John Maeda and Maira Kalman at ADC

John Maeda and Maira Kalman spoke at the Art Director’s Club on Tuesday night as part of the Hall of Fame Festival.  The two on stage together were an uncomfortable set.  Mr. Maeda, director of the MIT Media Lab and president of RISD, forgot his laptop.  He insisted that he had an amazing talk prepared on his laptop.  In place of this amazing talk, he delivered his life story, much like the talk I went to by him last year, just minus the simplicity components.  Tofu factory, MIT, chasing sorta girlfriend to Japan… His humor was dry and unsympathetic.  Seems that Maeda has reached a level of fame where he no longer needs to deliver original or intelligent content to the many audiences that ask for his time.  Thanks John.

Mrs. Kalman, illustrator and author of great repute, took the audience on a meandering journey through her current project on Lincoln, peppered with anecdotes about wallpaper and yard sales and diners.  Her self-mockery carried a distinctly more intimate and charming tone than Maeda’s.  (“The New York Times asked me to do a book about anything, so of course I did a book about nothing.”)  I have never heard Kalman speak, and I suspect she is in the same boat as Maeda, delivering the same anecdotes and conclusions such that when you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it, and you’ll go see it again if that brand of humor or reasoning suits you. (I went because I was so unsatisfied with the first talk I saw by Maeda, I wanted to give him another chance.)

The question and answer period was awkward.  The moderator struggled to find commonalities between the highly trained computer scientist as designer and the untrained meandering illustrator.  “You both come from cultures outside the US.  How has that informed your work?”  Silence.  They squint their eyes in the direction of the audience looking in the ether for something to say.  The questions about similarities effectively accentuated their differences.  Kalman is motivated by curiosity and repelled by boredom. (“I know to move on when I am board.”)  Maeda is motivated by achievement and repelled my mediocrity (“As soon as I see a student doing it better than me, I give it up and move on to something else.”)  Eventually Meada started leaning in toward Kalman with questions of his own.  Kalman delivered flat, short answers, each time looking more eager to jump off the stage and away from this mocking, logical man.  Meada seemed to like it that way.