The Theater at Madison Square Garden
May 11, 2010
Thank you, and thank you Dean Scheeder for that introduction.
It's doubly a pleasure to address you all today, both because it's an honor to be with people on such an important occasion, and because, for some of you, I've had a hand in your education. I teach at Tisch, down in Red Burns' shop, the Interactive Telecommunications Program. My official job there is teaching theory and practice of social media, which means my unofficial job is explaining why all the old people are freaking out.
As you've heard already today, there is an upheaval in the creative environment you are heading into, so this afternoon, I want to tell you some stories about other people who lived their lives in times of creative revolution. I'll start with three: Johannes Trithemus, Piet Mondrian, and Ani DiFranco.
Trithemus first. Johannes Trithemus was an Abbot in the German town of Sponheim, in the late 1400s. Now to be an Abbot in the late 1400s was no fun, because an infernal machine had been unleashed on Europe, a machine that threatened the livelihood of the scribes working for Trithemus. That was the printing press, and it could create a book 300 times as fast as a scribe copying one out by hand.
Trithemus could see where this was going. If the literate population of Europe continued to buy cheap, abundant books created on a printing press, it would be bad news for the expensive, scarce books created by the scribes. Seeing this, he decided to alert the world to the dangers of abundant media, writing a book called De Laude Scriptorum Manulium. Loosely translated from the Latin, that reads "In Praise of Writing by Hand." Even more loosely translated, it reads "Won't Someone Please Think of the Scribes?"
Trithemus finished his manuscript in 1492. Now consider his dilemma: he has to get his book read as widely as possible, so he has to get a lot of copies made, really fast. He couldn't give it to the scribes, because they wrote too slowly, so De Laude Scriptorum was printed on a printing press. The medium destroyed the message.
Next time you hear some media mogul saying "We love digital media, we're very excited about it, we just want to make sure it doesn't change anything", you can now recognize that as a 500 year old thought (and one that didn't work the first time around either.)
This is one of the hallmarks of a media revolution: when even the people who hate the new medium have to use it. But of course, the future isn't shaped by people who try to opt out of it, it's shaped by people who try to figure out what to do about it.
There's a funny painting in the Museum of Modern Art, up in midtown. It shows the rectangles of a windmill standing in a field, lit brilliant white on a sunny day -- it's very Dutch, this painting. It isn't at MoMA because of its subject, though, it's there because of its creator, Piet Mondrian.
Mondrian painted this windmill in the first decade of the 20th century; by the second decade of that century, he'd reduced his entire visual palette to colored rectangles and black lines. This was one of the most rapid and complete turns to abstraction in the history of painting. What could have driven such a dramatic change?
The camera.
For the 700 years prior, the core intuition of European painting was that people like to look at things that look like things look like. So painters got very good at making one kind of thing -- paintings -- that looked like other things -- a windmill, a person, a bowl of fruit. If your goal is to make things that look like things look like, though, it's pretty hard to beat the camera for pure visual mimicry. All of a sudden, European painting was out of its historic job.
So one day, Mondrian shows up at his studio, and there's a note pinned to his door: "While you were out...representation stopped being a good idea." Now, every painter in Europe got this memo, but the vast majority of them couldn't read it, and the vast majority of those who could just made the sign of the cross and went back to painting bowls of fruit. Mondrian, though, said "Well, this isn't what I trained for, but if this is what's happening, let's go"; he asked himself "What if we stop making paintings that look like things, and start making paintings that look like paint?"
Notice that Mondrian wasn't a photographer. This is another hallmark of revolution -- when the new medium doesn't just add new possibilities, it also changes the environment for all the old possibilities as well.
So it is today. Digital media -- the internet, the web, mobile phones -- aren't just offering creative people new opportunities, they are changing the context of older forms as well. Whatever you make -- photos or films, software or hardware, a dance or a play -- digital media is changing the context in which you work.
MoMA has the Mondrian painting up because you can see, in the gleaming rectangles of the windmill, where he's going to end up. That's hindsight, though; it's only in retrospect that we can connect the windmill with the rectangles. While the change is underway, it's much more confusing.
In 1989, the singer and songwriter Ani DiFranco found an invisible memo pinned to her studio door, and it said "The music industry doesn't make music. Musicians make music. The music industry just distributes it." DiFranco realized that if she could reach her own audience, she could be her own record label, so she founded what became Righteous Babe records.
