Month: September 2016

LOS ANGELES IS IN THE MIDST OF A CULTURAL RENAISSANCE. AT THE EPICENTER IS THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART (LACMA). AT ITS EPICENTER IS MICHAEL GOVAN, WHO IS REDEFINING THE ROLE OF MUSEUM DIRECTOR, MUSEUM AND CITY SIMULTANEOUSLY…

FRED HOFFMAN: I thought I’d start by getting your reflections on your museum experience prior to Los Angeles, starting with the Guggenheim, and how you think your time at the Guggenheim has impacted you today.

MICHAEL GOVAN: I was very young, like 24 or 25. I was thrown into New York, helping Tom Krens run the Guggenheim. It seems like a long time ago. One of the highlights was working with Frank Gehry in Los Angeles on the Guggenheim Bilbao design—getting to know that great architect and getting his view on Los Angeles. In spending time with Frank, I came to appreciate his perspective on L.A. You know, the story that since there’s no downtown and it’s simply a line, it’s Wilshire Boulevard, which becomes the map of Los Angeles. A lot of things from that experience just stuck with me, never expecting to end up in L.A. The other, and probably biggest thing, was working with the Panza Collection.

FH: I was going to ask if Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, one of the first and foremost collectors of not only abstract expressionism and pop but environmental-scale works of the late ’60s and ’70s, helped shape your aesthetic vision.

MG: Working with the artists in the Panza Collection of the Guggenheim shaped my entire life, and I think that’s what drew me into the idea that maybe I wasn’t going to be an artist … that maybe I could work with artists.

FH: You’ve run with it in such a brilliant way.

MG: It was something I was interested in when I was in school, when I was an artist. I actually met Panza and some of those artists when I was still in Williams College, because we were working with Panza at Mass MoCA, where we were trying to turn that factory into a museum, which is now a museum called Mass MoCA. When Panza came, we got very involved with him. He brought Dan Flavin, and even then Dan Flavin was a hero of mine in terms of that kind of art. So even back then, before the Guggenheim, I was so lucky, and then, of course, to travel to Varese and see my first Maria Nordman, to see Bruce Nauman’s full-room installations, James Turrell’s first Skyspace, Robert Irwin’s window and corridor, Richard Serra, Carl Andre’s zinc piece and many others was just such a revelation—to go to Italy to see all these American artists that you couldn’t see anywhere in the U.S. This was such a powerful experience, and equally powerful was when we [the Guggenheim Museum] acquired the Panza Collection. You may remember the press—not all the artists were happy. Because I was the lead on the negotiation, when the going got rough all the curators threw it all back to me to resolve it. So I ended up meeting and working with each of the artists in the collection.

FH: What were the concerns of these artists?

MG: I think it was a lot of things. One was that Panza had acquired things, you know, for very little money and now he was half-selling them. It was half-gift; he was very generous, but he was half-selling them to the Guggenheim. The artists weren’t benefiting in any way and Panza had never been very wealthy. He had been generous to bring the artists to install the work but he was not a wealthy man. Panza was not really equipped to deal with the complexity of these artists. Some of the artists were upset. Donald Judd and Dan Flavin were particularly upset. When I stepped in the middle of it, the idea was to make peace and that was hard, especially with Judd. But there was nothing more exciting than working with those artists.

FH: I can only imagine.

MG: Judd was aggressively negative, and the only reason I got to go to Marfa was because Judd was so mad at the Guggenheim and someone called Judd and said, “Look, this guy is too young to have done too much wrong yet. You’ve got to meet with him.” And he’s like, “He can come down here, but I won’t meet with him.” And, of course, Judd not only met with me but he told me his life story. He showed me what it meant to make art outside of the context of an urban institution and why that was important. Equally, Dan Flavin became one of my closest artist friends. There are probably 20 relationships that came out of that moment. The thing is, I learned quickly that the reputation artists sometimes have for being difficult almost always has nothing to do with them wanting to be difficult; it has to do with principle. It wasn’t Judd being difficult for the hell of it; he had a specific set of ethical and artistic principles that he believed in—ideas and concerns that are really inherent in art. Understanding this completely changed my mind, my understanding of what lies behind the work of a great artist. Today we live in an era when market conditions often get ahead, and artists are sometimes difficult for the wrong reasons. Or in a way, not difficult enough. They’re sometimes too flexible, and when they aren’t it’s not necessarily about art, it’s about something else.

