Hasta La Ideas

Of all the design lectures we’ve sat through, either as part of our schools’ curricula or in postgraduate events, the most interesting ones are where you can’t quite decide if the speaker is crazy or not. It is those lecturers right on the edge whose bizarre-yet-articulate, incendiary-yet-well-reasoned statements often inculcate long-lived, resounding thoughts. I will sometimes look at an object or space and still hear then-professor Karim Rashid’s words echoing in my head.

One professor whose lectures I wish I’d been exposed to in school is Peter Schjeldahl, senior art critic for The New Yorker and former art critic for The Village Voice. I’ve just come across this snippet of an older lecture of his, delivered at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, on why “Good Artists Tend to Be Bad Students.” The clip below is choppily-edited and too short to work up any kind of conclusive momentum—the end of the clip leaves us none the wiser as to why the title might be true—but I do miss hearing crusty, quotable thoughts like this:

I don’t believe in the existence of beautiful things. I believe in experiences of beauty. I think it’s a regular occurrence in the mental economy of anyone who is not clinically depressed.

The entire lecture is available for viewing here. It’s 80 minutes long so you’ll have to carve out some time to watch it in full.

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