Month: April 2004

The higher the wage rate, the more valuable is time. Some people will use their greater wealth to consume more leisure, others will run around and look harried.

Surely the arts should adapt to serve this second category of customer. We are all familiar with channel-surfing, or the two-minute pop song, but how about “high culture” in bite-sized portions?

“There’s no hard and fast reason why an opera has to be colossal or epic in scale,” says director David Pountney. “An opera is simply a narrative idea expressed through music. Length is immaterial – I have seen several successful operas that are barely 10 minutes long.”

In fact, 10 minutes sounds Wagnerian in comparison with Peter Reynolds’s Sands of Time. At three minutes and 34 seconds, it is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s shortest opera. “The librettist, Simon Rees, came up with the idea of an opera whose duration should match the boiling of an egg,” says Reynolds. “So we created a domestic scenario of a couple having an argument over breakfast. It starts with the sand-timer being turned, and ends with the egg coming out of the saucepan.” [I’ve added the link to this quotation]

Then there is always Samuel Beckett:

…the shortest of all Beckett works, the notoriously ephemeral Breath, consists of a set of printed instructions that take longer to read than to perform. Richard Gregory, of the company Quarantine, recently produced the work at Newcastle Playhouse, and came up with an ingenious solution for extending its 30-second duration. They did it twice. “I think we spent about a fortnight, all told, preparing a piece that was over in under a minute,” says Gregory.

And here is a nice short (truly short) story:

Augusto Monterroso’s El Dinosaurio reads in its entirety: “Upon waking the dinosaur was still there.”

Addendum: If your tastes run in the other direction, here is a version of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, slowed to down to last twenty-four hours. And go to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, where you can see Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho”, the classic Hitchcock movie but at much slower speed.

The ever-insightful David Nishimura asks why museums are so strongly discouraged from selling works in their inventories. I have seen (informal) estimates that U.S. museums display no more than five percent of their collections over a few years. Nishimura asks:

In fact, museums often end up with stuff that they cannot exhibit or that is of little or no relevance to what they are all about (it’s not only relatives who end up receiving gifts that are better intentioned than chosen!). Storage space is another issue, as is the cost of insurance.

Museums also evolve over time. Nearly all older American museums, for example, started out with collections of European paintings of decidedly mediocre quality. Skip forward a few generations, and those museums’ galleries are at an entirely different level — the legacy of wealthy patrons, vastly improved connoisseurship, and the dispersal of so many old European collections. And so what was once exemplary is now the stuff sold in bulk by third-rank auction houses. Is it so bad that such works be sold off, especially if the proceeds can be used to acquire better items not well represented in the collection?

In practice, museum directors who “deaccession” artworks come under heavy criticism. Why? Here is where a very crude theory, too crude to possibly be true, comes in.

Stop thinking of visitors as the museum’s customers. Instead the customers are the donors. Donating a picture is like spending money. The donor gives a Picasso to MOMA, in return purchasing the feeling of “having given a Picasso to MOMA.” This yields tax, networking, and other privileges in this life, as well as a long-term legacy. Museums, in turn, take some care to attract viewers, so that their real customers — the donors — have greater feelings of satisfaction about the whole enterprise.

In this “model,” selling off artworks makes customers (donors) nervous. “How do I know they won’t sell off my [sic] Picasso once I’ve died?” It is only a slight reassurance to respond: “We only sell off the second-rate pictures in our inventory.” So museums sit on their huge and growing stashes of art. In this manner they signal their trustworthiness to future donors.

Under some assumptions this outcome is roughly efficient. Donating a picture to a vault is how that donor wishes to “spend” her resources. The donor may self-deceive into thinking that the donated work is a masterpiece. By the time the truth is revealed, she has passed away. Subsequently selling the work to a museum in Topeka would damage future donors more than it would benefit Kansas viewers. The museum community, of course, does not like to admit that its donors are the primary customers (how would viewers and government funders feel?), so it must present other reasons why deaccessioning is bad. At the same time the museum faces a “time consistency” problem, and would like nothing more than to sell off its dross.

The policy bottom line: Government funding eases museum needs for funds, and makes it easier for museums to keep pictures in vaults. The funding subsidizes the legacies of dead donors, eases time consistency problems for future donors, and limits the real supply of art, to the detriment of viewers. That’s just in this fantasy model of course, not in the real world.