Book Reviews

The Happy Hooker:

My Own Story

by Xaviera Hollander

with Robin Moore & Yvonne Dunleavy

     This is one book that will never be on any high school students’ reading list. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything from reading it. It isn’t meant to be an educational book either, at least not in the commonly accepted sense of the word. But The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander strives to be some kind of combination of the informative and the titillating. Actually, it was probably just written to make money, but somehow beneath the commercial facade of this Sexual Revolution-era best seller, there is a hint of sincerity and authenticity that makes it stand out where other kinds of pulp erotica would be little more than disposable and forgettable trash best suited for time spent while sitting on the toilet.

Hollander’s story begins in Indonesia. Her family was Dutch with a German mother and a Jewish father. Born in the city of Surabaya, the second biggest city on the island of Jawa, she spent her first two years of life in a concentration camp. World War II had just begun and the Japanese invaders took her family away to prison. After the war, they brought her to Holland where, contrary to the stereotype of sex workers and promiscuous women, she had a healthy relationship with her family. This bit of information does lead to an open question. I’m suggesting that just because she had a good relationship with her parents, that doesn’t mean she didn’t suffer some form of abuse outside her nuclear family. Hollander does mention that she had two incestuous relationships during later adolescence with her mother’s cousins. There is also the entire society around her to consider and who know what happened to her while living in the concentration camp. This is all speculation of course, but there is a pregnant silence that hangs over her account of her childhood. In any case, she is precociously sexually active and gets involved with the swinger lifestyle during her teenage years.

Hollander moves on to South Africa to work as a secretary and becomes so lonely that she...I won’t put a spoiler here, but I will say she did something that gives new meaning to the saying that every dog has his day. She then follows a man to New York City, gets work as a secretary for the United Nations and an unnamed embassy. Her fiance turns out to be a creep, then she discovers she can make good money, and have a lot more fun, through self-employment as a prostitute. Before you know it, her career gets catapulted astronomically and she lands a job as the madame of the highest ranking bordello in Manhattan. All this happens before reaching the age of thirty. From the time she leaves her fiancee and quits her secretarial career, this book follows two basic themes: one is the day to day mechanics of the prostitution business, the other is explicit descriptions of what she does in the bedroom.

The former of those two categories is what makes The Happy Hooker interesting. The business of running a high-class cathouse gets described from top to bottom. The fine details of everything, from bookkeeping to advertising to the kinds of houses that are used to how to treat johns, are revealed. You learn about who gets paid off, how to handle the police, how to handle obnoxious customers, how to manage prostitutes, and how to manage the profits. While these parts are primarily descriptive, there are some interesting bits of psychological insight, mostly in relation to the customers. One interesting observation that Hollander makes is that about half the customers are not actually interested in sex; they are only using sex as a way of getting close to women for a feeling of emotional intimacy, even if it is illusory. What she means is that loneliness in the male population has reached an epidemic proportion and as long as it persists, prostitution will survive as well. Other interesting insights are given about the kinds of customers she condescendingly calls “freaks”, These are the men who pay to be dominated, tied up, beaten up, verbally abused, and humiliated. Some of them pay good money to have fantasies acted out. Some of these are powerful businessmen or politicians who find relief from stress in this way while others are married and secretly gay, being unable to express themselves sexually due to the burdens that a heterosexual society places on them to conform to gender norms. Others seek out prostitutes to help them cope with childhood traumas. In contrast, Hollander has a certain amount of admiration for most of her johns, albeit tempered by professional distance. She believes in treating her clients with dignity, especially when they show a modicum of respect towards the prostitutes who work for her.

With these points in mind, Xaviera Hollander comes across as a charming woman with a generous personality. Her charm isn’t just sensual, it is brainy and sometimes kindhearted as well. As an ambitious career-minded woman, she saw the world of living as a secretary in New York as being personally and professionally unfulfilling. As a prostitute, she could manage her own life and as a madame she could be the successful businesswoman she aspired to be. She achieved a type of independence that wasn’t available to women in the more traditional sense of labor. The culture of work in America at that time, one in which women were denied the same opportunities for economic and social advancement as men, put her in a position to capitalize off the restrictive, short-comings of society. Sometimes you can’t entirely blame a criminal for their crimes; there are circumstances in the surrounding society that make some criminal behaviors inevitable and it can be said that often societies get the kind of criminals they deserve. But from a practical, or possibly even a moral point of view, there is no reason why Hollander’s profession should be considered a criminal offense.

