Why Maeda Matters

Sunday's column in the Globe focused on John Maeda, a long-time Media Lab professor (and globally-renowned artist) who was picked in December to run the Rhode Island School of Design. Maeda is funny, thoughtful, wise and challenging -- the perfect personality for an artist pushing boundaries, and a professor nudging students in interesting new directions. He's also all over the Web in video form.

My Globe video is below...with more links after that.



Here's a talk he gave last year at TED.

Here's his video hello to the RISD community.

And here's Maeda in conversation with another young designer, Joshua Davis.

When I say 'I live at the mall,' I really mean it

I consider artists part of the innovation economy here in New England, pushing all of us to think and see in different ways...

...Which is why I love this story: "Artists get probation for building secret mall apartment." From the AP story:

Michael Townsend, 36, said he and seven other artists built the apartment in a 750-square-foot loft in the parking garage [of the Providence Place Mall] four years ago and lived there for up to three weeks at a time while documenting mall life.

The apartment included a sectional sofa and love seat, coffee and breakfast tables, chairs, lamps, rugs, paintings, a hutch filled with china, a waffle iron, TV and Sony Playstation 2 -- although a burglar broke in and stole the Playstation last spring, Townsend said. The artists built a cinderblock wall and nondescript utility door to keep the loft hidden from the outside world.

Providence Journal columnist Bob Kerr quips, "The retail mecca had an artist-in-residence program and didn’t even know it."

You can see video and photos of the project here.

(Of course, some mall operator, somewhere, is now imagining the opportunity: if people love the mall so much, why not build time shares there that they can buy into?)

For $1.99, you can get Monet to roll over in his grave

Fine art for your cell phone.

I'm sure Winslow Homer never imagined he'd read this sentence: "Text 'fog' to 69632...and the museum will send back a copy of 'The Fog Warning,' the museum’s most famous Winslow Homer painting"?