When I was a teen, I had terrible periods. I had crippling cramps, I leaked blood onto my clothes and onto my bed sheets, and I had period diarrhea. And I had to miss school one to two days a month, and I remember sitting on the couch with my heating pads, thinking, "What's up with this?" When I ate food, I didn't leak saliva from my salivary glands. When I went for a walk, I didn't leak fluid from my knees, "joint fluid." Why was menstruation so different? I wanted answers to these questions but there was no one for me to ask. My mother knew nothing about menstruation except that it was dirty and shameful and I shouldn't talk about it. I asked girlfriends and everybody spoke in euphemisms. And finally, when I got the courage to go to the doctor and talk about my heavy periods, I was told to eat liver. (Laughter) And when I went to the drug store to buy my menstrual products, my 48-pack of super maxi pads, back in the day when they were the size of a tissue box, each pad -- (Laughter) You know what I'm talking about. You have no idea how far absorbent technology has come. (Laughter) I used to have to buy my menstrual products in the feminine hygiene aisle. And I remember standing there, thinking, "Well, why don't I buy toilet paper in the anal hygiene aisle?" (Laughter) Like, what's up with that? Why can't we talk about periods? And it's not about the blood, as Freud would have you say, because if it were, there would be an ear, nose and throat surgeon up here right now, talking about the taboos of nose bleeds, right? And it's not even about periods, because otherwise, when we got rid of our toxic, shameful periods when we became menopausal, we'd be elevated to a higher social status. (Laughter) (Applause) It's just a patriarchal society is invested in oppressing women, and at different points in our lives, different things are used. And menstruation is used during what we in medicine call the reproductive years. It's been around since pretty much the beginning of time, many cultures thought that women could spoil crops or milk, or wilt flowers. And then when religion came along, purity myths only made that worse. And medicine wasn't any help. In the 1920s and '30s there was the idea that women elaborated something called a menotoxin. We could wilt flowers just by walking by. (Laughter) And that's what happens when there's no diversity, right. Because there was no woman to put her hand up and go, "Well, actually, that doesn't happen." And when you can't talk about what's happening to your body, how do you break these myths? Because you don't even need to be a doctor to say that periods aren't toxic. If they were, why would an embryo implant in a toxic swill? And if we all had this secret menotoxin, we could be laying waste to crops and spoiling milk. (Laughter) Why would we have not used our X-Women powers to get the vote sooner? (Laughter) (Applause) Even now, when I tweet about period diarrhea, as one does, (Laughter) I mention that it affects 28 percent of women. And every single time, someone approaches me and says, "I thought I was the only one." That's how effective that culture of shame is, that women can't even share their experiences. So I began to think, "Well, what if everybody knew about periods like a gynecologist? Wouldn't that be great?" Then you would all know what I know, you'd know that menstruation is a pretty unique phenomenon among mammals. Most mammals have estrus. Humans, some primates, some bats, the elephant shrew and the spiny mouse menstruate. And with menstruation what happens is the brain triggers the ovary to start producing an egg. Estrogen is released and it starts to build up the lining of the uterus, cell upon cell, like bricks. And what happens if you build a brick wall too high without mortar? Well, it's unstable. So what happens when you ovulate? You release a hormone called progesterone, which is progestational, it gets the uterus ready. It acts like a mortar and it holds those bricks together. It also causes some changes to make the lining more hospitable for implantation. If there's no pregnancy, (Whoosh) lining comes out, there's bleeding from the blood vessels and that's the period. And I always find this point really interesting. Because with estrus, the final signaling to get the lining of the uterus ready actually comes from the embryo. But with menstruation, that choice comes from the ovary. It's as if choice is coded in to our reproductive tracts. (Cheering and applause) OK, so now we know why the blood is there. And it's a pretty significant amount. It's 30 to 90 milliliters of blood, which is one to three ounces, and it can be more, and I know it seems like it's more a lot of the times. I know. So why do we have so much blood? And why doesn't it just stay there till the next cycle, right? Like, you didn't get pregnant, so why can't it hang around? Well imagine if each month it got thicker and thicker and thicker, right, like, imagine what tsunami period that would be. (Laughter) We can't reabsorb it, because it's too much. And it's too much because we need a thick uterine lining for a very specific reason. Pregnancy exerts a significant biological toll on our bodies. There is maternal mortality, there is the toll of breastfeeding and there is the toll of raising a child until it is independent. And evolution -- (Laughter) That goes on longer for some of us than others. (Laughter) But evolution knows about risk-benefit ratio. And so evolution wants to maximize the chance of a beneficial outcome. And how do you maximize the chance of a beneficial outcome? You try to