Why great art rewards a second look: the case for 'thick' work

The author recants a long-held belief that ‘great’ literature and art are an elaborate con perpetrated on students. The real distinction, he argues, is what he calls thickness: works that unfold the more attention you give them, rewarding careful study while often repelling casual browsers. His complaint with school is not that the classics lack depth, but that teachers presented them as self-explanatory rather than warning students that the payoff requires effort to reach.

The centerpiece is Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and its famous ‘butt music’ — a snippet of notation painted on a tortured figure’s backside, transcribed and made viral by a student in 2012. Digging into the work of medieval-music expert Ian Pittman, the author finds the joke is deeper than a novelty: the notation was never meant to be playable (lacking a clef and with randomly spaced notes), and any ‘performance’ of it is essentially invented — the same act an LLM performs when it hallucinates. Bosch, who viewed secular music as damnable, intended the unplayable score as a warning rather than a song.

From there the piece proposes four ‘thickening agents’ that make art reward repeated engagement: visible traces of discarded approaches (Hokusai’s decades of revisions); leaving room for the viewer to supply an essential ingredient, like a cake mix that makes you crack the egg; and embedding genuine reasons behind every choice, so nothing is arbitrary. The throughline is that depth is a feature you have to be equipped to find, not one that announces itself.