David Byrne's new book, Sleeping Beauties, examines ideas and inventions that were once ignored or forgotten but later revived, from Indian irrigation systems to the manuscripts of Franz Kafka.
A career built on curiosity
Byrne, best known as the frontman of Talking Heads, has spent decades moving between art forms—ballet, experimental theatre, film, musicals, and even bicycle rack design. His career has been marked by constant reinvention and a wide-ranging curiosity.
Given this success, it might seem surprising that his latest work focuses on failure: artists who were laughed at, forgotten, or deemed heretical. The term "sleeping beauties" comes from a 2004 academic paper by Leiden University scientometrics professor Ton van Raan, and Byrne notes the book itself took time to ferment.
Case studies from Caravaggio to Gaudí
The book presents around three dozen case studies, some well-known like Caravaggio and heliocentrism, others less so. Antoni Gaudí, now celebrated for the Sagrada Família, was mistaken for a beggar when he died in 1926 after being hit by a tram. His career had foundered, with critics calling him a "Wagnerian monster of architecture" and George Orwell describing his cathedral as "one of the most hideous buildings in the world." After the second world war, Dalí championed his work, Irving Penn featured it in Vogue, and Unesco made it a world heritage site. Now, after a woman prayed to him and regained her eyesight, Gaudí is within one miracle of sainthood.
The most revelatory chapters move beyond art to environmental and infrastructural stories. In a chapter on water management in South India, Byrne recounts how rulers of the Chola dynasty financed a network of pools, wells, and tanks that channelled monsoon overflows to downstream lakes. Curved stones trapped silt, and local people managed water rights, ensuring fruit trees and fish thrived, making the area less prone to droughts. Later, the East India Company replaced these systems with more clunky management, prioritising profit over local expertise. It has taken local activists, working after destructive floods, to revive the old waterways.
Why good ideas go dormant
Byrne's subtitle—Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up—suggests a business manual, but his answers range from economic shifts to the role of advocates, such as Max Brod's resurrection of Kafka's manuscripts. His prose can be matey, asking of Caravaggio, "Why was he such a crazy asshole?" and sardonic, noting a lesson for collectors sequestering assets in places like the Geneva Freeport: "there's a risk the work will fall out of the conversation."
Byrne hints that rediscovered ideas can be reactionary as well as progressive, and writer Iain Sinclair has spoken of a category of authors he calls "the Reforgotten." Still, the book offers a curriculum for schools and universities: engage with science and art, be open to play and metaphor, and consider the counterintuitive. His advice: "Follow the young, the persistent, and amateurs."
