WALTER AMERIKA BLOGS

Future vs History

If yo have some time to spare, sit down and watch this debat between two world class thinkers and authors - Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz - discussing their similarities and differences as well as the foundations, methods, biases and limitations of both their disciplines. But only if you're really relaxed and not bothered by deadlines or other heartweakening stuff.

The art of trusting

My friend Aad Boon loves a fine piece of art. So, in the good tradition of Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, together with his wife Mirjam he commissioned Paul Dedden and Albert Keizer - better know as the Space Cowboys - to make him a sculputure. To be placed in his lovely garden. Now the basic thing of such an assignment seems to me to be trust. Trust by the artists involved that they will get the freedom to create along their ideas and standards of quality and at the same time trust by the commissioner that the artists will have a real interest in his individual esthetic likings and possibilities in time, space and money involved.

Concidering the happy faces of both Space Cowboys and Aad and Mirjam when the sculpture was revealed to family and friends last night, it seemed to me that the art of trusting worked out beautifully between the four of them.