CULTURE

The Third Culture

Kevin Kelly
[2.27.98]

Kevin Kelly wrote the following essay for Science Magazine's "Essays on Science and Society", in celebration of the 150th anniversary of that publication. The second essay in the series (following "The Great Asymmetry" by Stephen Jay Gould), it appeared in the Volume 279, Number 5353 Issue of 13 February 1998, pp. 992 - 993 of Science and it is also available on the Science Online website. It is published here for the third culture mail list by permission of the author.

KEVIN KELLY is the executive editor of Wired and author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World.

Kevin Kelly's Edge Bio Page


THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER, 1998

WHAT QUESTIONS ARE YOU ASKING YOURSELF?
James Lee Byars
[1.11.98]

Everything has been explained. There is nothing left to consider. The explanation can no longer be treated as a definition. The question: a description. The answer: not explanation, but a description and knowing how to consider it. Asking or telling: there isn't any difference.

The final elegance: assuming, asking the question. No answers. No explanations. "Why do you demand explanations? If they are given, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present."[1] The solution: not an explanation: a description and knowing how to consider it.

Experience a minute. Experience an hour. Can you experience a minute and an hour together, simultaneously, at the same time? This is an important question to ask.

No explanation, no solution, but consideration of the question. "Every proposition proposing a fact must in its complete analysis propose the general character of the universe required for the fact."[2] The description, the proposition: not a definition, but a commission. "Understanding a commission means: knowing what one has got to do."[3]

Any new style, any new life, any new world, is but a god where gods are no longer valid. "The god that one so finds is but a word born of words, and returns to the word. For the reply we make to ourselves is assuredly never anything other than the question itself."4

"Our kind of innovation consists not in the answers, but in the true novelty of the questions themselves; in the statement of problems, not in their solutions."5 What is important is not "to illustrate a truth—or even an interrogation—known in advance, but to bring to the world certain interrogations . . . not yet known as such to themselves."6

A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in fantastic amounts of data, or in huge libraries filled with books. There's no value any more in amount, in quantity, in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative. Ask the most subtle sensibilities in the world what questions they are asking themselves.

— from By the Late John Brockman, 1969

~~

In Edge 19, I presented a eulogy to honor my friend and collaborator of sorts, the artist James Lee Byars, who died in Egypt last May.

I met Byars in 1969 when he sought me out after the publication of my first book, By the Late John Brockman. We were both in the art world, we shared an interest in language, in the uses of the interrogative, in avoiding the anesthesiology of wisdom, and in "the Steins"—Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, and Frankenstein. In 1971, our dialogue, in part, informed the creation by James Lee of "The World Question Center".

I wrote the following about his project at the time of his death:

"James Lee inspired the idea that led to the Reality Club (and subsequently to Edge), and is responsible for the motto of the club. He believed that to arrive at an axiology of societal knowledge it was pure folly to go to a Widener Library and read 6 million volumes of books. (In this regard he kept only four books at a time in a box in his minimally furnished room, replacing books as he read them.) This led to his creation of the World Question Center in which he planned to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world together in a room, lock them behind closed doors, and have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves.

The expected result, in theory, was to be a synthesis of all thought. But between idea and execution are many pitfalls. James Lee identified his 100 most brilliant minds (a few of them have graced the pages of this Site), called each of them, and asked what questions they were asking themselves. The result: 70 people hung up on him."

That was in 1971. New technologies equal new perceptions. The Internet and email now allow for a serious implementation of Jimmy Lee's grand design and I am pleased to note that among the contributors are Freeman Dyson and Murray Gell-Mann, two names on his 1971 list of "the 100 most brilliant minds in the world."

For the first anniversary edition of Edge I asked a number of the third culture thinkers to use the interrogative. I have asked "the most subtle sensibilities in the world what questions they are asking themselves."

I am pleased to present The World Question Center.

Copyright

The Third Culture
John Brockman
[12.1.97]

FRONT MATTER

Copyright © 1995 by John Brockman

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Originally published by Simon & Schuster 1995
First Touchstone Edition 1996

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brockman, John, date.
The Third Culture: Scientists on the Edge / by John Brockman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
1. Scientists — 20th century — Interviews. 2. Intellectuals — 20th century — Interviews. 3. Science and the humanities. I. Title.
Q141.B76 1995
500—dc2095-83
CIPISBN: 0-684-80359-3
ISBN: 0-684-82344-6 (Pbk.)

