
Amazon
Article by Susan Berfield and Matthew Boyle
Published on 7/19/2018
(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- In Best Buy’s perfect world, all
380 of its new “in-home advisors” would
park their clean, white Priuses in front of a customer’s house
27. rather than in the driveway, where the car
could block others. They would quickly appraise the
neighborhood, survey the landscaping, and see if
a security system is in place. After knocking gently on the
front door, they would step back and stand
to the right, smiling, head down slightly, arms uncrossed, name
tag visible on their blue, wrinkle-free
Best Buy polo shirts. They would shake hands firmly, avoiding
the dead fish or the lobster claw.
Once inside, they would offer to remove their shoes. They
wouldn’t lean on the walls or place their
Best Buy tablets on the furniture. If they noticed a cat, they
would know better than to say they own a
dog, and they definitely wouldn’t talk politics. The advisors
would make customers comfortable by
mimicking their conversational style and pace: If a customer
talked with her hands, advisors would, too.
They would have a tape measure with a laser, and they wouldn’t
tease the cat with it. They wouldn’t
knock on walls to determine where a stud was – they would use
their stud finders—and they would
never put the tool on their chest and say “beep.” That wouldn’t
be amusing. “If you’re using that for
rapport, start again,” says Bryan Bucknell, a self-proclaimed
“longtime sales dude” at Best Buy Co.
who’s training recruits for the program. He’s with his aspiring
advisors – 27 men and 9 women,
uniformly enthusiastic in their blue shirts – in a windowless
conference room at Best Buy’s
headquarters outside Minneapolis, where they’ve come for the
final session of a five-week initiation in
late May.
Best Buy’s better-known Geek Squad deploys agents to help
customers with repairs and installations.
28. The advisors act as, in Best Buy’s language, personal chief
technology officers, helping people make
their homes smart or merely more functional. Some in this
group worked on the Geek Squad, some as
retail staff, a few were lured back to Best Buy, and at least one
was employed by companies that Best
Buy put out of business. They’ve already learned about the
devices and appliances they can offer:
TVs, sound systems, refrigerators, washing machines, security
cameras, doorbells, garage doors, and
smoke alarms, as well as Amazon Echo and Google Home and
Apple HomePod, and smart shades
and lighting and thermostats.
Now they’re in this conference room practicing how to sell by
seeming not to. “Be a consultant, not a
salesperson,” Bucknell says. “Use phrases like: ‘How would
you like it if,’ ‘Do you think it would help if
you could,’ ‘Have you ever thought about.’” They’re supposed
to establish long-term relationships with
their customers rather than chase one-time transactions. They
won’t need to anxiously track weekly
metrics and, unlike the Geek Squad and blue shirts working in
stores, they’ll be paid an annual salary
instead of an hourly wage. Their house calls are free and can
last as long as 90 minutes.
Best Buy, the last national electronics chain, is counting on
these advisors to distinguish it from
Amazon.com Inc., the company’s competitor, partner, and
would-be vanquisher. With more than 1,000
big-box stores in North America and about 125,000 employees,
Best Buy was supposed to have
succumbed to the inevitable. “Everyone thought we were going
to die,” says Hubert Joly, who was
hired as chief executive officer in August 2012 after profits
29. shrunk about 90 percent in one quarter and
his predecessor resigned amid an investigation into his
relationship with an employee.
Instead, Best Buy has become an improbable survivor led by an
unlikely boss. Joly was raised and
educated in France, trained at McKinsey & Co., and previously
employed by hospitality company
Carlson, based outside Minneapolis, and media conglomerate
Vivendi SA, where he greenlighted a
little game called World of Warcraft. He’s the first outside
CEO in the chain’s 52-year history. He had
no retail experience – Best Buy’s stock fell 10 percent the day
he was named CEO – but Joly
understands how to value, and capture, customers’ time.
