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“URGENT!” URGENT!” the cc’d copy of an email screamed, one of a dozen emails that greeted me as I turned on my phone at the baggage carousel at Malpensa Airport after the long flight from JFK. “The great American visionary thinker John Brockman arrives this morning at Grand Hotel Milan. You MUST, repeat MUST pay him a visit.” It was signed HUO.

The prior evening, waiting in the lounge at JFK, I had had the bright idea to write my friend and longtime collaborator, the London-based, peripatetic art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist (known to all as HUO), and ask if there was anyone in Milan I should know.

Once I was settled at the hotel, the phone began ringing and a procession of leading Italian artists, designers, and architects called to request a meeting, including Enzo Mari, the modernist artist and furniture designer; Alberto Garutti, whose aesthetic strategies have inspired a dialogue between contemporary art, spectator, and public space; and fashion designer Miuccia Prada, who “requests your presence for tea this afternoon at Prada headquarters.” And thus, thanks to HUO, did the jet-lagged “great American visionary thinker” stumble and mumble his way through his first day in Milan, November 2011.

HUO is sui generis: He lives a twenty-four-hour day, sleeping (I guess) whenever, and employing full-time assistants who work eight-hour shifts and are available to him 24/7. Over a recent two-year period, he visited art venues in either China or India for forty weekends each year—departing London Thursday evening, back at his desk on Monday. Last year, once again, ArtReview ranked him #1 on their annual “Power 100” list.

Recently we collaborated on a panel during the “GUEST, GHOST, HOST: MACHINE!” Serpentine event that took place at London’s new City Hall. We were joined by Venki Ramakrishnan, Jaan Tallinn, and Andrew Blake, research director of The Alan Turing Institute. The event was consistent with HUO’s mission of bringing together art and science: “The curator is no longer understood simply as the person who fills a space with objects,” he says, “but also as the person who brings different cultural spheres into contact, invents new display features, and makes junctions that allow unexpected encounters and results.”

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