When I was considering a career in the art world, I took a course in London, and one of my supervisors was this irascible Italian called Pietro, who drank too much, smoked too much and swore much too much.
But he was a passionate teacher, and I remember one of our earlier classes with him, he was projecting images on the wall, asking us to think about them, and he put up an image of a painting.
It was a landscape with figures, semi-dressed, drinking wine.
There was a nude woman in the lower foreground, and on the hillside in the back, there was a figure of the mythological god Bacchus, and he said, "What is this?"
And I -- no one else did, so I put up my hand, and I said, "It's a Bacchanal by Titian."
He said, "It's a what?"
I thought maybe I'd pronounced it wrong.
"It's a Bacchanal by Titian."
He said, "It's a what?"
I said, "It's a Bacchanal by Titian."
(Laughter) He said, "You boneless bookworm!
It's a fucking orgy!"
(Laughter) As I said, he swore too much.
There was an important lesson for me in that.
Pietro was suspicious of formal art training, art history training, because he feared that it filled people up with jargon, and then they just classified things rather than looking at them, and he wanted to remind us that all art was once contemporary, and he wanted us to use our eyes, and he was especially evangelical about this message, because he was losing his sight.
He wanted us to look and ask basic questions of objects.
What is it?
How is it made?
Why was it made?
How is it used?
And these were important lessons to me when I subsequently became a professional art historian.
My kind of eureka moment came a few years later, when I was studying the art of the courts of Northern Europe, and of course it was very much discussed in terms of the paintings and the sculptures and the architecture of the day.
But as I began to read historical documents and contemporary descriptions, I found there was a kind of a missing component, for everywhere I came across descriptions of tapestries.
Tapestries were ubiquitous between the Middle Ages and, really, well into the 18th century, and it was pretty apparent why.
Tapestries were portable.
You could roll them up, send them ahead of you, and in the time it took to hang them up, you could transform a cold, dank interior into a richly colored setting.
Tapestries effectively provided a vast canvas on which the patrons of the day could depict the heroes with whom they wanted to be associated, or even themselves, and in addition to that, tapestries were hugely expensive.
They required scores of highly skilled weavers working over extended periods of time with very expensive materials -- the wools, the silks, even gold and silver thread.
So, all in all, in an age when the visual image of any kind was rare, tapestries were an incredibly potent form of propaganda.
Well, I became a tapestry historian.
In due course, I ended up as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, because I saw the Met as one of the few places where I could organize really big exhibitions about the subject I cared so passionately about.
And in about 1997, the then-director Philippe de Montebello gave me the go-ahead to organize an exhibition for 2002.
We normally have these very long lead-in times.
It wasn't straightforward.
It's no longer a question of chucking a tapestry in the back of a car.
They have to be wound on huge rollers, shipped in oversized freighters.
Some of them are so big we had, to get them into the museum, we had to take them up the great steps at the front.
We thought very hard about how to present this unknown subject to a modern audience: the dark colors to set off the colors that remained in objects that were often faded; the placing of lights to bring out the silk and the gold thread; the labeling.
You know, we live in an age where we are so used to television images and photographs, a one-hit image.
These were big, complex things, almost like cartoons with multiple narratives.
We had to draw our audience in, get them to slow down, to explore the objects.
There was a lot of skepticism.
On the opening night, I overheard one of the senior members of staff saying, "This is going to be a bomb."
But in reality, in the course of the coming weeks and months, hundreds of thousands of people came to see the show.
The exhibition was designed to be an experience, and tapestries are hard to reproduce in photographs.
So I want you to use your imaginations, thinking of these wall-high objects, some of them 10 meters wide, depicting lavish court scenes with courtiers and dandies who would look quite at home in the pages of the fashion press today, thick woods with hunters crashing through the undergrowth in pursuit of wild boars and deer, violent battles with scenes of fear and heroism.
I remember taking my son's school class.
He was eight at the time, and all the little boys, they kind of -- you know, they were little boys, and then the thing that caught their attention was in one of the hunting scenes there was a dog pooping in the foreground — (Laughter) — kind of an in-your-face joke by the artist.
And you can just imagine them.
But it brought it alive to them.
I think they suddenly saw that these weren't just old faded tapestries.