Comparable sales rose 5.6 percent last year
and 9 percent during the Christmas season, the biggest holiday
gain since 2003. The stock price has
Best Buy Page 2 of 6 09.21.2018
quadrupled. Even Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is impressed. “The
last five years, since Hubert came to
Best Buy, have been remarkable,” he said at an appearance in
April.
Those years were about getting people into Best Buy stores and
onto its website; Best Buy’s future will
be about getting its people into homes. Joly, who made a
surprise visit to talk with the trainees,
explains the importance of this strategy: “That lets you have a
real conversation. You can talk about
what’s possible, be human, make it real.” They’ll encounter
those slogans again throughout
30. headquarters. “We get 26 percent of our consumers’ electronic
spending. That’s embarrassing,” he
says. “If we get a third, it would still be embarrassing, but the
growth for the company would be
tremendous. This is a great way to make a sale, but it’s also the
beginning of a beautiful friendship, to
quote Casablanca. Does anybody know Casablanca?”
Richard Schulze opened his first store, Sound of Music, in his
hometown of St. Paul in 1966. Herb
Alpert and the Tijuana Brass recorded that year’s best-selling
album, Whipped Cream and Other
Delights, and the popular new home audio system was the eight-
track player. Over the next decade
and a half, Schulze and his close associate, Brad Anderson – a
former seminary student who almost
quit when he didn’t make a sale in his first few weeks – opened
six other locations. But they let their
operating costs pile up and came close to bankruptcy twice. In
1983, the two changed strategy: They
opened a discount superstore and called it Best Buy. They
thought they could compete with Circuit
City, which already had dozens of big boxes across the country
and revenue of $250 million.
Best Buy went public two years later. Schulze and Anderson
expanded beyond the Twin Cities, often
in more convenient locations than Circuit City’s, and in 1995
overtook it as the nation’s largest
electronics chain. Electronics was an inherently unstable
business, but Best Buy knew how to manage
the inevitable obsolescence, always making sure it had a hot
new video game console or phone in
stores. When the company struggled, it was usually because
executives couldn’t keep up with growth.
Amazon started selling CDs in 1998, but Best Buy didn’t
31. consider the company much of a threat. That
didn’t last. “The pace of its growth was faster than we were
prepared to engage in the early 2000s,”
Schulze wrote in an email. In 2002, when he was 61 and worth
about $2 billion, he turned the CEO job
over to Anderson. Schulze remained chairman and the largest
shareholder.
Anderson’s first move, in late 2002, was to buy the Geek Squad
– a startup with 50 agents (now
20,000) who provided tech support to customers in their homes,
in stores, by phone, or online – and in
doing so transformed the business. (The Geeks joked that they
owned Best Buy, not the other way
around, though services like the Geek Squad have only ever
accounted for about 5 percent of
revenue.) Other purchases were less transformative. In 2008,
Best Buy spent $121 million for
Napster, the rebranded, decriminalized paid music service
whose customers were soon filched by
Spotify Technology SA and Pandora Media Inc. Anderson
oversaw a huge expansion in the number of
stores in those six years, from about 600 in the U.S. and Canada
to almost 3,900 in 13 countries.
Best Buy floundered as the Great Recession took hold and
Amazon sharpened its edge with offerings
such as limited same-day delivery and AmazonBasics, a line of
low-cost, private-label commodity
electronics. The poorly managed Circuit City liquidated in
early 2009. Later that year, Anderson
retired, though he stayed on as vice chairman. His successor,
Brian Dunn, had joined the company as
a blue shirt in 1985 and had served as its president since 2006.
Dunn undid much of what Anderson had done. He closed stores,
32. shut down overseas operations, and
dumped Napster. But that wasn’t enough to halt Best Buy’s
decline amid the quickening digital
takeover. “A lot of our businesses simultaneously got worse,
fast,” Anderson said in a phone interview.
Stores fell into disrepair, the staff became complacent, sales
tanked, the stock price dropped, and to
maintain some measure of profitability, the company gave up
competing on price.