FH: Shifting gears, what were your expectations at the time you accepted the job as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art?

MG: Very specifically I had the sort of global experience at the Guggenheim of a big museum, which from a budget and management standpoint was about as big as LACMA. So I had the management experience. I left that to go to Dia in order to be closer to artists. Because of that experience I had the opportunity of working closely with some of the greatest artists of our time. Between the big-city experience where you have that general public coming in and the Dia:Beacon experience where you can transform a small town and create an experience which is sort of, I don’t know, life-changing, somehow L.A. seemed to have the potential to mix both, and clearly it was the most exciting, multicultural urban audience.

FH: An untapped audience?

MG: Yes, it wasn’t that tapped. The tendency was very small, and then on the flip side, because of the amount of land and because of the, I mean, honestly, the indoor-outdoor experience—the weather and that so many artists from L.A. had that environmental sense, that three-dimensional sense—for me, it was a city architecture. I thought, “Oh, you can create something that is super public and sublime.” You know, like you could do both here in L.A. It was also the idea that maybe we should recalibrate these interests in contemporary art world that I was so familiar with back to a more historical base—that maybe that comparison would make it more relevant. The other thing is, you quickly saw in the early 2000s that the contemporary art-world was globalizing so fast. You couldn’t just hang out with New York artists and expect to be in the center of the art world. Art was being made everywhere, and so, in order to understand that, you had to understand the cultural identities, the histories of many other cultures. The idea of an encyclopedic museum that was sort of fresh and young—this museum is only 50 years old—seemed to present such opportunities. And this museum was into contemporary art from the day it was born, right? When I arrived I was interested in the idea of an encyclopedic art museum with a contemporary perspective. I thought somehow the world needed one of those.

FH: Do you think of yourself as sort of unique in this regard?

MG: For me it was very much about globalism—about the art of the past and how it related to the art of the present. I remember this being very controversial in certain circles. Like, “Why would you have a person who is a contemporary art person running an encyclopedic museum?” Of course, now it looks like a no-brainer because many of the people who have been named to these top posts have their expertise in contemporary art, including the directors of the Brooklyn Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s now become a bit of a trend. I think that’s obvious and for many reasons, including that most of the jobs and most of the growth and energy in art museums in the last 20 years has been in the modern and contemporary field. And the audience is growing strongly. But it won’t always be that way.

FH: When did you first hear about Chris Burden’s streetlights?

MG: I started talking about public sculpture on the campus and Stephanie Barron [senior curator] came up to me and said, “You really have to go up and see what Chris is doing.”

FH: When you first saw these objects, did you have any idea that they could have such an important function on your campus and create such a profound identity for the museum?

MG: Well, no and yes. When I came to the museum, I knew for sure that I wanted a campus that was marked by art. Nothing against architecture—I love architecture, but I wanted the image of the museum in the guidebooks not to be a building but art. Especially since our buildings are so ugly! It was painful to see that the guidebook showed the entry with the giant limestone wall and you couldn’t see any art. So I knew. Somehow it was obvious. I didn’t know what form it would take, and the story is that it was almost like a dream. I went to Andy Gordon, who was not the chairman of the board and was not even a really big art collector, and said, “This will change the museum in Los Angeles. You have to do it.”

FH: But did you have a sense that Urban Light would become such an icon?