These were images of the world in the past, and that it was the same for our audience.
And for me as a curator, I felt proud.
I felt I'd shifted the needle a little.
Through this experience that could only be created in a museum, I'd opened up the eyes of my audience -- historians, artists, press, the general public -- to the beauty of this lost medium.
A few years later, I was invited to be the director of the museum, and after I got over that -- "Who, me?
The tapestry geek?
I don't wear a tie!" -- I realized the fact: I believe passionately in that curated museum experience.
We live in an age of ubiquitous information, and sort of "just add water" expertise, but there's nothing that compares with the presentation of significant objects in a well-told narrative, what the curator does, the interpretation of a complex, esoteric subject, in a way that retains the integrity of the subject, that makes it -- unpacks it for a general audience.
And that, to me, today, is now the challenge and the fun of my job, supporting the vision of my curators, whether it's an exhibition of Samurai swords, early Byzantine artifacts, Renaissance portraits, or the show we heard mentioned earlier, the McQueen show, with which we enjoyed so much success last summer.
That was an interesting case.
In the late spring, early summer of 2010, shortly after McQueen's suicide, our curator of costume, Andrew Bolton, came to see me, and said, "I've been thinking of doing a show on McQueen, and now is the moment.
We have to, we have to do it fast."
It wasn't easy.
McQueen had worked throughout his career with a small team of designers and managers who were very protective of his legacy, but Andrew went to London and worked with them over the summer and won their confidence, and that of the designers who created his amazing fashion shows, which were works of performance art in their own right, and we proceeded to do something at the museum, I think, we've never done before.
It wasn't just your standard installation.
In fact, we ripped down the galleries to recreate entirely different settings, a recreation of his first studio, a hall of mirrors, a curiosity box, a sunken ship, a burned-out interior, with videos and soundtracks that ranged from operatic arias to pigs fornicating.
And in this extraordinary setting, the costumes were like actors and actresses, or living sculptures.
It could have been a train wreck.
It could have looked like shop windows on Fifth Avenue at Christmas, but because of the way that Andrew connected with the McQueen team, he was channeling the rawness and the brilliance of McQueen, and the show was quite transcendant, and it became a phenomenon in its own right.
By the end of the show, we had people queuing for four or five hours to get into the show, but no one really complained.
I heard over and over again, "Wow, that was worth it.
It was a such a visceral, emotive experience."
Now, I've described two very immersive exhibitions, but I also believe that collections, individual objects, can also have that same power.
The Met was set up not as a museum of American art, but of an encyclopedic museum, and today, 140 years later, that vision is as prescient as ever, because, of course, we live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and we're exposed to it through the 24/7 newsreels.
It's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations, the cultures, that we're seeing the current manifestation of.
Whether it's Libya, Egypt, Syria, it's in our galleries that we can explain and give greater understanding.
I mean, our new Islamic galleries are a case in point, opened 10 years, almost to the week, after 9/11.
I think for most Americans, knowledge of the Islamic world was pretty slight before 9/11, and then it was thrust upon us in one of America's darkest hours, and the perception was through the polarization of that terrible event.
Now, in our galleries, we show 14 centuries of the development of different Islamic cultures across a vast geographic spread, and, again, hundreds of thousands of people have come to see these galleries since they opened last October.
I'm often asked, "Is digital media replacing the museum?"
and I think those numbers are a resounding rejection of that notion.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a huge advocate of the Web.
It gives us a way of reaching out to audiences around the globe, but nothing replaces the authenticity of the object presented with passionate scholarship.
Bringing people face to face with our objects is a way of bringing them face to face with people across time, across space, whose lives may have been very different to our own, but who, like us, had hopes and dreams, frustrations and achievements in their lives.
And I think this is a process that helps us better understand ourselves, helps us make better decisions about where we're going.
The Great Hall at the Met is one of the great portals of the world, awe-inspiring, like a medieval cathedral.
From there, you can walk in any direction to almost any culture.
I frequently go out into the hall and the galleries and I watch our visitors coming in.
Some of them are comfortable.
They scott66@example.net.
They know what they're looking for.
Others are very uneasy.
It's an intimidating place.
They feel that the institution is elitist.