In time for the 2010 holiday season, Amazon released its price
check app, a boon for shoppers and a
calamity for Best Buy. Amazon almost always had a lower
price – as well as better inventory
management and faster delivery – and all of a sudden it seemed
like Best Buy might become obsolete.
Best Buy Page 3 of 6 09.21.2018
In March 2012, the company reported it had lost $1.7 billion in
a single quarter. Meanwhile, the board’s
audit committee learned that Dunn, who was married and 51,
had a close relationship with a 29-year-
old female employee. An investigation found the CEO had
given the woman tickets to concerts and
sporting events and loaned her $600. They’d met for drinks and
lunches on workdays and weekends.
During two trips abroad in 2011, Dunn called her 33 times and
sent her 191 text messages. He
resigned in April 2012. (Dunn declined to comment for this
story.) Schulze, who’d learned about the
relationship, was forced to resign as chairman.
Instead of leaving quietly, Schulze tried to take control of the
33. company he founded. He owned more
than 20 percent of Best Buy, but would need to raise billions of
dollars to acquire a majority stake. That
summer he invited Anderson and several others to join him in a
takeover plot they called Blue Bird.
In August 2012, when even the most loyal executives were
demoralized and their relatives were asking
why they still worked at Best Buy, the board hired Joly to
rescue the company. In October, Bloomberg
Businessweek published “The Battle for Best Buy, the
Incredible Shrinking Big Box,” with a cover
illustration of zombies attacking a store.
“You could feel the vibe change within the building,” Amy
College, a senior merchandising executive,
says of the weeks after Joly took over. He gave up the
executive suite where Dunn had worked, with a
secure entrance and a panic room nearby. He didn’t renew
sports sponsorships and ended Best Buy’s
experiment with a results-only work environment that dispensed
with schedules, mandatory meetings,
and clock-watching. As part of a $1.4 billion cost-cutting plan,
he sold ventures in Europe and China.
After layoffs at headquarters, he and his chief financial officer,
Sharon McCollam, figured they could
shrink most workspaces by a few inches to fit almost all of the
4,000-person staff into three of the four
buildings the company owns in Richfield, Minn. U.S. Bank is
among the tenants that now rent the
fourth.
Joly also approached Schulze. His takeover plan didn’t endear
him to the board, and he hadn’t been
involved in Joly’s hiring, but he remained Best Buy’s largest
shareholder. “I didn’t know him,” Joly says.
34. “But I guessed that his intentions were good. He wanted to save
the company. That’s what I was
recruited for.” Joly and Schulze met that fall and winter. By
spring, Schulze still hadn’t found enough
backers to help him buy out the company, and he abandoned
Blue Bird. He’s now chairman emeritus
and speaks regularly with Joly.
Joly made another deft overture that fall: He worked at a store
in St. Cloud for a week, which showed
him that he could improve morale with even a small gesture.
He made a bigger one when he restored
the company’s generous employee discount program, which
Dunn had curtailed. Joly also invested in
regular training for the sales staff, who he says were
“considered not very competent and not very
engaged.”
It wasn’t just about morale. About five months into the job, he
announced Best Buy would match the
price on any product that Amazon, and more than a dozen other
retailers, offered. It would be costly,
but it was the only way to nullify one of Amazon’s biggest
advantages.
The CEO applied what he calls the bicycle theory to the
moribund company. “If you try to direct a
bicycle at standstill, you fall. The key is to get moving,” Joly
says. “You learn about creating energy.”
Initially, he says, he wasn’t much more clear about his plans
than that, but executives later told him
they got the message: “If we don’t change, we are going to die.”
Joly recounted these early days during an interview in March at
Bloomberg’s New York office. He
came with three senior communication executives, charts
35. showing the company’s progress, and copies
of a presentation he’d made to investors several months earlier.
Joly, who’s 58 and expensively
dressed, was genial, well-rehearsed, and skilled at deflecting.
“You won’t get me to say a bad word
about Amazon,” he said in response to questions about the
company that still poses the greatest
existential threat to Best Buy. “There is a lot of room for both
of us.” Best Buy and Amazon together
Best Buy Page 4 of 6 09.21.2018
account for only a quarter of all consumer spending on
electronics. “It’s not a zero-sum game,” Joly
says often.
