ASPEN ART MUSEUM
MAGAZINE
28
In Aspen
Legendary editor, journalist and author Tina Brown is the first external curator of the Aspen Ideas Festival: bringing baseball stars, CEOs, Shakespeare scholars and a diverse spectrum of thinking to Aspen this June
CURRENT ISSUES
for a hike. You have to just live with that, but as a control freak, it worries me. I’m always asking my team, “How can I make this program better than a hike?” EM Having just returned from power walking the Venice Biennale, I can absolutely relate. TB I like that analogy. I’m hoping that Aspen Ideas will have that Biennale- like feeling where you suddenly discover something and you don’t really know who or what it is. The festival is a real banquet this year. We will have comedian and writer Bill Maher, the artist Hank Willis Thomas, who made The Embrace [2023], the sculpture honoring the relationship of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. John Legend is con- firmed, but not yet announced. Then there is the actor Renée Fleming; Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft; Jane Fonda; the Brazilian musician Alok; the journalist Fareed Zakaria; the base- ball great A-Rod; and Kris Bowers, the composer and documentary maker who just won an Oscar for The Last Repair Shop [2023]. So, you can see, it’s a great mix. I don’t think there are many events where you can find both A-Rod and Fareed. We have a wonderful panel called “Shakespeare and Politics,” moderated by New York Times colum nist Maureen Dowd, with Shakespeare
Brown Live Media and Women in the World, with summits globally. I was actually the first person to use the term “live journalism” because I saw that broadcast journalism, in particular, was reluctant to give time and space to fascinating voices that weren’t those of celebrities. That’s why I created Women in the World—to bring to the stage global women who no one had ever necessarily heard of, but who had powerful stories to tell. You need your Angelina Jolie or your Oprah so that people show up, but really, what they go home talking about is very often someone they’d not heard of before, who shared their spotlight. So, with Aspen Ideas, I approached it like an issue of Vanity Fair or The New Yorker . I’ve tried to bring the high- low mix of pop culture, as well as idea-driven conversations and writers. It’s actually the first time I’ve done a festival, which is a whole other animal. There’s a certain amount of exciting anarchy to a festival because it’s all going on at the same time. You really have to accept that people are going to be choosing one event over another. Every program needs to offer a way to get people into the room. And, in Aspen, you’re not only competing with the other programs but with the gorgeous scenery; a lot of people are at- tending the festival so they can have a smattering of culture and then go off
scholar Stephen Greenblatt and his torian Sir Simon Schama. EM You’ve assembled a cast of speakers from across the political spectrum. Jane Fonda and Patrick Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, for example, might not agree on all that much. What do you hope to achieve with such an ideologically diverse assembly? TB I want to make a point. It’s deeply boring when it’s all the same old liberal or Republican consensus. It’s very hard today to get a mix like this, but I want to ensure that we really do cross the spectrum. We have the conservative historian Niall Ferguson doing a panel on the China-Taiwan issues with Matt Pottinger, who was part of the Trump administration. And yet, we also have former Secretary of State John Kerry on the climate crisis. I don’t want this festival to feel hermetic, like everybody’s got the same point of view. You want people to be challenged intellectually and enjoy it. EM What are your impressions of Aspen itself? Is there anything about it that is conducive to this kind of assembly? TB I know a lot of the people at the Aspen Institute. I’m a very good friend of former CEO Walter Isaacson and I’ve been to the festival as an author. The combination of the ravishing landscape, the backdrop of the Rockies and a very,
EVAN MOFFITT You’ve had a long and illustrious career as an editor, from Tatler , Vanity Fair and The New Yorker to founding The Daily Beast . You chronicle some of those experiences in The Vanity Fair Diaries [2017], which is full of dishy insights on the politics and culture of the 1980s, but also shows how you were able to put that magazine on the map. So, can you explain what makes for great editorial? What do you look for? TINA BROWN I’m always looking for a strong point of view. An against-the-grain point of view. Vivid writing and a flair for combining that with visuals. The photograph, with the headline, with the text—it’s an art form, to make those things kinetic. That’s what Vanity Fair did at its best—bring together pictures, words, captions, headlines, the article, the cover. It was a real package. Sometimes people erroneously think that a great magazine is a bunch of articles with a staple through it, but actually, it’s so much more than that. EM Do you approach the challenge of putting together a dynamic talks program in a similar way to curating a magazine, with a broad range of voices? TB Yes. My approach to the Aspen Ideas Festival has been very much like the approach I bring to magazines. I have had a parallel career in live events for a long time. For ten years, I ran Tina
The Aspen Ideas Festival runs June 23–29.
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