get the highest quality embryos. And how do you get the highest quality embryos? You make them work for it. You give them an obstacle course. So over the millennia that we have evolved, it's been a little bit like an arms race in the uterus, the lining getting thicker and thicker and thicker, and the embryo getting more invasive until we reach this détente with the lining of the uterus that we have. So we have this thick uterine lining and now it's got to come out, and how do you stop bleeding? Well, you stop a nose bleed by pinching it, if you cut your leg, you put pressure on it. We stop bleeding with pressure. When we menstruate, the lining of the uterus releases substances that are made into chemicals called prostaglandins and other inflammatory mediators. And they make the uterus cramp down, they make it squeeze on those blood vessels to stop the bleeding. They might also change blood flow to the uterus and also cause inflammation and that makes pain worse. And so you say, "OK, how much pressure is generated?" And from studies where some incredible women have volunteered to have pressure catheters put in their uterus that they wear their whole menstrual cycle -- God bless them, because we wouldn't have this knowledge without, and it's very important knowledge, because the pressure that's generated in the uterus during menstruation is 120 millimeters of mercury. "Well what's that," you say. Well, it's the amount of pressure that's generated during the second stage of labor when you're pushing. (Audience gasps) Right. Which, for those of you who haven't had an unmedicated delivery, that's what it's like when the blood pressure cuff is not quite as tight as it was at the beginning, but it's still pretty tight, and you wish it would stop. So that kind of makes it different, right? If you start thinking about the pain of menstruation, we wouldn't say if someone needed to miss school because they were in the second stage of labor and pushing, we wouldn't call them weak. We'd be like, "Oh my God, you made it that far," right? (Laughter) And we wouldn't deny pain control to women who have typical pain of labor, right? So it's important for us to call this pain "typical" instead of "normal," because when we say it's normal, it's easier to dismiss. As opposed to saying it's typical, and we should address it. And we do have some ways to address menstrual pain. One way is with something called a TENS unit, which you can wear under your clothes and it sends an electrical impulse to the nerves and muscles and no one really knows how it works, but we think it might be the gate theory of pain, which is counterirritation. It's the same reason why, if you hurt yourself, you rub it. Vibration travels faster to your brain than pain does. We also have medications called nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications. And what they do is they block the release of prostaglandins. They can reduce menstrual pain for 80 percent of women. They also reduce the volume of blood by 30 to 40 percent and they can help with period diarrhea. And we also have hormonal contraception, which gives us a thinner lining of the uterus, so there's less prostaglandins produced and with less blood, there's less need for cramping. Now, if those treatments fail you -- and it's important to use that word choice, because we never fail the treatment, the treatment fails us. If that treatment fails you, you could be amongst the people who have a resistance to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories. We don't quite understand, but there are some complex mechanisms why those medications just don't work for some women. It's also possible that you could have another reason for painful periods. You could have a condition called endometriosis, where the lining of the uterus is growing in the pelvic cavity, causing inflammation and scar tissue and adhesions. And there may be other mechanisms we don't quite understand yet, because it's a possibility that pain thresholds could be different due to very complex biological mechanisms. But we're only going to find that out by talking about it. It shouldn't be an act of feminism to know how your body works. It shouldn't -- (Applause) It shouldn't be an act of feminism to ask for help when you're suffering. The era of menstrual taboos is over. (Cheers and applause) The only curse here is the ability to convince half the population that the very biological machinery that perpetuates the species, that gives everything that we have, is somehow dirty or toxic. And I'm not going to stand for it. (Applause) And the way we break that curse? It's knowledge. Thank you. (Cheers and applause) The National Portrait Gallery is the place dedicated to presenting great American lives, amazing people. And that's what it's about. We use portraiture as a way to deliver those lives, but that's it. And so I'm not going to talk about the painted portrait today. I'm going to talk about a program I started there, which, from my point of view, is the proudest thing I did. I started to worry about the fact that a lot of people don't get their portraits painted anymore, and they're amazing people, and we want to deliver them to future generations. So, how do we do that? And so I came up with the idea of the living self-portrait series. And the living self-portrait series was the idea of basically my being a brush in the hand of amazing people who would come and I would interview. And so what I'm going to do is, not so much give you the great hits of that program, as to give you this whole notion of how you encounter