Prizewinners

When I was elected to an honor society in college, my parents were delirious but my older brother remarked, "He's no smarter today than he was yesterday, before you heard about this prize."

This is all about perception, of course, and something called "Consensual validation."
The same thing applies to Nobel prizes and to Academy Awards. You do not think you are smart enough to judge a person's intelligence, creativity, work for yourself, but when the committee speaks, well, then you know genius or talent.

In the case of the Nobel prize in physics or chemistry or medicine, you have the excuse that you cannot judge someone's work in such arcane fields. But in literature, you are perfectly capable. Somehow though, when Ernest Hemingway's book has a little label that says, "Nobel prize winner," well, then The Old Man in the sea is transformed from an affected small tale of a fisherman into a freighted, symbolic masterpiece and it has all sorts of gravitas.

It's the old Being There thing. Once Chauncey Gardner gets on TV and people start telling each other how brilliant he is, well then a simpleton becomes a sage.

Fact is, there is much in Hemingway which is puerile and badly done, but there is something in his best work or parts of his best work which is wonderful.

When it comes to economics, Paul Krugman gets listened to because he's won the prize, but every day in the pages of the New York Times, you can judge for yourself. Fact is, he sings the same song, and if he's right that we ought to be spending more government money to lift the economy out of recession, it's not true because he won the Nobel Prize.

That committee doesn't know any more than you do, when it comes to the dismal science.

In literature, I can say without any doubt, the Nobel committee knows nothing. The day they vote Bob Dylan a Nobel prize in literature, well then I'll say, whoever was on the committee that day got it right. Until then, I can judge the committee wanting all by myself.

When it comes to the Academy Awards, or the Pulitzer prizes, well, I don't need their help to know what good is. The fact is, those awards are just commercial enterprises. The explosion of awards shows, which now approach the number of reality shows, should expose that truth.

There is some value in celebrating achievement.

We just ought to be very careful to distinguish accomplishment (the work) from the award (the recognition or assertion of the value of that work)

Fact is, here in New Hampshire, I can count on one hand the number of people I know who can name any Nobel prize winner in any category. They do a lot better with Academy Award winners.

I'm not sure what that means.