Category: The Arts
Art as Data in Political History
From Valentine Figuroa of MIT:
Ongoing advances in machine learning are expanding opportunities to analyze large-scale visual data. In historical political economy, paintings from museums and private collections represent an untapped source of information. Before computational methods can be applied, however, it is essential to establish a framework for assessing what information paintings encode and under what assumptions it can be interpreted. This article develops such a framework, drawing on the enduring concerns of the traditional humanities. I describe three applications using a database of 25,000 European paintings from 1000CE to the First World War. Each application targets a distinct type of information conveyed in paintings (depicted content, communicative intent, and incidental information) and a cultural transformation of the early-modern period. The first revisits the notion of a European “civilizing process”—the internalization of stricter norms of behavior that occurred in tandem with the growth of state power—by examining whether paintings of meals show increasingly complex etiquette. The second analyzes portraits to study how political elites shaped their public image, highlighting a long-term shift from chivalric to more rational-bureaucratic representations of men. The third documents a long-term process of secularization, measured by the share of religious paintings, which began prior to the Reformation and accelerated afterward.
Here is the link, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My Conversation with the excellent Gaurav Kapadia
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Gaurav Kapadia has deliberately avoided publicity throughout his career in investing, which makes this conversation a rare window into how he thinks. He now runs XN, a firm built around concentrated bets on a small number of companies with long holding periods. However, his education in judgment began much earlier, in a two-family house in Flushing that his parents converted into a four-family house. It was there where a young Gaurav served as de facto landlord, collecting rent and negotiating late payments at age 10. That grounding now expresses itself across an unusual range of domains: Tyler invited him on the show not just as an investor, but as someone with a rare ability to judge quality in cities, talent, art, and more with equal fluency.
Tyler and Gaurav discuss how Queens has thrived without new infrastructure, what he’d change as “dictator” of Flushing, whether Robert Moses should rise or fall in status, who’s the most underrated NYC mayor, what’s needed to attract better mayoral candidates, the weirdest place in NYC, why he initially turned down opportunities in investment banking for consulting, bonding with Rishi Sunak over railroads, XN’s investment philosophy, maintaining founder energy in investment firms and how he hires to prevent complacency, AI’s impact on investing, the differences between New York and London finance, the most common fundraising mistake art museums make, why he collects only American artists within 20 years of his own age, what makes Kara Walker and Rashid Johnson and Salman Toor special, whether buying art makes you a better investor, his new magazine Totei celebrating craft and craftsmanship, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, I don’t intend this as commentary on any particular individual, but what is it that could be done to attract a higher quality of candidate for being mayor of New York? It’s a super important job. It’s one of the world’s greatest cities, arguably the greatest. Why isn’t there more talent running after it?
KAPADIA: It is something that I’ve thought about a great deal. I think there’s a bunch of little things that accumulate, but the main thing that happens in New York City is, people automatically assume they can’t win because it’s such a big and great city. Actually, the last few presidential elections and also the current mayoral election have taught people that anyone could win. I think that, in and of itself, is going to draw more candidates as we go forward.
What happened as an example, this time, people just assumed that one candidate had the race locked up, so a lot of good candidates, even that I know, decided not even to run. It turns out that that ended up not being the case at all. Now that people put that into their mental model, the new Bayesian analysis of that would be, “Oh, more people should run.”
The second thing: New York has a bunch of very peculiar dynamics. It’s an off-year election, and the primaries are at very awkward times. I believe there’s a history of why the primary shifted to basically the third week of June, in which there’s a very low turnout. The third week of June in New York City, when the private schools are out and an off-year election. You’re able to win the Democratic nomination and therefore the mayoral election with tens of thousands of votes in a city this big. That is absolutely insane.
A couple of things that I would probably do would be to make the primary more normal, change the election timing to make it on-cycle, even number of years. You’d have to figure out how to do that. Potentially have an open primary as well.
COWEN: If we apply the Gaurav Kapadia judgment algorithm to mayoral candidates, what’s the non-obvious quality you’re looking for?
KAPADIA: Optimism.
COWEN: Optimism.
KAPADIA: Optimism.
COWEN: Is it scarce?