MG: Icons aren’t given. Things aren’t an icon, a priority. The public makes icons; you put things out and you hope that it’s owned, right? Like, when you do things like 202 street lamps or a 350-ton rock [Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass], you’re pretty sure that people are gonna have an opinion. It’s not gonna be lukewarm or not noticed. So, yes, it was put out there with the hope that it would be the equivalent of, have an effect like that of the Guggenheim Bilbao, where architecture ignited a city. What I didn’t get for sure was how the sculpture was supposed to be engaged by the public. Originally the security fence was supposed to be out front to protect the sculpture, but I said, “No, no, no, they’re street lamps. They can’t be behind a security fence.” So we pulled the security fence back because Chris said they were going to be lit all night long, and I said, “OK, the art’s open all night long. That’s the deal.” So I think there was a tremendous hope that the public would grab them.

FH: It was a declaration to the public to take advantage of this opportunity.

MG: Yes, and it was given by the artist in that sense. The first thing you read when you come to LACMA, if you pay attention, is the artist’s statement on the plaque declaring that a great city is beautiful to behold and safe after dark—a kind of civic ethical statement.

FH: Michael, how does the museum keep progressing on the track you have created over the last 10 years? I am especially interested in how you keep going in terms of the identity of this museum with the world of contemporary art. Your projects with Burden, Heizer and Irwin are a clear declaration of the museum’s strong, fully engaged, ongoing commitment to contemporary art. How will you demonstrate that commitment during the upcoming eight years when you will have limited exhibition space and significant disruption to the campus during the removal of four of your buildings and the construction of your new Peter Zumthor campus?

MG: What we’re trying to do is what has been done over centuries in building cities and working with living artists to help define those cities. Somehow culture got derailed in museums. You know, during the largest percentage of time in the history of art, civilizations worked with living artists to make things and mark their places and their points of view. Then we got into this weird era in the 19th century or early 20th century when you mostly collected things of other eras—dead artists—and assembled them in things like a box, right? So we’re really just trying to go back to that place in time by working with the artists of our time, rather than trying to decorate with the plunder of other eras. So it’s hand in hand of the old and the new. Obviously, once you’ve done that a lot on one site, you’re gonna run out of room at some point.

There are many questions. One is what would we do when we’re closed? When we’re closed, we will still be open because we will have 100,000 square feet of exhibition space and we’ll have the campus that we’ve made, so those things that you see—Barbara Kruger, Chris Burden, Robert Irwin, Mike Heizer—all those things will be present. The one thing we’re doing is commissioning a work of architecture that I think will be very extraordinary. We will also replace and re-site things like the Tony Smith installation very significantly. We have things like the Calder sculpture, commissioned when LACMA was born in ’65, which will be more prominently sited because right now it’s a little bit hidden. And then, of course, we have other works bubbling. We will continue our now established tradition of engaging artists to be part of our program, not just to show their work but working with our exhibitions and our curators. I don’t think we’re public about that yet, but we’re working on two right now. So that’s a way of engaging with an artist.

I would like to throw out another aspect of the museum’s future. In the old model of the museum you simply added wings, like barnacles, when you had more art. But really, if you think about it, the era of collecting ancient and older objects is almost closed. There aren’t a lot of old objects and a lot of them are already in museums. They are very expensive and they’re few and far between. The collecting energies, as you have pointed out, are really a question of the present. If you think about the next 50 to 100 years, the greatest growth of any museum will be art of that time, whatever the now is going forward. I’ve started to propose to the trustees and the staff that maybe the growth model isn’t all on this site. We live in a horizontal city. There are many, many cities within it, with neighborhood spaces that are underutilized and communities that are very hungry.

FH: That’s exciting to hear.

MG: As we keep working with artists and consider the character of this place and the time from 1965 when the place was born with the Calder sculpture to, say, the 2030s, when some of the last works will be placed here—100 years maybe on this campus—there will always be programming, but the possibility to extend out to other communities in L.A. is huge. That’s in my head. I won’t be around for all of it, but if I could lay the administrative mechanism to maintain and care for this vision—and this includes even owning houses—then you could grow LACMA out like, you know, like the pearls on a necklace around Los Angeles County of places and spaces.

