The Arts

What is the deadweight loss from museum art collections?

by on January 31, 2013 at 7:36 am in Law, The Arts | Permalink

Steven Kopit, a loyal MR commentator, asks:

Tyler -

Let’s have more on the economics of museums. That’s actually an interesting topic.

Only a very small portion of the collections of the Louvre other major museums is on display at any given time. I think it would make a great deal of sense to provide additional venues for shows–including in China. In the end, holdings of art (like income, per SS) only matter is someone actually consumes them, ie, gets to see them.

I say the deadweight loss here is not so large.  Most art exhibitions are not self-financing from the side of the viewers, which suggests that the demand to see the pictures is not higher than the costs of mounting the exhibit.  Arguably you can throw in philanthropic support as another part of “market demand,” but I consider that a separate valuation issue.  Maybe our current artistic institutions are under-providing marketing opportunities for businesses and foundations, but that still won’t get you a major pent-up demand to view the pictures, again not relative to cost.  The very popular pictures, such as the good works by the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, are shown quite frequently, including in traveling exhibitions.

Context matters a great deal in this setting.  Currently most of the Louvre is not being viewed at any point in time, as the crowds tend to cluster in a few very well-known areas.  Many people would want to go see anything they are told they ought to go see.  What is underfunded is some kind of “demand for participation in a public event,” not the viewing of art per se.  If only they could create more hullaballoo around the more obscure Flemish painters.

Almost all museums have large stretches of empty walls.  I would put up many more pictures there, as indeed I do in my own home.  That museums do not do this I find striking and indicative.  Nor do I see viewers and visitors demanding this, if anything the unspoken feeling might be to wish for a bit less on the walls, so that one may have the feeling of having seen everything without exhaustion.

The costs of storing art are high.  Perhaps the Louvre should sell some of its lower-tier works to private collectors.  But the general public just doesn’t want so much more art to see, not if they have to pay for it and maybe even if they don’t.

81 comments

Cultural vouchers in Brazil

by on January 26, 2013 at 4:36 am in The Arts | Permalink

This old idea from Alan Peacock will be implemented:

Despite the economic crisis, Brazil announced Thursday it planned to give workers here a 50-real ($25) monthly stipend for cultural expenses like movies, books or museums. “In all developed countries, culture plays a key role in the economy,” Culture Minister Marta Suplicy said in an interview on national television. She recalled that popular former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva created “Bolsa Familia” (Family Grant), the program of conditional cash transfers to the poor which his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, expanded. “Now we are creating food for the soul; Why would the poor not be able to access culture?” the minister said. Suplicy said the new incentive, approved by Congress and endorsed by Rousseff late last month, is expected to be introduced some time this year.
Here is a bit more, and for the pointer I thank Bill Badrick.

31 comments

What has San Diego contributed to American culture?

by on January 2, 2013 at 12:08 pm in History, The Arts | Permalink

In honor of the AEA meetings I was going to do “My Favorite Things San Diego” but frankly I came up with what is more or less a total blank.  Eddie Vedder?  I like Tom Waits.  Lots of athletes.  What else?

San Diego, by population, is the eighth largest city in the United States.  Yet it seems to have had hardly any cultural influence.  What gives?

Movie, set in: Almost Famous, or perhaps A Day Without a Mexican.

End of story, unless you can tell me more.  I’m sure to enjoy the weather, though I’ll look longingly at Tijuana just across the border.

207 comments

Merry Christmas!

by on December 25, 2012 at 12:22 am in Religion, The Arts | Permalink

17 comments

My favorite things Israel

by on December 6, 2012 at 5:47 am in The Arts, Travel | Permalink

1. Film: A rich and rapidly improving genre.  My favorites are Lebanon or Waltz with Bashir, with a sentimental nod to Yana’s Friends, which isn’t great but I saw it on my second date with Natasha.

2. Movie, set in (non-Israeli): I don’t like Exodus, so can I cite the Mel Gibson movie?  Are we totally sure that it is indeed set in Israel?  What else am I missing?  “Painting, set in” would be a fun category, but too hard to choose.

3. Actress: Natalie Portman is excellent in Closer.

4. Classical musician: Daniel Barenboim, Yefim Bronfman, Ivry Gitlis, and Eliahu Inbal would be at the top of a pretty long list.  Perlman has a style too aggressive for my taste, at least as it comes across on disc.

