What would it be like to see like Rembrandt - to sense the gesture in all things, looking through the squalor and ugliness and finding a deeper, hard beauty in all that: what was that like? Can we let him suggest to us the penetrating gaze, the love of everything alive and being and moving?
Even if you’re listening to pounding music in headphones and everything is lit by street lights and neon signs and the subway rumbles underneath you?
Is Rembrandt’s gaze - 350 years old, pre-industrial, pre-electric, pre-mass-media - unrecoverable, anachronistic, irrelevant?
I ask myself this all the time.
There’s a saying in Torah study that if Moses were to come to a temple today he wouldn’t understand Torah, for he has missed out on 2500 years of commentary.
You have the amazing good luck to be a designer of today, right now.
When I went to NYU, my teachers were men and women of the theater of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. They taught about designing for a world that economically, technically and culturally doesn’t exist anymore - and yet their deeper lessons about design and life go through my head every day. Even if I turn their lessons on their heads.
For the next three years, remember this - keep it lodged in some protected part of your mind: It’s going to feel at times that we’re making you draw, see, and design our way, in some official, approved manner. But it’s really about leaping over and flying beyond. We’re here to help you surpass us, and to work in a world that no one knows yet is possible.
Camus said that no graduation ceremony is complete until the students consume the faculty.
I’ve been doing this design stuff professionally for coming up on 30 years and I’m good and smart and you should listen to everything I say - and I want you take everything I have, like a thief in the night, and misuse it for your own ends.
Your Mission
Be astonishing.
Have a great year!
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