Her Job: Using Her Own Curiosity to "Keep Challenging People's Preconceptions About Museums"

QDaily interviews Paola Antonelli, MoMA's senior curator of architecture and design, the woman The Atlantic called "the most modern curator."

Paola Antonelli believes that "the age of design has arrived, and it is enough to send us into raptures."

Since she was hired as senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in 1994, Antonelli has been doing one thing: pushing out the boundaries of "design" and challenging what people assume a museum is for.

This December, an exhibition she has curated opens at MoMA — only the second show about fashion in the museum's history, and the first large clothing exhibition since 1944. That one, "Are Clothes Modern?", was curated by the architect and designer Bernard Rudofsky, and later became known as the least fashion-show-like fashion show ever staged: Rudofsky gathered garments from the Second World War and used them to explain how fashion and society shape each other.

Reading today's society through clothes is the same curatorial logic Antonelli has applied to her new show. Whether fashion belongs in a museum at all, though, is still a vexed question. (Is fashion art?) Vanessa Friedman, fashion critic at The New York Times, once wrote: "Fashion, though famous for its elitism, has in fact long been regarded as the 'adopted child' of art — lacking in creativity and not valuable enough."

Antonelli thinks more and more people are recognizing the power of fashion, and that MoMA ought to care about it. She has called the show "Item: Is Fashion Modern?" Its protagonists are objects, not designers. She wants visitors to come away understanding where fashion comes from and how it changes.

Antonelli studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan, and before MoMA hired her she worked at architecture and design magazines including Domus and Abitare. She says she is not a fashion person, but she reads fashion in her own way, and always wants to reach further.

In April 2017 she came to Shanghai at the invitation of Ye Xiaowei, fashion director of Modern Media Group and editor-in-chief of Modern Weekly, to see Shanghai Fashion Week. During the week she took part in a discussion at Design Republic called "Eyes Wide Open," where she spoke as the main guest and made her argument again: "Fashion isn't necessarily something that blooms and vanishes — it actually has continuity. I looked into the industry more closely, and I think the moment to talk about fashion is exactly now."

A lot of young designers turned up, which delighted her. "I met many young Chinese designers, and I really like Angel Chen, Museum of Friendship (Wang Tianmo), Uma Wang and Feng Chen Wang." The Shanghai she found, she said, was not the Shanghai she had heard about in New York. "Walking around the streets here, I saw people wearing all sorts of clothes. They can express themselves freely, and that's wonderful."

Antonelli started work on the year-end fashion show a full year ahead. She recruited an advisory group of 14 people from the fashion world — among them Penny Martin, editor of The Gentlewoman, and Shayne Oliver, the artist who founded Hood by Air — to argue over what should go in.

She settled on 111 items: the white T-shirt, Levi's 501 jeans, the Casio digital watch, the little black dress, even the Jewish kippah and the Palestinian keffiyeh. You may doubt that these things count as fashion. Antonelli's answer: "These are the fashion designs that register the social, economic and political changes of the past 100 years."

She wanted the show to trace where popular forms come from and how they mutate, and the research turned up plenty of surprises. Everyone assumes the benchmark of twentieth-century style was the wrap dress Diane von Furstenberg launched in 1974 — but the spiral, body-hugging wrap cut is already there in the Taxi Dress that the British designer Charles James made in 1932. Go back further still and you find the source of that cut in the traditional Japanese kimono.

Why 111? "Because I like numbers divisible by three," Antonelli told QDaily. "I started at 99, added a few more, and it became 111." When she previewed "Item: Is Fashion Modern?" last year the announced count was 99; this year it grew to 111.

"My criteria are shaped by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western culture. I'm not saying this list of 111 matters to everyone. All I can say is that it's my personal view — I think it matters, and I want it to push people to think about fashion from another angle."

Putting a white T-shirt and a pair of Levi's on solemn display at the Museum of Modern Art, receiving visitors alongside Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Van Gogh's The Starry Night, may not look like serious business. It is still not the most radical thing Paola Antonelli has done.

"If someone gave me a free hand, I think I'd do a show about nature. We use nature, we take from nature, and we have to find ways to pay it back. So I want an exhibition that works on that question — it would take in furniture, digitization, architecture," she told QDaily.