Five weeks later, in mid-April, Joly and Bezos appeared at a
Best Buy store in Bellevue, Wash., to
announce a joint venture. The companies would release Toshiba
and Insignia smart televisions with
Amazon Fire TV, exclusively sold by Best Buy at its stores and
on its website and on Amazon.com.
“It’s definitely sleeping with the enemy, but more power to
them,” says Aaron Cheris, head of Bain &
Co.’s Americas retail practice.
There is, of course, one thing Best Buy has that Amazon
doesn’t: more than 1,000 big-box stores. Joly
saw the benefit of using them as showrooms – a word so fraught
in retail that the company calls them
showcases – for the big tech brands, Amazon included. Best
Buy was among the first chains to feature
Apple boutiques. In April 2013, Joly said there would be
Samsung mini-shops in its 1,400 U.S.
36. locations by June. That same month, Best Buy began adding
600 Microsoft stores-within-stores. Sony
arrived in 2014. Last year, Best Buy turned over more space to
Amazon and Google to better display
their smart home technologies. The two are bitter rivals:
Amazon doesn’t sell Google Home and offers
a limited selection of Google’s Nest products. Best Buy is
neutral ground.
The brands essentially pay rent to Best Buy (it’s cheaper than
building stores) and either send in their
own salespeople or train the blue shirts. No one at Best Buy
would offer details about these
partnerships. But even analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush
Securities Inc., who in almost 10 years
has never recommended buying Best Buy’s stock, describes the
partnerships as a phenomenal
success because they ease the financial burden of operating
stores while enhancing profit margins.
“Best Buy is like an arms dealer,” he says. “They’re indifferent
to what brand you buy as long as you
buy it from them.”
Despite these successes, the shadow of neglect threatened the
company’s promise. Its app crashed
regularly. The website existed in a time warp. Out-of-stock
items were frequently promoted, there
were no customer reviews, product information was scant, and it
could take 10 clicks to check out. By
the end of 2016, all of this had been fixed.
So had the supply chain. In August 2013, the company
recruited Rob Bass from Target Corp. to make
it more efficient and to save a couple hundred million dollars to
help cover the costs of Joly’s price-
matching strategy. Bass discovered quickly why customers
37. were frustrated: Best Buy’s distribution
centers typically weren’t open on weekends or holidays, and its
warehouse management software was
at least two decades old. The software has been updated, the
supply operations extended, and two-
day free delivery is standard on orders of $35 or more. In April
2016, Best Buy announced it would
offer same-day delivery in a few cities for a fee. Right after
that, Amazon expanded same-day delivery
to some Prime customers for free. Best Buy then lowered its
price, which had been as high as $20, to
$5.99. This past holiday season, Best Buy expanded its same-
day service to 40 cities.
Bass also turned back to the stores. He started a system that
allowed them to fulfill orders via delivery
and pickup. Best Buy says 70 percent of Americans live within
15 miles of one of its locations, so it’s
been encouraging customers to come collect their orders. Forty
percent of the time they do, which
“helps my budget a lot,” Bass says. To make those pickups
faster, the company is testing an “On My
Way” function on its app to ensure customers don’t arrive
before their TVs are retrieved from the back
of the store. Since 2012 the proportion of its online revenue
has more than doubled, from 7 percent of
all U.S. sales to 16 percent, well above those at other big-box
retailers.
As individual pieces of technology become simpler to use,
connecting them gets more complicated and
important for their utility. To Joly, this was a missed
opportunity. “The vision I had from the beginning
is for us to be to the consumer what a company like Accenture
is for a business,” he says.
38. Best Buy Page 5 of 6 09.21.2018
To one longtime employee, this was an enticing idea: an elite
group of salespeople who could offer
more than the Geek Squad did. Corie Barry had tried to start an
advisory program in 2010 when she
was a senior director without a budget. Now she’s chief
financial officer.
