OK, last post this morning. This one perhaps more a lesson for professional writing. Chapter two discusses on three artists well-known for their ability to call attention to their work and in doing so to the cultural process of art: Duchamp, Warhol, and Christo. Lanham reserves the most positive attention for Christo and focuses  primarily on  his work Running Fence, the huge cloth sail he constructed through Marin and Sonoma counties.  Lanham admires the entrepeneurial spirit through which Christo and Jeanne-Claude, his wife, pursued the project. They created a corporation and invested $3 million of their own money into the project. Obviously hundreds of people were involved in constructing the 24 mile long fence through 55 parcels of private property. Think of all the meetings with various county boards, the permits, the environmental impact reports, etc., etc. In the end, Christo chose to complete his artistic vision by having the sail drop into the ocean without getting permission to do so from the appropriate agency.

In short, it was a huge rhetorical undertaking, and all for something that stood for two weeks. Once the project was underway, museums and other’s in the art community invested. In return they got sketches and other objects they could display and sell. The sail got cut up and sold like pieces of the Shroud of Turin or snippets of baseball uniforms attached to baseball cards.

Christo took a huge ($3 million) risk and made profit, a classical tale of art and commerce. The kind of thing that pisses off so many artists (and art critics and academics). The rhetorical side of this is interesting for professional writing.

you take your grand idea and you persuade people to share its grandeur. You do this in all those hearings and applications. This plunges you deeply into the paradox of stuff. You are trying to build something–the stuff is vital–but the attention structure the stuff creates, both in the making and the standing, is what finally matters. You create, as persuassion must, a participative drama. It must include, if it is to have dramatic vitality, a vociferous opposition. This was supplied by the local artists. They hated this foreigner coming in and hogging all the attention and redefining art in a way that left them clerks of a forgotten mood. And so they organized the opposition. But this was the part they were cast for in Christo’s drama anyway, and the madder they got, the better they played their parts. When Christo pointed their roles out to them, they got madder still.

This perhaps well describes the relationship between professional writing and English, if not the larger humanities. It is a keen insight. The objections of the "clerks of a forgotten mood" are a necessary component in the project. The louder and more public objections become, the more attention one gets. If someone wants to proclaim that technology or professional writing threatens to "destroy the humanities" or "destroy the university" or whatever, fantastic. Send out a petition. Hold a public hearing. Have a shouting match in the hallway. Stage of protest. Go for it.

Professional writing, as the future of the humanities in the attention economy, must understand the attention trap it sets for the humanities, a trap similar to the ones set by Duchamp or Warhol. However, unlike Warhol, the trap need not be set purely for the purpose of personal fame and fortune. The purpose, like any curriculum, is educational.

Undoubtedly there are risks. There are always risks in building new courses and programs. Often they are undertaken by junior faculty, who have both the most to lose and the most to gain. Make it part of the drama.

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