Still, you have to wonder about the “happy” part of being a hooker. Let the book speak for itself. Xaviera Hollander’s work as a prostitute and madame were not always easy going. She gets raped, robbed, exploited by the mafia and police, arrested, harassed, beaten up by a drunk john, and witnesses a murder. Her romantic relationships are not satisfying and she comes across as being emotionally detached, sometimes even emotionally dead, to the people she works with. Later in the book she admits that prostitution is inherently distressing. When reading this book, there were a lot of times I wondered just how happy she actually was.

Then there is the explicit sex. In the beginning of the book, some of these passages were somewhat exciting, maybe because they were more erotic than pornographic. By that I mean descriptions were brief and written without excessive detail, leaving a lot up to the imagination. Hollander’s trip to Puerto Rico was attention-grabbing, especially the part where she did mescaline with a bunch of guys who gangbanged her on the beach. It was even more memorable because three strangers approached them and started masturbating while watching the action, then hurled coconuts at them while the orgy continued. After that the sexual descriptions get to be dull and banal. If you already know what people do when they do it, you aren’t going to get aroused, entertained, or informed by hese passages. A couple of the freak scenes were amusing, but the generic descriptions of S&M don’t go far if you’ve already been around the block a few times. And I’m certainly not prudent myself, but after reading page after page after page of Hollander talking about all the men she’s fucked, I really did feel like taking a good long bath. By the end it starts to feel a little bit gross.

Fortunately, the interesting parts of the book balance out with the disposable parts. But Xaviera Hollander and her ghost writers are not writers of the highest caliber. This isn’t Henry Miller or Anais Nin. It isn’t even Sacher-Masoch who was certainly a bad writer. It is the insights you pick up that make this worth reading once, providing you are interested in the culture of sex workers. For cultural historians, it is also an interesting document from the Sexual Revolution. Written at a turning point when sexual promiscuity and experimentation were spilling out of the hippie counter-culture and into the mainstream, the fact that this was a cash-cow of a bestseller in its day, going into multiple printings and spawning a whole series of follow ups, a vinyl LP, Hollywood movies, television appearances, and tours around the lecture circuit, it serves as a legitimate artifact carrying information about where the mindset of middle-America was at the beginning of the 1970s.

The Happy Hooker isn’t a great work of literature, but part of what makes it interesting is the way it speaks outside of itself. Its inherent value is not limited to the words on the page. In fact, judging it by that standard would diminish whatever importance it has. It was obviously written for commercial purposes, but while Hollander was in the limelight she took the opportunity to advocate for an outlawed lifestyle that she felt should be legal and hassle free. She used her voice to vindicate sex workers, a class of people who still haven’t found mainstream acceptance even though the commercial end of sex work has obviously infiltrated the mainstream. Sex work as a whole is an occupation that is both consumed and condemned simultaneously, sometimes even supported by the same people who denounce it. What really stands out to me, though, is that this book, even though ghost-written, proves to the world that Madame Xaviera is a damn smart businesswoman. In the business of whorehouses, she knew how to find out what men wanted and made money by giving it to them without shame. She has done the same thing with her memoirs; she found out what middle America, at that time, meaning mostly middle class and middle aged men, wanted to read and delivered them the product. She has been riding this gravy train of her own making ever since. This is the sign of a clever woman with direction, ambition and determination. You could even say she is a good role model for independent women. It makes you wonder how many other sex workers there are who could rise above their present situation and potentially be good at business too.

 

Book Review

The Malleus Maleficarum

by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger

     Some people have called The Malleus Maleficarum the wickedest book ever written. I’m not convinced it has maintained that status over the years. For historical reasons, I’ll say it doesn’t deserve to be exonerated, however. Certainly the German Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger who wrote it don’t deserve any praise either. These were some seriously evil medieval Catholic bureaucrats. As a work of literature in our time, it can, however, serve as an important historical document and a reference point for where we have come from intellectually since the beginning of the Renaissance.

The Malleus Maleficarum is essentially a legal document, written by the Catholic Inquisition for the purpose of punishing heretics, in this case most specifically Satanists and practitioners of witchcraft. It is written as three separate books. The first lays out a legal definition of heresy and witchcraft. The second part is an explication of what witches do, how to protect yourself from witches, and how to remove curses that have afflicted an individual. The third book is a set of guidelines for conducting trials related to the crime of heresy and the practice of witchcraft.

