Notes For Later

How many women artists have been erased from museums through pre-Instagram modes of re-appropriation: their works attributed to male colleagues in their studios, their mentors or their lovers or more visible friends. How many women only get into museums by being muses, and never the artist themselves?

A few weeks ago, the internet exploded with an amazing clip. Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking was answering viewer questions for a live audience in Sydney, Australia. The male emcee posed a question submitted by the presumably female Samantha Su. “What do you think is the cosmological effect of Zayn leaving One Direction and consequently breaking the hearts of millions of girls across the world?” The emcee then added his own commentary, behaving as if he has no responsibility whatsoever to try to understand an enormous population — girls — who are clearly so confoundingly incomprehensible he has wholly discounted their contributions. “I haven’t a clue what that’s about,” he said. But Stephen Hawking, generous and clearly even more intelligent than I had already thought, answered, “Finally a question about something important. My advice to any heartbroken young girl is to pay close attention to the study of theoretical physics, because one day there may well be proof of multiple universes. It would not be beyond the realms of possibility that somewhere outside of our own universe lies a different universe. And in that universe, Zayn is still in One Direction.”

How to respond, then, to this now permanent condition of overproduction? With cheerful skepticism. With gratitude for those rare occasions when we come across a book that speaks to us personally. With forgiveness for those critics and publishers who induce us to waste our time with some literary flavor of the day. Absolutely without indignation, since none of this is anyone’s particular “fault.” Above all with a sense of wonder and curiosity at the general and implacable human determination... to fill endless space with dubious mental material when life is short and there are so many other things to be done.

“Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.”

I like working at night when the world is quiet and all the residual energy is loose and flowing around in the atmosphere because most people are asleep and not gobbling it all up.

The future, like the past, is in the real world, with real projects, self-initiated as well as by commission. Make the world you actually live in not the world you can imagine living in, a little bit better. An entrepreneurial, collaborative, nomadic, polymorphic, practice seems to be what will work best in the 21st century. Designers can shape their practice any way they choose. Make good choices.

So called “speculative design” or “critical design” are in reality institutional projects that have little use or interest outside of the institutions that generate them. Whilst this crit room fodder can have a lot of pedagogical value in school, it is a mistake to presume as the fine artist does, that your particular brand of self-indulgent navel-gazing is something the rest of the world needs or wants.... Your fantasy praxis is the residue of privilege.

... copying out a text, as opposed to merely reading it, modifies our soul and reveals hidden aspects of our inner self.

On Book Fairs

This is a dangerous moment for France, both in the frighteningly immediate sense—there are armed terrorists loose in the capital—and because the decisions that a nation makes at a time of terror are not always the best ones, for anybody. “L’amour: Plus fort que la haine,” as Charlie Hebdo put it years ago—and what makes that line meaningful, and not some trite filler of empty air in a shot-up office—is remembering who you are.