Recent Highlights

With John Cleese, blocking the view of a Monet, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

The New York Times published in October my op-ed on the dangers of conceptual art as an investment vehicle. Of course, the piece is about much more than that! You can read it here.

My offsider at Arts & Letters Daily, Prof. Tran Huu Dung, recently visited Giverny, the place where Monet produced many of his famous water-lilly paintings. Tran took this remarkable photograph. Scroll down to the lillies and reflections in the mid-foreground in order to see what a highly realistic artist Monet was.

News of my trips in January to the United States and February to Australia to flog The Art Instinct can be found here. There were speeches and signings in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, Houston, Washington, New York, and Sydney. I even appeared with this guy:

A living work of art

The Aspen Ideas Festival talk was given in July and a plenary address at the American Society of Aesthetics comes around in October. Also scheduled is a joint gig with John Cleese at the Santa Barbara Art Museum on October 21st.

Claire Fox, Charles Murray, and I spoke last year at a Sydney event sponsored by the Centre for Independent Studies. The topic was elitism, and in different ways the three of us defended it. My piece has just been published in The Australian. You can read it here. (The Stuttgart journal Merkur has now published this talk in German.) A longer review of John Carey’s book, mentioned in the essay, can be found here.

Philip Matthews of the Press talked to Doug Campbell and me for a lovely article on Climate Debate Daily. You can read the Press article here.

Many thanks to the editors of the New York Times for naming my Joyce Hatto essay, “Shoot the Piano Player,” as one of the paper’s “Notable Op-Eds of the Year.” It was only op-ed given that honor for January or February, and so heads the Times’s chronological list.

Thanks to Robert Fulford for this appreciative piece on Arts & Letters Daily in Canada’s National Post.

Mark Singer has written a very fine article on the Joyce Hatto scandal for The New Yorker. I have an advance PDF version of it here.

It is absurd to imagine that Joyce Hatto did not know about her faked recordings....

How has Joyce Hatto’s husband, William Barrington-Coupe, been able to get away with his farrago of nonsense about this fraud? Barrington-Coupe’s account has been accepted by the press and the public at large. As numerous headlines put it, he has “come clean.” He “did it out of love.”

“Coming clean” in his fanciful account means that (1) he only started to mix in other pianists’ tracks to cover the grunting of his diseased and suffering wife. (2) All recordings of her mix her work with other pianists. (3) He did it all for her, to make things more bearable. (4) She didn’t know a thing about it. He wins, you see: he is a hero, and she was a mere victim of his kindness. He lied to her, and to everyone else, but don’t be too harsh, since he did it out of love.

This is pluperfect rubbish. No one has detected any mixing of two pianists on the same track in any of her fakes. All known tracks so far are 100% other pianists, with time compression in some cases (not all), with the effect of making the recording even faster and more brilliant than the originals.

So much for (1) and (2). As for (3) and (4), Joyce Hatto was a lively, bubbly, intelligent person who promoted these recordings to people, and was familiar with them. She was not at the end of her life anywhere near doddery senility, and seemed to have no intellectual impairment. (Listen to her last radio interview here: no sign of being out of touch.)

Think through the possibilities. It is not implausible to imagine a recording engineer who is also a loving husband slipping a false performance of one track or other into a CD where her performance had fallen short. But we are not talking about a track or two, we are faced here with the biggest single body of pianistic output in recording history (Rubinstein’s lifetime production was less that 100 CDs, but included many, many repetitions of the same pieces). So far, not a single post-1970 recording by Joyce Hatto has turned out not to be a fake.

Her catalogue includes around 30 or so concertos. This is probably more recorded concerto repertoire than Rubinstein and Horowitz combined. All of these CDs have the same non-existent conductor and orchestra. Joyce Hatto was aware of these CDs. This is incompatible with Barrington-Coupe’s claim that she did not know what was going on. In fact, it is a palpable absurdity to imagine she did not know. She signed CDs, she boasted of her exploits! Listen to the radio interviews.

Joyce Hatto knew her catalogue, she knew the claims made about her, she knew the reviews and the critics, and she knew how to charm anyone who talked to her.

As for whether Barrington-Coupe loved his wife, it is doubtless true, but it is entirely beside the point. I’m sure Clyde loved Bonnie too.

