Upcoming lecture in Hong Kong

On Sunday, July 26, I’ll be giving a talk at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. My topic is “The Next Revolution in Art.” An excerpt from the opening of my talk:

“Art is a perennial human desire. We need and hunger for stories, images, and sounds that are unique, beautiful, self-affirming, and/or profound. We love to immerse ourselves in music, movies, books, paintings, and architecture.
“But art has not always flourished in human history. In many times and places, the amount of art has been minimal while the culture focused on other activities — bare survival, military conquest, ascetic spiritualism, for example.
“Yet in a few times and places art has flourished magnificently. Those of us who love art, as well as professional art historians, find ourselves drawn to the great eras when art was produced in large quantities, enjoyed by many, many people, and was of such high quality that it survived across the generations and still speaks to us today.
“Why is that? Art flourished in Renaissance Florence, for example, but not in nearby Milan. Or further back in time, Athens created a magnificent art culture, but nearby Sparta was an artistic desert. Or more recently, Paris in the nineteenth century was a hotbed of innovative art, while nearby Prussia was largely inert artistically.
“Today my goal is to speak of what makes great art cities possible. …”

Thank you very much to Margaret Chik for inviting me and for making this event possible.