Paola Antonelli

Paola Antonelli

We first met Paola Antonelli in her early days at MoMA when we were working on the MoMA QNS project. As Design Curator at MoMA, Paola’s goal is to promote a public understanding of design, until its influence on society and on progress is fully acknowledged. Previously a professor of design history and theory at UCLA, Antonelli has lectured around the world, and written articles on design for such magazines as Metropolis, Harvard Design Review, I.D. magazine, Paper, Metropolitan Home, Harper’s Bazaar, and Nest. Her latest curatorial effort at MoMA, Design and the Elastic Mind, ran from February 24 through May 12, 2008, and drew huge crowds and much attention.

B: Your colleague Terry Riley [former Deputy Director of Architecture and Design] has recently been appointed Director of the Miami Art Museum. In general, do you think a focused area of expertise helps or hinders in such a capacity?
PA: Architects and designers are great at any organizational task because it is their job to do the best to achieve the established goals by using the tools at one’s disposal, and possibly surpass them by using creativity. That is what they do for a living.

B: Italian is your mother tongue. Can you remember any embarrassing moments in your professional career that were caused by language?
PA: Many! The one that I remember more clearly is when I was showing a slide of an anthropomorphic nutcracker to an audience of 150 at UCLA and I pointed at the head, arms, and then flashed the laser towards to groin and gingerly and innocently exclaimed, “And this is the place for the nuts.”

B: Do you speak any languages other than Italian and English?
PA: French and Spanish and a bit of German.

B: What museums do you most admire?
PA: Besides MoMA? Many. I love each museum that has a strong and defined viewpoint, from the Exploratorium in SF to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA and the Neue Galerie in NY. I love those small museums about very pointed subjects. I love strong ideas and their execution, even if I might not be enthralled by the art itself. I like gigantic museums, but they scare me a bit because my attention span does not go past one hour. And then I love the museums I grew up with in Milan—the Museo dela Scienza e della Tecnica and the Poldi Pezzoli.

B: Can you think of any product or invention that never quite got off the ground due to poor design?
PA: I wish that bad design were enough to stop a product from reaching the market…

B: Can you think of any product or invention with beautiful design that failed for other reasons?
PA: I remember the Modo, this strange, passion fruit-shaped tool that was launched several years ago in New York by Paper magazine and that was supposed to use a wireless telephone connection to tell you what was going on that night in New York. It was very pretty, but it did not work and frankly, it was quite useless. Useless things are OK, but they have to at least work.

B: Who are your three favorite artists?
PA: Andrea Zittel, Hieronymus Bosch, and Rothko. Only because you are asking three; I would have many, many more. Pollock, Stanley Kubrick, Feininger, Richter… And because you are asking for artists, I would so much rather tell you my favorite dead architects and designers.

B: Will what is now called “modern art” ever stop being modern?
PA: No. It is not a style, it is an attitude towards the design process.

Read part 1 of this interview

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