In a world defined by an unceasing torrent of images, the act of reading is increasingly felt as a practice of resistance against acceleration and superficial perception. In his essay for Tamyr Journal, poet Ivan Beketov explores why literature remains a vital tool for an artist navigating memory, time, and the sheer complexity of contemporary experience.
I was asked to write a few short texts addressing a deceptively simple question: why should an artist read today? One might begin with the obvious: reading is a way to break through the confines of the banal. After all, the contemporary artist works not merely with physical materials such as paint, wood, space, or music, but, first and foremost, with cognition and memory. Or, deeper still, with time and its derivatives. Reading is no longer about the mere accumulation of knowledge; today, the book, or the text itself, remains one of the few spaces where a human being can truly inhabit the duration of time.
Text as a Way to Slow Down Time for Attention Training
Attention is arguably the primary artistic medium today. It functions as an optics, while reading serves as the method for calibrating it; books are the tools that refine our ways of seeing. We live in an era of ready-made images. Every visual gesture has already been made by someone, and every composition has already been encountered. Consequently, the question of art is increasingly less about what to show and far more about why it is being shown. In other words, the question of the form of necessity arises. This is a purely philosophical question, the answer to which is rarely found within art itself, but rather in individual experience. Books, as repositories of individual experience, help find not the form, but the necessity of form. Through reading, an artist gradually discovers that they are working not with canvas or objects, but with the very same questions that occupy the poet, the philosopher, and the thinker. This distinction is vital. History, anthropology, and poetry are the territories where humanity has spent centuries trying to comprehend its own existence.
What is time? What is memory? What remains of a human being? Why do some things vanish while others endure for centuries? What connects beauty and loss? What is a home? What is an image, a symbol, a myth? What is a form? These are eternal questions.
The Question of Why an Artist Should Read Books May At First Glance Seem Peculiar
For centuries, the link between art and literature was taken for granted. Artists read Dante and Ovid, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Baudelaire and Dostoevsky. Literature served as a wellspring of plots, images, symbols, and cultural codes. In the early twenty-first century, however, this question acquires a new urgency because the very status of the image, and of the depicted, has shifted. For most of human history, images were scarce. A person encountered a limited number of paintings, sculptures, and architectural ensembles; thus, an encounter with a work of art was a monumental event. Today, the situation is radically reversed. We live within an unprecedented visual excess, with thousands of images flickering across screens daily. Paradoxically, this is precisely why the act of reading becomes more critical for an artist than ever before. The crisis of contemporary art lies not in a scarcity of images, but in a scarcity of profound semantic structures capable of organizing this visual torrent.
We must trace our steps back slightly. In the late twentieth century, philosophers and cultural theorists began to describe a condition wherein humanity encounters not reality itself, but an infinite production of signs. Simulacra, media reality, information flows, and virtual spaces have migrated from theoretical texts into our daily existence. The image has ceased to be a window onto the world, becoming instead an autonomous environment. Under these conditions, the artist faces a new challenge. If art previously sought to produce images, today it is compelled to contemplate the very mechanisms of their generation. This is precisely where literature reclaims its ancient yet entirely renewed significance; it is rediscovered in its urgency under these altered conditions. Once again, we must speak of time. Literature represents one of the last cultural practices anchored in duration. Reading demands time, sequence, and the capacity to sustain attention over dozens, if not hundreds, of pages. In the era of mindless scrolling, this becomes increasingly difficult. Consequently, the artist faces a crisis of attention rather than a crisis of technique. We appear capable of producing images rapidly, yet we are less and less capable of looking at the world deeply. Whatevever happens, one truth remains absolute: any serious art begins with a sustained gaze.
Being a literary person, I must offer concrete examples. When Marcel Proust describes the taste of a madeleine, when Virginia Woolf captures the movement of light across a room wall, or when Walter Benjamin analyzes the figure of the flâneur, they perform an action of vital importance to the artist: they restore the lost density of time to human experience. Here, reading transforms into a training of perception, a calibration of optics. In that precise moment, we learn to perceive the process rather than the object, the unfolding in time rather than the event, and the condition of emergence rather than the form itself. This is what constitutes necessity. Books are therefore required by the contemporary artist not as a source of narratives, but as a tool for the cultivation of attention.
There is, however, a more profound reason. Recent decades in literature and art have been defined by a gradual abandonment of the autonomous artwork. Increasingly, a work of art is understood as a network of relations, a system of links, and a space where diverse voices, groups, cultures, and historical strata interact. This trajectory manifested in literature earlier than it did in the visual arts. The novels of Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, and Roberto Bolaño, to name a few at random, are structured not as linear narratives, but as intricate systems of intersecting discourses. Parallel processes are unfolding in the visual arts. An exhibition becomes an investigation, an archive, an anthropological and philosophical statement. The artist can no longer rely solely on visual competence. They now operate within the territories of history, politics, memory, ecology, technology, urbanism, postcolonial theory, gender studies, media archaeology, and numerous other disciplines. The artist has become a researcher. Their practice is characterized by a transition from the production of objects to the generation of semantic situations, and the artwork now exists as a question rather than an answer. The paradox is that this very question cannot be articulated without language. Here lies the intersection between reading and artistic practice. Language is not merely a means of describing the world, given that we see only what we can name, but is primarily an instrument of cognition. We think through concepts, metaphors, and narratives. Consequently, the richer the linguistic experience of the artist, the more complex their capacity to perceive reality.
In this sense, reading expands the very structure of perception rather than merely broadening one's horizons; it shifts the focus of our optics. Borges helps us glimpse infinity within the structure of a library. Abe reveals metaphysics within everyday spaces. Barthes exposes the multiplicity of meanings within a text. Deleuze clarifies difference within repetition, and Berger uncovers ideology within the gaze itself. Every book creates a new experience of organizing reality. As a result, we gain access not to a static body of knowledge, but to a plurality of optics. This is paramount today, as cultures experience a crisis of worldviews amidst competing narratives. While modernism still hoped to discover a universal language of art, contemporary culture and the artist within it exist in a state of multiplicity, characterized by overlapping histories and shifting regimes of truth. In such environment, it is impossible to rely on ready-made answers. One must develop the capacity to exist within this complexity. This is precisely the lesson of reading and literature. It demonstrates that human experience cannot be reduced to slogans or prepackaged frameworks. A good book does not simplify the world; it unveils its ambiguity and, in doing so, renders it more intelligible.
The question is not how much to read, but rather what to read
Our civilization began as a civilization of text, and it continues as a civilization of articulation. The present is, if you will, one long prompt. The future is what you have written; this is what I always repeat. We will discuss the authors I would recommend in greater detail in the second part of this essay.
Translation: Yuliya Gubanova.