"But that subject would probably never be approved. Just like the show I did five years ago — nobody accepted it at first."

For the show she means, Antonelli did something no one had done before: she brought 14 video games into MoMA, among them Pac-Man, Tetris, The Sims and Myst.

When MoMA announced that video games were entering the permanent collection, The Guardian's art critic Jonathan Jones immediately published a piece titled "Sorry MoMA, video games are not art." It travelled widely on social media and set off a loud argument.

The wave of doubt did not wound her. "Whenever you decide to collect something, it starts a debate," Antonelli replied. "MoMA's collection is a whole. The only reason we divide it into departments is that human knowledge works that way — no one person can touch the entirety of human consciousness."

People said video games are not art. But the curatorial mission running through MoMA's whole history has been exactly this: to stretch what art means, and to blur the line between "art" and everything else people make — design, architecture, film, fashion.

MoMA began with a very simple idea shared by a group of art enthusiasts and philanthropists: a small gallery where ordinary people could see contemporary art.

On November 7, 1929, MoMA's first exhibition gave New Yorkers an unfamiliar way of looking. Alfred H. Barr, its founding director, brought in works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh; even in the hard years of the Great Depression, the month-long Post-Impressionist show drew 47,293 visitors.

Barr probably did not foresee that the artists in that first show would become the brightest names in the history of modernist art, but his instincts have guided MoMA ever since. He compared an art museum to a laboratory, encouraged experiment, and wanted to break the conventional idea of what a museum was.

"Design is the highest expression of human creativity — so games are obviously a form of modern design. Good design becomes part of who we are, like the Roman numerals we have always used. I want people to understand that design is much more than cute chairs. Design is in our lives; it's everything around us." That was Antonelli in her 2013 TED talk, "Why I Brought Pac-Man to MoMA," explaining why the games belonged in the collection. It is the most watched of her three TED talks, with 910,000 views.

The Atlantic called Paola Antonelli "the most modern curator" in its August 2014 issue. Her ideas tend toward the odd, and the strange things she has carried into MoMA are not only video games but a mining detonator and, yes, a bottle of sweat.

In 2013 she staged a show called "Design and Violence." She picked out iconic objects made after 2001 — the year she treats as the dividing line in how the public understands violence — to show what they have to do with violence: a 3D-printed handgun, for instance, and a mining detonator, a device for setting off explosions, designed by Afghan students.

She rethought the format too, stretching the show out to keep curiosity flowing. In the first month MoMA put two objects on view; after that, one new object every week, for a full year.

"Design means a lot of things. It is absolutely not just Eames chairs and Braun toasters. It can also be a history of violence." Antonelli wanted people to think about design more widely: it can destroy at the same time as it creates beauty, and scientific progress keeps widening what design can do while raising new questions. As 3D printing spreads, for example, is a 3D-printed handgun ethical?

"Every exhibition I curate shows me a different world. It's as if I change jobs each time," Antonelli says. The one she cannot forget is "Design and the Elastic Mind," which she staged in 2008.

MoMA had put on a technology show as early as 1934, "Machine Art" — but like many exhibitions of its time it was built on an unshakable faith in the power of technological change, displaying the best modern design America could offer, full of fascination and reverence for the machine.

Antonelli always wants to push further. A year before her show opened she went to Adam Bly, founder of Seed magazine, and together they ran a monthly salon that brought designers and scientists into the same room. In the exhibition itself she gave pride of place to conceptual work from both sides, hoping to show how each of them lays out a future for us.

"A good designer should be like a sponge, actively absorbing the information they run into and converting it into something we can use." That was Antonelli on designers, in the talk previewing the show — and it describes her as well. She always puts design in a wider setting, watches it through its relationship with other things, and then interprets it her own way.

People think of a museum as a library, a hall of exhibits, somewhere solemn and sacred. Paola Antonelli wants her down-to-earth shows to update that picture. When someone objected that the video games she had installed at MoMA were really just piles of code, she shot back: "And Picasso's paintings are just paint?"

Cover image: MoMA, TED