Description

In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori sits down with novelist and philosopher Mark de Silva to explore his monumental 2022 novel The Logos — a thousand-page meditation on art, perception, capitalism, and the visual texture of contemporary life.

A writer steeped in philosophy and the visual arts, Mark reveals how The Logos emerged from nearly a decade of research into advertising theory, image culture, and the psychological forces that shape our desires. Lori and Mark’s conversation ranges from the phenomenology of seeing, to the dark glamour of New York City, drawing versus painting, and the strange seductions of stealth marketing.

Together, Lori and Mark dive deep into:

• The narrator’s crisis of art and identity — and how success in the gallery world becomes a trap
• Drawing vs. painting as competing ways of capturing truth
• The philosophy of visual perception and why looking too closely can dissolve the world
• Advertising as the new public art, and the blurred lines between art, manipulation, and influence
• Daphne and Duke, the quasi-celebrities at the center of a massive, ambiguous ad campaign
• New York City as a psychological landscape — its light, darkness, and peripheries
• Emotional stuntedness, knowledge as alienation, and the costs of obsessive perception
• The Logos as a portrait of contemporary capitalist culture — the beauty and the rot
• Mark’s new work-in-progress: a sweeping novel about psychiatry, objectivity, homelessness, and agricultural labor in California

Mark also recommends some of the big books currently on his mind, including:

• Hermann Broch — The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil
• Solvej Balle -- On the Calculation of Volume series

This is a rich, layered conversation about what it means to see, what it means to make art, and what it means to capture the truth of a world defined by images.

CHAPTERS

00:00 — The twin crises at the heart of The Logos
00:40 — Introducing Mark de Silva
02:00 — Nine years of research and writing
04:20 — An artist losing faith in the art world
06:15 — Advertising as the new public art
08:10 — Portraiture, obsession, and the essence of a person
10:00 — Seeing too closely and dissolving boundaries
12:00 — Drawing vs. painting: form vs. sensory seduction
15:15 — The sensory trap of consumer culture
17:30 — Ubiquity vs. usefulness in advertising theory
20:00 — Stealth campaigns, non-celebrities, and identity
23:00 — Art or capital? Garrett’s mysterious motives
25:30 — The darkness underneath Daphne and Duke
29:00 — New York City as a living organism
33:00 — Emotional stuntedness and the alienation of knowledge
37:00 — Writing through the eye — the book’s visual intensity
40:45 — Art after capitalism: what still matters?
45:00 — Is commercial art “real art”?
47:20 — Mark’s next novel: psychiatry, mind, and California
51:00 — Big book recommendations
55:00 — Closing reflections