I'm working to try and break down that sense of that elitism.
I want to put people in a contemplative frame of mind, where they're prepared to be a little bit lost, to explore, to see the unfamiliar in the familiar, or to try the unknown.
Because for us, it's all about bringing them face to face with great works of art, capturing them at that moment of discomfort, when the inclination is kind of to reach for your iPhone, your Blackberry, but to create a zone where their curiosity can expand.
And whether it's in the expression of a Greek sculpture that reminds you of a friend, or a dog pooping in the corner of a tapestry, or, to bring it back to my tutor Pietro, those dancing figures who are indeed knocking back the wine, and that nude figure in the left foreground.
Wow.
She is a gorgeous embodiment of youthful sexuality.
In that moment, our scholarship can tell you that this is a bacchanal, but if we're doing our job right, and you've checked the jargon at the front door, trust your instinct.
You know it's an orgy.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Applause)
Someone has tripped the magical alarms in the Element Temple.
By the time you and the other monks arrive on the scene, you know you have a disaster on your hands.
Overnight, four young apprentices broke into the temple’s inner chamber to steal the sacred element crystals.
But when the alarm went off they panicked, and each of them swallowed the crystal they held right before they were caught.
With no idea how to control the crystals’ vast powers, they’ll soon transform into uncontrollable elemental spirits.
Improbably enough, the old monk next to you has seen something similar happen before.
He explains: “You must determine who ate which crystal and get each into the proper containment field before they transform.
The elements compel their masters: those who ate the Earth and Water Crystals must speak the truth, while those who consumed Fire and Air must lie."
The youths are too scared to confess their own transgressions.
Instead, they fall to accusing each other.
“Rikku took the Water crystal!”
Sumi blurts out.
Rikku interrupts angrily.
“It was Bella, she stole the Fire crystal!”
So Bella yells: “Jonah ate the Air crystal, I saw him!”
Jonah looks up timidly and shakes his head.
“I… I don’t know what happened, but Sumi doesn’t have the Earth crystal.”
So who ate which crystal?
Pause now to figure it out for yourself.
There’s no getting around it— this will take some trial and error.
But that’s not a bad thing.
If we make a wrong guess, we’ll eventually reach a point where our conclusions contradict each other.
That would allow us to confirm that our initial guess was wrong and work from there.
This is a technique known as proof by contradiction.
The trick is in being strategic about where we begin our guessing.
Some assumptions might not lead to contradictions without making further assumptions.
We want to pick one that creates the most constraints on its own, and thus gives us the most information when it turns out to be right or wrong.
Take, for example, Sumi’s statement.
If we assume she’s telling the truth, we’d know the identity of both truth tellers.
Rikku would have the Water crystal, and since she’s not lying about him, Sumi would have Earth.
So Bella would have the Fire crystal, as Rikku says.
But then Bella would have to be lying about Jonah having the Air crystal.
And yet that’s the only remaining option.
This is a contradiction, and it tells us our initial assumption was wrong.
So now we can go back to the start, but with the added knowledge that Sumi is lying.
As a liar, Sumi must either have the Fire or Air crystal.
That means Jonah was telling the truth about her, so he can’t have taken either of those.
And that means Bella was lying about him, so she must also have either Fire or Air.
Since Sumi was lying, Rikku can’t have taken the Water crystal— the only one left who could have it is Jonah.
And because we’ve already identified the two liars, Rikku must have the Earth crystal.
That means Bella has the Fire crystal and Sumi has Air.
You manage to get them all in the proper containment fields just as the crystals’ magic begins to manifest.
Compared with the difficult task of training these kids to control their new powers, figuring out who had which crystal was elementary.
I am multidisciplinary.
As a scientist, I've been a crew commander for a NASA Mars simulation last year, and as an artist, I create multicultural community art all over the planet.
And recently, I've actually been combining both.
But let me first talk a little more about that NASA mission.
This is the HI-SEAS program.
HI-SEAS is a NASA-funded planetary surface analogue on the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, and it's a research program that is specifically designed to study the effects of long-term isolation of small crews.
I lived in this dome for four months with a crew of six, a very interesting experience, of course.
We did all kinds of research.