The lines from "Since Feeling Is First" are reprinted from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E.E. Cummings; edited by George J. Firmage; by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1926, 1954, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1985 by George James Firmage.


BOOKS BY JOHN BROCKMAN

AS AUTHOR:

By the Late John Brockman
37
Afterwords
Digerati

AS EDITOR:

About Bateson
Speculations
Doing Science
Ways of Knowing
Creativity
How Things Are


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I first published a brief essay about the idea of an emerging third culture in September 1991, in my newsletter EDGE (#3). An extended version of the essay was later published by the Los Angeles TimesThe New Statesman, and the Copenhagen daily newspaperInformation.

Several people made helpful comments on the essay. I wish to thank Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel C. Dennett, Russell Jacoby, Stewart Brand, and David Shipley.

I am grateful to Judy Herrick, who for the past three years has presented me with thousands of pages of accurate transcriptions. I also want to thank my line editor, Sara Lippincott, for her time, effort, diligence, and valuable suggestions. And to Bob Asahina, my editor at Simon & Schuster, I express my appreciation for a perceptive reading of the manuscript and for his friendship.

A number of friends have read and commented on drafts of the manuscript. I would like to thank Wim Coleman, Pat Perrin, Clifford Stoll, Howard Rheingold, Stewart Brand, and Kevin Kelly.

Finally, special thanks and appreciation to Katinka Matson and our son, Max Brockman, for their patience and support.


Back to Contents

Excerpted from The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brockman (Simon & Schuster, 1995) . Copyright© 1995 by John Brockman. All rights reserved.

Truth, Beauty, and Goodness: Education for All Human Beings

Howard Gardner
[9.20.97]

Introduction
By John Brockman

Howard Gardner, Professor of Education at Harvard University, is deeply involved in educational reform, particularly in the United States. He is dismayed by how much of the discussion, both in the United States and abroad, is basically methodological and technical. "We argue endlessly: shall we have charter schools, shall we have vouchers, shall we have elected school boards, shall we have national standards, who gets to decide on them, should there be national tests, are unions the problem, are they solution, who funds education, etc.," he says. Those questions are not trivial, but he find a paucity of discussion of the purposes, the goals of education nowadays and in the foreseeable future.

Gardner, who is more or less on the progressive side of education, is struck by the fact that most of the attention is paid to people who can be described as conservative: "there's more attention paid to Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind and E.D. Hirsch 's book Cultural Literacy, both published ten years ago, than almost anything else that's been written on education in America in recent memory."

How do we push away the thickets and get to fundamentals? Howard is under no illusion that he's going to come up with answers that other people haven't come up with before; "Plato and Socrates had a lot to say on the topic, also Confucius and Rousseau among others," he notes. "But we can't simply repeat the traditional answers mindlessly. We can't just go back to the trivium and quadrivium because they seemed to work in the Middle Ages. We do know a lot about human beings that we didn't know before, and we know something about the shape of the world, which is very different than it has been in the past. I am pondering the constraints of education as well as the things that are changing; I am thinking about what we've learned about the mind and the brain and different cultures. I want to lay out something which at least I'd want to have for my kids, and at best what I'd want to have for kids everywhere."

Gardner has written fifteen books, nine of which have the word "mind" in the title. Read on and you will understand why.

—JB

He Confuses 1 And 2 The 200 I.Q.

James Lee Byars, John Brockman
[7.16.97]

Introduction

On Saturday, May 24, I received the following email message from the Swiss art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist:

"Dear John, I just got a very sad message that James Lee Byars died yesterday in Cairo. Very sick he spent the last 2 ,3 months of his life near the pharaohs.

Cordially,

Hans Ulrich."

On a visit to New York, Hans Ulrich had noticed that my office walls are covered with the framed works of art by James Lee, which, in each case, are pieces he mailed to me or stuffed under my door. Inevitably they were constructed out of exotic papers he had found in Chinatown and on which he either wrote in a his highly stylized script or microprinted lists of questions in a type size so tiny as to be unreadable to the naked eye.