The media coverage of the Hatto episode is a lesson in how the news cycle turns over with a story. Barrington-Coupe got in with this last bit of nonsense just at the point when editors were likely getting tired of the story. They don’t care; they have other things to worry about. Oh, journalism!

In sum, based on her letters to critics and her radio interviews, it is my considered opinion that Joyce Hatto, in addition of being a lively, chirpy, witty, bright, and positive person, was also a systematic, methodical liar. The only thing she needed was to be married to a convicted fraudster who was also a recording engineer. And guess what?

Because she was so extremely pleasant and because she was an artist, it has been very difficult for people to accept the notion of her guilt. Con artists are often very engaging people with high IQs. Her positive attitude derived, I imagine, in part from thinking she was going to get away with it. She was very likely having the time of her life, at last the star she’d always longed to be. And, perhaps luckily for her, she died before she was caught out.

Anyway, my New York Times op-ed goes through the issues. Four interesting letters to the editor are included. There is an excellent page by Andrys Basten bringing together information about the Hatto scandal. You can find it here.

Joyce Hatto

After a long period of overcast weather, the Christchurch sky at last cleared on January 22, 2007, and we were able to observe Comet McNaught in its true celestial glory. It is the most impressive comet I have ever seen (and I’ve seen a few, since my first, Comet Arend-Roland and then Comet Mrkos, both in 1957). The photo above was made by holding my Fuji digital camera steady on the top of the old Saab for a 15 second exposure. The location was near Darfield and a 70 km/hr Nor’wester was blowing across the Canterbury Plains. Both with naked eye and with 11x80 binoculars the comet was spectacular: a brilliant head and coma with a wonderfully streaky tail. The Fuji shot below hardly does justice to it. (To be sure, there are better photos than this available on the net, but like my snaps of the Acropolis or the Taj Mahal, this one’s a personal memento.)

I attended the White House Press Correspondents’ Association Annual Dinner in 2006 at the Hinckley Hilton. My account, angled toward a New Zealand audience, can be read here.

In 2003, John Brockman’s annual Edge Question asked for a memo to the President on the premise that he had just appointed you as his Science Advisor. I recently came across my contribution; I had lost track of it. You can read it here. I stand by it still.

Philosophy/Classics 141: Classical Concepts of Beauty.

We’re gearing up for this course, described here.

Students who want a head start can begin with Plato’s Republic. We encourage students to use different editions: an English translation you can get your hands on, new or used, is fine by us.

Specific course requirements are outlined here. The University webpage for the course is here.

Philosophy 220 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

I am getting library material together for this new second-semester course, including DVDs, many produced for the anniversary of Darwin’s birth in 2009. I’ll definitely be using David Attenborough’s entralling doco on the bower birds of northern Australia and New Guinea. Wow!

Another mistake in my DVD orders for the new course. It turns out that Darwin: The Voyage that Shook the World is a creationist doco that masquerades as legit Darwin history. The makers even managed to trick perfectly decent Darwin scholars, such as Harvard’s Janet Browne, the Darwin biographer, into being interviewed. Little did these academics know that they were giving credibility to a shoddy creationist enterprise! I must say, however, that it is in the end a rather turgid and even harmless piece of work. It is too confused in its presentation to give the viewer any strong reason to challenge evolution.

Philosophy 110 Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus

Thanks to everyone for making up such an engaged class. (Well, most of you, anyway!)

Here is an article on the placebo effect from the latest issue of the American magazine, The Skeptic.

The article on homeopathy I was reading from is here. There is another excellent article here.

You essay topic is here. The helpful essay by Popper is here. The excellent British journalist, David Aaronovitch, has written a new book on conspiracy theories. Anyone who buys it off Amazon might have a headstart. The Times published an extract from the book. Here are reviews in the Guardian, the Times of London, the Scotsman, the New Statesman, the Literary Review, and the Financial Times.

Here’s a treat: Andrew Marr’s BBC programme, Start the Week, begins with an interview with David Aaronovitch, talking about his book on conspiracy theories and the people who believe them. Listen to what he says about Princess Diana’s death. It’s very much worth taking notes. Hear it here.

The article on conspiracy theories by Jerry Goodenough is here. Its examples are drawn from conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination.

On the question of conspiracy theories about about the 9/11 attacks, one of the best sources is a long article produced by Mechanics Illustrated magazine. It is here. You may prefer to print it out or to read online the print version.