When she did this, she wasn't regarded as a genius, she was just regarded as weird. When people talked about the music industry in the 90's, they'd say "Well, there are the major labels, and then there are the independent labels...oh, and then there's Righteous Babe."
It wasn't until the middle of this decade, when Soulja Boy Tell'em and OK Go and Radiohead all started biting DiFranco's rhymes, started talking directly with their audiences, that people realized DiFranco wasn't weird, she was visionary. Even when you get it right, it can take the world a long time to catch up.
Which brings me to the fourth person I want to talk about today, the fourth person living their lives in a period of creative upheaval: you.
We are gathered here today to salute you, on the occasion of your graduation. Which is kind of weird, when you think about it. Faculty spends a lot of time in admissions meetings, deciding which students we'd be most excited to have join us. Then we bring you into our classrooms to be part of the conversations we care about most in the world. And then, just when your work is getting really interesting, we kick you out. Why would we do that?
One model for thinking about college is that we run an intellectual conveyor belt. You enter at one end and as you move along, as we stuff you full of the things you need to know. Now you are at the other end, and we're going to slap a diploma on your forehead and ship you back off to the world.
A lot of people think of college education this way, but I think that's the wrong model. It'sespecially the wrong model for creative people. It's especially the wrong model for creative people in a time of creative upheaval. A better model is the relay race. When NYU hands you a diploma, we'll also be handing you the baton, both because we think you're ready to grasp it, and also because we think you can take it and run with it to places we can't get to.
The advantage you, our students, have over us, your teachers, isn't that you know more things than we do. You don't; we know more things than you. As your parents have been trying to tell you for some time now, "paying attention" plus "middle age" equals "knows lots of things." The advantage you have over us is that a lot of things we know are now wrong.
I am old enough to have come to a full adult consciousness about the way the world works back when years began with a 1. Here's something I know: the news starts at 6 pm every evening, and it ends at 7 -- there's always exactly one hour of news every day. And the only choice I have in the matter is which of three white men are going to read it to me in English.
I know a lot of things like that. I know that books are printed on paper, and come from bookstores. I know that music is printed on plastic circles, and comes from music stores. I know that if I want to hire a secretary or sell a bike, I have to go through the newspaper. I know that all publicly available media is made by professionals. I know that if I want to watch a television program, I must stand in front of the TV at the appointed hour and no other, because that is when my show will be spilling out, and I have no way of catching it and saving it for later.
To many of you in the audience, and especially those of you clad in purple gowns, this must sound like crazy talk, but believe me, life used to be like that, and it was exactly as lousy as it sounds. The advantage you have over us is that you don't have to spend any time or energy unlearning those things. Most of you don't care, and many of you don't know, how we used to do things back when years began with a one, which is good, because it doesn't matter. All that matters is that you go out into the world and try to figure what a good idea looks like right now.
I'm going to tell you a secret, a secret we've waited to share with you until literally the last day you are in our care. You will have noticed, these last couple of years, that we have been pretty insistent about you showing up on time and paying attention while we tell you what we think you need to know. But in addition to that, we also secretly hope you've learned something else. We hope you've learned to ignore us.
Now some of you, it must be said, seem to have mastered that skill, but I'm not talking about ignoring us wholesale. I'm talking about selectively ignoring us, because there will come a day, very soon, when you are out in the world doing your work, and everything you have learned will be telling you one thing, and the world will seem to be telling you another. And at that moment, we hope you go with the world.
When you do that, when you go with what the world seems to be telling you, when you read the invisible memo and try to react to it...you will probably fail. Most new ideas are bad ideas; if it were any other way, innovation would be easy instead of hard. So you have to do it again, and again. Out in the big show, out in the real world, new ideas rarely come as a result of a single eureka moment. Mondrian went from windmills to rectangles in a historical eye-blink, but it wast still ten years of his actual life. Good ideas come as a result of unending, iterated experimentation.
School, you will have noticed, is a good place to experiment, because while you are experimenting, you can fail like crazy, and your failures will be contained by the four walls of the institution, and witnessed only by people who love you, and want you to succeed. That's the advantage of school. The disadvantage of school is that your successes have also been contained by those four walls, rather than spreading out into the world where they belong.
Today might be a good day to fix that. Somebody has to figure out what a good idea looks like right now. Could be you.
Congratulations, everybody. See you in the big show.
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