Big idUS in Columbus
Hats off to Columbus for celebrating its 200th anniversary! There are perhaps dozens of different ways to do a birthday party, and part of the festivity for the last couple of weeks has been a wide-ranging look at the creative aspects of the community I call home.
Looking around us in the early part of the 21st century, there is plenty of evidence that civil society is losing ground. In this space, we have argued the case for responsibility in public finances and by public officials – where slipsliding, chiseling the taxpayers and poor performance seem to be increasingly in style. We have deplored the lack of content in the current political campaigns and the ones before that. We have taken up the cause of lawsuit reform because the point of a lawsuit for civil damages is to prove how damaged you have been at the hands of the party(ies) you are suing. No more stiff upper lip or grin and bear it. All of these things and more are inherently decivilizing in major and minor ways.
Today, in stark contrast, we rejoice at the breadth of the display of creative energy for Columbus’s bicentennial, both for what it is, and for what it promises. For the last two weeks, a confection of events under the banner of an organization formed for the occasion and called idUS has brought together many of the strains which define an “open and smart” city.
City leaders opened a huge symbolic gift-wrapped box downtown on September 28th to start the festivities, loosely modeled upon an extremely successful “IdeaFest” initiated by Louisville a few years ago. One of the first events was an Eco-Summit, which allowed Columbus to be the first American host of a six-day gathering of the world’s top environmental experts with 1,600 registrants from 75 countries.
The Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University showed Karen Finley again, the artist who famously stripped down and poured chocolate sauce over her body to initiate a new wave of performance art. But this time, she was included with the entire 156-image “master set” of Annie Liebovitz images which the celebrity portrait photographer has picked out to illustrate 40 years of her life’s work behind the camera. Both Obamas, Queen Elizabeth, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon were there alongside Susan Sontag, Robert Penn Warren and John Lennon.
The Columbus College of Art & Design launched MindMarket, a new art and design business incubator, as part of the idUS cluster. TEDxColumbus, among the first 50 such conferences worldwide, doubled in attendance and, for the first time held auditions for speakers. Columbus Design Week for architecture and design was declared, and venues all over the city featured innovation programs for the public, some with no admission fee, and all exceptionally well prepared based on our participation.
Last night the Wexner offered a program featuring a dialogue between the Chairman and CEO of Chrysler Group LLC and CEO of Fiat S.p.A., Sergio Marchionne, and John Jay, the Co-Global Creative Director of Weiden+Kennedy, who met for the first time as they presented the story behind the “Imported from Detroit” Super Bowl ad campaign for Chrysler. Their presentation on successful ad campaigns and recreating an iconic brand left me with a lust to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee that cannot be described.
Jamie Greene, program manager for the 200Columbus Bicentennial Commission, which organized the event, suggests that: “Six or seven years from now, if you’re anywhere in the world and you want to be inspired and engaged about the best of innovation and creativity, you have to think about coming to Columbus for idUS.”
I am certainly looking forward to that, and continuation of this welcome trend to not just restore civilized society with all of this innovation, but to enhance lives all over the globe.
I am very proud of my city for putting on this kind of birthday party.