The cool thing is that when the public comes to this place in 10 years, not only will they see an incredible, accessible, safe and fantastic facility for the collections, but the movie museum will be open—it will be art and film. By the way, there’s automobiles too, and with the subway stop right here this piece of Los Angeles will be one of the great cultural parks of the world. It’s a huge offering, and in this sense, you won’t have this kind of cluster anywhere else. A number of museums have been copying what we’re doing in some sense, but that’s difficult to copy. Nobody’s gonna build a movie museum and an art museum and alter a public space on this level and as easily. In that sense, we are creating a unique identity here in Los Angeles.

FH: Absolutely, and it took a unique person to put those pieces together.

MG: Yeah, the seeds are all here.

FH: Well, they weren’t mined before.

MG: I’m really looking forward to the next decade. The last decade has gone into laying the groundwork—the hard work behind the scenes, the collective of building the board, of building these relationships with art and film and all of that. You know, in a decade this will be a completely transformed place. In 2018, these buildings will disappear and all will be replaced by ambitious architecture and ideas—it’s incredible. L.A. is probably the only city, certainly in the U.S., that will look so completely different in the next 10 to 20 years. So it’s kind of a thrilling thing to be here.

FH: Michael, thank you for sharing your thoughts and vision with me.

 

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“PEOPLE FALL IN LOVE AT CAFÉS. PEOPLE HAVE DEEP AND IMPORTANT CONVERSATIONS IN CAFÉS. THEY MEET PEOPLE THEY MIGHT MARRY OR GO INTO BUSINESS WITH, OR BOTH, SO IT’S A GREAT RESPONSIBILITY.”

“I feel like serving coffee is a moral act. It needs to be taken very seriously,” says James Freeman, founder of Oakland-based artisanal roaster Blue Bottle Coffee.

To understand just how seriously Freeman takes it, look no further than his blossoming coffee empire. Started in 2002, Blue Bottle has expanded to more than 26 cafés (found everywhere from San Francisco’s Ferry Building to New York’s Rockefeller Center) and multiple roasteries in the United States and Japan. Speaking on the phone from the brand’s Oakland headquarters, Freeman is readying to jump on a plane bound for Tokyo with his wife and children to celebrate the opening of the Shinjuku café, situated inside the busiest train station in the world.

Freeman’s love of Japan is no secret; since early 2015, three Blue Bottle Coffee cafés have gone up in and around Tokyo, with more to follow by the end of the year. He first visited the country as a teenager and “it blew me away,” he says. But even more apparent is his deep appreciation of Japanese hospitality, an art that informs many of Freeman’s business decisions. “I’ve really been inspired by Japanese coffee houses, called kissaten,” says Freeman. “They’re dowdy and unfashionable, but they’re deeply personal.” He also references the Japanese concept of kodawari, which, loosely translated, means a devotion to even the most mundane details, and the pursuit of excellence. “All of these kissaten have a deep kodawari,” he muses.

Undoubtedly, Blue Bottle Coffee has its own sense of kodawari, a result of Freeman’s own obsessive traits and innate quest for perfection. Long before Freeman’s infatuation with coffee, the Northern California native was on track to becoming a career musician. “You play things thousands and thousands of times, over and over again, looking for microscopic improvements. That was my life from age 12 on,” he says. “That can turn you on, of course, but you’re untethered to the practical, and that helped me when I started coffee, because that was just how I lived.”

What started out as a hobby—Freeman would roast coffee beans at home on a perforated baking sheet—quickly turned into a passion as he began discovering the nuances of freshly roasted beans (“I was having these really interesting experiences of coffee getting more and more delicious a few days after roasting and then reaching a peak and tapering off”). Soon he began pouring his coffee at a local farmers market on Saturdays—which he half-jokingly refers to as his hospitality “graduate school.” “I learned a lot in terms of being in the context of a food community, being very hospitable, to work in a challenging environment without running water, without electric power,” says Freeman. Perseverance paid off: Freeman’s last gig as a professional clarinet player was in January 2001; Blue Bottle Coffee launched in a 186-square-foot roastery the following year and hasn’t stopped growing since.