people in that kind of situation, what you try to find out about them, and when people deliver and when they don't and why. Now, I had two preconditions. One was that they be American. That's just because, in the nature of the National Portrait Gallery, it's created to look at American lives. That was easy, but then I made the decision, maybe arbitrary, that they needed to be people of a certain age, which at that point, when I created this program, seemed really old. Sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. For obvious reasons, it doesn't seem that old anymore to me. And why did I do that? Well, for one thing, we're a youth-obsessed culture. And I thought really what we need is an elders program to just sit at the feet of amazing people and hear them talk. But the second part of it -- and the older I get, the more convinced I am that that's true. It's amazing what people will say when they know how the story turned out. That's the one advantage that older people have. Well, they have other, little bit of advantage, but they also have some disadvantages, but the one thing they or we have is that we've reached the point in life where we know how the story turned out. So, we can then go back in our lives, if we've got an interviewer who gets that, and begin to reflect on how we got there. All of those accidents that wound up creating the life narrative that we inherited. So, I thought okay, now, what is it going to take to make this work? There are many kinds of interviews. We know them. There are the journalist interviews, which are the interrogation that is expected. This is somewhat against resistance and caginess on the part of the interviewee. Then there's the celebrity interview, where it's more important who's asking the question than who answers. That's Barbara Walters and others like that, and we like that. That's Frost-Nixon, where Frost seems to be as important as Nixon in that process. Fair enough. But I wanted interviews that were different. I wanted to be, as I later thought of it, empathic, which is to say, to feel what they wanted to say and to be an agent of their self-revelation. By the way, this was always done in public. This was not an oral history program. This was all about 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual, and having me be the brush in their self-portrait. Now, it turns out that I was pretty perezdonald@example.net. I didn't know it coming into it. And the only reason I really know that is because of one interview I did with Senator William Fulbright, and that was six months after he'd had a stroke. And he had never appeared in public since that point. This was not a devastating stroke, but it did affect his speaking and so forth. And I thought it was worth a chance, he thought it was worth a chance, and so we got up on the stage, and we had an hour conversation about his life, and after that a woman rushed up to me, essentially did, and she said, "Where did you train as a doctor?" And I said, "I have no training as a doctor. I never claimed that." And she said, "Well, something very weird was happening. When he started a sentence, particularly in the early parts of the interview, and paused, you gave him the word, the bridge to get to the end of the sentence, and by the end of it, he was speaking complete sentences on his own." I didn't know what was going on, but I was so part of the process of getting that out. So I thought, okay, fine, I've got empathy, or empathy, at any rate, is what's critical to this kind of interview. But then I began to think of other things. Who makes a great interview in this context? It had nothing to do with their intellect, the quality of their intellect. Some of them were very brilliant, some of them were, you know, ordinary people who would never claim to be intellectuals, but it was never about that. It was about their energy. It's energy that creates extraordinary interviews and extraordinary lives. I'm convinced of it. And it had nothing to do with the energy of being young. These were people through their 90s. In fact, the first person I interviewed was George Abbott, who was 97, and Abbott was filled with the life force -- I guess that's the way I think about it -- filled with it. And so he filled the room, and we had an extraordinary conversation. He was supposed to be the toughest interview that anybody would ever do because he was famous for being silent, for never ever saying anything except maybe a word or two. And, in fact, he did wind up opening up -- by the way, his energy is evidenced in other ways. He subsequently got married again at 102, so he, you know, he had a lot of the life force in him. But after the interview, I got a call, very gruff voice, from a woman. I didn't know who she was, and she said, "Did you get George Abbott to talk?" And I said, "Yeah. Apparently I did." And she said, "I'm his old girlfriend, Maureen Stapleton, and I could never do it." And then she made me go up with the tape of it and prove that George Abbott actually could talk. So, you know, you want energy, you want the life force, but you really want them also to think that they have a story worth sharing. The worst interviews that you can ever have are with people who are modest. Never ever get up on a stage with somebody who's modest, because all of these people have been assembled to listen to them, and they sit there and they say, "Aw, shucks, it was an accident." There's nothing that ever happens that justifies people taking good hours of the day to be with them. The worst interview I ever did: William L. Shirer. The