KAPADIA: Extraordinarily scarce. I think there’s much more doomerism everywhere than optimism. At the end of the day, people are attracted to optimism. If you think about the machinery of the city and the state, having a clear plan — of course, you need all the basics. You need to be able to govern. It’s a very complicated city. There’re many constituents.
But I think beyond that, you have to have the ability to inspire. For some reason, almost all of the candidates, over the last couple of cycles, have really not had that — with the exception of probably one — the ability to inspire. I think that is the most underrated quality that one will need.
COWEN: I have my own answer to this question, but I’m curious to see what you say. What is, for you, the weirdest part of New York City that you know of that doesn’t really feel like it belongs to New York City at all?
Definitely recommended.
Ford Madox Ford on Joseph Conrad
And, above all things else, as the writer has somewhere pointed out, Conrad was a politician. He loved the contemplation of humanity pulling away at the tangled skeins of parties or of alliances. Until, suddenly a strand gave, a position cleared up, a ministry was solidly formed, a dynasty emerged. He was, that is to say a student of politics, without prescription, without dogma, and, as a Papist, with a profound disbelief in the perfectibility of human institutions. The writer never saw Conrad read any book of memoirs except those of Maxime Ducamp and the Correspondence of Flaubert; those we read daily together over a space of years. But somewhere in the past Conrad had read every imaginable and unimaginable volume of politicians’ memoirs, Mme de Campan, the Duc d’Audiffret Pasquier, Benjamin Constant, Karoline Bauer, Sir Horace Rumbold, Napoleon the Great, Napoleon III, Benjamin Franklin, Assheton Smith, Pitt, Chatham, Palmerston, Parnell, the late Queen Victoria, Dilke, Morley…. There was no memoir of all these that he had missed or forgotten—down to Il Principe or the letters of Thomas Cromwell. He could suddenly produce an incident from the life of Lord Shaftesbury and work it into Nostromo: which was the political history of an imagined South American Republic. That was one of the secrets of his greatness.
But certainly he had no prescription. Revolutions were to him always anathema since, he was accustomed to declare, all revolutions always have been, always must be, nothing more in the end than palace intrigues: intrigues either for power within, or for the occupancy of, a palace. The journalists’ bar in the palace of the Luxemburg where sits the present Senate of the Third Republic was once the bedchamber of Marie de Medicis. That is not to say that Conrad actively desired the restoration of the Bourbons: he would have preferred the journalists to remain where[Pg 60] they were rather than have any revolution at all. All revolutions are an interruption of the processes of thought and of the discovery of a New Form … for the novel.
The short book, online and free, is interesting throughout. Ford knew Conrad well, and appreciated him at a deep level.
Colors of growth
This looks pretty tremendous:
We develop a novel approach to measuring long-run economic growth by exploiting systematic variation in the use of color in European paintings. Drawing inspiration from the literature on nighttime lights as a proxy for income, we extract hue, saturation, and brightness from millions of pixels to construct annual indices for Great Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany between 1600 and 1820. These indices track broad trends in existing GDP reconstructions while revealing higher frequency fluctuations – such as those associated with wars, political instability, and climatic shocks – that traditional series smooth over. Our findings demonstrate that light, decomposed into color and brightness components, provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.
That is new research by Lars Boerner, Tim Reinicke, Samad Sarferaz, and Battista Severgnini. Via Ethan Mollick.
My Conversation with the excellent Dan Wang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Dan debate whether American infrastructure is actually broken or just differently optimized, why health care spending should reach 35% of GDP, how lawyerly influences shaped East Asian development differently than China, China’s lack of a liberal tradition and why it won’t democratize like South Korea or Taiwan did, its economic dysfunction despite its manufacturing superstars, Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives, a 10-day itinerary for Yunnan, James C. Scott’s work on Zomia, whether Beijing or Shanghai is the better city, Liu Cixin and why volume one of The Three-Body Problem is the best, why contemporary Chinese music and film have declined under Xi, Chinese marriage markets and what it’s like to be elderly in China, the Dan Wang production function, why Stendhal is his favorite novelist and Rossini’s Comte Ory moves him, what Dan wants to learn next, whether LLMs will make Tyler’s hyper-specific podcast questions obsolete, what flavor of drama their conversation turned out to be, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: When will Chinese suburbs be really attractive?