Freeman’s methodical approach to coffee still harkens back to his farmers market days; he’s constantly looking for ways to elevate his product. “I divide up my week so every day has a different theme of focus,” he says. Today, which happens to be a Tuesday, is all about product, which ranges from the single-origin, fruit-forward Kenyan Kirinyaga Peaberry to the chocolaty Hayes Valley Espresso and the best-selling Bella Donovan—taken black or with milk or cream. “I’ll go back to the cupping room and cup all the blends from all the different regions. All of it is blind, so we don’t weigh in with preconceived notions of what things should taste like. It’s all this idea of trying to get a little bit better.” All of Blue Bottle’s U.S. roasteries are certified organic, and more than 85 percent of coffee purchased is certified organic, too.

Blue Bottle is often referred to as a trailblazer in Third Wave coffee—the movement toward artisanal coffee with a focus on all aspects of production, from the growers to roasting and brewing. It’s a reaction, in part, to the coffee-for-the-masses concept practiced by the likes of Starbucks, shining a spotlight on quality versus quantity. Freeman is a believer in the notion that the consumer’s expectations have changed. “My theory—that’s totally untethered to any factual exploration—is that there are just as many places to get coffee as there were 10 or 20 or 50 years ago, but every time a place that doesn’t serve coffee well closes, another one opens that serves coffee a lot better. So I feel like the standard is getting higher.”

Part of that equation includes service. Tantamount to coffee at Blue Bottle is a commitment to hospitality on display throughout its cafés. This is one of the areas where Freeman takes cues from Japanese culture. He refers back to the day Blue Bottle’s first door opened in Kiyosumi, when they served close to 1,200 customers. “We closed and nobody had coffee on their shoes. It’s those little micro lessons that I think can be so powerful, as well as the macro lessons about welcoming people and keeping a neat space, and treating everyone as if they are the most important guest you’ll ever have.” Freeman calls it a sense of “heads-up-ness”—the idea of thanking people for waiting in line, and acknowledging customers in a friendly and direct manner.

There are innumerable ways to measure Blue Bottle’s success since its inception, from the brand’s 2014 acquisition of L.A.’s Handsome Coffee Roasters and subscription coffee roaster Tonx to the ready-to-go all-organic Blue Bottle Cold Brew and New Orleans Iced Coffee that line the shelves at Whole Foods. And let’s not forget the 10 additional cafés slated to open by the end of 2016. But Freeman’s job is never done. “If you try to maintain something, it’s going to slip away from you,” he says. “You have to think about getting better at what makes it work, whether it’s designing a space or teaching somebody how to make coffee, or sourcing the most interesting coffee we can find. These are investments nobody needs to know about, nobody needs to see. [The customer] just needs to know they’re going to have a better experience next year than this year.”
 

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HUMANITY: Where do you think you learned to be who you are? Your compassion, your empathy—how did you learn to be who you’ve become?

