A painting study / Tianhao 田浩
Here’s to the Crazy Ones
With a title drawn from Apple’s “Think Different” ad and a setting named for Steve Jobs, Tianhao paints a man who quite literally sees the world another way.
Why Steve Jobs?
The connection begins with the painting’s name. Here’s to the Crazy Ones repeats the opening words of Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” ad, which celebrated people willing to challenge accepted ideas. Tianhao sets the scene in the Steve Jobs Theater, bringing that phrase into a place named in Jobs’s honor.
Instead of sitting in one of the seats and watching the stage, the man balances on his hands and turns his view upside down. Read alongside the title, his unusual choice becomes a visual expression of “Think Different”: he finds his own way to experience a room designed for everyone to use the same way.
Photo: Matthew Yohe; crop via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Steve Jobs · Apple · 1997
What “Think Different” meant
Jobs’s own career included a dramatic rejection: he was forced out of the company he had helped create. He went on to found NeXT and later returned to Apple. In his Stanford speech, he spoke about starting again and trusting his judgment rather than living by other people’s opinions.
That history helps explain the appeal of Tianhao’s solitary figure. He has stepped outside the behavior the room expects of him, and he does so without an audience. The painting can be read as a tribute to the side of Jobs that made “Think Different” persuasive: his willingness to pursue an idea before other people believed in it.
Watch the original campaign in Ken Segall’s archive