Artistic Intimacy

Dr. Leah Price is Professor of English at Harvard and has an incredibly impressive resume - particularly when you consider that she is still on the shy side of 40. One thing I don't understand though, she got her Ph.D. at Yale. I thought there was a rule that if you got your Ph.D. at Yale you weren't allowed to teach at Harvard. I have chosen to "talk" with her since she was quoted in the story that sparked this post.
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Leah, may I speak frankly?

In life, Leah, certain intimacies should remain private. I am aware that in the age of the Internet that assertion seems quaint at best, at worst, foolish or even stupid. But simply because something can be made public doesn’t mean it should be. Evidence is all around us. Micro-blogs like Twitter and Facebook's “What’s on your mind” are easy targets. Someone I do not know just informed me via my Facebook page that, “Sweden is great. Very interesting, but also clean and friendly people.” And I should care because . . . .? Darker examples also abound. Do a search on any pejorative term and you will encounter thousands of public symptoms of social pathology that should be confined to the privacy of a therapist’s inner sanctum.

But, the current burr under my saddle is somewhat different, even strange. I heard an interesting story on NPR the other day [see below] about a website called BookGlutton. [http://www.bookglutton.com/] You were quoted so you know the site and the story far better than I, but apparently the site is a sort of cyber book club where everybody simultaneously reads a book and discusses it in a semi-social, semi-intellectual gabfest that occurs as a live chat session in the margin of the screen, right? The story quotes teachers who love the site as a teaching tool. I can see the value in that. Given that reading for pleasure has largely tanked among young people, I am in favor of anything that draws people to the joy of reading. However, the article also quotes you as saying:

"There's something frustrating about reading on a Kindle. "The fact that you're reading on a screen makes you expect, 'Oh, I should be able to click through on this. Oh, I should be able to look this word up. I should be able to Google this name.' "

And then they say that you have no doubt that within the next decade, no one will feel that frustration anymore - because, I assume, we'll be reading novels interactively with a bunch of friends?

Leah, I have to admit that that just creeps me out. OK, you're still a thirty-something. I can cut you some slack there. You probably grew up reading on a screen. But the notion of clicking my way through a novel with folks chatting along side in the margin? Come on now.

“OMG! Didn’t see that coming! Did anyone else? I thought she was his sister! LOL!”
“Oh, I knew it had to happen. Total manifestation of the commodification of cultural dominance.”
“The what of what? Who are you?”
“I’m a grad student at Stanford.”
“Well, excuuuuse me!”

OK, I am aware that once an artist puts a work before an audience he or she lets go of the work. The audience can do whatever they want with it. But I always think of that interaction – artist and audience – as one-to-one. Even theater and film, which are often presented to groups, are experienced individually. We – one person – interact through the artwork with another person. For me it doesn’t matter if my role at the moment is artist or audience member, that interaction is more than personal – it is intimate.

This notion of “group think” being brought to bear on novels, on any artform, becomes a problem once we leave the realm of pedagogy. When you teach you have to at least pay lip service to the notion that there are no stupid questions, that every input moves us along the path to learning. That is, of course, a crock. There are incredibly stupid questions that create horrific detours on the road to insight. But in the classroom you often have to walk that road.

Docents walk that road for us in museums, and many do it brilliantly. I remember a woman at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. We had signed up for a tour, there were supposed to be seven of us, but five people failed to show up, so my wife and I got a tour for two. It was quite wonderful, we learned a lot. But that was pedagogy. When I am intimately involved with a work of art I am completely unconcerned about what the kid in the back row thinks. I am equally disinterested in an expert point of view. When I am looking at The Birth of Venus, I don’t want anyone else there, thank you. This is between Botticelli and me. This is private. I don’t want to be disturbed.

The good people at Bookglutton, and you Leah, should be quick to point out that their site in no way denies me the privacy to read a book all by myself. You are, of course, right. But I worry that it puts us on a slippery slope. It creates a space that redefines our interaction with art. It is the same slope that leads to babies in strollers parked in front of Michelangelo’s David, to the seven-year-old with the toy musket shooting at the actor portraying George Washington at Colonial Williamsburg, to our seeming inability to distinguish between entertainment, public pedagogy and private artistic intimacy.

There is certainly space for all three in our society – but not in the same room, not on the same screen, not at the same time.

NPR story on Bookglutton:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106150832