Sure, it was a small show, but that probably has more to do with the space Barbara was given rather than her intentions or aspirations. In the end, people were able to see a few unique things from MoMA’s collection — why does a show even need a “thread”? People make their own meaning by seeing the work. Curators comments are almost always ridiculous and pretentious and should be routinely ignored.

>>The book’s genesis is a conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani casually mutters to Friedman: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase—the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:

“As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: ‘The playing field is being leveled.’

“What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”

This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting-—ironically, as it were-—with Columbus’s discovery that the world is round.

Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus’s discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the “flat world” into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.

“Let me… share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round,” he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.

Tom, you couldn’t be more right with Friedman. He’s an utter jackass who somehow has gained respectability with the dumber elements of the business and media worlds. Dave Rees nailed it long ago: http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/moustache_of_understanding.html