Our main research was actually a food study, but apart from that food study -- developing a new food system for astronauts living in deep space -- we also did all kinds of other research.
We did extra-vehicular activities, as you can see here, wearing mock-up space suits, but we also had our chores and lots of other stuff to do, like questionnaires at the end of every day.
Busy, busy work.
Now, as you can imagine, it's quite challenging to live with just a small group of people in a small space for a long time.
There's all kinds of psychological challenges: how to keep a team together in these circumstances; how to deal with the warping of time you start to sense when you're living in these circumstances; sleep problems that arise; etc.
But also we learned a lot.
I learned a lot about how individual crew members actually cope with a situation like this; how you can keep a crew productive and happy, for example, giving them a good deal of autonomy is a good trick to do that; and honestly, I learned a lot about leadership, because I was a crew commander.
So doing this mission, I really started thinking more deeply about our future in outer space.
We will venture into outer space, and we will start inhabiting outer space.
I have no doubt about it.
It might take 50 years or it might take 500 years, but it's going to happen nevertheless.
So I came up with a new art project called Seeker.
And the Seeker project is actually challenging communities all over the world to come up with starship prototypes that re-envision human habitation and survival.
That's the core of the project.
Now, one important thing: This is not a dystopian project.
This is not about, "Oh my God, the world is going wrong and we have to escape because we need another future somewhere else."
No, no.
The project is basically inviting people to take a step away from earthbound constraints and, as such, reimagine our future.
And it's really helpful, and it works really well, so that's really the important part of what we're doing.
Now, in this project, I'm using a cocreation approach, which is a slightly different approach from what you would expect from many artists.
I'm essentially dropping a basic idea into a group, into a community, people start gravitating to the idea, and together, we shape and build the artwork.
It's a little bit like termites, really.
We just work together, and even, for example, when architects visit what we're doing, sometimes they have a bit of a hard time understanding how we build without a master plan.
We always come up with these fantastic large-scale scupltures that actually we can also inhabit.
The first version was done in Belgium and Holland.
It was built with a team of almost 50 people.
This is the second iteration of that same project, but in Slovenia, in a different country, and the new group was like, we're going to do the architecture differently.
So they took away the architecture, they kept the base of the artwork, and they built an entirely new, much more biomorphic architecture on top of that.
And that's another crucial part of the project.
It's an evolving artwork, evolving architecture.
This was the last version that was just presented a few weeks ago in Holland, which was using caravans as modules to build a starship.
We bought some second-hand caravans, cut them open, and reassembled them into a starship.
Now, when we're thinking about starships, we're not just approaching it as a technological challenge.
We're really looking at it as a combination of three systems: ecology, people and technology.
So there's always a strong ecological component in the project.
Here you can see aquaponic systems that are actually surrounding the astronauts, so they're constantly in contact with part of the food that they're eating.
Now, a very typical thing for this project is that we run our own isolation missions inside these art and design projects.
We actually lock ourselves up for multiple days on end, and test what we build.
And this is, for example, on the right hand side you can see an isolation mission in the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana in Slovenia, where six artists and designers locked themselves up -- I was part of that -- for four days inside the museum.
And, of course, obviously, this is a very performative and very strong experience for all of us.
Now, the next version of the project is currently being developed together with Camilo Rodriguez-Beltran, who is also a TED Fellow, in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a magical place.
First of all, it's really considered a Mars analogue.
It really does look like Mars in certain locations and has been used by NASA to test equipment.
And it has a long history of being connected to space through observations of the stars.
It's now home to ALMA, the large telescope that's being developed there.
But also, it's the driest location on the planet, and that makes it extremely interesting to build our project, because suddenly, sustainability is something we have to explore fully.
We have no other option, so I'm very curious to see what's going to happen.
Now, a specific thing for this particular version of the project is that I'm very interested to see how we can connect with the local population, the native population.
These people have been living there for a very long time and can be considered experts in sustainability, and so I'm very interested to see what we can learn from them, and have an input of indigenous knowledge into space exploration.
So we're trying to redefine how we look at our future in outer space by exploring integration, biology, technology and people; by using a cocreation approach; and by using and exploring local traditions and to see how we can learn from the past and integrate that into our deep future.
Thank you.
(Applause)