5. Fiction author: I very much admire and enjoy David Grossman’s To The End of the Land.

6. Philosopher: Joseph Raz, especially his The Morality of Freedom.

7. Non-fiction author: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is splendid.  Tom Segev could be a runner-up.

8. Co-author: Amihai Glazer, from UC Irvine.

9. Other economists: Donald Patinkin, Ariel Rubinstein, Ehud Kalai, Jacob Frenkel, Dan Ariely, Robert Aumann, Sergiu Hart, Elhanan Helpman, Reuven Brenner, Zvi Hercowitz, Oded Galor, Michael Bruno, and Stanley Fischer would be a few others.  Overall the country is strong in game theory and monetary economics, as well as economics more generally.

I strike a zero when it comes to popular music.  I don’t like Kiss/Gene Simmons, and Israeli popular music I don’t know well but from a distance I do not expect to like it much.  The visual arts are also not obviously strong, though perhaps you can enlighten me in the comments.

67 comments

The changing economics of youth subculture

by on November 12, 2012 at 3:41 am in Economics, History, The Arts, Uncategorized | Permalink

From a Metafilter discussion, here is one comment:

Music distribution, music purchasing and the ethics around them have changed. When I was a mere slip of a girl, it really mattered whether one was on a major label or not, and everyone knew someone who ran a tiny label out of their bedroom, etc etc. I can’t get over how my fellow anarchists listen to, like, Beyonce. That would not have gone over well in 1996. As a result, fashion/music subcultures are, I think, more permeable and fluid, and there’s less oppositionality associated with music.

Also, fast fashion and big changes in the distribution and status of vintage and thrift store fashion. I’d argue that up through the nineties, second hand clothes were a little bit declasse; they aren’t anymore. Clothes more than 20 years old were easy to find in the thrift stores and were of fairly high quality. Now even the last of the union-made eighties clothes are hard to find and can be quite pricey. (I mean, I remember when I bought a 50s silk-satin Dior dress – not atelier, but still – for $5.99 at Saver’s.) So style changes faster and it’s harder to associate style with oppositionality and with a stable ‘style tribe’.

“Style tribes” themselves are pretty well commodified, too – you can make a nice living catering to goths or VLV folks or whatever. So there’s less, I guess, libidinal investmentthere.

Also, life is more precarious and it’s harder to get work. Back when I was properly young in the nineties, if you didn’t have a job you could just temp. It wasn’t fun (remember that zine Temp Slave) but you could keep a roof over your head. A lot easier to do subculture stuff then. Even the serious anarchists I know now scrabble a lot more for work, food and money than back then.

Rents are higher – where in 1995 you could run a whole anarchist community center on $300/month plus utilities – which could be paid with three people who had jobs and could chip in $100 each, now you’re looking at $1200/month plus utilities and fewer people who can kick down $100.

I mean, there’s still plenty of youth fashion, music and neat stuff going on – it’s just that the support structures are more fragile and temporary and the borders between things are thinner.

That is from Frowner.  Hat tip goes to @NatashaPlotkin, the most underrated tweeter I know of, with only 76 followers.

21 comments

Sentences to ponder

by on October 31, 2012 at 3:25 pm in Music, The Arts | Permalink

Natasha later said she saw nothing strange in a musician’s ability to express emotions she has not experienced. “Had I experienced them, that wouldn’t necessarily help me to express them better in my music. I’m an actress, not a character; my job is to represent something, not to live it. Chopin wrote a mazurka, Person X in the audience wants to hear the mazurka and so I have to decipher the score and make it apprehensible to Person X, and it’s really hard to do. But it has nothing to do with my life experience.”

Here is more, from Andrew Solomon, mostly about prodigies, interesting throughout.  I also like this bit:

…Marc sat on a phone book on the piano bench so his hands would be high enough to play comfortably and launched into Chopin’s “Fantasie-Impromptu,” which he imbued with a quality of nuanced yearning that seemed almost inconceivable in someone with a shelf of Cookie Monster videos.

4 comments

Anthem: Ayn Rand’s Dystopian Masterpiece

by on October 25, 2012 at 7:35 am in Books, Philosophy, The Arts | Permalink

Rod Long offers a very insightful reading of Ayn Rand’s Anthem:

The book’s most striking feature, both stylistically and in the substance of the story, is the absence of the first-person singular. The idea of a totalitarian state suppressing subversive ideas by banning or distorting the language needed to express or even formulate it has been made generally familiar by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its fictional language, “Newspeak”; but Rand’s treatment precedes Orwell’s by more than a decade (and may possibly have influenced it).