journalist who did "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." This guy had met Hitler and Gandhi within six months, and every time I'd ask him about it, he'd say, "Oh, I just happened to be there. Didn't matter." Whatever. Awful. I never would ever agree to interview a modest person. They have to think that they did something and that they want to share it with you. But it comes down, in the end, to how do you get through all the barriers we have. All of us are public and private beings, and if all you're going to get from the interviewee is their public self, there's no point in it. It's pre-programmed. It's infomercial, and we all have infomercials about our lives. We know the great lines, we know the great moments, we know what we're not going to share, and the point of this was not to embarrass anybody. This wasn't -- and some of you will remember Mike Wallace's old interviews -- tough, aggressive and so forth. They have their place. I was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say, to break out of their own cocoon of the public self, and the more public they had been, the more entrenched that person, that outer person was. And let me tell you at once the worse moment and the best moment that happened in this interview series. It all has to do with that shell that most of us have, and particularly certain people. There's an extraordinary woman named Clare Boothe Luce. It'll be your generational determinant as to whether her name means much to you. She did so much. She was a playwright. She did an extraordinary play called "The Women." She was a congresswoman when there weren't very many congresswomen. She was editor of Vanity Fair, one of the great phenomenal women of her day. And, incidentally, I call her the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Right. She was sort of adored on the Right the way Eleanor Roosevelt was on the Left. And, in fact, when we did the interview -- I did the living self-portrait with her -- there were three former directors of the CIA basically sitting at her feet, just enjoying her presence. And I thought, this is going to be a piece of cake, because I always have preliminary talks with these people for just maybe 10 or 15 minutes. We never talk before that because if you talk before, you don't get it on the stage. So she and I had a delightful conversation. We were on the stage and then -- by the way, spectacular. It was all part of Clare Boothe Luce's look. She was in a great evening gown. She was 80, almost that day of the interview, and there she was and there I was, and I just proceeded into the questions. And she stonewalled me. It was unbelievable. Anything that I would ask, she would turn around, dismiss, and I was basically up there -- any of you in the moderate-to-full entertainment world know what it is to die onstage. And I was dying. She was absolutely not giving me a thing. And I began to wonder what was going on, and you think while you talk, and basically, I thought, I got it. When we were alone, I was her audience. Now I'm her competitor for the audience. That's the problem here, and she's fighting me for that, and so then I asked her a question -- I didn't know how I was going to get out of it -- I asked her a question about her days as a playwright, and again, characteristically, instead of saying, "Oh yes, I was a playwright, and this is what blah blah blah," she said, "Oh, playwright. Everybody knows I was a playwright. Most people think that I was an actress. I was never an actress." But I hadn't asked that, and then she went off on a tear, and she said, "Oh, well, there was that one time that I was an actress. It was for a charity in Connecticut when I was a congresswoman, and I got up there," and she went on and on, "And then I got on the stage." And then she turned to me and said, "And you know what those young actors did? They upstaged me." And she said, "Do you know what that is?" Just withering in her contempt. And I said, "I'm learning." (Laughter) And she looked at me, and it was like the successful arm-wrestle, and then, after that, she delivered an extraordinary account of what her life really was like. I have to end that one. This is my tribute to Clare Boothe Luce. Again, a remarkable person. I'm not politically attracted to her, but through her life force, I'm attracted to her. And the way she died -- she had, toward the end, a brain tumor. That's probably as terrible a way to die as you can imagine, and very few of us were invited to a dinner party. And she was in horrible pain. We all knew that. She stayed in her room. Everybody came. The butler passed around canapes. The usual sort of thing. Then at a certain moment, the door opened and she walked out perfectly dressed, completely composed. The public self, the beauty, the intellect, and she walked around and talked to every person there and then went back into the room and was never seen again. She wanted the control of her final moment, and she did it amazingly. Now, there are other ways that you get somebody to open up, and this is just a brief reference. It wasn't this arm-wrestle, but it was a little surprising for the person involved. I interviewed Steve Martin. It wasn't all that long ago. And we were sitting there, and almost toward the beginning of the interview, I turned to him and I said, "Steve," or "Mr. Martin, it is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods. Was yours unhappy?" And he looked at me, you know, as if to say, "This is how you're going to start this thing, right off?" And then he turned to me, not stupidly, and he