WANG: What are Chinese suburbs? You use this term, Tyler, and I’m not sure what exactly they mean.
COWEN: You have a yard and a dog and a car, right?
WANG: Yes.
COWEN: You control your school district with the other parents. That’s a suburb.
WANG: How about never? I’m not expecting that China will have American-style suburbs anytime soon, in part because of the social engineering projects that are pretty extensive in China. I think there is a sense in which Chinese cities are not especially dense. Indian cities are much, much more dense. I think that Chinese cities, the streets are not necessarily terribly full of people all the time. They just sprawl quite extensively.
They sprawl in ways that I think the edges of the city still look somewhat like the center of the city, which there’s too many high-rises. There’s probably fewer parks. There’s probably fewer restaurants. Almost nobody has a yard and a dog in their home. That’s in part because the Communist Party has organized most people to live in apartment compounds in which it is much easier to control them.
We saw this really extensively in the pandemic, in which people were unable to leave their Shanghai apartment compounds for anything other than getting their noses and mouths swabbed. I write a little bit about how, if you take the rail outside of major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you hit farmland really, really quickly. That is in part because the Communist Party assesses governors as well as mayors on their degree of food self-sufficiency.
Cities like Shanghai and Beijing have to produce a lot of their own crops, both grains as well as vegetables, as well as fruits, as well as livestock, within a certain radius so that in case there’s ever a major devastating war, they don’t have to rely on strawberries from Mexico or strawberries from Cambodia, or Thailand. There’s a lot of farmland allocated outside of major cities. I think that will prevent suburban sprawl. You can’t control people if they all have a yard as well as a dog. I think the Communist Party will not allow it.
COWEN: Whether the variable of engineers matters, I went and I looked at the history of other East Asian economies, which have done very well in manufacturing, built out generally excellent infrastructure. None of these problems with the Second Avenue line in New York. Taiwan, like the presidents, at least if we believe GPT-5, three of them were lawyers and none of them were engineers. South Korea, you have actually some economists, a lot of bureaucrats.
WANG: Wow. Imagine that. Economists in charge, Tyler.
COWEN: I wouldn’t think it could work. A few lawyers, one engineer. Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, he’s a lawyer. He thinks in a very lawyerly manner. Singapore has arguably done the best of all those countries. Much richer than China, inspired China. Why should I think engineers rather than just East Asia, and a bunch of other accompanying facts about these places are what matter?
WANG: Japan, a lot of lawyers in the top leadership. What exactly was the leadership of Hong Kong? A bunch of British civil servants.
COWEN: Some of whom are probably lawyers or legal-type minds, right? Not in general engineers.
WANG: PPE grads. I think that we can understand the engineering variable mostly because of how much more China has done relative to Japan and South Korea and Taiwan.
COWEN: It’s much, much poorer. Per capita manufacturing output is gone much better in these other countries.
And:
WANG: Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let’s call it books, music, all sorts of things, but when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. I much prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace. I prefer Buddenbrooks to Magic Mountain. Here again, you oppose me. What’s the deal?
COWEN: I don’t think the differences are that big. For instance, if we ask ourselves, what’s the relative ranking of Chengdu plus Chongqing compared to the rest of the world? We’re 98.5% in agreement compared to almost anyone else. When you get to the micro level, the so-called narcissism of petty differences, obviously, you’re born in China. I grew up in New Jersey. It’s going to shape our perspectives.
Anything in China, you have been there in a much more full-time way, and you speak and read Chinese, and none of that applies to me. I’m popping in and out as a tourist. Then, I think the differences make much more sense. It’s possible I would prefer to live in Shanghai for essentially the reasons you mentioned. If I’m somewhere for a week, I’m definitely going to pick Beijing. I’ll go around to the galleries. The things that are terrible about the city just don’t bother me that much, because I know I’ll be gone.
WANG: 98.5% agreement. I’ll take that, Tyler. It’s you and me against the rest of the world, but then we’ll save our best disagreements for each other.
COWEN: Let’s see if you can pass an intellectual Turing test. Why is it that I think Yunnan is the single best place in the world to visit? Just flat out the best if you had to pick one region. Not why you think it is, but why I think it is.
