take something down

the good stuff is in the way

It was a fancy liberal arts college that introduced me to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: a urinal, signed “R. Mutt.” This, they told me, was one of the most important artworks of the 20th century.

I didn’t buy it at the time. Instead, I filed it away under “things fancy people claim to enjoy.” Since then, I’ve come to appreciate Dada and modern art in general, but what stays with me about Fountain is the room. A urinal in a bathroom is plumbing, but set it apart with a little placard nearby and people will observe.

Every day, more and more stuff comes my way online. More posts, newsletters, shows, books. Much of it is good, important, or both. Despite my best efforts to weed and curate, I encounter a constant flood of excellence and urgency. I spend a good chunk of my time swimming upstream through a deluge, trying to hold onto my reserves of attention long enough to make something of what I’m experiencing.

This is why the idea of an ordinary object standing alone with a sign that says look here is no longer a joke to me. Duchamp cleared a space. Duchamp decided that this object deserved attention and declined to include more. Just this, and nothing else. This kind of bravery is valuable in an era when we’re all told to feed the algorithm. More rods, more chances for lightning to strike, right?

I mentioned Morioka Shoten in an essay back in 2015, a few months after it opened. It’s a store that sells one book at a time. Multiple copies of a single title accompanied by a small exhibition of related work on the walls. One room, one book. Eleven years later, the shop still occupies its quiet nook in Ginza. People come from all over to see it. At the time I wrote about it here, I saw a clever marketing gimmick. Looking back, I missed the importance of opportunity cost. Every bookseller knows that featuring more titles means more chances at a sale, even though they understand that every additional book draws the shopper’s attention from all the rest. Morioka has given up all the rest for eleven years straight. Nothing in the shop competes for your eye. It’s a pedestal.

Todd Sattersten publishes one book a year at Bard Press. The whole company’s attention goes to a single title. There’s nothing scarier you can do in this business, and the pedestal sends a signal to the marketplace. When a publishing house puts everything it has behind one book, booksellers, reviewers, and readers feel the difference.

As a writer, the line you should have cut from the piece was almost always pretty good. Nobody agonizes over deleting something bad. The best improvisers, as I’ve written before, throw away good ideas without ceremony, because they trust the right idea is somewhere behind it.

Look at your own work hanging on that wall. Then take something down.