said, "What was your childhood like?" And I said -- these are all arm wrestles, but they're affectionate -- and I said, "My father was loving and supportive, which is why I'm not funny." (Laughter) And he looked at me, and then we heard the big sad story. His father was an SOB, and, in fact, he was another comedian with an unhappy childhood, but then we were off and running. So the question is: What is the key that's going to allow this to proceed? Now, these are arm wrestle questions, but I want to tell you about questions that are more related to empathy and that really, very often, are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked. And I'll just give you two examples of this because of the time constraints. One was an interview I did with one of the great American biographers. Again, some of you will know him, most of you won't, Dumas Malone. He did a five-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, spent virtually his whole life with Thomas Jefferson, and by the way, at one point I asked him, "Would you like to have met him?" And he said, "Well, of course, but actually, I know him better than anyone who ever met him, because I got to read all of his letters." So, he was very satisfied with the kind of relationship they had over 50 years. And I asked him one question. I said, "Did Jefferson ever disappoint you?" And here is this man who had given his whole life to uncovering Jefferson and connecting with him, and he said, "Well ..." -- I'm going to do a bad southern accent. Dumas Malone was from Mississippi originally. But he said, "Well," he said, "I'm afraid so." He said, "You know, I've read everything, and sometimes Mr. Jefferson would smooth the truth a bit." And he basically was saying that this was a man who lied more than he wished he had, because he saw the letters. He said, "But I understand that." He said, "I understand that." He said, "We southerners do like a smooth surface, so that there were times when he just didn't want the confrontation." And he said, "Now, John Adams was too honest." And he started to talk about that, and later on he invited me to his house, and I met his wife who was from Massachusetts, and he and she had exactly the relationship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. She was the New Englander and abrasive, and he was this courtly fellow. But really the most important question I ever asked, and most of the times when I talk about it, people kind of suck in their breath at my audacity, or cruelty, but I promise you it was the right question. This was to Agnes de Mille. Agnes de Mille is one of the great choreographers in our history. She basically created the dances in "Oklahoma," transforming the American theater. An amazing woman. At the time that I proposed to her that -- by the way, I would have proposed to her; she was extraordinary -- but proposed to her that she come on. She said, "Come to my apartment." She lived in New York. "Come to my apartment and we'll talk for those 15 minutes, and then we'll decide whether we proceed." And so I showed up in this dark, rambling New York apartment, and she called out to me, and she was in bed. I had known that she had had a stroke, and that was some 10 years before. And so she spent almost all of her life in bed, but -- I speak of the life force -- her hair was askew. She wasn't about to make up for this occasion. And she was sitting there surrounded by books, and her most interesting possession she felt at that moment was her will, which she had by her side. She wasn't unhappy about this. She was resigned. She said, "I keep this will by my bed, memento mori, and I change it all the time just because I want to." And she was loving the prospect of death as much as she had loved life. I thought, this is somebody I've got to get in this series. She agreed. She came on. Of course she was wheelchaired on. Half of her body was stricken, the other half not. She was, of course, done up for the occasion, but this was a woman in great physical distress. And we had a conversation, and then I asked her this unthinkable question. I said, "Was it a problem for you in your life that you were not beautiful?" And the audience just -- you know, they're always on the side of the interviewee, and they felt that this was a kind of assault, but this was the question she had wanted somebody to ask her whole life. And she began to talk about her childhood, when she was beautiful, and she literally turned -- here she was, in this broken body -- and she turned to the audience and described herself as the fair demoiselle with her red hair and her light steps and so forth, and then she said, "And then puberty hit." And she began to talk about things that had happened to her body and her face, and how she could no longer count on her beauty, and her family then treated her like the ugly sister of the beautiful one for whom all the ballet lessons were given. And she had to go along just to be with her sister for company, and in that process, she made a number of decisions. First of all, was that dance, even though it hadn't been offered to her, was her life. And secondly, she had better be, although she did dance for a while, a choreographer because then her looks didn't matter. But she was thrilled to get that out as a real, real fact in her life. It was an amazing privilege to do this series. There were other moments like that, very few moments of silence. The key point was empathy because everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions, so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are, and I commend