James Lee, who defined the sophisticated edge of that world of ideas had been my neighbor, closest friend, and a collaborator of sorts. He had spent a number of years in Japan and had a decided zen-like epistemology in which there was no distinction between art and life. As one of us used to say (I sometimes get confused here): "what comes before performance?" In his case, the performance was an exercise in the interrogative. James Lee liked questions.

In The First Reader, Gertrude Stein wrote about how Johnny measured Jimmy and how Jimmy measured Johnny until the characters became meaningless and what remained was the act of measurement. She was the first writer who made integral to her work the idea of an indeterminate and discontinuous universe. Words represented neither character nor activity: they were "not imitations either of sounds or colors or emotions." Language was an intellectual re-creation. Through an emphasis on such stylistic devices as repetition she used language to deny meaning and representational concerns. As she pointed out, she would "write as if the fact of writing something were continually becoming true and completing itself, not as if it were leading to something." A rose is a rose is a rose. And a universe is a universe is a universe.

It was in this spirit that James Lee (Jimmy) and I (Johnny) began an intense dialogue around 1970 that sprang, in part from his interest in my early book, By the Late John Brockman (1969) and my fascination with his notion of "Einstein, Gertrude Stein, and Wittgenstein," which, by the end of our collaboration, had become "Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, and Frankenstein." We walked in Central Park nearly every day; we talked incessantly; we had dinners; we wore his plural clothing; we had fist fights; we asked each other the questions we were asking ourselves; we sought to write what he called "the perfect book." He liked "sentences that go 100 ways at once. You can't tell where the subject is, you can't tell what the subject is."

James Lee inspired the idea that led to the Reality Club, which became Edge during the 1990s and the advent of the Web. And he was responsible for the Edge motto. He believed that to arrive at an axiology of societal knowledge it was pure folly to go to a Widener Library and read 6 million volumes of books. (In this regard he kept only four books at a time in a box in his minimally furnished room, replacing books as he read them.) This led to his creation of the World Question Center in which he planned to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world together in a room, lock them behind closed doors, and have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves. The expected result, in theory, was to be a synthesis of all thought. But between idea and execution are many pitfalls. James Lee identified his 100 most brilliant minds (a few of them have graced the pages of this Site), called each of them, and asked what questions they were asking themselves. The result: 70 people hung up on him.

It took nearly two years of starting and finishing each others sentences, but we did write the book. Dozens of notebooks, hundreds of handwritten pages, were reduced to 100 sentences, one to a page. I publish it here for the first time.            

JB
 

p.s. A week after receiving news of James Lee's death, I went to my farm and found the following message on the answering machine time-stamped May 16. "Johnny, Jimmy — send ten thou right away for "The Perfect Book." Wire money to Byars, American Express, Cairo. Johnny, I'm dying in a hotel room in Egypt. Five hundred a day to eat through a tube. Johnny, this is it. Send the money. Call your publisher. Jimmy. Cairo. Click."

James Lee Byars
1932-1997
"Click"

(The New York Times, May 24, 1997:) "BYARS-James Lee, internationally renowned artist whose work concentrated on minimal hermetic forms, reduction towards essence and absence, and an acute sense of the ephemeral, died on Thursday, May 23, 1997, at the Anglo-American hospital in Cairo, Egypt. He was 65 years old."

JAMES LEE BYARS' Edge Bio Page


DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES; OR, THE ORIGINS OF [ARTIFICIAL] LIFE

George Dyson
[7.7.97]

Introductions by
John Brockman and
George Dyson

I got to know George Dyson by attending several of Esther Dyson's PC Forum conferences, annual gatherings for the elite of the personal computer and software worlds. He was not a speaker, not even an industry player, just the younger brother. So why was I spending most of my free time hanging out and talking to him and not to the powers-that-be in the digital world?