DESMOND TUTU: It’s a very good thing to be aware that you owe so much to other people. What you become is the influence of so many. I say the major influence of my life as I look back was my mother, who was not terribly educated; she finished elementary school and then went to a trade school to get a diploma in domestic science. I say to people that I resemble her physically. She had a large nose like mine and was thumpy, but I say I hope I resemble her in who she was. She was a very compassionate and caring person and couldn’t stand someone having an injustice done to them. She would very gently try to be on the side of the one who was having the rough time. You don’t consciously say you are emulating somebody, but in fact it is someone that has left a stamp of their personality on you. There was a very famous English priest; I had TB and I was in the hospital for 20 months, and amazingly, this man, who used to be very busy in Sophiatown, just outside Johannesburg, would visit me every week when he was available. When he was not available he would send another of his brethren. And so I am clear that so many people have touched my life and helped me to become a slightly better person than I’d otherwise have been, and to have had the wonderful support of my wife, Leah, in the days that we were struggling during apartheid. It was rough for her and for the children. Sometimes the apartheid government would target my wife. I have to take my hat off to Leah and to the children in the way that they were there with and for me in a very difficult time in my career. And so I hope that I’ve been able to contribute in helping us all to become slightly better people. Our country, which was being crushed under the burden of the vicious policy, the racist policy—I was part of a huge movement in the country and internationally, the anti-apartheid movement, hoping that it would be part of a process of helping all of us become slightly more human. We become better people by being caring people. You discover that as you give, in fact, you receive much more than you put out. And it’s been wonderful to be there when the struggle against injustice was won in our country, and all of us, black and white in South Africa, tasted what it meant to be truly free in a democratic dispensation where you didn’t have silly rules that depended on the color of a person’s skin. You learned that our value doesn’t depend on biological irrelevancies, really. We are born really to be compassionate people, to be caring people. You have a billion people living in absolute poverty, having so many people go to bed hungry; you have children dying of preventable diseases just because their families can’t afford fairly inexpensive inoculations against measles, against smallpox; and then to be appalled by how we spend so much of our money on arms! I mean, it’s obscene to know the billions and billions that we invest in these ghastly instruments of killing when we know that a small fraction of that would ensure that no child would die because they didn’t have clean water to drink, no child would die because they didn’t have affordable health care, no child would languish because they didn’t manage to go to school.

HUMANITY: You’ve accomplished so much in your life—what continues to motivate you?

DT: Well, in terms of accomplishment, it’s a wonderful thing to be part of a coalition, being part of a movement, and I had the privilege of being regarded as one of the leaders in the movement for justice, but we haven’t reached nirvana yet. There are so many parts of the world where you hope you can make a contribution. You get shocked when you see people scavenging in dustbins, and that should not be happening in our world. We have the capacity of ensuring that no one would have a rough time, that everyone would have a decent standard of living. There are many people in the world who are seeking to work for that, and I hope I can continue to be part of that kind of movement. People who say “Let us make poverty history.” People who say “Let us end war.” People who say “Let us stop producing nuclear weapons. Let us stop war. Stop war, make love,” you know? That’s God’s dream for all of us. In my own country, South Africa, we have got something that we didn’t enjoy for a long time—I mean freedom—but look around and you see many of our people languishing in poverty, especially young people who are unemployed, and we are sitting on a powder keg with so many people poor, and they see others who are not poor, and it’s not sustainable. The inequities are not sustainable. I mean, we don’t need to be a world that feels so vulnerable, so insecure, worrying about terrorists and that kind of thing. You don’t need an agitator to tell you that it is not right, and we have the solution in our hands, which is to want for the other what you desire for yourself.

HUMANITY: How would you hope to be remembered by the world, and then how would you like to be remembered by your family and those close to you?

DT: I’ve thought about this. Sometimes they ask you what you would want for your epitaph and I would say I would hope everyone would remember me as someone who loved. Loved … I love you. As someone who laughed and someone who cried, because I do all three, yeah. I would hope that is what they would remember.

HUMANITY: What is your idea of true happiness?

DT: I hope that all of us can get persuaded that, actually, my humanity is bound up with your humanity. The more foolish human you are, the more likely that I will be too, because we will be living in this wonderful delicate network of interdependence. I hope that many of us will come around to realizing that we can’t be fully human when there are so many who are being dehumanized, made less than who they really are. Whether we like it or not, in that particular process, we do become less than what we could really be. When you see someone picking at a rubbish bin or a rubbish dump you ask yourself a very deep question—if that thing doesn’t somehow, apart from appalling you, somehow diminish you. There may be a lot of us who say “Oh no, it’s got nothing to do with me.” But that is not true. Something of my humanity is lost as that person is dehumanized by conditions that you and I know can be eradicated. I just hope that we will come to realize just how precious each one of us is.