that to you, even if you're not doing interviews. Just be that way with your friends and particularly the older members of your family. Thank you very much. I'm almost like a crazy evangelical. I've always known that the age of design is upon us, almost like a rapture. If the day is sunny, I think, "Oh, the gods have had a good design day." Or, I go to a show and I see a beautiful piece by an artist, particularly beautiful, I say he's so good because he clearly looked to design to understand what he needed to do. So I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression. That's why I'm talking to you today about the age of design, and the age of design is the age in which design is still cute furniture, is still posters, is still fast cars, what you see at MoMA today. But in truth, what I really would like to explain to the public and to the audiences of MoMA is that the most interesting chairs are the ones that are actually made by a robot, like this beautiful chair by Dirk Vander Kooij, where a robot deposits a toothpaste-like slur of recycled refrigerator parts, as if he were a big candy, and makes a chair out of it. Or good design is digital fonts that we use all the time and that become part of our identity. I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs, that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life. And it's interesting how so much of what we're talking about tonight is not simply design but interaction design. And in fact, interaction design is what I've been trying to insert in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art for a few years, starting not very timidly but just pointedly with works, for instance, by Martin Wattenberg -- the way a machine plays chess with itself, that you see here, or Lisa Strausfeld and her partners, the Sugar interface for One Laptop Per Child, Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On musical instruments, and Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters, and John Maeda's Reactive Books, and also Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's I Want You To Want Me. These were some of the first acquisitions that really introduced the idea of interaction design to the public. But more recently, I've been trying really to go even deeper into interaction design with examples that are emotionally really suggestive and that really explain interaction design at a level that is almost undeniable. The Wind Map, by Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, I don't know if you've ever seen it -- it's really fantastic. It looks at the territory of the United States as if it were a wheat field that is procured by the winds and that is really giving you a pictorial image of what's going on with the winds in the United States. But also, more recently, we started acquiring video games, and that's where all hell broke loose in a really interesting way. (Laughter) There are still people that believe that there's a high and there's a low. And that's really what I find so intriguing about the reactions that we've had to the anointment of video games in the MoMA collection. We've -- No, first of all, New York Magazine always gets it. I love them. So we are in the right quadrant. We are in the Highbrow -- that's daring, that's courageous -- and Brilliant, which is great. Timidly, we've been higher on the diagonal in other situations, but it's okay. It's good. It's good. It's good. (Laughter) But here comes the art critic. Oh, that was fantastic. So the first was Jonathan Jones from The Guardian. "Sorry, MoMA, video games are not art." Did I ever say they were art? I was talking about interaction design. Excuse me. "Exhibiting Pac-Man and Tetris alongside Picasso and Van Gogh" -- They're two floors away. (Laughter) — "will mean game over for any real understanding of art." I'm bringing in the end of the world. You know? We were talking about the rapture? It's coming. And Jonathan Jones is making it happen. So the same Guardian rebuts, "Are video games art: the debate that shouldn't be. Last week, Guardian art critic blah blah suggested that games cannot qualify as art. But is he right? And does it matter?" Thank you. Does it matter? You know, it's like once again there's this whole problem of design being often misunderstood for art, or the idea that is so diffuse that designers want to aspire to, would like to be called, artists. No. Designers aspire to be really great designers. Thank you very much. And that's more than enough. So my knight in shining armor, John Maeda, without any prompt, came out with this big declaration on why video games belong in the MoMA. And that was fantastic. And I thought that was it. But then there was another wonderfully pretentious article that came out in The New Republic, so pretentious, by Liel Leibovitz, and it said, "MoMA has mistaken video games for art." Again. "The museum is putting Pac-Man alongside Picasso." Again. "That misses the point." Excuse me. You're missing the point. And here, look, the above question is put bluntly: "Are video games art? No. Video games aren't art because they are quite thoroughly something else: code." Oh, so Picasso is not art because it's oil paint. Right? So it's so fantastic to see how these feathers that were ruffled, and these reactions, were so vehement. And you know what? The International Cat Video Film Festival didn't have that much of a reaction. (Laughter) I think this was truly fantastic. We were talking about dancing ponies, but I was really jealous of the Walker Arts Center for putting up this festival, because it's very, very