Strongly recommended, Dan and I had so much fun we kept going for about an hour and forty minutes. And of course you should buy and read Dan’s bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
*God’s Grandeur*
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
Do (human) readers prefer AI writers?
It seems so, do read through the whole abstract:
The use of copyrighted books for training AI models has led to numerous lawsuits from authors concerned about AI’s ability to generate derivative content. Yet it’s unclear whether these models can generate high quality literary text while emulating authors’ styles/voices. To answer this we conducted a preregistered study comparing MFA-trained expert writers with three frontier AI models: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in writing up to 450 word excerpts emulating 50 awardwinning authors’ (including Nobel laureates, Booker Prize winners, and young emerging National Book Award finalists) diverse styles. In blind pairwise evaluations by 159 representative expert (MFA-trained writers from top U.S. writing programs) and lay readers (recruited via Prolific), AI-generated text from in-context prompting was strongly disfavored by experts for both stylistic fidelity (odds ratio [OR]=0.16, p < 10^-8) and writing quality (OR=0.13, p< 10^-7) but showed mixed results with lay readers. However, fine-tuning ChatGPT on individual author’s complete works completely reversed these findings: experts now favored AI-generated text for stylistic fidelity (OR=8.16, p < 10^-13) and writing quality (OR=1.87, p=0.010), with lay readers showing similar shifts. These effects are robust under cluster-robust inference and generalize across authors and styles in author-level heterogeneity analyses. The fine-tuned outputs were rarely flagged as AI-generated (3% rate versus 97% for incontext prompting) by state-of-the-art AI detectors. Mediation analysis reveals this reversal occurs because fine-tuning eliminates detectable AI stylistic quirks (e.g., cliché density) that penalize incontext outputs, altering the relationship between AI detectability and reader preference. While we do not account for additional costs of human effort required to transform raw AI output into cohesive, publishable novel length prose, the median fine-tuning and inference cost of $81 per author represents a dramatic 99.7% reduction compared to typical professional writer compensation. Author-specific fine-tuning thus enables non-verbatim AI writing that readers prefer to expert human writing, thereby providing empirical evidence directly relevant to copyright’s fourth fair-use factor, the “effect upon the potential market or value” of the source works.
That is from a new paper by Tuhin Chakrabarty, Jane C. Ginsburg, and Paramveer Dhillon. For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis. I recall an earlier piece showing that LLMs also prefer LLM outputs?
My Conversation with the excellent Jonny Steinberg
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg’s particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee’s journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist’s emotional insight.
Tyler and Jonny discuss why South African police only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls, how to fix policing, the ghettoization of crime, how prison gangs regulate behavior through century-old rituals, how apartheid led to mass incarceration and how it manifested in prisons, why Nelson Mandela never really knew his wife Winnie and the many masks they each wore, what went wrong with the ANC, why the judiciary maintained its independence but not its quality, whether Tyler should buy land in Durban, the art scene in Johannesburg, how COVID gave statism a new lease on life, why the best South African novels may still be ahead, his forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes, why English families weren’t foolish to move to Rhodesia in the 1920s, where to take an ideal two-week trip around South Africa, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: My favorite book of yours again is Winnie and Nelson, which has won a number of awards. A few questions about that. So, they’re this very charismatic couple. Obviously, they become world-historical famous. For how long were they even together as a pair?
STEINBERG: Very, very briefly. They met in early 1957. They married in ’58. By 1960, Mandela was no longer living at home. He was underground. He was on the run. By 1962, he was in prison. So, they were really only living together under the same roof for two years.
COWEN: And how well do you feel they knew each other?
STEINBERG: Well, that’s an interesting question because Nelson Mandela was very, very in love with his wife, very besotted with his wife. He was 38, she was 20 when they met. She was beautiful. He was a notorious philanderer. He was married with three children when they met. He really was besotted with her. I don’t think that he ever truly came to know her. And when he was in prison, you can see it in his letters. It’s quite remarkable to watch. She more and more becomes the center of meaning in his life, his sense of foundation, his sense of self as everything else is falling away.
