Name: Reality Hunger
ISBN: 9780307273536

David Shields

The author of the best-selling The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead presents a call for new art forms to match the complexities of the 21st century, exploring how creative expression is being reshaped to reflect today's increasingly artificial and disconnected world.

A Manifesto

Reality Hunger

Ri Liu

This is not the work of someone asked by an external party to write on their expertise. The text came from a place within, which is the point of the thing and you have to respect it for that.

I loved this book for the insights it provided, but I struggled with it as well.

One objection I have is the author's flippant insistence that you "take a razor blade or box cutter" to the pages that contain the sources of cited material. Where these ideas are taken from, often wholesale, matters. From a reader's perspective, I want to know the origin of these ideas, to better understand them, to judge for myself their validity. It is not unreasonable as Shields states that "we own all the words" and that humanity benefits from the open access of knowledge, I too find that idea appealing. However the reality is that in the world of commodities we live in, credit buys prestige, a fact that the author, a white man, benefits immensely from, for being a known name, being asked to write more books, to give talks. Credit matters. All this seems to have revealed the author's blindspot, in typical western individualistic fashion, of the collaborative nature of creativity.

Towards the end the author started coming off uncomfortably as one of those narcissistic gen X men who I've encountered numerous times in my life and I've seen how personally destructive they can be. You can see in this book an excuse for that type of behaviour. People who use the label 'provocateur' usually rub me the wrong way.

Reality Hunger A Manifesto