My excellent Conversation with Benjamin Moser

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Benjamin Moser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer celebrated for his in-depth studies of literary and cultural figures such as Susan Sontag and Clarice Lispector. His latest book, which details a twenty-year love affair with the Dutch masters, is one of Tyler’s favorite books on art criticism ever.

Benjamin joined Tyler to discuss why Vermeer was almost forgotten, how Rembrandt was so productive, what auctions of the old masters reveals about current approaches to painting, why Dutch art hangs best in houses, what makes the Kunstmuseum in the Hague so special, why Dutch students won’t read older books, Benjamin’s favorite Dutch movie, the tensions within Dutch social tolerance, the joys of living in Utrecht, why Latin Americans make for harder interview subjects, whether Brasilia works as a city, why modernism persisted in Brazil, how to appreciate Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag’s (waning) influence, V.S. Naipaul’s mentorship, Houston’s intellectual culture, what he’s learning next, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: You once wrote about Susan Sontag, and I quote, “So much of Sontag’s best work concerns the ways we try, and fail, to see.” Please explain.

MOSER: This is what On Photography is about. This is what Against Interpretation is about in Sontag’s work. Of course, in my new book, The Upside-Down World, I talk about how I’m not really great at seeing, particularly. I’m not that visual. I’m a reader. I’m a bookworm. Often, when I’ve looked at paintings, I’ve realized how little I actually see. Sometimes I do feel embarrassed by it. You’ll read the label and it’ll be three sentences, and it’ll say like, A Man with a Dog. You’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even see the dog.” You know what I mean?

On these very basic levels, I just think, “Oh, if someone doesn’t point it out to me, I really don’t see.” I think that that was one of the fascinating things about Sontag, that she was not really able to see. She was actually quite terrible at seeing, and this was especially true in her relationships. She was very bad at seeing what other people were thinking and feeling.

I think because she was aware of that, she tried very hard to remedy it, but it’s just not something you can force. You can’t force yourself to like certain music or to like certain tastes that you might not actually like.

COWEN: What was Sontag most right about or most insightful about?

MOSER: I think this question of images — what images do — and photography and how representations, metaphors can pervert things. She had a very deep repulsion to photography. She really hated photography, and this is why a lot of photographers hated her because they felt this, even though she didn’t really say it. She really didn’t trust it. She really thought it was wicked. At the same time, for somebody who had a deficit, I guess you could say, in seeing, she really relied on it to understand the world.

I think that tension is very instructive for us, because now, she already says 50 years ago, “There are all these images. We don’t know what to do with them. We don’t know how to process them.” Forget AI, forget Russian trolls on Twitter. She uses this word I really like, hygiene, a lot. She talks about mental hygiene and how you can clean the rusty pipes in your brain. That’s why I think reading her helped me at least to understand a lot of what I’m seeing in the world.

COWEN: Do you think she will simply end up forgotten?

Again, I am happy to recommend Benjamin’s latest book The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters.