11.30.17
Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand | Audio

Episode 70: When Art Imitates Life


In 1979, Michael was still living in Ohio when Woody Allen’s Manhattan came out, and

It just seemed like exactly everything I wanted out of life was in that opening sequence.

Now Manhattan — a movie in which Allen’s character dates a high-school student, and a movie that Louis C.K. refers back to in his unreleased film I Love You Daddy, looks very different. Michael asks:

Do you think somehow these guys who have these urges that they somehow know are wrong, they use their art in order to normalize what they’re doing? If I can get people to see this and accept it as a thing, then it makes the underlying urges, it offers me a measure of forgiveness and acceptance and all that, because I'm not hiding and it's out in the open.

Also mentioned this week:
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Michael Bierut + Jessica Helfand Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

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