An answer to this question can be gleaned by a reading of his new book about the evolution of mind and computers that derives both its title and outlook from Samuel Butler's 1863 essay "Darwin Among the Machines." Observing the beginnings of miniaturization, self-reproduction, and telecommunication among machines, Butler predicted that Nature's intelligence, only temporarily subservient to technology, would resurface to reclaim our creations as her own. Updating Butler's arguments, George has distilled the historical record to chronicle the origins of digital telecommunications and the evolution of digital computers.

George views the World Wide Web as a globally networked, electronic, sentient being. In the evolution of mind in the electronic network, on a level transcending our own, he finds that nature is on the side of the machines. As Danny Hillis noted: "history with a future."

- JB 


Exactly seven years ago, I found myself weaving through midtown Manhattan traffic with John Brockman, on our way to the Metropolitan Club, where Hugh Downs was to introduce my Reality Club debut presentation, "Baidarka: The Skin Boat as a Frame of Mind." I've been weaving in and out of traffic with Brockman ever since. Today he brings me back to the Reality Club to present some excerpts from my new book.

The following selections concern the dual origins of (artificial) life. I choose this subject for three reasons (besides the origins of life being a question that so many of us have been asking ourselves):

  1. The dual-origin theory allows me to credit my father, Freeman Dyson, with a hypothesis that may or may not apply correctly to the appearance of life the first time around. Right or wrong, the hypothesis deserves a second chance;
  2. The work of Nils Barricelli at the Institute for Advanced Study in the 1950s, summarized here, has not received the attention or recognition it deserves;
  3. The speculations and misconceptions of an amateur such as myself are sure to provoke discussion among the many professionals who visit Edge.

- George Dyson


Engineering Formalism and Artistry: The Yin and Yang of Multimedia

Luyen Chou
[5.19.97]

Introduction
By John Brockman

CD-ROM developer and publisher Luyen Chou stopped using the word multimedia because nobody knows what it means. He is interested in "interactivity" — media that forces an interaction with your brain — or the synapses in your brain. "Most people consider interactivity to stop at the fingertips, so if you look at what most people consider interactive, a remote control for a television, or a light switch in a home, would be considered interactive. That's not very interesting to me," he says. What interests him is how we build media that forces an engagement with the mind, and very little is doing that right now. That's the direction that he's trying to take interactivity.

His company, Learn Technologies Interactive, produces products that sell, products which are also both interesting and enlightening. ("Qin" has already sold 100,000 copies). In February they received both recognition and notoriety by winning the Milia D'Or at Milia in Cannes for the best Culture and Art product. What was the reaction of the French audience to an American company walking away with the top award for a CD-ROM based on an art exhibit at the National Museum of American Art ? They booed him off the stage. C'est dommage, Luyen.

Luyen Chou is "The Mandarin." 

—JB

A Possible Solution For The Problem Of Time In Quantum Cosmology

Lee Smolin, Stuart A. Kauffman
[4.6.97]

Introduction
By John Brockman

In The Third Culture, I noted that physicists had come to the wrong book. They had little to say about the other scientists, and, vice versa. This may have to do with the fact that the language of physics is mathematics; it may also be that ideas about complexity and evolution have not had the same relevance for cosmology and physics as they have for biology and computer science. Astronomers have studied the spectra of light emitted by distant stars billions of years ago, and have so far found no indication that the laws of physics have changed over this epoch.

Cosmology, which came into its own as a science only about thirty years ago, is concerned in part with pinning down the parameters of the universe: its expansion rate, the amount of its mass, the nature of its "dark matter." Cosmologists today are also speculating on more far-reaching questions, such as how the universe was created and how its structure was determined. While some cosmologists are speculating that the laws of physics might explain the origin of the universe, the origin of the laws themselves is a problem so unfathomable that it is rarely discussed. Might the principles of adaptive complexity be at work? Is there a way in which the universe may have organized itself? Does the "anthropic principle"óthe notion that the existence of intelligent observers like us is in some sense a factor in the universe's existenceóhave any useful part to play in cosmology?

The theoretical physicist Lee Smolin is interested in the problem of quantum gravityóof reconciling quantum theory with Einstein's gravitational theory, the theory of general relativity, to produce a correct picture of spacetime. He also thinks about creating what he calls a theory of the whole universe, which would explain its evolution, and he has invented a method by which natural selection might operate on the cosmic scale.

