On Unread Books
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
Bayard's book is a masterpiece; I found it hilarious and recommended it to a friend, who has taken to it so much he buys copies for others and often uses “Bayardian” as an adjective. All the stuff surrounding the book only add to its enjoyment (after you've read it), such as the fact that there was a question mark in the original title which went away in the translation, the author's coy refusal to say whether he was serious or joking, and his insistence in interviews that the opinions in the book are not his own but that of a fictionalized persona…
I think I found this book because it was highly rated on the interesting complete review site (its review of this book is here: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/books/bayardp.htm). Not everyone is likely to enjoy this book (some found it pointless), but worth taking a look.
I've started speaking about this book with my gf for about 2 or 3 years now, even though I haven't read it (and will not read it in the near future, as my to-read-next list is quite big and always growing). I find it's an excellent book, and much more so as it's recommended by a writer like Eco, a guy who I did actually read (even though that happened 20 years ago, so the details are fuzzy) and who forever influenced my view on books and how to read and interpret them.
I also heartily recommend Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket". I'm not from an English-speaking country so it wasn't required reading for me while in school, but I nevertheless found its no-ending thingie as the quintessence of modern literature. In fact, Eco has often talked about the Gordon Pym story, one of the characters of one of his novels is named exactly like that.
A con isn't "pretentious".
People who have actually read a book can be much more pretentious about it -- in the sense of acting as if this gave them some unique insight over other mere mortals who haven't read it.
It's much more akin to objects (including books!) signed by people: the value of the object is that the object participated in some part of history, rather than anything about the object per se.
I.e., modern art is valuable in part because people will go to art galleries and museums to stare at denotationally-valueless art if it gives them an excuse to talk/think about art history. Art galleries and museums are willing to buy those pieces to capture that foot-traffic, which gives a price to the pieces.
You do realize you're a dyed-in-the-wool postmodernist, right?
2. It's not really that complicated. Writing operates in the exact same way; without the context of our societal language, a novel would just be "meaningless and valueless" as it would simply be a bunch of black symbols on a piece of paper. This would likely be more obvious if we lived in a visually-based society and not a linguistic-based one.
Is there a name for the specific kind of modern art that has red canvases, soup cans, and splatter-painting as central examples? I'd be glad to change my usage if there were a clearer term.
> Not to mention that modern != contemporary.
I'm not sure what you mean here; I was using "modern art" to refer specifically to the works of the Modern Art movement—which tended to have a lot of 'scribble-drawings'—rather than more generally to "art made in modern times."
> It's not really that complicated. Writing operates in the exact same way; without the context of our societal language, a novel would just be "meaningless and valueless" as it would simply be a bunch of black symbols on a piece of paper.
This is silly; a book can tell you a story without you needing to know anything about the time and place the book was written in. You need to know the language of the book, yes, but a book with a considerate author will often subtly teach you any jargon it uses, or the significance of cultural signifiers it refers to, etc. This is why outsider protagonists in fiction are so common.
And this is also the point of "annotated editions" of books: authors tend to write assuming their audience will understand their own current cultural milieu, but not that of other cultures or eras. A text that comes from another culture has no value to a layperson from outside that culture, until it is annotated with enough context to make it accessible.
Modern art (or whatever you'd call the subset of the movement that has scribble-drawings as its central referent) is not self-contained in this way, in the sense that people don't expect or require modern art to build in a lens for interpreting it, to consider it "good."
In a world without the "people like owning signed copies of things" effect, I'd expect art that is meaningless without inaccessible-to-laymen cultural context to mostly fail, in the same way unannotated books from foreign cultures fail; and I'd expect such works to succeed exactly to the degree to which the author—or an intermediate, such as a museum curator—went to the effort to create a more complete work that contains both the piece and its cultural context. You know: really long wall tags. Or a documentary video playing beside the exhibited piece.
You do see these, but not very often. Why? Because "art lovers" value being the ones to explain the cultural context to their friends, and value works (and curatory paradigms) that enable this, by avoiding annotation and leaving the works illegible. Thus neatly explaining how the scribble-drawings cluster of works ever achieved popularity at all. "Art snobs", who enjoy—to coin a phrase—artsplaining.
No, because there is no broad "type" that does such things.
I'm not sure what you mean here; I was using "modern art" to refer specifically to the works of the Modern Art movement—which tended to have a lot of 'scribble-drawings'—rather than more generally to "art made in modern times."