The first section, in which witchcraft is defined and explained, is moderately interesting as the most intellectually rigorous part of the book. In part, the authors try to explain what they believe to be motivating factors in human behavior. People can be pushed and pulled in all directions yet they still have freedom of choice because the forces that move them are sometimes not strong enough to do anything more than exert an influence over people. Free will makes it possible to resist these compulsions. The supposed power that acts on people comes from the influence of the stars. Despite this belief, regarded as a fact in medieval society, astrology is considered a forbidden practice, punishable by law. Witches attempt to seize control over these occult forces to do harm or create good fortune for the people the try to effect. Behind all this is Satan who sends his devils out to convince people to practice witchcraft so he can wreck God’s creation. Sexuality plays a strong role in this theory because the authors claim that demons called incubi and succubi transmit tainted semen to women since such semen will cause the children who grow out of it to become witches when they grow up. Or maybe the real reason is that the authors were uptight old men who were overcome by sexual frustration and anxiety so they blamed women for their own psychological problems.

This first section is not a thrilling read unless you are a highly disciplined reader. It is full of theological and philosophical arguments that mostly rely on textual antecedents, circular logic, and reference to authority figures for support. There are heavy doses of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas, for example, and if they said something is true than it must be true because they are canonized saints and by theological definition, they can not be wrong. Plato and Aristotle are also heavily referenced since this was the dawning of the Renaissance, after all, when those guys were getting rediscovered in Europe right at the time the Arabs were abandoning them thanks to narrow minded dolts like Al Ghazali. On a more bizarre note, Homer’s The Odyssey is used as proof of witchcraft because it says Circe turned Odysseus’s men into pigs; this is proof of what witches are capable of doing. The thought that this could be imaginary never crossed the authors’ minds. There is some modicum of challenge to adapting your way of thinking to this lunacy, but at times it gets interesting because they try to explain the human psychology of motivations. There are some passages that read like a crude version of empirical philosophers like Locke and Hume, and others that are like a rudimentary version of Immanuel Kant. The passages about astrology address some of the same issues of influence and will that geneticists question in the effect of genes on our behavior, only without the scientific discipline to back up the claims.

The second section is the most interesting as it describes what witches supposedly do. While sometimes they remove curses or cure illnesses, the bulk of their activities include malevolent curses and spells. There is a lot of copulating with devils, spells cast on children by evil midwives, the raising of hailstorms, the drying up of cows’ milk, and the ultimate evil: causing male impotence. This seems to be a major preoccupation for these Catholic Inquisitors because they bring it up over and over again. They even make the strange claim that witches can cause a man’s one-eyed wonder worm to completely disappear. The most interesting part of this sections is when a man approaches a witch and asks her to restore his trouser snake; the witch tells him to climb a tree where she keeps a bunch of dicks sitting in a bird’s nest just waiting to be taken away. Instead of taking his own third leg, the guy takes the biggest one instead, but he is unable to attach it to himself because it does not rightfully belong to him. It is easy to see how the people in this pre-scientific society scapegoated witches for things they did not understand like bad weather or cow diseases, but I might offer an alternate explanation for the disappearing dork syndrome that so preoccupied the officials of the church. There is such a thing as shrinkage and if you can imagine being a middle-aged man in freezing cold Germany during the middle of a harsh winter, trying to shag a peasant girl with hairy legs, crooked brown teeth, and rancid sauerkraut on her breath while she lays with her legs spread in a barn thick with the odor of horse manure, you might understand why your best friend might not be eager to come out and play. But when these crusty old Catholics can’t get it up, they blame the witches and a bunch of them have to get burned at the stake in retaliation. The drama of human stupidity never ends. So it goes.

The rest of the second section details the ways that witchcraft can be prevented or how damage from such magic can be cured. You don’t have to think too hard to figure out that getting baptized, praying, and going to confession are the only ways to officially and effectively combat the works of Satan. These Catholic rituals draw a strict line of demarcation between those inside the church and those outside of it. In a sociological sense, Catholic ritual is a means of dominating and controlling those within the church while those outside the lines of demarcation are subject to persecution because they are outside the limits of control. Thereby the witches must be destroyed because they represent a threat to the order and power of the church by not complying with their practices. This scapegoating solidifies the autocracy of the religious institution, causing a tightly controlled community bond by giving the members a visible and tangible target to destroy. If witches did not exist, it would be necessary for the church to invent them. Every religion needs enemies in order to survive.

