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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

> It's just some arbitrary committee of people somewhere that decide who wins it.

The committee for the literature prize has contained some prestigious literary figures themselves, so it is to a slight degree a judgement of peers. Secondly, the membership of the committee has historically represented a high society that many authors have been members of themselves, or who hoped to have that high society among their audience. Go through the Nobel ceremony archives and you can see some writers getting quite emotional that they are there among the committee and the invited guests.

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I agree that the deciding committee isn't completely incompetent. As you know, there are plenty of other intelligentsia that could also award prizes but they aren't deemed as prestigious. E.g. why the Swedish academy instead of the Royal Society? I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others.

That's just how prestige works. It's a social phenomenon, not an objective reality. It can snowball.

This book has an interesting but slightly reductive take on how prestige works in the arts: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/artworld-prestige-97...

Indeed. One prize gets 1% prestige, so people want to win it. More people want to win it, so the prize gains more prestige, etc.

So you've answered your own questions as to why this isn't strange at all - it's just how social capital works.

Why else would the premier restaurant review have been started by a tire company? It's all path dependence, and once you get enough momentum behind one choice it becomes self reinforcing.

> So you've answered your own questions

Yes, I am trying to.

> E.g. why the Swedish academy instead of the Royal Society?

Because a rich Swede endowed it over a century ago, and its had that time to build up prestige.

It's sort of like why Harvard is so prestigious: it was the first American University, its existed continuously, and has always ran itself like it was elite.

> I think it is a bit strange how we fetisihize the Nobel above all others.

My guess it's one of the oldest extant awards of its kind, if not the oldest.

This scandal (and the hiatus) might allow a competitor to emerge as the most prestigious award in the field of literature, but I doubt such award will have the same popular awareness, because the Nobel's breadth helps a lot with it's fame.

Just like Borges never got a Nobel, Kubrick never got an Oscar as director.

These awards systems with arbitrary judges are far from fair.

Leo should have won an Oscar a long time before The Revenant ;-)

I'm not interested in looking it up and linking here, but there are several quora answers about how Leo wasn't really "robbed". He was unfortunate that every year he had a great movie, something was better.

I have recently gone back through Kubrick’s entire filmography from Paths of Glory on, the first time I had seen many of these films since I was a teenager. It was... underwhelming. I am now able to sympathize with Kubrick critics.

With regard to Borges, he shares the same problem in terms of female characters as Cormac McCarthy as mentioned above. Plus, there is a real lack of emotional depth to Borges’ work. His themes may interest anoraks like ourselves, but I don’t think he is a truly universal figure.

Timeliness is what made Kubrick “great” — the social commentary aspect of his films. As far as directing quality, I am simply whelmed rather than over or underwhelmed.

IMHO "Barry Lyndon" is one of the best movies ever-made, and I say that as a cinephile who also thinks that Kubrick is slightly (but just slightly) over-rated.

A literature prize like the Nobel is by definition a thing targeted towards literature buffs, and Borges is a god among gods for those kind of people (of which I'm a part of), with or without female characters (come to think of it, I can't remember that many male characters in his books either).

Anyway, I stopped taking the Nobel literature prizes all that seriously the moment when I realized that they hadn't given it to Proust (his duchesse de Guermantes is one of the most important female characters in the history of literature) and Kafka.

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