I'm not sure how you are aware of the Modern Art movement but somehow equate it to scribble drawings. You consider Picasso's work to be "scribble drawings"? Art made in the past ±30 years is not considered "modern art", it is considered "contemporary art." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art
This is silly; a book can tell you a story without you needing to know anything about the time and place the book was written in. You need to know the language of the book, yes, but a book with a considerate author will often subtly teach you any jargon it uses, or the significance of cultural signifiers it refers to, etc. This is why outsider protagonists in fiction are so common.
You're missing my point. The language of the book (English) corresponds to the language of art. A lot of contemporary art is a reaction to things within its own field and cannot be really understood without understanding its context. If you don't understand its context (and have a hostile "they're just art snobs" attitude toward it) then no, you probably won't appreciate it. Not to mention the fact that again, contemporary art is truly a massive field filled with every possible variety of artist and intent, ranging from political statements to pure works of craftsmanship, and everything in between.
Ultimately, contemporary art has its own vocabulary. If you don't bother to learn it, don't expect to understand it. Furthermore, understanding a piece doesn't mean you like it or think it's a good piece of art. Whether contemporary artists should or should not aim to have their work intelligible to laymen is another question entirely.
A seminal piece of modern art is Duchamps urinal. Apparently, there was a big exhibition in Paris in the early 20th century, and the organizers were a bit snooty, but tried to be progressive, so there were no rules for this exhibition, anything can be art (context: art was at the time narrowly defined as paintings of identifiable subjects in gilded frame, or something like that). Duchamp supposed they weren't totally earnest about that, so he bought a urinal, signed it and submitted it, and sure enough, the organizers rejected it as "not art". He trolled them. Cool, exposing the hipocrites, big deal at the time.
But time has more than caught up with this gag. Exposing hipocrisy today is totally run of the mill, literally daily fare in news, comedy, whatever.
This leaves us with people paying $20 to visit a the MOMA and look solemnly at a 100 year old urinal that has literally zero inherent artistic qualities. That belong in a history museum, not an art museum. Perhaps modern art museums should be understood more as an art history museum, we're there because it feels significant to be physically near a historically significant object, not to enjoy any inherent qualities of the object.
That said, and not having read the book in question ;), I think TFA is to be read in the context of literary professionals, not muggles[2] who read books for the enjoyment of actually reading the book.
1: The Turing paper is supposed to be a very enjoyable read. Needless to say, I haven't actually read it.
2: I haven't read any Harry Potter.
Additional: I'm always shitting on the humanities in the comments here. I dont have anything against them, I both produce them and consume massive quantities of them. My point is simply that they are trivial. If all art suddenly disappeared it wouldnt really matter. If knowledge about, and/or the fruits of STEM stuff disappeared it would be a huge setback, it could cause civilization to collapse.
Additional additional: It bugs me how large a percentage of our resources we plow into entertainment.
eg.
"On a global scale, the entertainment and media market was worth 1.72 trillion U.S. dollars in 2015 and is set to rise to 2.14 trillion by 2020"
NASAs current yearly budget is about 18.4 billion
That's a very strange idea.
If all existing novels dissappeared do you think we would produce novels straight away?
If all painting dissappeared would we paint with perspective, or in abstract, or just go for rough cave type paintings?
How long would it take us to come up with rhyming metre, or the observational essay, cinema or stand-up?
You think we'd start from having no references and create this immediately?
On the other hand, there is only one Pythagoras' theorem, and an infinitude of similar incorrect theorems. We postulate that intelligent aliens should discover Pythagoras' theorem but not Jazz or De Stijl.
Ugh. This is so arrogant.
Take a step back, talk to some people outside this bubble, of different ages, from different parts of the world, and not just on the internet. Get a sense for how they want to live their lives, for what's important to them. Then come back to this opinion you hold so strongly and question it honestly.
If all art disappeared, sure almost everyone on the planet would be initially upset and unhappy about it. But we'd just continue to make more, humans make art compulsively and instinctively. Eg. In archaeology the signs of art are often equated with the presence of modern humans. Scientific discovery on the other hand does not come naturally, one must subvert ones natural common sense and intuition and use tools like math and the scientific method. Every discovery is hard fought. Also art has no endgame, with enough science and technology we could create AI, the technological singularity, explore the galaxy, achieve literal immortality. With the best art and the happiest people it would all still certainly be erased by the sun going nova, or even just by a medium sized asteroid.
ps. Heres another one..What if all art more than 50 years old disappeared? Most people mightnt even care or notice.
It sounds like in your scenario art is the endgame. What else will we do with our immortal selves once we've reached technological singularity?
