David Byrne will always be most widely known as the co-founder and frontman of Talking Heads. That may count among the greatest possible achievements for any artist — to the minds of many an Open Culture reader, at least — but it must occasionally frustrate the man himself. Talking Heads broke up 35 years ago, but Byrne has only grown more and more productive since, recording his own albums, creating musicals, writing books, putting on PowerPoint presentations, and even designing bike racks. By now, his ideas have stretched so far beyond music that he’s considering the nature of ideas themselves, how they succeed or fail in catching on, and why they go in and out of acceptance over time. Hence his new book Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up.
“I first saw the term ‘sleeping beauties’ (outside of the folktale or the Disney movie) when I went down a rabbit hole and stumbled on a paper from 2004 called “Sleeping Beauties in Science” by the scientometrics researcher Anthony van Raan at Leiden University,” Byrne writes in an excerpt of the book published online. (Scientometrics being, he adds, “the study of the impact and communication of science.”) He cites a favorite example of the astronomer Vera Rubin’s discovery, in the nineteen-seventies, of “evidence for dark matter, which is estimated to make up a large percentage of the universe.” Understanding her own observations required her to “question even her most basic assumptions — that matter must emit light and radiation. She was a visual thinker, and she used her data to create plots and sketches that revealed patterns within the numbers.”
Only decades later was Rubin’s counterintuitive vision of the universe supported by theoretical physicists and radio astronomers using ever more technologically advanced tools like “the powerful Hale Telescope, Kent Ford’s new spectrograph, and the Uhuru satellite, which tracked cosmic X‑rays.” In the Science Friday interview at the top of the post, Byrne brings up a much older, longer-sleeping beauty often featured here on Open Culture: ancient Roman concrete, the source of whose extraordinary strength and endurance was only determined a few years ago. Though especially vivid in technology and science, “this forgetting and then remembering, I knew from my own experience, wasn’t limited to academia,” he writes. “It happens in all kinds of fields and endeavors — music, art, literature, every kind of creative profession.”
As Adam Grant writes in the New York Times Book Review, the range of examples covered in Sleeping Beauties includes “how advocates reawakened Bach’s compositions and Vermeer’s paintings after one and two centuries of slumber; how technological advances rekindled theories of continental drift and black holes; how accidents resuscitated hand-washing and genetics; and how war renewed interest in the submarine and The Great Gatsby.” Making an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Byrne was asked if any of his own work has undergone a similar process of disinterest followed by rediscovery. “It’s kind of the opposite,” he replies. “There’s things that I’ve done where I go, ‘That one does not hold up that well at all’ ” — which, if the irony of cultural history continues to operate as usual, will be exactly the records the children of today’s Talking Heads fans put on most enthusiastically a few years down the line.
Related Content:
David Byrne’s New Illustrated Book Playfully Presents A History of the World (in Dingbats)
David Byrne: From Talking Heads Frontman to Leading Urban Cyclist
David Byrne: How Architecture Helped Music Evolve
Brian Eno Explores What Art Does in a New Book Co-Written with Artist Bette A
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
