These prizes have their counterparts in the music world, and there too they are well-known as strong "reverse indicators of value," at least to everyone outside the immediate social orbit of the committee and the recipients. A certain amount of focus on the under-forties arises from a good-faith response to a good-faith criticism: lifetime achievement awards are obscene when the elderly achiever really could have used that money to stay afloat during their starving-artist years. This, together with the realization that many small grants to individual artists would do more good than a few massive grants to superstars and large organizations, has (re)shaped the landscape somewhat for the better. I suspect there are good intentions behind this; yet NNT's observations here supply the necessary damned if you do caveats. Radical postmodernists get the most attention for rejecting the cleansing effect of time, for junking the Thirty Year Rule that historians formerly observed, etc., and yet functionally the bourgeois mainstream has also rejected these things, much more quietly but with equal thoroughness and equally strident rationalizations. In one respect it is obvious that people need the money more when they are younger. The problem, though, is that it is not so easy to see the future. To attempt to do so is a fragilista maneuver through and through.
The problem in deciding whether a scientific result or a new innovation is a "breakthrough," that is, the opposite of noise, is that one needs to see all aspects of the idea—and there is always some opacity that time, and only time, can dissipate. ...
Likewise, seemingly uninteresting results that go unnoticed, can, years later, turn out to be breakthroughs.
So time can act as a cleanser of noise by confining to its dustbins all these overhyped works. Some organizations even turn such scientific production into a cheap spectator sport, with ranking of the "ten hottest papers" in, say, rectal oncology or some such sub-sub-specialty.
If we replace scientific results with scientists, we often get the same neomaniac hype. There is a disease to grant a prize for a promising scientist "under forty," a disease that is infecting economics, mathematics, finance, etc. Mathematics is a bit special because the value of its results can be immediately seen—so I skip the criticism. Of the fields I am familiar with, such as literature, finance, and economics, I can pretty much ascertain that the prizes given to those under forty are the best reverse indicator of value... The worst effect of these prizes is penalizing those who don't get them and debasing the field by turning it into an athletic competition.
Should we have a prize, it should be for "over a hundred": it took close to one hundred and forty years to validate the contribution of one Jules Regnault, who discovered optionality and mapped it mathematically—along with what we dubbed the philosopher's stone. His work stayed obscure all this time."
N.N. Taleb
Antifragile (2012)
pp. 329-330
In borrowing this Talebism, I am certainly wary of embracing Taleb's peculiar brand of Darwinism. He is not the least bit convincing when he claims, after all else he has written here and prior, to be content with merely passing on his genes and riding off into the Darwinian sunset. Clearly he lives to read, argue, eat and drink, put mice down people's shirts, and so on. (How I wish I'd had this last idea when I was sitting in Dr. Damschroder's theory classes!) I'm not in favor of a full Hunger Games approach to artisthood. The point, rather, that Taleb's arguments reveal, and which is in my experience simply not yet acknowledged in artists' circles, is that the fragilizing effects of awards are even worse than the trappings of a pure survival competition. They compound "cumulative advantage," lead to "Matthew effects," and claim to see the future. They "penaliz[e] those who don't get them and debas[e] the field by turning it into an athletic competition." I'm sure we will continue to have them even so. We all might as well apply just in case. But please don't believe anything anyone involved says about the recipients or the process, and please don't believe that competitions and awards are about supporting the next generation's finest practitioners. They cannot be about that. The list of Pulitzer winners speaks for itself here.
Synchronically, lifetime achievement awards are indefensible; diachronically they are the only defensible kind of award in fields that are, for our purposes here, the opposite of math, where the value of results is very rarely immediately seen, indeed where this value is all but guaranteed to change, and where this guarantee in and of itself does not need to be elevated to a risk by our having previously bet against it. Of course we can collectively decide to redefine value as strictly limited to that which can be immediately seen. It may seem like this has already happened; but watch those pomos carefully, especially when they don't know they are being watched, and you will find all the evidence you'll ever need that this presentism is no more a part of who they really are than their mismatched tube socks.
3 comments:
Marshall McLuhan
"The Poor Rich"
in The Mechanical Bride
2002 Gingko Press edition [orig. 1951]
pp. 55-56
"The very conditions of success render the rich suspicious of those failures whom they might be expected to assist. They have no training or taste which would enable them to select struggling artists or writers who might be worthy of aid. In these matters, therefore, they work through the dealers in old pictures or distribute many tiny gratuities through bureaucratic foundations which are run on the most finicky, academic lines. This, of course, overlooks these endowments for hospitals and libraries which are intended as family monuments. And it is not true to say that the rich are niggardly. The point here is simply that they are timid and unresourceful in a way which stands in stark contrast to the zip and push that has put them where they are." (56)
I quite accidentally paired Taleb with McLuhan and have tremendously enjoyed the haphazard connections which have emerged. Perhaps I have already given Taleb more attention than he deserves, but I do confess that at least in word (I cannot know about deed) his "resourcefulness," his respect for the vulnerable and for the risk-takers, all stand in stark contrast to most people who have made as much money as he has. That in and of itself I find worthy of the highest respect, and it further inclines me to take him seriously as a philosophical thinker.
Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)
"To reward and to make celebrities of artists, can, also, be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival."
(p. 65)
Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
Man, Play and Games (1961)
"More and more, the recruitment of officials is accomplished through competitive examinations. ... Bureaucracy is thus a factor in a type of competition, in which agôn is the principle underlying any administrative, military, university, or judicial career. ...democracy progresses precisely through fair competition and equality of law and opportunity, which is sometimes more nominal than real.
"In Ancient Greece, the first theorists of democracy resolved the difficulty in perhaps bizarre but impeccable and novel fashion. They maintained that selecting magistrates by lot was an absolutely equalitarian procedure. They viewed elections as a kind of subterfuge or makeshift inspired by aristocrats. Aristotle, especially, reasons in this way. ...
[110]
Elections were preferred whenever the territory involved was very large or where a large number of participants necessitated a representative government. The verdict of the lots, expressed by a white bean, was no less esteemed as an egalitarian system. At the same time, it may be regarded as a precaution against the intrigues, maneuvers, or conspiracies of the oligarchs who were difficult to replace."
(pp. 109-110)
"...what I shall arbitrarily call disguised lotteries—i.e. those not requiring money to be risked and seeming to reward talent, learning, ingenuity, or any other type of merit, thus naturally escaping general notice or legal sanction. Some grand prizes of a literary character may truly bring fortune and glory to a writer, at least for several years. These contests stimulate thousands of others that are of little significance but which somehow trade upon the prestige of the more important competition. ... There are no limits to all this. Radiologists have even selected a girl (a Miss Lois Conway, 18 years of age) as Miss Skeleton, proved by X-rays to have the prettiest bony structure."
(p. 118)
(more)
(see also this)
Post a Comment