In his talk, Nato Thompson will explore the implications of how incredibly different the world is today than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. With many of the tools of art now integral elements of major industries (advertising, public relations, design), the territory for making art (and perhaps more radically meaning itself) has had to shift. This talk comes out of Thompson's new book from Melville House.

Nato Thompson is the Chief Curator at Creative Time. Since January 2007, Nato has organized major projects for the New York-based nonprofit arts organization such as most recently Living as Form: Twenty Years of Socially Engaged Art (2011), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), and Paul Chan's acclaimed Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007).  He also organized the first three Creative Time Summits. Previous to Creative Time, he worked as Curator at MASS MoCA where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions such as The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004). In 2009, he curated an exhibition for Independent Curators International titled Experimental Geography, which is also a book available by Melville House Publishing.