Pet Rocks

Back in the seventies, 1975 to be precise, a Californian, Gary Dahl, from Los Gatos decided to put a stone in a box and sell it (for $3.95) as if it were a live pet. He called it, appropriately, a “Pet Rock.” This new kind of pet came with a training manual with instructions on how to raise and care for it, as well as a set of commands: while “sit” and “stay” were fairly easy to accomplish, “roll over” usually required extra help on the part of the trainer and “come” was found to be impossible to teach reliably. Now, to you, the reader, this may sound trite, but to a pot-smoking hippie in 1975 it was the funniest thing since Reefer Madness—and by 1975 some 95% of Californians were pot-smoking hippies—and, accordingly, Mr. Dahl became a millionaire.

Later, in the 1980s, thanks to a clever needle-point seamster from Georgia, the world was introduced to little dolls called the “Cabbage Patch Kids.” For a $40.00 “adoption fee” you could be the proud parent of one of these orphans, which may not sound attractive to you, but America went wild, camping out in front of Wal-Mart, depleting their bank accounts at auctions, and dissolving marriages over custody issues; and by 1990, 65 million of these “kids” had found homes. Their creator, Xavier Roberts, found himself in a new home.

You may be asking yourself: “What is happening here?” Anthropologically speaking, the situation is easy enough to explain. This is what could be called a cultural phenomenon: that is, the deep-seated need of people to belong to a group expressing itself suddenly, and commercially, when a product hits the right market at the right time—or, to put it another way: consciously or subconsciously, we all desire shared experience, and material objects may act as proof of collective identity. In a word, it’s all about being human; and, dear reader, if you like it or not, humans buy Pet Rocks and Cabbage Patch Kids.

It is very important that the reader understands that cultural phenomena rise up from the human spirit, and certain aspects of human behavior cannot be quantified by scientific methodology or deconstructed by logical means. Just as what happens in your synapses has yet to be mapped, there is no blueprint to the absurdity of men and women, and woe to those who waste precious time attempting to define and discern the missing links between Pet Rocks, Cabbage Patch Kids, Big Macs and Harry Potter. And yet this is precisely what a special minority of us do: they are called art critics.

All too many critics make the mistake of confusing cultural phenomena with creative genius. They use the word “great” to denote an artist of grandeur, and yet they forget to define the word “art.” Provided the object is absurd, identifying it as a cultural phenomenon is not difficult. When the object shows a degree of expertise, however, questions of creativity wax uncontrollably, and the critics begin to laud the happy chap who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Indeed, history has seen the coming and going of many “pet rocks”—some of them have been “great,” although this is purely incidental. Case in point, Franz Kafka, who, at the risk of shocking certain readers, was not a great novelist. After all, how can he be called a great novelist if in his lifetime he never finished a novel?

If Kafka has earned the title “great” over the years, it has not been as a novelist, but as a paradox—and it is beyond the scope of this essay to explain how that happened. What can be said is that thanks to the labor of a cohort of writers, his mysterious and morbid world has grown like only something cultural can grow. It’s no longer a question of whether you think he is good or bad (for the record, he is good), but whether you have read him or not. Well, have you read him or not? Did you make it from page one to page 298 of The Castle without putting the book down? Are you a scholar? A student? Or a tourist in Prague looking to while away some time?