wonderful. And there's this Flaubert quote that I love: "I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it." I consider myself the tide of shit. (Laughter) (Applause) You know, we have to go through that. Even in the 1930s, my colleagues that were trying to put together an abstract art show had all of these works stopped by the customs officers that decided they were not art. So it's happened before, and it will happen in the future, but right now I can tell you that I am so, so proud to be able to call Pac-Man part of the MoMA collection. And the same with, for instance, Tetris, original version, the Soviet one. And you know, the amount of work -- yeah, Alexey Pajitnov was working for the Soviet government and that's how he developed Tetris, and Alexey himself reconstructed the whole game and even gave us a simulation of the cathode ray tube that makes it look slightly bombed. And it's fantastic. So behind these acquisitions is an enormous amount of work, because we're still the Museum of Modern Art, so even when we tackle popular culture, we tackle it as a form of interaction design and as something that has to go into the collection at MoMA, therefore, has to be researched. So to get to choosing Eric Chahi's wonderful Another World, amongst others, we put together a panel of experts, and we worked on this acquisition, and it's mostly myself and Kate Carmody and Paul Galloway. We worked on it for a year and a half. So many people helped us — designers of games, you might know Jamin Warren and his collaborators at Kill Screen magazine, and you know, Kevin Slavin. You name it. We bugged everybody, because we knew that we were ignorant. We were not real gamers enough, so we had to really talk to them. And so we decided, of course, to have Sim City 2000, not the other Sim City, that one in particular, so the criteria that we developed along the way were really strong, and were not only criteria of selection. They were also criteria of exhibition and of preservation. That's what makes this acquisition more than a little game or a little joke. It's truly a way to think of how to preserve and show artifacts that will more and more become part of our lives in the future. We live today, as you know very well, not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two. And that's really where interaction lies, and that's the importance of interaction. And in order to explain interaction, we need to really bring people in and make them realize how interaction is part of their lives. So when I talk about it, I don't talk only about video games, which are in a way the purest form of interaction, unadulterated by any kind of function or finality. I also talk about the MetroCard vending machine, which I consider a masterpiece of interaction. I mean, that interface is beautiful. It looks like a burly MTA guy coming out of the tunnel. You know, with your mitt you can actually paw the MetroCard, and I talk about how bad ATM machines usually are. So I let people understand that it's up to them to know how to judge interaction so as to know when it's good or when it's bad. So when I show The Sims, I try to make people really feel what it meant to have an interaction with The Sims, not only the fun but also the responsibility that came with the Tamagotchi. You know, video games can be truly deep even when they're completely mindless. I'm sure that all of you know Katamari Damacy. It's about rolling a ball and picking up as many objects as you can in a finite amount of time and hopefully you'll be able to make it into a planet. I've never made it into a planet, but that's it. Or, you know, Vib-Ribbon was not distributed here in the United States. It was a PlayStation game, but mostly for Japan. And it was one of the first video games in which you could choose your own music. So you would put into the PlayStation, you would put your own CD, and then the game would change alongside your music. So really fantastic. Not to mention Eve Online. Eve Online is an artificial universe, if you wish, but one of the diplomats that was killed in Benghazi, not Ambassador Stevens, but one of his collaborators, was a really big shot in Eve Online, so here you have a diplomat in the real world that spends his time in Eve Online to kind of test, maybe, all of his ideas about diplomacy and about universe-building, and to the point that the first announcement of the bombing was actually given on Eve Online, and after his death, several parts of the universe were named after him. And I was just recently at the Eve Online fan festival in Reykjavík that was quite amazing. I mean, we're talking about an experience that of course can seem weird to many, but that is very educational. Of course, there are games that are even more educational. Dwarf Fortress is like the holy grail of this kind of massive multiplayer online game, and in fact the two Adams brothers were in Reykjavík, and they were greeted by a standing ovation by all the Eve Online fans. It was amazing to see. And it's a beautiful game. So you start seeing here that the aesthetics that are so important to a museum collection like MoMA's are kept alive also by the selection of these games. And you know, Valve -- you know, Portal -- is an example of a video game in which you have a certain type of violence which also leads me to talk about one of the biggest issues that we had to discuss when we acquired the video games, what to do with violence. Right? We had to make decisions. At MoMA, interestingly, there's a lot of violence depicted in the art part of the collection, but when I came to