Borges: The Task of Art

As he neared the end of his life, Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) offered his thoughts on the “task of art,” essentially distilling 80+ years of wisdom into a few pithy lines. He says:

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy. A writer or any artist has the sometimes joyful duty to transform all that into symbols. These symbols could be colors, forms or sounds. For a poet, the symbols are sounds and also words, fables, stories, poetry. The work of a poet never ends. It has nothing to do with working hours. Your are continuously receiving things from the external world. These must be transformed, and eventually will be transformed. This revelation can appear anytime. A poet never rests. He’s always working, even when he dreams. Besides, the life of a writer, is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.

via openculture.com

Paola Antonelli Presentation At Creative Mornings

via vimeo.com

Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was the June 2010 SwissMiss’ CreativeMornings speaker. She discusses design history, education, the exhibit “Design and the Elastic Mind” and next year’s “Talk To Me” exhibition currently taking shape transparently via a blog at MoMA.org/Talktome.

“Design and the Elastic Mind” and the symposium “Mind 08” presented around it where truly inspiring and eye-opening for me and introduced me to the work of many people I have come to love.

The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams “is a genius designer, and a genius manager of his process,” who clearly believes that “design should not dominate people.”

via kottke.org

The Origins of the World's Most Important Typefaces

via chacha.com

Click on the link above for the page where you can download a full-size PDF of the image. A lot of history in one concise package.

A Look At Art with Stephen Fry

In an increasingly infantilised world where so much seems to be split into good or bad, correct or incorrect, acceptable or unacceptable, where complex ideas are chopped up for public consumption like food chopped up for a child, where so much is hygienic, attainable, safe, sugared, assimilable, digestible, pasteurised, homogenised and sanitised, in such a world our appetite has never been greater for the complex, the ambiguous, the challenging, the untamed, the sharp, the peculiar, the surprising, the dangerous, the dirty, the difficult, the untameable, the elusive, the unsafe and the unknowable. In other words, for art.

via stephenfry.com

Speech Given at a Dinner for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – 8th June 2010 by Stephen Fry.