The cosmologist Sir Martin Rees noted in The Third Culture that "one of the key issues in physics is to reconcile gravity with the quantum principle and the microphysical forces. There are various schools of thought; the Stephen Hawking School, the Roger Penrose School, and a number of others. My view is that we're a long way away from a consensus in that field, but Smolin and Ashtekar have injected important new ideas into that debate."

"Quantum gravity was one of the subjects beyond the fringe, when John Wheeler talked about it in the 1950s. Now it's something where serious approaches are being adopted. But we're still a long way from experimental test. Lee Smolin's most important insight was to suggest a new way of looking at space and time in terms of a lattice structure on a tiny scale. It relates in a way to Wheeler's very farsighted ideas of spacetime foam: the idea that if you look at space and time on a very tiny scale, there are no longer three dimensions of space and one of time but the dimensions all get screwed up in a complicated way.

"The other idea with which Smolin is associated is "natural selection" of universes. He's saying that in some sense the universes that allow complexity and evolution reproduce themselves more efficiently than other universes. The ensemble itself is thus evolving in some complicated way. When stars die, they sometimes form black holes. (This is something which I wear my astrophysical hat to study.) Smolin speculatesóas others, like Alan Guth, have also doneóthat inside a black hole it's possible for a small region to, as it were, sprout into a new universe. We don't see it, but it inflates into some new dimension. Smolin takes that idea on board, but then introduces another conjecture, which is that the laws of nature in the new universe are related to those in the previous universe. This differs from Andrei Linde's idea of a random ensemble, because Smolin supposes that the new universe retains physical laws not too different from its parent universe. What that would mean is that universes big and complex enough to allow stars to form, evolve, and die, and which can therefore produce lots of black holes, would have more progeny, because each black hole can then lead to a new universe; whereas a universe that didn't allow stars and black holes to form would have no progeny. Therefore Smolin claims that the ensemble of universes may evolve not randomly but by some Darwinian selection, in favor of the potentially complex universes."

The physicist Alan Guth points out that "a possible reason that Discover magazine dubbed Lee "The New Einstein" on a recent cover is that his work is motivated by the same goalóto construct a unified theory of physicsóand his approach is to keep Einstein's original theory as the fundamental basis of it. Superstring theory basically puts Einstein's theory in the background. The belief is that Einstein's theory will reemerge as a low-energy limit, but it's not the fundamental ingredient of the theory. The fundamental ingredient of the superstring theory is this microscopic string. In Smolin's formulation, the fundamental ingredient remains the gravitational field, and the goal is to treat it quantum mechanically. What he hopes to do that's different from the failed approachóthe approach that successfully quantizes electromagnetism but fails for gravityó is to exploit the fact that the theory of gravity is fundamentally nonlinear."

"The relativity physicists belong to a small club. It's a club that has yet to convince the majority of the community that the approach they're pursuing is the right one. Certainly Smolin is welcome to come and give seminars, and at major conferences he and his colleagues are invited to speak. The physics community is interested in hearing what they have to say. But the majority looks to the superstring approach to answer essentially the same questions."

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann noted "Smolin? Oh, is he that young guy with those crazy ideas? He may not be wrong!"

The synthetic path to investigating the world is the logical space occupied by Gell-Mann, the biologist Stuart Kauffman, the computer scientist Christopher G. Langton, and the physicist J. Doyne Farmer, and their colleagues in and around Los Alamos and the Santa Fe Institute.

The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by a group that included Gell-Mann, then at the California Institute of Technology, and the Los Alamos chemist George Cowan. Some say it came into being as a haven for bored physicists. Indeed, the end of the reductionist program in physics may well be an epistemological demise, in which the ultimate question is neither asked nor answered but instead the terms of the inquiry are transformed. This is what is happening in Santa Fe.

Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist who studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. Twenty-five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free." Kauffman is not easy. His models are rigorous, mathematical, and, to many of his colleagues, somewhat difficult to understand. A key to his worldview is the notion that convergent rather than divergent flow plays the deciding role in the evolution of life. With his colleague Christopher G. Langton, he believes that the complex systems best able to adapt are those poised on the border between chaos and disorder.

