Tastings

Elliott Washor is a pioneering educator who participated in last year's AIGA-sponsored Aspen Summit. “Was the conference worth your while?” I asked him.

Washor said it was, and he knew why. “I got two ideas and two contacts,” he said. “That's as much as I have any right to expect.”

Those criteria seem to me to be as good as any for assessing the value of conferences. After years of brooding about what design conferees have a right to expect, and wondering how often those expectations are met, I long ago decided not to attend any conferences I was not required to take part in. Still, I seemed to be going to too many. Well, there were too many. Yet I continued to go, finding myself in the position of the client who knows half of the money he spends on advertising is wasted, but does not know which half.

Recently, however, I attended a conference that I was not recruited, or even especially encouraged, to attend. It was sold out. But when I explained that I was not threatening to come for the entire day as a paying customer, but merely wanted to sit in on one particular breakout session that two friends of mine were running, I was cleared to crash.

The event was an AIGA New York student conference devoted to the question, “Are You a Designer?” Small wonder that it was sold out. The roster of presenters was loaded with design luminaries, and the thematic question is one raised chronically by students and perhaps not entirely put aside by many practitioners. Arriving a few minutes early, I was lucky enough to catch the tail end of Carin Goldberg's presentation, which closed with an onscreen quote from Anthelme Brillat- Savarin's The Physiology of Taste: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” That didn't meet either of Washor's criteria-the epigram was not a new idea to me and Carin was not a new contact, but the episode gave me an excuse to revisit a story I wish I'd told 20 years ago.

It was AIGA's first national AIGA conference, held in Boston in 1985, recorded in both local and AIGA lore as “the year of that hurricane.” As the winds grew fiercer and the sky darker, conferees were instructed to leave the MIT auditorium where we had been meeting, and take refuge in the nearest hotel. Once we got there, everyone was admonished to sit tight. There wasn't much else to do—all flights were cancelled—but sitting tight was no small task for some 1,200 people expecting to see visual presentations. Some resourceful person quickly rounded up a dozen or more speakers and fellow travelers, of whom I was one, to serve as an ad hoc panel to discuss—well, the subject was left open, and stayed that way. Our role was like that of the orchestra on the Titanic: to make things look normal as long as possible.

Someone was saddled with the chore of acting as moderator. In the absence of anything to moderate he invited the audience to ask the panel a question, and immediately got one.

“What is your favorite food?”

I like too many comestibles to have a favorite, but this was no occasion for a technical objection. The mission was entertainment, not truth. I don't remember my answer, only that it was lame. Some panelists were more amusing than others, but the only one who stood out was the writer Tom Wolfe. Earlier that day he had delivered a hilarious talk lampooning the preposterous extravagance of the corporate literature produced by AIGA members and their ilk. Continuing in that vein, he now revealed his favorite food: “The Fairchild annual report!”

On the way to the airport the next day I realized what I should have said. It would not have answered the question, but panelists rarely do that anyway, nor do questioners usually expect them to. No, I would have used the query as an occasion to recount two adventures built around the favorite foods of other people. Both of them tended to repudiate Brillat-Savarin's famous dictum. At a performance of Ballet Theatre one night I read in the program book that George Ballantine's favorite sandwich consisted of caviar and cream cheese spread on an untoasted English muffin. Inspired, I stopped at Zabar's on the way back from Lincoln Center and eagerly bought all three ingredients. When I got home, I made the sandwich. It was delicious. I made another. It was also good but uncomfortably filling. That night I got painfully sick to my stomach and swore off caviar and modern ballet, which I couldn't afford after buying the caviar in the first place.

The other adventure also began in print. In one of the magazines found only in dentist's waiting rooms I had read that Richard Nixon's favorite lunch was cottage cheese and ketchup, which I judged appropriately revolting. One day, weeks later, I was working at home on a tight deadline and didn't want to stop for lunch. In the refrigerator I found the makings of a Nixonian feast. Making certain that I was not being watched, I spread the ingredients on a plate and sat down to the meal with trepidation.

It was not half bad. In fact, it was pretty good. If pressed, I will admit that I have tried the combination again since then with no regrets. As Milton Glaser says after describing his mother's famously infamous spaghetti recipe, “Don't knock it until you try it.”

The same principle was pointedly emphasized at yet another AIGA conference by then I.D. editor Chee Pearlman, who presented Dr. Seuss's classic children's book Green Eggs and Ham as a metaphorical injunction to clients: Do not form an opinion about any design without tasting it first.