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Channels: European Design
Maxwell Anderson welcomes artists and audience members to the European Design Symposium hosted by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Thank you all for coming. I am Max Anderson. I am The Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I am very grateful for this turnout.
Americans I think invented the infomercial, so I am going to leave some slides up as I talk. Give you something else to look at, which are the glorious images of Miller House and Garden in Columbus, Indiana
about 45 minutes south of us, which the Indianapolis Museum of Art is acquiring on May 1st of this year, and we will look forward in a couple of years time, in the Spring of 2011, to open it to the public
as one of the great modern residences around the United States, and it seemed like a great placeholder for images to lead us off this morning for this symposium of European Design Since 1985.
I want to thank the Mondriaan Foundation in Amsterdam for support of this symposium with additional support from the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York,
and we are also greatful for support from the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Consulate General of Switzerland to bring speakers from 10 European countries to Indianapolis.
There are a lot of you in the audience who have made possible the participation on a discounted basis of students from various universities around the State and the region. We are greatful to all of you for that, too many to name.
Also, for the students, there is this Strand Session, I wanted you to be aware to head to Deer-Zink Pavilion for designated tables for lunch, which is just down this way,
and that will be after the break for lunchtime. Also, speaking of infomercials, all of you receive a 10% coupon for use in discounts in the Design Center, the IMA Store, or the gallery shop,
which will be in your program brochure. I also wanted to make sure that if you would eat lunch quickly, have some fellowship and amusements, and then head to the galleries to see not only the exhibition,
but some of the other 132,000 square feet of galleries. We are one of the 10 largest encyclopedic museums in the United States,
and 1 of the 10 oldest, and so there are so many remarkable things to behold in collections. Ranging from Asia to Africa, Europe, the Americas to the world of contemporary art,
and see design objects in the context of art history, which is a privilege of doing this project at the IMA, where there are so many wonderful things
in the history of creativity, over five millennia, that had a function. That were not ars gratia artis, but were there installed in a church, a chapel, a propagandistic maneuver by an emperor,
or some other object that was intended to fulfil a purpose, and this fiction of art as something for art's sake is just a few hundred years old.
But here at the IMA, we look at design arts in a much broader context of the history of creativity. At a time when the contemporary art market is imploding,
we are also fortunate to have a long view, and today’s symposium will give us a since of how over a trajectory of time, over the last generation, so many great ides were born
and have taken root and really changed our lives around the world. I have the pleasure of introducing our key note speaker, Michele De Lucchi, who is an internationally renowned architect, designer,
and an artist who is a prime mover behind the design achievements of Cartel among others. The recipient on numerous occasions of the Premio Compasso d'Oro ADI
and many other achievements too numerous to list but are in your program, and I hope you will enjoy not only his presentation, but those to follow
with the adventures we have through European Design with some of its leading protagonists and scholars. Thank you for coming. Michele.
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