The third section is a horrible bore. It explains the way witches are brought to trial, how their crimes are categorized, the legal ways in which they are interrogated, and their ultimate punishment which is, in the vast majority of cases, the death penalty. The witch’s confession is the whole meat of the matter. If the accused does not confess to practicing witchcraft, they are threatened with torture. If that doesn’t work, they are tortured. If that doesn’t work, they are executed for lying. If they do confess, they are strangled before being burned at the stake so they don’t have to feel the pain of the fire. There is no way to win for anyone charged with this crime. Even the torture is a catch 22; if a person is to be tortured with hot irons, Satan will prevent them from getting burned badly enough to confess. Therefore, if being tortured with hot irons doesn’t force them to confess, it is proof that they are in the employ of the devil. Heads I win, tails you lose. If they confess, so much the better. For the most part, this section is an excruciatingly dull and repetitive recital of legal protocols and procedures that makes the rambling abstractions of modern legal tomes exciting by comparison.

Thanks to the rigorous intellectual ignorance, and sexual frustrations, of Kramer and Sprenger masses of people were burned in medieval Europe for the innocuous crime of practicing witchcraft. Probably most of the accused never did anything more occult than wish on a star or mutter a curse under their breath when they were annoyed. Aside from the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansings of the modern world, the only other comparison to our times might be the draconian laws that put millions of people in jail, most of them from minority populations, for the victimless crime of smoking dope. The powerful people of the world always seem to exert their power over others through the arbitrary and often pointless practice of penology. It makes me wonder if government and religion are forms of human sickness. But there is a twisted logic to the war on drugs; nobody denies that heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamine are inherently dangerous after all and trafficking them is a bad business. But why did the German Inquisition persecute witches to such a degree? My personal thought is that the church at that time was in crisis. The dispute between the papacies in Rome and Avignon was weakening the Catholic church. At the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, scientific inquiry was gaining a foothold that challenged church dogmas. Heretical sects were springing up all over Europe. The greed, the money grubbing, and promiscuity of priests was making Christian officials look hypocritical. Germany was on the brink of the Protestant Reformation. Religion was ineffective in stopping the Black Death. My idea is that the church was in decline and needed something to reinvigorate itself to reassert its power over the European peoples. An Inquisition against the heresy of witchcraft and Satanism might have been what they thought they needed to retake control. Witches were typically old impoverished women of the uneducated peasantry who lived alone. They were the most marginalized and most defenseless members of society. That made them easy scapegoats. Hard working farmers whose crops were destroyed by hail storms and whose cows no longer gave milk needed someone to vent their anger on, and the church manipulated theses superstitious people into believing witches were the cause of all their problems.

Ultimately, I don’t think The Malleus Maleficarum fits the bill for being the wickedest book ever written. That is unless part of the meaning of wickedness involves boring the reader into a coma. If you take the text as it is and try to apply it in the modern world, it is nothing but irrelevant and dated unless you are some kind of religious fanatic or conspiracy theory crank. It probably won’t appeal much to most readers except for students of medieval, theological, intellectual, or legal history. The antithesis is that if you relate it to the context of medieval society and the resulting effects it had, meaning the burning of thousands of innocent people under the guise of witches, then there are certainly elements of evil within these pages. It wasn’t the witches who were evil, it was the Inquisitors who mass murdered them. Atrocities are so often done in the name of the good. While the Catholic church has matured some and spoken out in the name of world peace, I daresay other institutions of power in our times aren’t much different in their intent than the medieval Inquisitors were. With the current rise of fundamentalist Christianity and Christian nationalism in America, we need to be on your guard. Human nature has not changed as much as its outward appearances have. 

 

Book Review

Passages in Modern Sculpture

by Rosalind E. Krauss

     The fine arts in Western cultures had, for thousands of years, been conservative in form and content. Most art, especially in western Europe, was limited to themes of Christianity and judgments of quality were based largely on the mastery of technique. Things loosened up during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and occasionally some oddball like Hieronymus Bosch made something so different that no one could comprehend it. Then Modernism came along and everything went haywire. Rosalind E. Krauss, armed with a solid background in philosophy and art criticism, takes a stab at making sense out of the course that modern sculpture took in her early work called Passages in Modern Sculpture. Through the construction of her own theory, she hones the chaos of modernism into semi-coherent steps along a continuum progressing towards an unknown destination.