And he begins to love her more and more, and even to coronate her more and more so that she doesn’t forget him. His letters grow more romantic, more intense, more emotional. But the person he’s so deeply in love with is really a fiction. She’s living a life on the outside. And you see this very troubling line between fantasy and reality. A man becoming deeply, deeply involved with a woman who is more and more a figment of his imagination.
COWEN: Do you think you learned anything about marriage more generally from writing this book?
STEINBERG: [laughs] One of the sets of documents that I came across in writing the book were the transcripts of their meetings in the last 10 years of his imprisonment. The authorities bugged all of his meetings. They knew they were being bugged, but nonetheless, they were very, very candid with each other. And you very unusually see a marriage in real time and what people are saying to each other. And when I read those lines, 10 different marriages that I know passed through my head: the bickering, the lying, the nasty things that people do to one another, the cruelties. It all seemed very familiar.
COWEN: How is it you think she managed his career from a distance, so to speak?
STEINBERG: Well, she was a really interesting woman. She arrived in Johannesburg, 20 years old in the 1950s, where there was no reason to expect a woman to want a place in public life, particularly not in the prime of public life. And she was absolutely convinced that there was no position she should not occupy because she was a woman. She wanted a place in politics; she wanted to exercise power. But she understood intuitively that in that time and place, the way to do that was through a man. And she went after the most powerful rising political activists available.
I don’t think it was quite as cynical as that. She loved him, but she absolutely wanted to exercise power, and that was a way to do it. Once she became Mrs. Mandela, I think she had an enormously aristocratic sense of politics and of entitlement and legitimacy. She understood herself to be South Africa’s leader by virtue of being married to him, and understood his and her reputations as her projects to endeavor to keep going. And she did so brilliantly. She was unbelievably savvy. She understood the power of image like nobody else did, and at times saved them both from oblivion.
COWEN: This is maybe a delicate question, but from a number of things I read, including your book, I get the impression that Winnie’s just flat out a bad person…
Interesting throughout, this is one of my favorite CWT episodes, noting it does have a South Africa focus.
Where has beauty gone in the modern world?
From David Perell and Cultural Tutor, a preview of a longer film to come:
What of American culture from the 1940s and 1950s deserves to survive?
In the comments, Elijah asks:
Would love to read a post about which movies and novels from this era do and do not deserve to survive and why.
I do not love 20th century American fiction, so maybe I am the wrong person to ask. I started with GPT-5, which gave this list of novels from those two decades. I’ve read a significant percentage of those, and would prefer:
Raymond Chandler, J.D. Salinger, Nabokov, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and lots of science fiction. The I, Robot stories are from the 1940s, and the book published in 1950. A lot of the “more serious” entries on that list I feel have diminished somewhat with age.
Great Hollywood movies from that era are too numerous to name. In music there is plenty of jazz, plus Elvis, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Buddy Holly, doo wop, “the roots of rock” (includes some one hit wonders), Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, the Everlies, the Louvin Brothers, Johnny Cash, lots of country and bluegrass and blues, and many other very well known names from the 1950s. It is one of the most seminal decades for music ever. The 1940s are worse, perhaps because of the war, but still there is Rodgers and Hammerstein, lots of big band, and Woody Guthrie.
Contra Ted Gioia, much of that remains well-known to this day, though I would admit Howard Hanson and Walter Piston have fallen by the wayside. Overall, I think we are processing the American past pretty well.
The Return of the MR Podcast: In Praise of Commercial Culture
The Marginal Revolution Podcast is back with new episodes! We begin with what I think is our best episode to date. We revisit Tyler’s 1998 book In Praise of Commercial Culture. This is the book that put Tyler on the map as a public intellectual. Tyler and I also wrote a paper, An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture, exploring themes from the book. But does In Praise of Commercial Culture stand the test of time? You be the judge!
Here’s one bit:
TABARROK: Here’s a quote from the book, “Art and democratic politics, although both beneficial activities, operate on conflicting principles.”
COWEN: So much of democratic politics is based on consensus. So much of wonderful art, especially new art, is based on overturning consensus, maybe sometimes offending people. All this came to a head in the 1990s, disputes over what the National Endowment for the Arts in America was funding. Some of it, of course, was obscene. Some of it was obscene and pretty good. Some of it was obscene and terrible.