 

 

HUMANITY: What do you think most of the world’s leaders are lacking right now?

DT: Most are wonderful people. They get to be constrained by all kinds of considerations. If all of them said: “I know I’m no longer up for re-election, so I’m going to do the things that I know ought to be done. I’m going to do the things that are going to contribute to peace efforts in the world. I’m not going to invest any more in arms. I’m going to invest more in people, in homes, the humanity of people. I’m going to invest in schooling. I’m going to invest in things that help neighborhoods to flourish. I’m going to invest.” I mean, it seems so obvious, but I would say to all the leaders, “How about trying to help fulfill the idea that we are all members of one family?”

HUMANITY: Can perfection be achieved?

DT: Not this side of death, I don’t think. I mean, very, very, very few, but it is not so much the goal that matters, it is the going, the getting there. Being involved and saying, “I want to be a more compassionate person, I want to be a more caring person,” and striving after that. No one is such a pain in the neck as someone who is on a crusade. Good people that we know are almost always people who attract, like Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, you name it. People who would bring a smile to your face as you think of them and who make you want to be a better person. They might be on a crusade, but they are not crusaders. They are beautiful people. Archbishop Hélder Câmara is famously quoted as saying: “When I feed the hungry, they say I’m a saint. When I ask why are they hungry, then they say I’m a communist.” He was a fantastic Roman Catholic archbishop. Archbishops always wear splendid robes; he wore khakis. Archbishops usually live in residences called palaces because they are very sumptuous places; he refused to live in one of those and chose to live in a favela. I visited him and you could see that he had stolen the hearts of all the people. But the story I want to tell you is that we were in a meeting once—Mother Teresa was present, he was present. I also was privileged to be present in Paris and I went up to him and said, “Please, can you bless me?” and I knelt down in front of him. He almost immediately plunked down himself and said, “OK, let’s bless each other.” A good person makes others comfortable in their skin, helps them want to be better human beings.

HUMANITY: What would you say to a young person who wants to follow in your footsteps and make an impact in the world as you have?

DT: We oldies become cynical. You young people dream that the world can become a better place, and so I usually say to them, “Go on dreaming. Go on being idealistic. Don’t allow oldies to make you cynical.” And so, if a young person wants to ask me, I say dream, dream, dream. Dream and just go on dreaming and dream that you will be helping God to make this a better world.

HUMANITY: Over the course of your career, you achieved quite a level of notoriety. Were there any surprises or negatives about becoming so well known?

DT: It’s OK when it helps you to help other people. I think I’m vain, but it’s wonderful to have a wife like Leah who really pulls you down a few pegs when you think you are very [important]. We went to West Point Military Academy, and at the end the cadets said, “Here is a cap for a memento,” and I tried it on and it didn’t fit me. Now, a nice wife would have said: “Oh, the cap is too small.” She said: “His head is too big.” And more recently she found a bumper-sticker kind of thing, which said: “You are entitled to your wrong opinion.” So I have someone readily available to puncture my balloon, you know. She’s wonderful—very good for me.

HUMANITY: What was it like receiving a Nobel Prize?

DT: I mean, it was very important. You say certain things before you get the Nobel Peace Prize, then you get a Nobel Peace Prize and you repeat the things that you said when nobody paid attention and suddenly it’s as if an oracle is speaking. But it was a prize given to me representatively. It was a prize they wanted to give to all of those who were involved under the anti-apartheid struggle. They couldn’t give it to everyone, so they thought, “He’s an easy name, Tutu. It’s easily recognizable.” But it was fantastic at the time and it’s an amazing thing. On the eve, I think the eve or maybe it was the same day, you’re in Oslo in this hotel, and you stand on the balcony in the evening. It’s a fantastic candlelight procession to honor you and it seems to go on forever and ever, with the candles flickering in the dusk. Yeah, just a fantastic experience, a fantastic honor.

 

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