The foundation of Krauss’s theory is the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. On the principle of the transcendent I, meaning that an individual’s true nature is not only located subjectively inside their own consciousness but rather is a meeting ground between their own self-perception and the perceptions of others, she builds a critical theory around the idea that modern art has no inherent meaning. In other words, the meaning of art is created by the viewer as they perceive and interact with that art. Pre-modern concepts of symbolism or allegory no longer apply with the avant-garde art movement of the Modernism period.

She also approaches art through the mediums of time and space. Pre-modernist sculpture was about the perfection of physical form whether the work be a three-dimensional statue or a two-dimensional work set against a background relief while suggesting a third dimension. Also, pre-modern sculpture mostly appeared in media res, representing a point in time along a narrative structure, implying the existence of moments before and after that point, suggested to the viewer and not directly experienced. Modernist sculpture broke with these constructs of time and space to create sculpture requiring different frames of reference for interpretation.

The fun really begins when Krauss applies her theory to art objects. She begins with Rodin, then moves on to the Futurists who expose the core of their objects by penetrating their surfaces and the Constructivists who reveal the interior of their sculptures by displacing outer parts, making surfaces that only cover fragments of the interior, or even using transparent materials. The ubiquitous readymades of Marcel Duchamp are analyzed to show a disconnect between the artists’ subjectivity and the art object itself which no longer represents their subjective life. Brancusi eradicates the inner core of sculpture by mi minimalizing the constituent parts of the surface. The Surrealists transform everyday objects into nonsense to reveal hidden unconscious contents and so on.

Her analysis is engaging and logical up to this point. When she introduces her concept of theatricality into the critique, it begins to wear a little thin. She brings theater into the discussion to show how sculpture was used by modernists to break down the barrier between performers and audience, what Antonin Artaud called the destruction of the fourth wall. But this idea barely seems to fit with what she is saying considering that it is a stretch to redefine performers on stage as art objects moving among other art objects. What she is trying to do is introduce the concept of movement into the study and analysis of sculpture. While previously sculpture had been static and unmoving, modern artists introduced the element of movable parts on one hand, as in the case of the mobiles of George Segal, or art that alters in appearance as the viewer moves around it as in the work of Anthony Caro. But the connection she makes is weak and confusing. This is partly due to her attempt at describing non-representational shapes that have no signifiers to properly correspond to the form they hold in physical space. Her argument also suffers because she introduces a large number of works that she never analyzes past the initial mention in the text.

The writing picks up again after that as she moves into postmodernist movements like pop art, minimalism, abstract expressionism, and earthworks. What this all builds up to is the concept of decentralization in art, an idea that originated in Freud’s theory of the decentralization of the ego in modern psychology, and reached its full expression in postmodern concepts of the interplay of surfaces or the lack of inner meaning, a state where symbols no longer symbolize anything unless the receiver of the symbol assigns a meaning to it. Does this critique of artistic progression run parallel to the experience of humanity in the twentieth century or does art now inhabit a space of its own that is disconnected from reality and impossible to interpret? That discussion would take a whole other book to explore, but I am sure Krauss would continue to insist that any art can be interpreted if we choose to put the creative effort into making it mean something, no matter how bewildering it may become.

The verity of Passages in Modern Sculpture is open to debate. Whether the order that Rosalind Krauss explicates is there or whether it is a construction of her own devise that she imposes on the chaos is an open question. There is something quite arbitrary in how she forms her argument and chooses art objects to support it. But if we follow the theory correctly, that is the whole point. It is up to us to create meaning. It isn’t handed out or spoonfed to us the way ultimate religious truths are. It is more a matter of asking the right questions in the first place and on that note, this book is worthwhile for consideration. 

 

Book Review

Entropy and Art:

An Essay on Disorder and Order

by Rudolf Arnheim

     A mile wide and one inch deep. That’s what I thought of Rudolf Arnheim’s essay Entropy and Art

Arnheim begins this short piece of writing with a textbook definition of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics as conceived of in Newtonian physics. All objects moving through time and space progress towards their end. That progression is irreversible. A rock is thrown through a window and the glass shatters into thousands of miniscule pieces; the action can not be reversed. The rock can not go back through the window sucking all the shards of glass back into their original position, once again forming a whole, undamaged piece of transparent glass inside a frame. Time can not go backwards. The dead can not come back to life. Everything moves in a continual stream towards death, decay, and dissolution. The disassociated elements will be recombined with other things to make new objects, but the original forms, once they are gone, are gone forever.

