Fictional portrait of Jo and Edward Hopper wins Walter Scott prize £25,000 award for the year’s best historical novel goes to Christine Dwyer Hickey’s The Narrow Land, which depicts the artists’ marriage..... The Guardian, US edition
In the name of science archeologists use sophisticated technology to desecrate burials all over the planet, all the while bemoaning the damage done by grave robbers before the legitimate scientists arrived to catalogue all that sacred stuff and put it in boxes, but at least they don’t lie. Do they keep things to themselves, we’ve always wondered, but they don’t make stuff up if they want to stay in the club. Scientists insist on integrity, no making up stuff and no borrowing without attribution, everything must be original to be signed by an author. They do this to protect the truth.
Art is like science, constantly churning with new discoveries and conceptual breakthroughs by famous personalities, except that it isn’t connected to the real world by anything. No repeating an experiment to verify nothing, it’s all just conjecture and truth has to run for its life. In art they dig up dead people too but they put them to work, leech off their poignant life stories to animate unworthy art, happens all the time. Along comes a book, could be good but that’s doubtful since the author has had to dug up corpses for characters and made them do stuff they’d never do in real life. What order of desecration would this be? This book has won a prize awarded by people who have no more respect for a dead artist, or honest originality, than the author.
Ed Hopper was a real person with a notoriously private private-life and the expression he made to the world was in his artwork. There’s no real reason to know about his personal trials, but for someone to use his name to pump up some second-rate word pie is just sad. Art has respect for the truth but it’s verified on an individual basis, and oddly enough it starts with you. Art is about self-concept and it’s up to you to pick and choose, but don’t suppose you can disregard honesty in art and find it in politics or recognize it in business. I’ve seen Hopper paintings so luminous they seemed to cast a light on the museum floor in front of them, and the notion of some literary ghoul gnawing his bones to win a prize and sell some books is beyond tawdry and cheap, it’s probably unhealthy for anyone who touches it.
In the name of science archeologists use sophisticated technology to desecrate burials all over the planet, all the while bemoaning the damage done by grave robbers before the legitimate scientists arrived to catalogue all that sacred stuff and put it in boxes, but at least they don’t lie. Do they keep things to themselves, we’ve always wondered, but they don’t make stuff up if they want to stay in the club. Scientists insist on integrity, no making up stuff and no borrowing without attribution, everything must be original to be signed by an author. They do this to protect the truth.
Art is like science, constantly churning with new discoveries and conceptual breakthroughs by famous personalities, except that it isn’t connected to the real world by anything. No repeating an experiment to verify nothing, it’s all just conjecture and truth has to run for its life. In art they dig up dead people too but they put them to work, leech off their poignant life stories to animate unworthy art, happens all the time. Along comes a book, could be good but that’s doubtful since the author has had to dug up corpses for characters and made them do stuff they’d never do in real life. What order of desecration would this be? This book has won a prize awarded by people who have no more respect for a dead artist, or honest originality, than the author.
Ed Hopper was a real person with a notoriously private private-life and the expression he made to the world was in his artwork. There’s no real reason to know about his personal trials, but for someone to use his name to pump up some second-rate word pie is just sad. Art has respect for the truth but it’s verified on an individual basis, and oddly enough it starts with you. Art is about self-concept and it’s up to you to pick and choose, but don’t suppose you can disregard honesty in art and find it in politics or recognize it in business. I’ve seen Hopper paintings so luminous they seemed to cast a light on the museum floor in front of them, and the notion of some literary ghoul gnawing his bones to win a prize and sell some books is beyond tawdry and cheap, it’s probably unhealthy for anyone who touches it.
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