I am late to this episode of the Colbert Report, but it’s quite good, so I’m sharing it anyway: it’s Paola Antonelli (below), senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, brought on at the start of her show, Applied Design, which started on Mar. 2. The show got a lot of notice because it includes the display of 14 video games, but Stephen Colbert is — as ever — more resourceful than that.
He doesn’t ask her about video games. He explores more important points of her thesis, such as where we are on the modern, post-modern, future scale. Antonelli has a great answer.
She also says that her title refers to a different dichotomy — theoretical design and applied design. In the future, and even now, design is in that way like physics. Eventually everything will disappear into our retina — not even Google glasses. And of course they go through various items to discuss good design. Throughout, she handles Colbert beautifully — and he her.
Odd, both slightly wonderful and slightly disturbing, that the Colbert Report is turning to be one of the few places to see a discussion of visual art on nationwide TV. (See here, for Neal MacGregor, and here, for Carrie Rebora Barrett.)
Hat-tip to Hyperallergic for this, which has a write-up here.
BigThink has a compendium of her commentaries.
Photo Credit: Seedmagazine