So how does something I saw during today’s ride connect with a PhD I never finished (actually, just barely started) one of the most famous critiques of conceptual art—and why people hate (or at least claim to) AI summaries?
While taking a spin around Randall’s Island, I noticed a fellow, built like a football linebacker and astride one of those bikes that looked like iridescent ice cream straight from the oven and probably cost more than a university-educated worker’s average salary in many African or Asian countries, staring at a screen on his handlebars. When we passed each other again, halfway around the island (we were riding in opposite directions) he was still transfixed on it. And when we passed each other again. And again.
Oh, and just after I saw him the first time, I almost crashed into someone on a Citibike e-bike who, along with his girlfriend on another Citibike e-bike, made ir impossible for me or anyone else to pass because their wobbling and swerving cut off the whole lane—while he recorded himself on his phone, completely oblivious to anything else. (Somehow I thought he was an actual or would-be “influencer.”) All the while, the girlfriend giggled.
Of course, it wasn’t the first time I saw behavior like his, or that of the fellow looking at the device on his handlebars. But I think I realized something about folks like them and the “phone zombies” we’ve all seen.
It seems that, at least for some people, whatever is in front of, or around, them is of no consequence: Only the summarized, digitized version that is presented to them, or they can make from it, matters.The guy looking at his device on his racing bike was looking at whatever AI or some program told him about his ride along, possibly, with physiological data. And the video the other rider was making of himself seemed to matter more than his actual ride.
They got me to thinking about the museum- and gallery-goers who look at the plaque or placard next to a work of art and read the description without paying much attention to the work itself. I am not talking only about tourists who go to the Met or the Louvre to check off a box on their New York or Paris itineraries. If I recall correctly, at least one critic said that a work of art matters only to the extent that it fits certain theories or narratives.
Now, I realize that some people are more verbal than visual. (I may be one.) Still, I feel that one thing that makes a work worth seeing is that it offers something language and theory can’t, or at least don’t do well. As an example, I wrote something about the way I believe Van Gogh experienced color: as forms of energy, which is why he balanced them as he did. Even if my explanation was brilliant or simply lovely (which I doubt), I hope that no one reads it without looking at his Irises.
So what does any of that, or the cyclists I saw today, have to do with my nipped in (or, more precisely, before) the bud doctoral program? Well, upon realizing that my MFA and creative work probably weren’t going to get me a full-time job in any school not in some “college town” island in a redneck sea, I figured I’d go for the next three letters in the academic alphabet. It didn’t take me long to see that students at that level, at least in the program I was in, weren’t actually studying Shakespeare or Blake or Yeats—or even contemporary (at the time) poets like Seamus Heaney or novelists like Toni Morrison. Rather, they were studying theory, which felt like the most abstract, even abstruse, areas of philosophy or social science. Those things can be interesting, but it seemed that discussion and writing in those classes were concerned entirely with the theories, with little or no mention of the work itself.
Sometimes people ask me how many miles I ride. i know the lengths, more or less, of some particular rides, but I don’t think about those numbers after I ride. I might recall the light or scent of a path or place, how my legs felt or how something changed along the way. I don’t try to reduce my pedaling to data point or a journey into a catalog —or Ai—description. There’s so much more, and better, to cycling—and life.