Kauffman asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection? The answer lies in a "new" biology, somewhat similar to that proposed by Brian Goodwin, in which natural selection is married to structuralism.

The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould noted in The Third Culture that "He's following in the structuralist tradition, which should not be seen as contrary to Darwin but as helpful to Darwin. Structural principles set constraints, and natural selection must work within them. His "order for free" is an outcome of sets of constraints; it shows that a great deal of order can be produced just from the physical attributes of matter and the structural principles of organization. You don't need a special Darwinian argument; that's what he means by "order for free." It's a very good phrase, because a strict Darwinian thinks that all sensible order has to come from natural selection. That's not true."

According to the computer scientist Danny (W. Daniel) Hillis: "Stuart Kauffman is a strange creature, because he's a theoretical biologist, which is almost an oxymoron. In physics, there are the theoretical types and the experimental types, and there's a good understanding of what the relationship is between them. There's a tremendous respect for the theoreticians. In physics, the theory is almost the real stuff, and the experiments are just an approximation to test the theory. If you get something a little bit wrong, then it's probably an experimental error. The theory is the thing of perfection, unless you find an experiment that shows that you need to shift to another theory. When Eddington went off during a solar eclipse to measure the bending of starlight by the sun and thus to test Einstein's general-relativity theory, somebody asked Einstein what he would think if Eddington's measurements failed to support his theory, and Einstein's comment was, "Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct."

"In biology, however, this is reversed. The experimental is on top, and the theory is considered poor stuff Everything in biology is data. The way to acquire respect is to spend hours in the lab, and have your students and postdocs spend hours in the lab, getting data. In some sense, you're not licensed to theorize unless you get the data. And you're allowed to theorize only about your own dataóor at the very least you need to have collected data before you get the right to theorize about other data."

"Stuart is of the rare breed that generates theories without being an experimentalist. He takes the trouble to understand things, such as dynamical-systems theory, and tries to connect those into biology, so he becomes a conduit of ideas that are coming out of physics, from the theorists in physics, into biology."

Kauffman and Smolin began working together a year ago and a result of this collaboration is a paper entitled "A Possible Solution For The Problem Of Time In Quantum Cosmology". An introductory letter from Smolin with initial comments from the theoretical physicist Julian Barbour and Murray Gell-Mann begin the related thread in the Reality Club.

While some of this material, particularly in the paper, is mathematical, most of it is readable by non-scientists. A few weeks ago I received an email from the novelist Bruce Sterling, who wrote: "This is truly a remarkably interesting mailing list; despite its recherche topics it seduces me into reading it almost every time." It is in this spirit I present Stu Kauffman and Lee Smolin's paper, "A Possible Solution For The Problem Of Time In Quantum Cosmology."

— JB

A Big Theory Of Culture

Brian Eno
[3.31.97]

Introduction by
Stewart Brand 

Here's what I greatly appreciate about Brian Eno, apart from the pleasure I take from his friendship and from the pure delight of his music and art...

Like all significant artists, Brian works from a deep and complex and evolving frame of reference. Unlike most artists, and like most scientists, he talks about that frame of reference. He's not worried that your experience of his art might be sullied by your understanding something about what he's up to — rather the opposite: he would like to include you in the process.

This is risky, but valuable. It's risky because once viewers or listeners know what the artist is attempting, they have criteria for judging when he has failed.

Brian's approach is valuable because it is so inviting. The informed viewer or listener is invited to think like an artist and therefore in a sense to become an artist. This is good for art and good for civilization.

I think that's what makes Brian's book, A Year With Swollen Appendices, so appealing. Brian is famous, and that makes us interested, and he's charming in print as well as in person, so we engage him comfortably. But what gets us about the book is how revealing it is. We see what a good artist does with his mind all day. It's inspiring.

There's a further benefit to telling all, this time to the artist. By not keeping his frame of reference secret, Brian is freed from binding allegiance to whatever he was thinking when he first became successful. You don't cling to secrets you've told. You move on, and your work keeps being surprising as a result. Maybe this approach works best with artists who are easily bored. Brian is, after all, the author/composer/performer of the tune (now a well-known meme), "Been there, done that."  

—SB

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