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Luck, context and talent

The world has seen so many talented artists and writers – but for every success there are many thousands of disappointments. That’s why I’m a fan of the Neglected Books blog which resurrects excellent writing from some decades past which has long been forgotten about. And the current post has a discussion about the part luck plays in the process by which some books become classics. It was Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan which first made me aware of this when he wrote the following - 

More than four centuries ago, the English essayist Francis Bacon had a very simple intuition. ….. Bacon mentioned a man who, upon being shown the pictures of those worshipers who paid their vows then subsequently escaped shipwreck, wondered where were the pictures of those who happened to drown after their vows. The lack of effectiveness of their prayers did not seem to be taken into account by the supporters of the handy rewards of religious practice. “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like”, he wrote in his Novum Organum, written in 1620.

 

This is a potent insight: the drowned worshippers, being dead, do not advertise their experiences. They are invisible and will be missed by the casual observer who will be led to believe in miracles.

Not just in miracles, as Taleb goes onto argue…..it is also the process which decides whether an artist is remembered. For every artist of genius, there have been many more with the same talent but whose profile, somehow, was submerged….

Art, of course, is the subject of high fashion – reputations ebb and flow…..we are vaguely aware of this…but it is money that speaks in the art “market” and it is the din of the cash register to which the ears of most art critics and dealers are attuned

 

Someone else who celebrates unknown or, rather, forgotten artists is Jonathan in Wales who runs a great blog called My Daily Art Display which fleshes out the detail of the lives of long-forgotten but superb artists…..

But it’s not, of course, just a matter of LUCK – the discussion at Neglected Books mentions the fantastic sea artist, Turner, who very much stood on the shoulders of other artists he knew –

 

There is a wing of the local museum devoted to the Norwich school of painters, who were around the time of J. M. W. Turner, who knew him, who inspired him and were inspired by him—but who weren’t Turner. So, it’s full of works that are amazing—but that aren’t the few classics people associate with Turner. Certainly, some of my favorite painters are artists I wouldn’t have known unless I’d seen their work hanging in a gallery or museum.

 2. The “Stepping Stones” report and diagram of 1977

Last month the new English libertarian journal The Critic had an interesting article reminding us of the maverick policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, John Hoskyns, a systems analyst who owned his own company. 

But in the early 1970s, as the three-day week, double-digit inflation, a declining GDP and crippling industrial action began to accelerate, he turned his mind to politics. Why, he asked himself, was Britain in the state it was? What exactly had gone wrong? Why did it have the longest working hours, lowest rate of pay and lowest production per head of any major country in Northern Europe? Why – a former industrial superpower and winner of two world wars – were we now falling so far behind?

The questions began to obsess him: “It was,” he wrote, “such an absolute Everest of problem-solving that I wouldn’t leave it alone, I couldn’t think about anything else.” He thus set to work on a diagram to map out all the causes and effects.

The diagram took an entire year to complete. It was really a “why?” diagram, Hoskyns explained:

Why did things happen? In other words, you look at a problem – what are the causes? And of course, there are often many causes. But then you look at the causes and you realise that they themselves are the result of other problems and other causes. Almost everything turned out to be a precondition for almost everything else.

 

“What the diagram really said,” Hoskyns later explained “is that if you’re going to change anything, you’ve got to change everything … because actually, in terms of logic, the causal connections are such that you cannot say, ‘Let’s just do that’, because – you can’t! Because actually, there are five other things that are causing that.”

When the Wiring Diagram was completed – a vast flow chart of interconnected ailments, some of the arrows moving in both directions – Hoskyns showed it to Thatcher.  She laughed at its complexity and said it looked like the map of a chemical works, but she was intrigued. 

 The final 1977 Stepping Stones report Hoskyns produced can be viewed here