{"id":871403,"date":"2026-10-05T09:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T09:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/871403\/"},"modified":"2026-10-05T09:00:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T09:00:08","slug":"sleeping-beauties-by-david-byrne-review-a-quirky-journey-through-the-afterlife-of-invention-david-byrne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/871403\/","title":{"rendered":"Sleeping Beauties by David Byrne review \u2013 a quirky journey through the afterlife of invention | David Byrne"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s barely been a moment in\u00a0 the last half-century when David Byrne hasn\u2019t been zinging about, dancing forward, opting odd. The art-school dropout frontman of Talking Heads<\/a>, he moved sideways into ballet, dance and experimental theatre, collaborated on the proto-ambient LP My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with his fellow polymath Brian Eno, directed films, wrote musicals (on \u2013 of course \u2013 Imelda Marcos), co-founded a label (Luaka Bop) that introduced the likes of Os Mutantes and William Onyeabor to a new generation, brought out books of tree drawings, and designed bicycle racks.<\/p>\n

Byrne\u2019s career \u2013 by most measures a remarkably successful one \u2013 has been built from code-switching, fidgety intelligence, stylistic infidelity. At first glance then, it\u2019s surprising that Sleeping Beauties is devoted to failure \u2013 to artists who were ignored, laughed at, forgotten; to ideas deemed batty or heretical; to ways of thinking about the world \u2013 sustaining it, replenishing it \u2013 that, often for political reasons, were found wanting, and wiped from our collective memory banks. Sleeping beauties is (of course) a term he first encountered in an academic paper by Leiden University scientometrics professor Ton van Raan. That was in 2004: this book, like a lot of the ideas and energies it animates, needed time to ferment.<\/p>\n

double quotation markOf Caravaggio he asks: ‘Why was he such a crazy asshole?’<\/p>\n

Some of his three-dozen case studies \u2013 Caravaggio, heliocentrism \u2013 are better known than others. Then there\u2019s Antoni Gaud\u00ed \u2013 now celebrated as the architect of the most popular building in Spain, the still unfinished Sagrada Fam\u00edlia \u2013 who, when he died in 1926, after being hit by a tram, was mistaken for a beggar. His career had foundered. A prominent Catalan critic called him \u201cthe Wagnerian monster of\u00a0architecture\u201d and his work \u201cthe bum-bum of the flatulence \u2026 [it] is German music in granite\u201d. George Orwell later described his cathedral as \u201cone of the most hideous buildings in the world\u201d. Yet, after the second world war, Gaud\u00ed had a prominent champion in Dal\u00ed. Fashions changed: Irving Penn featured the building in a Vogue shoot. Institutional backing came in the form of Unesco making it a world heritage site. Now, after a woman who prayed to him to restore her eyesight was suddenly able to see, he is within one\u00a0miracle of becoming a saint.<\/p>\n

The most revelatory chapters eschew art for environmental and infrastructural stories. In one \u2013 plainly titled Water Management in South India \u2013 Byrne recounts how rulers during the Chola dynasty that ended in AD1280 financed a complex network of pools, wells and tanks that allowed monsoon-triggered overflows to be channelled to lakes downstream. Curved stones were developed to trap silt and sludge. Water rights were managed by local people who ensured fruit trees abounded near banks, fish were plentiful in lakes, and that the area was less prone to droughts than other parts of the country. Later the East India Company brought in more clunky management systems and promoted profit above local expertise. It\u2019s taken dogged local activists, operating in the aftermath of destructive floods, to revive the wise old waterways.<\/p>\n

Byrne\u2019s subtitle \u2013 Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up \u2013 makes it sound like a business manual in the cultural industries section of an airport bookshop. The answers he gives range from economic shifts (which have made the likes of solar energy more feasible) to the crucial role played by advocates (for example, Max Brod\u2019s resurrection of his friend Kafka\u2019s manuscripts). If his prose can sometimes be a bit matey (of Caravaggio he asks: \u201cWhy was he such a crazy asshole?\u201d), he can also be sardonic (\u201cA lesson for contemporary collectors sequestering their assets in places like the Geneva Freeport \u2013 there\u2019s a risk the work will fall out of the conversation.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Art that\u2019s rediscovered can disappear again: writer Iain Sinclair has spoken of a category of authors he calls \u201cthe Reforgotten\u201d. And rediscovered ideas, Byrne hints at too briefly, can be reactionary as well as progressive. Still, there\u2019s an (inter)national curriculum here that schools and universities would do well to champion: engage with science and with art, be open to play and to metaphor, consider all that is counterintuitive. More? \u201cFollow the young, the persistent, and amateurs.\u201d Not bad advice at all.<\/p>\n

Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dorrmant and How They Wake Up by David Byrne is published by Canongate (\u00a326). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s barely been a moment in\u00a0 the last half-century when David Byrne hasn\u2019t been zinging about, dancing forward,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":871404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":["post-871403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/871404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}