Paola Antonelli
Senior Curator, Architecture & Design, Museum of Modern Art
Revealing the Human Spirit through Design
Since she stepped back from practicing architecture in order to focus on writing about design, teaching and curating gallery exhibitions, Italian native Paola Antonelli has become one of the world’s foremost design experts, named one of the top one hundred most powerful people in the world of art by Art Review. As the senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, Antonelli lives and breathes in a space where beauty and function meet.
Recently, she built a reality-bending display of artifacts that she calls “Design and the Elastic Mind.” The exhibit represents an aggregate of innovative ideas that touch on every aspect of human existence. The vast array of artifacts it contains attempts to solve some of the complexities and frustrations of life. These solutions point to not only our fears and anxieties but also to our aspirations and our hopeful concepts of the future.
The exhibit suggests that we are concerned about energy and medical technology but also about the etiquette of wearing earbuds while carrying on a conversation. Essentially, Antonelli’s collection reveals the human spirit at this particular moment. And it does so through the medium of design.
“Design allows science and technology to become part of people’s lives,” says Antonelli. “Without it, there would be to much distance between progress and reality, and so progress would be useless.”
The pragmatism behind design only enhances its beauty as it responds to the rhythms of the world we have created. But function and convenience are only part of what it can achieve. If we ascribe to the vision of Antonelli’s exhibit, it can also relieve conditions such as loneliness (see ‘Accessories for Lonely Men’), grief (‘AfterLife Microbial Fuel Cell’), and pain for burn victims (‘SnowWorld’). One day, enhanced genetic receptors and long, synthetic eyebrow whiskers might even help us to select our mates more efficiently.
The “elastic” aspect of the exhibit, according to Antonelli, refers to the capacity of the human mind to go fast and to take in many ideas. Even the exhibit’s Web site conveys the speed, breadth and depth of design. A tiny, Spartan white font crams in a daunting amount of information against a black background, as if the page simply cannot contain everything it wants to. Viewers to the site can scroll up and down or from left to right. They can even jump along thread-like arcs that have bubble photos of artifacts dangling from them.
But the real power of the exhibit stems from Antonelli’s own elastic sensibilities. Although she insists she is not a designer herself, she has the precise qualities that she attributes to the most impressive designers: “very creative but also very disciplined.” She has the mind of a business woman and the heart of an artist. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Willing to find good design anywhere, she walks through unfamiliar cities around the globe to see with her own eyes how people solve their problems, small and large.
“I look for nothing in particular, but I take everything in,” she explains. “There’s only so much you can understand from the guardrail of a freeway or from the inside of a taxi. I take it all in, it goes somewhere in my brain and it creates a strange picture that is superficial, but accurate.”
Antonelli’s sense of where design is headed and what it currently responds to may offer valuable insights to businesses that feel the ground of traditional commerce shifting beneath them. Staying competitive in a global and cyber marketplace demands that careful attention be paid to the increasingly complex nuances of consumer preferences.
“I would like to position design among the arts and among science and technology as an agent of change,” says Antonelli. “Design doesn’t yet have the position that it deserves in people’s culture.”
The functional aspect of many of the artifacts Antonelli curates makes them commercially viable. In fact, many of the pieces in “Design and the Elastic Mind” are already on the market. Design “lives in the marketplace,” she says. But that doesn’t diminish its artistic appeal: “It’s about what one wants to look for in a design piece. We look at everything, but it’s better to look at things set to go on the market.”
Antonelli would love to go back to the time before the Industrial Revolution when there was no definition for design. Her only personal stipulation about it is that it “always attempts to reach a goal elegantly.” And when she sees something special, she knows it: “I feel tenderness, emotion. It makes me so happy when I see a great object because what I see is human ingenuity.”
