David Byrne’s New Book Explores the Strange Afterlife of Good Ideas: From Vermeer’s Paintings to Roman Concrete & Dark Matter

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. 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. David Byrne Turns His Acclaimed Musi­cal Amer­i­can Utopia into a Pic­ture Book for Grown-Ups, with Vivid Illus­tra­tions by Maira Kalman 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’s Unusu­al Forms of Visu­al Art: Bike Racks, Cor­po­rate Signs & Pow­er­point Pre­sen­ta­tions 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. by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (0) | We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to!

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