Contest answer

So here's the deal. The King James Bible, The Wizard of Oz, and the UN Secretariat building in New York are all magnificent, towering achievements on an artistic level. Can you imagine a "Bible as Literature" class based on the New English Bible? Can you think of a film which has resonated in the general public's imagination more strongly or for longer than The Wizard of Oz? Can you think of a building in New York more perfect than the UN Secretariat?

I'm serious about the UN Secretariat, by the way. When I first arrived in New York, I was magnetically attracted to the gleaming Chrysler Building, of course. And then after working downtown for a while I moved my affections over to the Woolworth Building. But the UN is probably closer to perfect than either of them – and beats, in my view, the Park Avenue icons of the Seagram Building and Lever House.

No, that's not the answer. But ask yourself why the Seagram Building and Lever House are so hugely admired, while the UN Secretariat is often forgotten. It's obvious: the Seagram was built by Mies and Johnson, while Lever House was built by Gordon Bunshaft. The UN Secretariat, by contrast, was built by, um...

So that's what I was driving at. When we think great literature, we think Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Nabokov – authors. When film buffs talk of the greats, they talk of Fellini and Wilder and Godard. Hell, pick up this week's New Yorker, and turn to Anthony Lane's cinema review. Check out the caption on the illustration: "Tom Cruise as special agent Ethan Hunt in J.J. Abrams's movie." Yes, even M:i:III, the ur-blockbuster, the ultimate star-driven film, is attributed to one J.J. Abrams – someone who couldn't even be called a film director before this movie came out, because he'd never directed a film before.

One minor milestone in the intellectual development of a child is when they start moving away from liking certain books and certain music, and start liking certain authors and certain bands. And once you go there, it's almost impossible to go back: everyone seems determined to give almost everything an author. (Which might be one of the reasons why conspiracy theories are so common, and opposition to Darwinism is so widespread.)

I've written before about how such attributions of authorship can be silly, but they're also important, because great works of art can actually get much less attention than they ought to if there isn't an author to glorify.

The three examples in my contest, then, are all works of art which don't have a single author who can take the credit and the glory – and for that reason, I think, they're often overlooked when they would never be if they were "by" someone famous. This is not a question of things being designed by committee, although Miss Representation was closer to the answer than anybody else. But in fact the fact that we want to attribute authorship of these artworks to someone, or something, even if it's only a committee, is telling. An artist, on one popular view, is one of the three necessary elements for a work of art to exist, the other two being an art object and a viewer. I hold up three possible counterexamples.

Posted by Felix at 21:31 EST

Comments

I guess, then, my handle has some justifiation? Or should we take this ~~outside~~ (checking to see if Stefan's code skills are better than that Guilfoile fella)?

Posted by: 99 at 23:07 EST, May 10, 2006

Nope. Or my HTML sucks.

Posted by: 97 at 23:09 EST, May 10, 2006

fixed. by me, thankyouverymuch.

Posted by: Felix at 23:47 EST, May 10, 2006

Felix Salmon, nul points. You are no longer allowed to run contests. That's not an answer to a question. It's a thesis based on a proposition. If you'd asked, "what exceptionally vague and all-encompassing, 750-word theory might I come up with that loosely, but not exclusively, connects these three items," you might have gotten away with it. But no. You didn't. I declare Stefan the winner with 'unicorns.' I have no idea what he's getting at, but at least it's an answer.

You are fired.

Posted by: Matthew at 9:23 EST, May 11, 2006

The answer is "they're art sans artist". That's four words, not a vague and all-encompassing theory.

Posted by: Felix at 10:32 EST, May 11, 2006

There's unicorns in all three of them.

1. I've personally seen the unicorns on the tapestry hanging in the UN Secretariat building.

2. An authority no less than Kottke last week pointed out there are unicorns in the King james Bible.

3. The movie version but not the book version has unicorns grazing in the background of one of the scenes.

That's clearly a much better answer than the one intended.

Posted by: Stefan at 15:08 EST, May 12, 2006

Dwarves, too. In the book, munchkins are described as "not as big as the grown folk she had always been used to; but neither were they very small. In fact, they seemed about as tall as Dorothy." Not so in the movie, where they are considerably shorter. Nebuchadnezzar was a dwarf, apparently. And "UN building dwarf" gets 775k hits from Google, one of which must refer to an actual dwarf in the UN, surely?

Posted by: Charles at 11:16 EST, May 15, 2006