In Rand’s dystopia, the first-person singular pronoun — the word “I” — has been abolished in order to prevent people from thinking of themselves as individuals with identities distinct from that of the collective. The struggle of Equality 7-2521 (Rand modeled her characters’ names on telephone exchanges of the “Pennsylvania 6-5000” form) to discover his own individuality is mirrored in his, and the text’s, struggle to move from “we” to “I.”

…If the book’s linguistic center is the first-person pronoun, its imaginal center is light — the guttering candlelight of the collectivist dystopia, contrasted with the electric light that the protagonist reinvents, the latter symbolizing the fire that Prometheus of Greek myth stole to give to the human race, and, consequently, symbolizing as well the creative fire of the unfettered individual mind.

…Rand was a dedicated Aristotelian and a lifelong critic of Plato, and many of the features of Anthem’s dystopia, such as government assignment of professions, state regulation of breeding and reproduction, and abolition of private property and the family, seem drawn from the recommendations in Plato’s Republic. The prohibition of the word “I” in favor of “we” is likewise a natural development of Plato’s dictum in the Republic that all citizens should say “mine” and “not mine” about the same things — a proposal criticized by Aristotle, who warns in his Politics that the attempt to give a community the same degree of unity as a single individual is doomed to disaster.

…Moreover, Equality 7-2521’s journey down into an abandoned subway tunnel to discover an artificial light source turns on its head Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the wise man ascends from the cave of physical reality, lit by the artificial light of the senses, to discover the “real” world of abstract Forms, lit by a sun of pure ineffable intellect. By reversing Plato’s parable, Rand, in Aristotelian fashion, reorients the pursuit of knowledge away from the supernatural and back to this world, to empirical reality.

Read the whole thing.

67 comments

*Glittering Images*, the new Camille Paglia book

by on October 18, 2012 at 6:52 am in Books, History, The Arts | Permalink

The subtitle is A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars and according to Paglia “The format of the book is based on Catholic breviaries of devotional images, like Mass cards of the saints.”

It presents powerful works of art and tells the reader to submit to them; for that alone it is better than most other books.  The influence of Harold Bloom, Paglia’s earlier teacher, is strong throughout.  The interpretations seem unsure as to whether they are summaries or revelations, bold challenges to orthodoxy or obvious truths.  I am glad I bought the book but still my itch for the Paglia of Sexual Personae — say the Edmund Spenser chapter (the book’s highlight in my view) — remains unscratched.

Here is Paglia on George Lucas, an excerpt from the latter part of the book.  I do not feel the need to criticize her main claim (Lucas is the greatest artist of our time), still her obsession with mythology and cinematographic technique to me misses the import of Lucas’s saga of glorious collapse, discussed only briefly, though I do like this bit: “Lucas crosscuts to the delirious destruction on Coruscant of the Great Rotunda of the Galactic Senate, with its thousand round balconies in cool tonalities of gray and black. This twinned ruination of industrial and political architecture is an epic Romantic spectacle…”

Recommended, but we are still waiting for the last three installments of Camille’s ouevre.

19 comments

“How capitalism can save art”

by on October 8, 2012 at 12:30 pm in Economics, The Arts | Permalink

That is the new Op-Ed by Camille Paglia, excerpt:

Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design. Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world—which, like it or not, is modern reality.

…Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineered industrial design. Personalized hand-held devices are their letters, diaries, telephones and newspapers, as well as their round-the-clock conduits for music, videos and movies. But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.

Paglia’s new book is here.  For the pointer I thank Alex T.

22 comments

My favorite things Korea

by on October 7, 2012 at 12:05 pm in The Arts | Permalink

1. Movie.  If I had to pick one, I might opt for Old Boy.  The deeper point is that you should watch them all.  If it is a Korean movie, and you can get your hands on it (as a non-Korean), it is probably excellent.  This is a remarkable regularity and a good selection filter for exploring.  This list is one place to start but not to stop.  The Host is a fun spoof of monster movies and Shiri is a gripping thriller.  Watch any Korean movie which Scott Sumner recommends.  Even some of the clunkier Korean movies, such as The Housemaid, are better than most Hollywood fare.

