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Highlights from the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival

This summer, the Institute's fifth annual Aspen Ideas Festival once again played host to some of the world's greatest minds as academics, politicians, business leaders, journalists, and artists came together to provoke, inspire, and challenge one another along with an audience of close to 4,000 people over the event's seven days. The Institute's Aspen Meadows campus was the setting for this vibrant forum, where leaders and thinkers united in civil discourse—no matter how serious the disagreement or how vigorous the debate. "Creating a public commons, where people meet face-to-face—that's what the Aspen Ideas Festival is all about," said Institute CEO Walter Isaacson, encouraging audience members and speakers alike to embark on their own journeys of intellectual exploration and discovery. Click a face to sample a great idea.

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Photos copyright 2009 by Dan Bayer or Michael Brands

Dialogues from the Aspen Ideas Festival

Click an image below to see a dialogue featuring a current deputy secretary of state and two former secretaries of state, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, poet Elizabeth Alexander, US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, or Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Here are a small sampling of the more than 200 conversations, interviews, and talks that took place over this stimulating week. Over the course of the Festival, at least one theme emerged: The process of executing an idea is often as important as the result. "It is the moment before the dance looks easy that is the most potent time," said Institute trustee and former Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence Anna Deavere Smith as she described the work that goes into artistic creation. It was a sentiment echoed by participants from fields as diverse as politics, education, the environment, the arts, and science. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad talked about the critical process by which people must engage in building each and every institution that eventually makes up a viable state. The Children's Defense Fund's Marian Wright Edelman described volunteerism as an end in itself—not just a contribution to a larger goal: "Service is the rent we all pay for living." And artist Chuck Close described the painstaking process of creating a portrait from thousands of small squares: "I think problem-creation is more interesting than problem-solving. If you back yourself into a corner, you are forced to come up with your own answers to your own questions."