..
Its like, youre starving but instead of going out to hunt you spend all day masturbating. Thats us as a species right now :)
I just think your claims are wrong. Human creativity is instinctual, whether it is applied to artistic or scientific endeavors. You're drawing a bright line that I don't believe exists.
I'm still not entirely convinced, but it's true that if the sharing of art vanished, I would find other ways to fill the gap without a huge amount of trouble (thought likely a large chunk of that would be me creating art for myself)
That said, I agree with you that most written literature has very little to offer most people. Most pieces of literature bear that designation because they are "teachable" in one form or another. Some are chosen because they perfect one very specific aspect of the craft of writing. Others, like Finnegan's Wake, are like P vs NP in that they provide an infinitely complex problem for intelligent minds to spend lifetimes chewing on without ever reaching a conclusion.
Something else to keep in mind: the medium is the message. The medium a piece of art chooses is significant. TV and movies will rot your brain regardless of whether it's The Big Bang Theory or Citizen Kane. Reading will improve your brain, regardless of whether you're reading Danielle Steel or Chaucer.
I have not heard that before.
The medium a piece of art chooses is significant, yes, (and in a lot of cases the creator chooses the wrong medium, eg. there are plenty of computer games out there that really want to be films, they dont make use of the strengths of the medium and even fight against it.)
The rest, I dont agree with.
Imo big bang, citizen kane, danielle Steel and chaucer are all somewhat equatable, because they are all fiction/entertainment. Personally I'd rate something educational or non-fiction over fiction in any medium
> Imo big bang, citizen kane, danielle Steel and chaucer are all somewhat equatable, because they are all fiction/entertainment.
It doesn't work that way. The medium has an impact on the formation and development of the brain itself.
I cannot agree with that at all. A great deal of cinema is heavy enough on information to be educational. Think about how much you can learn about history, literature, economics, or politics from watching Jean-Luc Godard’s output from 1962-1968. Even if the medium has flaws in the depth of its presentation, its compilation of citations to important literature that can then be followed up, can be invaluable.
And aren't plays reading? And do they really lose the goodness they have as "reading" when they move from the written page to a performance that just happens to be captured on film instead of before a live audience?
If you do some searching, you'll find lots of ink spilled on the subject of "does TV rot your brain" and the cognitive benefits of reading.
"you can just sit back and watch everything unfold without effort on your part. You’re less likely to pause to reflect on what’s happening."
does not apply to the considerable number of filmmakers (and occasional television content producers) who employ Brechtian alienation techniques.
eg. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobe...
To use computers as an analogy. If you were to examine it only physically, a hard drive filled with random garbage would look the same as one filled with our greatest works.
Like.... little worms will be transmitted directly through the screen, and a bad smell will start pouring out your ears?
Give us a break.
Visual storytelling is fundamentally different from pure linguistic storytelling. It has much higher bandwidth, so it provides a richer set of simultaneous messages (in some ways similar to an opera or stage play or puppet show, but with even more flexibility over the visual content), but also causes a forced progression through time that makes it not as easily amenable to skimming, reading out of order, re-reading, cross-referencing, or pausing to write direct responses to the text.
But there’s a huge amount to learn and appreciate in visual stories. The best visual stories are incomparably better than the worst written schlock, and vice versa.
I'd say it's mostly the opposite: civilization is what remains when you remove most of the STEM -- and culture surely is that.
We could be savage warmongering apes with fully advanced STEM. And we often are.
A lot of art inspires people.
How many young men saw that movie about Facebook, and didn't want to become the next billionaire?
Art influences the masses. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worst. That FB movie for the worse, in my world, but I felt that eay about Disco, and Cowboy hats that Travolta brough upon us.
Art is everywhere. Now if we lost Banksy I don't think we would unravel.
Not only does art greatly enhances the enjoyment of life, it's been a critically important survival tool throughout human history and pre-history. Even for primitive humans, art was used to help record and offload and pass on critical information through stories, waypoints/maps, and artworks. Our appreciation for beautiful forms, structures, rhythms, etc, is an evolutionary adaptation that helps us arouse interest and fascination with our world, inspiring us on to greater things and ultimately increasing our survival. This is why our appreciation of natural beauty and art is universal across cultures and time. Many have written and talked about these ideas. STEM doesn't happen without art.
Technology, on the other hand, has put us and our planet on the brink of extinction. Obviously we are now 'all in' on STEM for the survival of modern civilization, but there are a lot of people living in the world today who may disagree about the fruits of progress.