What ended up happening is the whole process got bureaucratized. The NEA ended up afraid to make highly controversial grants. They spend more on overhead. They send more around to the states. Now, it’s much more boring. It seems obvious in retrospect. The NEA did a much better job in the 1960s, right after it was founded, when it was just a bunch of smart people sitting around a table saying, “Let’s send some money to this person,” and then they’d just do it, basically.
TABARROK: Right, so the greatness cannot survive the mediocrity of democratic consensus.
COWEN: There are plenty of good cases where government does good things in the arts, often in the early stages of some process before it’s too politicized. I think some critics overlook that or don’t want to admit it.
TABARROK: One of the interesting things in your book was that the whole history of the NEA, this recreates itself, has recreated itself many times in the past. The salon during the French painting Renaissance, the impressionists hated the salon, right?
COWEN: Right. And had typically turned them away because the works weren’t good enough.
TABARROK: There could be rent-seeking going on, right? The artists get control. Sometimes it’s democratic politics, but sometimes it’s some clique of artists who get control and then funnel the money to their friends.
COWEN: French cinematic subsidies would more fit that latter model. It’s not so much that the French voters want to pay for those movies, but a lot of French government is controlled by elites. The elites like a certain kind of cinema. They view it as a counterweight to Hollywood, preserving French culture. The French still pay for or, indirectly by quota, subsidize a lot of films that just don’t really even get released. They end up somewhere and they just don’t have much impact flat out.
Here’s the episode. Subscribe now to take a small step toward a much better world: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube.
My Hope Axis podcast with Anna Gát
Here is the YouTube, here is transcript access, here is their episode summary:
The brilliant @tylercowen joins @TheAnnaGat for a lively, wide-ranging conversation exploring hope from the perspective of insiders and outsiders, the obsessed and the competitive, immigrants and hard workers. They talk about talent and luck, what makes America unique, whether the dream of Internet Utopia has ended, and how Gen-Z might rebel. Along the way: Jack Nicholson, John Stuart Mill, road trips through Eastern Europe, the Enlightenment of AI, and why courage shapes the future.
Excerpt:
Tyler Cowen: But the top players I’ve met, like Anand or Magnus Carlsen or Kasparov, they truly hate losing with every bone in their body. They do not approach it philosophically. They can become very miserable as a result. And that’s very far from my attitudes. It shaped my life in a significant way.
Anna Gát: I was so surprised. I was like, what? But actually, what? In Maggie Smith-high RP—what? This never occurred to me that losing can be approached philosophically.
Tyler Cowen: And I think always keeping my equanimity has been good for me, getting these compound returns over long periods of time. But if you’re doing a thing like chess or math or sports that really favors the young, you don’t have all those decades of compound returns. You’ve got to motivate yourself to the maximum extent right now. And then hating losing is super useful. But that’s just—those are not the things I’ve done. The people who hate losing should do things that are youth-weighted, and the people who have equanimity should do things that are maturity and age-weighted with compounding returns.
Excellent discussion, lots of fresh material. Here is the Hope Axis podcast more generally. Here is Anna’s Interintellect project, worthy of media attention. Most of all it is intellectual discourse, but it also seems to be the most successful “dating service” I am aware of.
My very interesting Conversation with Seamus Murphy
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Seamus Murphy is an Irish photographer and filmmaker who has spent decades documenting life in some of the world’s most challenging places—from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to Nigeria’s Boko Haram territories. Having left recession-era Ireland in the 1980s to teach himself photography in American darkrooms, Murphy has become that rare artist who moves seamlessly between conflict zones and recording studios, creating books of Afghan women’s poetry while directing music videos that anticipated Brexit.
Tyler and Seamus discuss the optimistic case for Afghanistan, his biggest fear when visiting any conflict zone, how photography has shaped perceptions of Afghanistan, why Russia reminded him of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, how the Catholic Church’s influence collapsed so suddenly in Ireland, why he left Ireland in the 1980s, what shapes Americans impression of Ireland, living part-time in Kolkata and what the future holds for that “slightly dying” but culturally vibrant city, his near-death encounters with Boko Haram in Nigeria, the visual similarities between Michigan and Russia, working with PJ Harvey on Let England Shake and their travels to Kosovo and Afghanistan together, his upcoming film about an Afghan family he’s documented for thirty years, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now you’re living in Kolkata mainly?
