Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Truth in Aphorism

Flash: art, at least since the industrial revolution, is of course a con. It tries to pack reality into itself, which it fails to do miserably. But then so does history, politics and science. Art’s salvation is that it knows its own temporariness. According to Shields, “Art is not truth; art is a lie that enables us to recognize truth.”

Or perhaps more accurately, art is created to be immediately and forever misinterpreted. A sort of cultural sacrificial lamb, the function of which is to keep the gods of certainty at bay. As one of Shield’s aphorisms has it:

“It is out of the madness of God, in the Old Testament, that there emerges what we, now, would recognize as the ‘real’; his perceived insanity is its very precondition.”

The real is indeed insane. Whether art intends to portray this insanity or ameliorate it as a comforting fetish is up to the artist. Art is not an exception to the general insanity. The only thing it ultimately can do is contest itself, assembling and disassembling images to form new images, claiming originality for the collage it produces. Great artists establish their images as models for future misinterpretation.

This of course progressively has eliminated the distinctions between fiction, essay, memoir, autobiography and factual reporting. All are equally interpretive and equally misinterpretive in their selectivity, authorial interests, and simple error. All are effectively novels. Or perhaps not even that: “My medium is prose, not the novel.” This is not too concerning since “Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.”

Science is the model for the future of art. For Shields, “Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts.” Scientific ideas are copied and distributed to inform, inspire, change perception, and claim originality. The uniqueness of these ideas lies not in their physical singularity (including the singularity of copyright) but in their effect on the scientific community. Copying in fact makes this impact possible.

So Shields makes a rather bold claim regarding works of art:

“What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library.”

And he certainly has a point. This is a new, perhaps technologically inevitable, way in which to value art; not through the prices set at auction or the royalties collected, but by the effect it has on world culture through direct mass distribution.
Shield’s model is that of cinema distribution rather than book publishing.

If so, we can count on an acceleration of “The process of aggrandizement: relatively ordinary problems are overblown into larger-than-life “literature.” the lie, the con, the hoax will become dominant. Oprah will be their promoter. The truth is you can’t have reality and drama. And we all want drama. Something has to happen not just be. The problem is that there are only so many dramatic stories. So they get repeated endlessly. Titillation is ultimately boring. Hence the craving reality without the “banality of non-fiction.”

Reality has to be appreciated for what it is. “The last Christian died on the cross.” Most people feel bad/sad/disappointed/disappointing most of the time. The rest are probably mentally ill and have checked out altogether. Comedy is probably the only way of dealing with this situation effectively. But the lyrical essay about consciousness confronting the world isn’t a bad alternative. Or maybe the future belongs to aphorism. It depends on what you mean by artistic truth; and Shields’s version is the tiniest bit vague.


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