2. Actress: Grace Park from Battlestar Galactica, and there is also Shin Eun-kyung.

3. Actor: John Cho, of Harold and Kumar fame.  It is unlikely he is the best.

4. Video artist: Nam June Paik.

5. Classical pianist: Kun-Woo Paik, I find he is better represented on disc (Ravel, Liszt, Scriabin) than on YouTube.  For violinist there is Sarah Chang, YouTube here.

6. Economist: Ha-Joon Chang comes to mind, although I disagree with most of his work.  Here is my podcast interview with him.

7. Poet: Ko Un is the only one I have read.  It is hard to judge any poet outside of his or her native language, but I definitely had the feeling something was there.

8. Novelist: Kyung-sook Shin is alas the only one I can name.

9. Movie, set in: Korean movies aside, you might consider Pork Chop Hill.

10. Painter: Contemporary art is a rich vein for South Korea.  This catalog is one good place to start.

The bottom line: This is an impressive showing and it is improving rapidly.  The killer categories is movies.

44 comments

Music Break

by on September 16, 2012 at 12:05 am in Current Affairs, Television, The Arts | Permalink

The X Factor isn’t doing well in the ratings but this was Xcellent.

http://youtu.be/iAJyoiQEQco

22 comments

why are americans less stylish than europeans/japanese?

by on September 12, 2012 at 1:33 pm in Economics, History, The Arts, Uncategorized | Permalink

From Bob Unwin:

i mean style in clothing, but the same question could be asked about taste in architecture, interior design and other domains. (blog post by a fashion person: http://bangsandabun.com/2010/03/europeans-dress-better-than-americans-fact/)

1. greater average distance to a major fashion center. both physical and cultural distance.

2. less urbanization [these points 1&2 were maybe more important in the past]

3. distance from europe and few of the relevant european style-leaders emigrating

4. different signaling aims (more internal cultural diversity and weaker class distinctions; male clothing needing to be less ‘gay’ and more conventional).

5. any relation to the late blooming of US visual art and music on the world scene?

6. american is more informal in style and has been an influential exporter of informal styles (this doesn’t undermine the general point about the style difference)

related question: are there any fashionable american economists? i’d be especially interested in any that dress like artists or literary intellectuals.

173 comments

My all-time favorite things Ontario

by on September 9, 2012 at 2:55 am in The Arts, Travel | Permalink

1. Short story author: Alice Munro I consider one of the very best writers ever, from anywhere or any period.  Read them all, and there is a new collection coming this November.  Here is one place to start.

2. Movie, set in: Dead Ringers, by David Cronenberg, one of my favorite films period.

3. Director: After Cronenberg there is James Cameron, hate me if you want but I find his movies splendid.  Sarah Polley remains underrated in the United States, start with Away From Her, another of my all-time favorites.

4. Novelist: Margaret Atwood, especially Cat’s Eye.  I used to like Robertson Davies, but somehow his novels have not stuck with me.

5. Pianist: I used to think that only half of Glenn Gould’s recordings were tolerable, but in the last five years I have come to see his Haydn and Brahms recordings as masterpieces.  Now it’s only the Mozart and Beethoven I can’t stand.  Don’t forget the Berg Sonata and of course the Bach and also his writings.

6. Architect: Frank Gehry comes to mind, though I do not like the new rendition of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

7. Alanis Morissette song: “Head Over Feet.”

8. Comedian: I love Mike Myers in “Wayne’s World” and Jim Carrey in “Ace Ventura” and “The Cable Guy.”

9. Favorite Neil Young album: Everybody Knows this is Nowhere.

10. Blogger: Ahem!  Cory Doctorow deserves mention too.

We haven’t even touched the painters.

What strikes me is not only how strong this list is, but how little thought was required to compile it.

33 comments

The equilibrium (with apologies to Daniel Klein)

by on September 8, 2012 at 12:06 pm in Economics, Education, Games, The Arts | Permalink

On September 5, the first Sleeping Beauty in Polataiko’s exhibition awoke to a kiss from another woman. Both of them were surprised. Polataiko shot photos of them laughing and looking at each other. Then he posted the images to his Facebook profile, where he has been live-blogging the entire event. Now the Sleeping Beauty must wed her “prince,” thus queering the historically heteronormative fairtytale. Gay marriage is not allowed in the Ukraine, however, so these two women will have to wed in a European country that does allow for same-sex marriage.

Here is more.  I believe that none of you had solved for this equilibrium.  For the pointer I thank Eapen.

18 comments

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