An old friend of mine, David Chandler, is “convinced the 9/11 was an inside job.” Many years ago, Dave and I went on expeditions together into the Mojave Desert, observing various deep-sky objects with his large Newtonian reflector. All I can say is that I knew him as a very gentle, pleasant, and very smart guy. A PDF of his essay is here.

Other articles that I think relevant to a discussion of conspiracy theories are by Brendan O’Neill here and here. Frank Furedi's piece is here. Stephen Marche has a very interesting new piece on conspiracy theories in Esquire. Don’t miss it here.

Here is a new article on the psychology of conspiracy theory belief that has shown up in Science News. You may be able to locate the article by googling the authors and title.

My general account of Cold Reading and the Forer Effect (or Barnum Effect) is here.

Philip Escoffey is an experienced magician and sceptic who sees through the various scam techniques of psychic con artists. His interview with Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand shows genuine insight. I suggest listening with pen in hand, stopping the interview here and there to take notes. The audio is here.

General information about the course is available here. Specific course requirements for Phil 110 this year are here. The University webpage for the course is here.

“Pugnacious, witty, and entertaining ... The Art Instinct is scintillatingly written and not to be missed – even the end notes are indispensable ,” writes Kirkus Reviews.

“Dutton’s eloquent account sheds light on the role art plays in our lives ... uniformly insightful and penetrating,” says the New York Times.

Denis Dutton “combines a magisterial command of the history of aesthetics back to Plato and Aristotle, a total commitment to clarity and verve in writing, and an up-to-the-minute grasp of almost every trend on the contemporary cultural scene. Result? A philosophy of art for the ages, ” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Check out all the reviews and other news HERE.

You may have seen this photograph. It used to appear in blow-up form in the Margaret Mead Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was also reproduced in an abysmal book called Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, by Marianna Torgovnick (panned by me here). Thanks to help from friends at the Museum of Natural History and across Central Park at the Metropolitan Museum, I am able to present the original color version of the photo. For an updated account of the controversy surrounding this image, click here.

This pan of the absurdly overrated Lord of the Rings films has been published in the Press, the New Zealand Herald, the Sunday Los Angeles Times, and the Australian. Here is the complete version from which these different edits derive.

If you travel into the Sepik River area of northern New Guinea, you may encounter firewalking as practiced by the natives. It is an old jungle tradition. Well, maybe not that old.

Back-up files for Phil 140 and Phil 142 readings include Aristotle’s Poetics, David Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste, excerpts from Immanuel Kant’s Third Critique, Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education, Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art?, and Clive Bell’s Art.

When the Shroud of Turin was at last carbon dated in 1988 many observers thought that would put an end to whacky speculation that it was the actual burial cloth of Jesus. Those of us who had spent much time studying the psychology of Shroud belief knew otherwise. A signed confession from the Shroud’s creator would not do make any difference to believers at this point.

A few years before the carbon test, I reviewed two recent books on the subject. The review can be found here.

Human Accomplishment, by Charles Murray, was the subject of a long review in the New Criterion. Murray’s book is a splendid achievement, so full of facts and hypotheses that critics have had a field day poking holes in it. While I poke a few, there is much to admire in this provocative work.

Charles Murray

Time magazine in its issue of 14 June 2004 (U.S. edition) has an article on weblogs that includes a flattering remark or two. I have never viewed Arts & Letters Daily as a weblog, in that it does not present a running commentary. The progenitor of the modern weblog, by the way, is not the personal diary, but the nineteeth-century commonplace book, a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings, favorite poems, and creative prose. ALD is just a daily reading list with attitude.

I’ve been searching for a decent link to Aristotle’s Poetics on the web. All I could find were fairly messy text and zipped versions that lacked the the editorial niceties to guide the eye and the mind through this work. The Perseus Project (W.H. Fyfe’s 1932 version) offers perhaps the best, but it’s broken into many separate pages and is very hard to navigate. So I’ve cobbled together a couple of versions of the 1902 Butcher rendering and applied a modern editorial eye to the result. Here’s what I’ve come up with. Corrections are most welcome (email me here). I know for starters that I’ve missed a few italics in this text.

The April issue of Philosophy and Literature is out with lots of fresh argument and analysis. Click on the image for the current table of contents. The infamous Philosophy and Literature style sheet can be consulted here.