I’m sure it’s a mix. There’s a lot of stuff that gets published each year by academics carving out their little kingdoms. But if there are books in the stack by Cornell alumnus Thomas Pynchon and his teacher Vladimir Nabokov, then the wall would have at least a few really good bricks.

Arthur, is “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me” in there? We’re counting on you to check the titles in person and report back. This is one work that should come with a bibliography.

I think there is cynicism about academia here, which I can relate too. As well, it is making something tangible, physical, of this earthly world (and beautiful in my opinion, in a concise way) out of something intellectual, “other worldly,” and perhaps unreadable (although why do we assume that?). Very Plato versus Aristotle, right?

Here’s what I get out of the artwork. (I’m assuming, by the way, that red is the color of the letter that Cornell students wear on their jackets.) In academia there’s the whole publish or perish situation, which results in hundreds of things being published each year (nationally) whose main purpose is to keep their authors employed. So you end up with the edifice of academia being constructed of unreadable books. The trailing off at the tail of the “C” is an interesting choice. Does it imply that the wall is still being constructed, or that the builder ran out of materials (or funding)? A wall of course is an powerful symbol in itself. It keeps some people in, and some people out. If there were more books, would the “C” be higher, or would it form a circle, enclosing the builder?