Talk:Bureau of Surrealist Research

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More Information Needed

This is a very poor effort indeed! Surrealism is quite an important topic and all aspects of it deserve coverage, but this stub reads as though whoever wrote it simply couldn't be bothered to finish it. Firstly, since the building still exists, a picture of it might be nice, and it would help to give the impression that Wikipedia is the real encyclopedia it aspires to be rather than merely an overgrown blog that self-identifies as one.

More importantly, you give the date of 11 October 1924 for the Bureau's opening, but absolutely no information at all about how long it lasted. Just going by the information given here, it might have closed within days, or it could still be operating now, a century down the line (the first answer is of course much closer to the truth).

And then there's this quote: "One of the more significant contributions of the Bureau was its implicit idea that Surrealism was not to be contained under the category of the aesthetic." Which suggests it accomplished other things besides coming up with a very vague "implicit idea". So what, exactly, did it achieve during the unspecifed period it remained in operation? Anything at all? If its greatest discovery was a rather wooly abstract concept, the implication is that it accomplished little or nothing, and its presumably brief existence served no useful purpose. But real encyclopedias written competently by grown-ups supply facts, not implications. Perhaps a list of the Bureau's actual achievements would be useful? Or if there weren't any, a statement to that effect? What you've got reads like something quoted out of any meaningful context by someone who looked up "Bureau of Surrealist Research" in the index of a book he hadn't read, let alone understood.

And then under "Legacy" we find this sentence, which in fact comprises the entire section: "A similarly conceived institute in Amsterdam existed bearing the name until at least 1970." We are told absolutely nothing about this Amsterdam "institute", except that it lasted "until at least 1970", a meaningless statement if we don't know when it was founded, which could be any time between 1924 and 1970, meaning it may have existed for 46 years and perhaps even longer, or for less than one year. Who founded it? An internationally famous artist and his large coterie of equally gifted buddies, or several nobodies who tried to jump on somebody else's bandwagon with minimal success? Did this rival institute accomplish as much as the original one, or indeed anything? And if there's really nothing to say about it except that at some point a thing with that name existed, is it worth mentioning at all?

To sum up the informational content of this article: the Bureau of Surrealist Research opened on 11 October 1924 and remained open for an unspecified length of time, during which it attracted an unspecified number of unnamed people from unspecified parts of Europe whose contributions are unspecified, plus a bunch of nutters. There were also apparently "many belligerent confrontations", which sounds interesting but unfortunately that's all the information we get. It made an unspecified number of "significant contributions" the nature of which isn't explained, except that one of them was an abstract concept which doesn't seem to have required the Bureau to actually do anything. And its legacy was a similarly named "institute" about which we're told nothing except that it was in Amsterdam and existed for an unspecified period of time which included at least some of the year 1970.

If this was a school report card, a tactful teacher would at this point write "Must try harder." 81.147.130.94 (talk) 12:42, 18 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]