Along the way, everything strives towards its goal of maximum structure, a peak of orderliness. But matter is caught in the tension between anabolic forces, the release of energy to progress towards a state of organization, and catabolic forces like friction, decay, and aging. This is, in other words, order and chaos, or structure and entropy. The state of maximum equilibrium is the state of maximum entropy. The peak of progression is reached, the tension is reduced, then order begins to relax before decay and destruction take over. It’s the big quantum orgasm of material physics.

So far so good, says the high school student in his science class. But Arnheim isn’t talking about Newtonian physics. He is talking about information systems with specific reference to the CIA’s Norbert Weiner and his technocratic theory of cybernetics. But actually Arnheim isn’t even talking about systems theory here. He is lifting the theory of entropy even further out of its original context and inserting into semiotics, then transferring it into art theory which he describes as an information system of visual language. Got It? Good. He illustrates his points about order and chaos in art by all-too briefly referencing works by Jean Arp and Andy Warhol. The former to explain the presence of chance in artistic production, the latter to show the principle of order. We also get some brief mentions of gestalt psychology and Freud’s theory of the conflict between the pleasure principle and the death wish, eros and thanatos, order and entropy.

Arnheim spends a long time, constructing his theory in the first section, but then in the second section he takes an unexpected turn. Arnheim himself does not agree with the theory he has just proposed. His point is that structure does not progress to its simplest form, as stated in the first section. Rather it progresses towards greater and greater complexity. Yes, he built up his theory so he could just tear it all down. Then there is a little bit more, but not much, about art. End of discussion.

The first major issue I have with this essay is that Arnheim does not display a deep understanding of entropy or even of science itself. He probably knows more than what he is telling, but he doesn’t demonstrate it in any way. He doesn’t apply the second law of thermodynamics to anything that is actually dynamic. Instead he transfers it to art theory via semiotics via cybernetics without making any argument as to why such a transference is legitimate. He does what a lot of postmodern obscurantists do which is taking a scientific term out of context without understanding what it originally meant, and using it in some way that is completely untethered from its original purpose, often to dress up a rather plain idea in a baffling outfit of unnecessarily complex clothes, all for the sake of looking more intellectual than the writer really is. Alan Sokol and Noam Chomsky, I vindicate you.

Another big problem I have with this essay is that Arnheim makes very little effort to apply his theory to actual works of art. What little application he does use is sparse and anemic, looking more like an afterthought than an actual part of the discourse. It is like he revised his original essay and inserted some references to art so that it would be something more than a generic explanation of entropy, something that can easily be found in any elementary textbook on physics.

Finally, I should ask why all this writing about entropy is even necessary. If he wants to write about the conflict between form and content in art, or structure and chaos, or any other dichotomy you can think of, can’t he just say so using direct language? Or is that not artsy enough? After all, what he is discussing is nothing new in art theory. This is the age old distinction between the Dionysian and Apollonian that is an inexhaustible well of analytic guidelines and one that will probably last as long as we humans do.

There is one thing to appreciate in this book. The way the form and content in the essay’s organization mirror each other is effectively done. It occurred to me as I read the shorter, second section, where he argues that systems progress towards greater complexity rather than greater simplicity, that the process of moving along those lines is used as a template for the structure of the essay as a whole with the content of each sub-section corresponding to the developmental stages of his theory as it goes along. There isn’t anything original in this but by self-referencing his own theory in this way, he proves his point to a certain extent. Unfortunately, Arnheim applies his theory to his own theory more than he does to art. Is this mental masturbation? Increasing tensions build up to a state of maximum entropy when the tension relaxes and then everything moves to a state of dissolution and greater complexity. Le petit mort. There is no such thing as a reverse ejaculation.

Rudolf Arnheim seems like a smart guy though I can’t come to any definite conclusions about his ideas based on Entropy and Art, which says too much about entropy and not enough about art. As such, this essay comes off as pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. His other books look promising, if a bit dry and rigorous. He was known for applying scientific concepts of psychology and visual perception to art. Those books may have some merit. He was certainly interested in, and well-educated, in scientific disciplines. This book just falls to short of its potential to be of any real value in regards to art theory.