In fall 2015, Joly asked her to set up a strategic growth office,
“a safe space for ideas,” Barry says. The
advisory program, which emerged through conversations with
Joly, would live by three main rules. No.
1: No job is too small. “We’ll come teach you how to ask Alexa
questions,” Barry says, offering an
example of a current – and common – request for using the
Amazon Echo. No. 2: We will come to your
home for free. No. 3: Be comfortable not closing a deal by
day’s end. “They sound really basic,” Barry
says. “But when an organization is built on transactions in the
moment and individual goals, it’s a big
change.”
She tested the program in San Antonio. Six months later,
during a trip to meet the team there, Joly
asked if Best Buy should try it elsewhere. “I said we’ve already
expanded to two other markets [Austin
and Atlanta]. He just said, ‘Wonderful.’ ” The in-home
advisors went national in September. When one
of the trainees at the session in Minneapolis asked Joly how big
he hoped the program could become,
he said: “I don’t have a specific goal. I don’t think it would be
helpful. McKinsey never had a goal of how
many clients. It was how good was the work.” Another
39. employee said: “This is why Amazon can’t
compete with us. They can’t dispatch an army of in-home
agents.” Joly wasn’t as sure. “Amazon is an
amazing company,” he replied. “They kill companies. Maybe
they will do this. But we have an
incredible opportunity. If someone wants to copy, that’s fine.”
Amazon has started offering free smart-home consultations and
installations. It doesn’t have a chain of
big-box stores in which to meet customers, but that didn’t
bother investors. Best Buy’s stock dropped
6.3 percent when Amazon announced its plans a year ago.
Lennar Corp., the huge homebuilder, said
in May that Echo and smart doorbells made by Ring, which
Amazon recently acquired, will be in model
homes across the U.S. It’s not far-fetched to imagine Apple
Inc. sending its geniuses into people’s
houses, either. Trish Walker, Best Buy’s president of services,
says, “It’s on us to stay ahead of
everybody, not just Amazon.”
Jess Kordash, 34 and one of Best Buy’s top salespeople, was
among those trained as an in-home
advisor during the test phase in 2016. She’s now based at a
store about an hour northwest of Orlando,
near the Villages, the country’s biggest retirement community,
where “some people love Alexa and
others don’t even have a smartphone,” she says. Three hours
with her prove to be a reality check on
Best Buy’s ambitions.
Her first visit on a Friday in June is to Jo-Ann and Reg
Kaminiecki, a retired couple in their 70s. She
parks her Prius in front of their house. The Kaminieckis
purchased an enormous refrigerator and
freezer from Kordash a year ago. She came to their home to
40. make sure they’d measured the space in
the kitchen correctly. In May they bought a new TV, their first
in 22 years. “It’s one of our 4K TVs,”
Kordash says. “It’s 65 inches, with a sound bar and Blu-ray to
see all those movies.” The Kaminieckis
have an alphabetized film collection lined up along their living
room and bedroom walls. They also
bought a TV stand with an electric fireplace, but the shelves
cracked during shipping. Kordash
promises to send their favorite Geek Squad agent when the
replacement arrives the following week.
“There is a lot of things we could do: light control, Alexa could
control the TV and sound bar, maybe we
could even put in a smart thermostat,” she says. “But I’m not
tempted to offer them more. I’m
completely comfortable with the fact that they’re not interested.
It was a year between the fridge and
the TV. Who knows what they might want in another year?”
“We’re content,” Jo-Ann says, almost regretfully.
Kordash next visits Harry Bohannan, 90, who’s just moved into
the Villages with his son and daughter-
in-law. He shows Kordash the TV that came with the house.
“The LED lights are flickering. That’s a
bad sign,” she says.
Best Buy Page 6 of 6 09.21.2018
“I didn’t think it was a good sign,” he replies good-naturedly.
Kordash says the cost to repair them will be more than a new
TV. “Do you want the same size?” she
