President of the Acropolis Museum
I think that contact with ancient civilizations is very important because we get to have in our life a third dimension. If we live only in the present, we don't understand what happened many thousand years ago. We don't realize what the development of humanity really is.
Museum director, curator, and cultural producer at large, Chris Dercon is the President of the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais, an umbrella group of national museums in France. His career in major cultural institutions across Europe spans several decades. From 2011 to 2016, he was director of London's Tate Modern. He has been program director of MoMA PS1 in New York, and has served as director of the Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and Berlin's Volksbühne theater. He is also a presenter, writer and maker of cultural documentaries.
www.grandpalais.fr
Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals
by the Foreign Policy magazine.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals
by the Foreign Policy magazine.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
Environmental Artist Mary Edna Fraser & Prof. Emeritus Orrin H. Pilkey
Co-authors of A Celebration of the World’s Barrier Islands & Global Climate Change: A Primer
I think any time we are closer to the earth, we can feel the struggles of other human beings as well. –Mary Edna Fraser
All over the world, we’re seeing because of climate change we’re seeing vast changes affecting all aspects of society. That’s something that we’ve not been able to face politically. We need to do that. – Orrin H. Pilkey
Environmental Artist Mary Edna Fraser & Prof. Emeritus Orrin H. Pilkey
Co-authors of A Celebration of the World’s Barrier Islands & Global Climate Change: A Primer
I think any time we are closer to the earth, we can feel the struggles of other human beings as well. –Mary Edna Fraser
All over the world, we’re seeing because of climate change we’re seeing vast changes affecting all aspects of society. That’s something that we’ve not been able to face politically. We need to do that. – Orrin H. Pilkey
Painter and Art Historian for Louvre Museum & Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA
Interview Highlights
Well, I have always considered Leonardo as the perfect artist, and more or less like a father. The real master is a kind of a father figure. So, to help me understand better, improve myself, know more, make the proper efforts and listen to someone who is so knowledgeable that in listening to what he says you will make real progress. I was listening to Maria Callas some time ago, because when she came to Paris in 1968 she was in the Opéra Paris, and she was in a concert. Music was in her psychology. In Leonardo, art was in his psychology, as an expression of the mystery of life in him. The same in Callas. I'm always observing artists performing because it's very interesting to observe. She was living in another dimension. As if she were connected to an invisible source, and that invisible source suddenly gave her genius. On top of all she'd been learning technically, so she had the art, the architectural setting of the technique. So she couldn't fail, because of course what she was singing was very difficult, but also, suddenly, life came into it.
Painter and Art Historian for Louvre Museum & Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA
Da Vinci certainly must have been very well organized because you can't make so much work without a base in the organization of your life which is very strict. You can't go and penetrate such high intellectual spheres unless you're a man of good. Do you understand what I mean? To have some ideal of perfection, beauty, and humanity inside yourself…Art is art, and that's all. To me, art is the expression of beauty, and beauty is something like the sun, shall we say. An absolute.
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Director · The Frick Collection
I firmly believe that the arts should be a part of everybody's education. It's not just learning the history of art, but it's about opening up creativity as a means that can be useful to somebody throughout one's life.
Award-winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist, Artist
Author of My Book of the Dead
One of the things of the things that is dying is our planet. We hear these sirens every single day. We’re being warned daily by experts and concerned people how vast that squandering is going. It’s a case of urgency and it’s astounding and a very sad, a very pathetic comment on modern life that most people are ignoring those signs. As a poet, it seems to me that one of the tasks that the poet takes on, it’s a vocation that’s born with it, it’s this consciousness, this serving as witness.