MURPHY: No. I’m living in London, some of the year in Kolkata.
COWEN: Why Kolkata?
MURPHY: My wife is Indian. She grew up in Delhi, Bombay, and Kolkata, but Kolkata was her favorite. They were the years that were her most fond of years. She’s got lots of friends from Kolkata. I love the city. She was saying that if I didn’t like the city, then we wouldn’t be spending as much time in Kolkata as we do, but I do love the city.
It’s got, in many ways, everything I would look for in a city. Kabul, in a way, was a bit like Kolkata when times were better. This is maybe a replacement for Kabul for me. Kolkata is extraordinary. It’s got that history. It’s got the buildings. Bengalis are fascinating. It’s got culture, fantastic food.
COWEN: The best streets in India, right?
MURPHY: Absolutely.
COWEN: It’s my daughter’s favorite city in India.
MURPHY: Really?
COWEN: Yes.
MURPHY: What does she like about it?
COWEN: There’s a kind of noir feel to it all.
MURPHY: Absolutely.
COWEN: It’s so compelling and so strong and just grabs you, and you feel it on every street, every block. It’s probably still the most intellectual Indian city with the best bookshops, a certain public intellectual life.
MURPHY: It’s widespread. It’s not just elite. It’s everyone. We went to a huge book fair. It’s like going to . . . I don’t know what it’s like going to, Kumbh Mela or something. It’s extraordinary.
There’s a huge tent right in the middle, and it’s for what they call little magazines. Little magazines are these very small publications run by one or two people. They’ll publish poetry. They’ll publish interesting stories. Sadly, I don’t speak Bengali because I’d love to be reading this stuff. There are hundreds of these things. They survive, and people buy them. It’s not just the elite. It’s extraordinary in that way.
COWEN: Is there any significant hardship associated with living there, say a few months of the year?
MURPHY: For us, no. There’s a lot of hardship —
COWEN: No pollution?
MURPHY: Yes. The biggest pollution for me is the noise, the noise pollution.
Interesting throughout.
Those new service sector jobs
Poets with Mercor, for $150 an hour. And that is just a start.
Northern Ghana travel notes
You will see termite mounds, baobab trees, and open skies.
The major city is Tamale, the third largest urban settlement in the country. The town is manageable and traffic is not intense. At night it is quiet. The “main street” is just a strip of stuff, and it feels neither like a center of town nor an “edge city” growth. Some of the nearby roads still are not paved. It is a shock to the visitor to realize that the center of town is not going to become any more “center of town-y,” no matter how much you drive around looking for the center of town.
We all liked it.
The “Red Clay” is a series of large art galleries and installations, of spectacular and unexpected quality, just on the edge of Tamale. Some of the installations reminded me of Beuys, for instance the large pile of abandoned WWII stretchers. One also sees there a Polish military plane from the 1930s, an old East German train, and a large pile with tens of thousands of glass green bottles. Some of the galleries have impressive very large paintings by James Barnor, mostly of Ghana workers building out the railroad. Goats wander the premise and scavenge for garbage. If you are an art lover, this place is definitely worth a trip.
The Larabanga mosque does not look as old as internet sources claim. I consider it somewhat overrated?
The surrounding area is 80-90 percent Muslim.
A driver explained to me that Islam in Tamale was very different from Islam in Saudi Arabia, because a) in Ghana women can drive motorbikes, and indeed have to for work, and b) in northern Ghana husbands cannot take any more than four wives.
Many more people here speak English than I was expecting. Some claim that they all speak decent English. I doubt that, but the percentage is way over half.
It all feels quite safe, and furthermore the drivers are not crazy.
Zaina Lodge has a kind of “infinity pool,” at a very modest scale, with views of the forest and sometimes of elephants drinking at the nearby water hole. It is one of the two or three best hotel views I have had.
My poll will grow in size, but so far zero out of two hotel workers use ChatGPT. One had not heard of it. High marginal returns!