In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller writes about attention and the Order of the Third Bird. The Order is
supposedly a secret international fellowship, going back centuries, of artists, authors, booksellers, professors, and avant-gardists. Participants in the Order would converge, flash-mob style, at museums, stare intensely at a work of art for half an hour, and vanish, their twee-seeming feat of attention complete.Forty years ago, the philosopher Richard Wollheim spoke of looking at a painting for two hours or more as a lone spectator. No flash-mob needed.
[“Going back centuries?” The Order sounds like the subject of an exhibit in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.]
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In Cortázar's novel 62: A Model Kit, someone, as a prank, places an ad in a newspaper summoning the members of a group named Neurotics Anonymous to the Courtauld Institute to stare at a particular painting and try to figure out why the person depicted is holding a particular species of flower. They respond, and the museum authorities become seriously concerned at the growing attention devoted to the painting, which no one has given much thought to before.
As a side note, I used to work with one of the people mentioned in the New Yorker article.
Do you think one or more Birds know about that novel?
I wouldn't be surprised!
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