MoMA 19 years ago, and as an Italian, I said, "You know what, we need a Beretta." And I was told, "No. No guns in the design collection." And I was like, "Why?" Interestingly, I learned that it's considered that in design and in the design collection, what you see is what you get. So when you see a gun, it's an instrument for killing in the design collection. If it's in the art collection, it might be a critique of the killing instrument. So it's very interesting. But we are acquiring our critical dimension also in design, so maybe one day we'll be able to acquire also the guns. But here, in this particular case, we decided, you know, with Kate and Paul, that we would have no gratuitous violence. So we have Portal because you shoot walls in order to create new spaces. We have Street Fighter II, because martial arts are good. (Laughter) But we don't have GTA because, maybe it's my own reflection, I've never been able to do anything but crashing cars and shooting prostitutes and pimps. So it was not very constructive. (Laughter) So, I'm making fun of it, but we discussed this for so many days. You have no idea. And to this day, I am ambivalent, but when you have instead games like Flow, there's no doubt. It's like, it's about serenity and it's about sublime. It's about experiencing what it means to be a sea creature. Then we have a few also side-scrollers -- classical ones. So it's quite a hefty collection. And right now, we started with the first 14, but we have several that are coming up, and the reason why we haven't acquired them yet is because you don't acquire just the game. You acquire the relationship with the company. What we want, what we aspire to, is the code. It's very hard to get, of course. But that's what would enable us to preserve the video games for a really long time, and that's what museums do. They also preserve artifacts for posterity. In absence of the code, because, you know, video game companies are not very forthcoming in some cases, in absence of that, we acquire the relationship with the company. We're going to stay with them forever. They're not going to get rid of us. And one day, we'll get that code. (Laughter) But I want to explain to you the criteria that we chose for interaction design. Aesthetics are really important. And I'm showing you Core War here, which is an early game that takes advantage aesthetically of the limitations of the processor. So the kind of interferences that you see here that look like beautiful barriers in the game are actually a consequence of the processor's limitedness, which is fantastic. So aesthetics is always important. And so is space, the spatial aspect of games. You know, I feel that the best video games are the ones that have really savvy architects that are behind them, and if they're not architects, bona fide trained in architecture, they have that feeling. But the spatial evolution in video games is extremely important. Time. The way we experience time in video games, as in other forms of interaction design, is really quite amazing. It can be real time or it can be the time within the game, as is in Animal Crossing, where seasons follow each other at their own pace. So time, space, aesthetics, and then, most important, behavior. The real core issue of interaction design is behavior. Designers that deal with interaction design behaviors that go to influence the rest of our lives. They're not just limited to our interaction with the screen. In this case, I'm showing you Marble Madness, which is a beautiful game in which the controller is a big sphere that vibrates with you, so you have a sphere that's moving in this landscape, and the sphere, the controller itself, gives you a sense of the movement. In a way, you can see how video games are the purest aspect of interaction design and are very useful to explain what interaction is. We don't want to show the video games with the paraphernalia. No arcade nostalgia. If anything, we want to show the code, and here you see Ben Fry's distellamap of Pac-Man, of the Pac-Man code. So the way we acquired the games is very interesting and very unorthodox. You see them here displayed alongside other examples of design, furniture and other parts, but there's no paraphernalia, no nostalagia, only the screen and a little shelf with the controllers. The controllers are, of course, part of the experience, so you cannot do away with it. But interestingly, this choice was not condemned too vehemently by gamers. I was afraid that they would kill us, and instead they understood, especially when I told them that I was trying to apply the same stratagem that Philip Johnson applied in 1934 when he wanted to make people understand the importance of design, and he took propeller blades and pieces of machinery and in the MoMA galleries he put them on white pedestals against white walls, as if they were Brancusi sculptures. He created this strange distance, this shock, that made people realize how gorgeous formally, and also important functionally, design pieces were. I would like to do the same with video games. By getting rid of the sticky carpets and the cigarette butts and everything else that we might remember from our childhood, I want people to understand that those are important forms of design. And in a way, the video games, the fonts and everything else lead us to make people understand a wider meaning for design. One of my dream acquisitions, which has been on hold for a few years but now will come back on the front burner, is a 747. I would like to acquire it, but without owning it. I don't want it to be at MoMA and