WHAT WE DO IS SECRET

RISD’s Future

Posted by Nobi, 21 Dec 2007

Today John Maeda accepted the offer to be the new president of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), the best art and design school in the US.

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I posted my cynical view of New York City in GERMS. I wonder if anyone has noticed that the title of the post responded to the domain name of this web site WHAT WE DO IS SECRET… I thought it would be a good way to punctuate Made by Blog as its entries started to drift away from topics only related to perfume.

Since the entry of GERMS I haven’t responded to the comments. I appreciate all of them and apologize for not having been able to comment back. Anyhow, here are my thoughts on some of the comments given to the previous few posts.

Sarah G’s comment on GERMS has been stuck in my head… “I think that while the city may have a clean face, there are dark and dangerous forces at work within it, and within American society at large. It is our responsibility as artists to respond to them. And that is where NYC’s next artistic jolt will come from.” I don’t think any artist will disagree with what she wrote there. My only question is how many artists would be able to face the challenge…

In GERMS, Treazurekitten also left a quote from Picasso, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” It’s actually one of my favorite quotes from the artist. In a way it was funny to hear Philippe Starck say “I think my job is absolutely useless …. I feel like shit…” in the video I posted recently. I’ve always believed that a truly creative and original artist will have the feeling of creating an absolutely useless garbage, and yet feels completely content with his life.

Octavian’s comment immediately reminded me of a Japanese food called Natto (fermented soy beans) which used to smell much stronger when I was a kid. Perhaps our modern society has been trying to kill all the unique smells on earth, and Natto was just another victim of this plot.

There was a brief comment from Estetik in an older post BRANDING THE FUTURE: “Olfactive branding is not really enough to achieve the goals.” Well, I think it depends on what the ‘goals’ are for the companies, and although olfactive branding may not bring immediate cash to the companies it will add a new dimension to their images for people who still have decent olfaction.

Yukiko asked about the locations shown in the 4 images posted on Dec 2. The top image in the entry is the interior of Azzedine Alaia Boutique in Paris. The second and third are Hotel Puerta America in Madrid. The last on is MHT (a jewelry store) in Tokyo. Yukiko-san, I don’t know if you live near Tokyo, but here is the address of MHT: 3-7-3 Kita-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo. I haven’t visited this store in Tokyo, but Marc Newson had lived in Japan for a while and he seems to understand what works well in Japan.

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