Category: The Arts
Why Aren’t Modernist Bridges Awful?
The public dislikes modern architecture but, generally speaking, they do not dislike modern bridges. Lists of the most awesome, most stunning, most beautiful bridges in the world will mention classics like London’s Tower Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Rakotzbrücke but alongside them they will picture the Kubitschek Bridge in Brazil (Shutterstock).
The Rio-Antirrio Bridge in Greece:
or the Moses “Bridge” in the Netherlands.
Whether you like these bridges or not, I don’t see in the literature an idea that modern bridges are all ugly or that modern bridge building has failed or fallen behind the great bridges of the past in the way that there is such a critique for modern architecture in general.
Why is this? I have a theory, which is that bridge designers come from engineering schools rather than schools of architecture. It is possible, of course, that there is something in the nature of bridges that prunes the design space in a way that attracts beauty–maybe we like catenaries, arches, cables in tension and beauty is just a byproduct of the engineering.
It is possible, however, to produce ugly bridges so it’s not just an engineering constraint. Moreover, one small but telling piece of evidence in favor of my theory is that most of the bridges chosen by Wallpaper magazine, an architecture magazine specifically, are in fact ugly (and with no overlap in the bridges from my first category of “popular” beautiful bridges). Here are a few, judge for yourself:
The fact that modern bridges are often beautiful, especially when they come from engineers, is consistent with Samuel Hughes’s argument that ugly has been a choice, not a constraint.
What should I ask Roman Mars?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Most of all he is obsessed with design, here is Wikipedia:
Roman Mars is an American radio producer. He is the host and producer of 99% Invisible, a KALW radio show and podcast, and a founder of the podcast collective Radiotopia, which he describes as efforts “to broaden the radio landscape [and] make shows that aren’t bound by conventions” of public radio in the United States. In 2020, he co-authored the New York Times best seller The 99% Invisible City with Kurt Kohlstedt…Mars, with Elizabeth Joh, also hosts the podcast What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law.
His TED talk on city flags is a good introduction to his thought.
So what should I ask him?
Fast Company covers New Aesthetics
A good piece, it is good to see the artists themselves front and center of the story.
JFK’s AI Voice
From Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural:
- “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
- “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
- “United, there is little we cannot do… Divided, there is little we can do.”
- “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
and from the 1962 moon speech at Rice University;
- We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard.
and from Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural speech:
- John Kennedy’s death commands what his life conveyed—that America must move forward.
- On the 20th day of January, in 1961, John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished ‘in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.’ But, he said, ‘let us begin.’ Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue.
Sound familiar?
Were John F. Kennedy’s speeches written by an AI? Probably not. But were AI’s trained on the speech writer Ted Sorensen? It would appear so. Or to be more accurate, AIs have absorbed the Sorensen toolkit: symmetry, parallelism, antithesis, repetition, and the neatly turned reversal.
Sorensen is considered a great stylist, and these are iconic lines. The problem with AI voice is not the techniques themselves. It is the overuse of them—their deployment to describe a trip to 7-Eleven with the same rhetorical flourishes once used to send men to the moon.
I suspect that will be an easy problem to fix, so don’t expect AI voice to continue.
Hat tip: murgh
Rothko show in Florence
In Museo San Marco there is an ancillary exhibit, placing some smaller, lighter colored Rothkos next to their Fra Angelico frescoes. Those rooms bowled me over, as for one thing they show how much Rothko was a religious painter at heart.
I also was struck by the high proportion of Chinese visitors at this show, even though they are not especially numerous in Florence right now.
The main Rothko show, at Palazzo Strozzi, had an opening room showing Rothkos tied to Renaissance (!) art, mostly with works from early Rothko. The rest of the exhibit had perfect lighting and was the best Rothko display I have seen.
Ken Griffin has very good taste in Rothko. One of his works is here.
Visiting Florence in August is less unbearable than I was expecting. So many other places have become crowded that the situation here does not phase me. Plus the heat is keeping many away? At dinnertime, there is no crush to get into the restaurants.
Moving on shortly, just here for one day!
The Rug Belt Atlas and Quiz
I have an amateur interest in Oriental rugs but my eye is untrained. Thus, for fun and learning I created with Fable a Rug Atlas and quiz.
Check it out. Constructive comments welcome.
P.S. The site is in fact safe! Working on getting it recognized.
My excellent Conversation with Andrew Graham-Dixon
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. From the episode summary:
Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we’d rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of the Catholic Faith, whether Vermeer painted for money or pointedly refused to, where the Gardner’s stolen Concert might be, why Dutch music never blossomed as much as Dutch painting did, how the Church of England rivaled the Cultural Revolution in wiping out British art, whether you can still spot an English painting on sight, the love that saturates late Rembrandt and the mystery of his soaring print prices, the nail on the wall that proves two Vermeer paintings are a pair, why the French are to blame for George Stubbs’ lack of status, whether we can still love Malevich, why Andrews calls recent Richter “almost like printing money,” why female artists and antique textiles remain absurdly cheap, why nobody builds beautiful neighborhoods any longer, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: In what sense was Vermeer a liberal?
GRAHAM-DIXON: Well, the main discovery of my book is that Vermeer was among the very first pioneers of what we now call the liberal tradition.
COWEN: What we now call the Netherlands, then the Dutch Republic.
GRAHAM-DIXON: In the Dutch Republic, and the Dutch contribution to the Enlightenment, which is the origins of the liberal tradition, has been very much forgotten. That’s absolutely at the heart of my book, is an attempt to remember these people, to bring them back into the place in history that they deserve. I’m not only talking about Vermeer. I’m talking about his friends, his patrons, because that’s the discovery of the book, is that he and his friends were a remarkable group of people, and they have been completely forgotten, and what they believed has been largely forgotten too. We need to remember it now, probably more than ever.
COWEN: This was also a religious movement.
GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes.
COWEN: Doctrinally, how would they have been different from, say, Protestants in England? The Collegiants, the Remonstrants?
GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. Vermeer’s patrons, it emerges, and Vermeer himself, were part of a Protestant sect in Holland called the Remonstrants. They had a more extreme manifestation called the Collegiants, and they were unique among all Christian denominations of that time in being utterly opposed to division, hostility, enmity. The only thing they wanted was to bring all Christians, indeed all people—they included Jewish people and Muslim people—they wanted to bring everyone together within a faith that only really cleaved to the essentials of what Jesus Christ said, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount.
They said, “If you actually follow Jesus properly, you can never make war. You can never persecute someone who differs from your opinion. You can never pick on somebody because they believe something different.” They were very, very tolerationist. They formed the first pacifist movement in European history. They lived in a time of appalling warfare, the Thirty Years’ War, probably the worst war in the history of the modern West. Fifteen million out of 20 million German people died in the course of 30 years, and the 5 million who were left, all the women had been violated, and all the men only have one arm or one leg. It was truly atrocious.
They’re responding to real traumatic historical events. They’re responding to what is going on around the corner from where they live. They come up with this very, very beautiful approach to life, full of optimism, full of idealism. For about 20 years, the Dutch Republic actually lives by these codes of belief to a great extent. It’s the only tolerant country in Europe.
And this:
COWEN: What makes George Stubbs such an underrated painter?
GRAHAM-DIXON: I think he’s been underrated forever because of his subject matter. I blame the French. The French in the 17th century invented a system for ranking works of art by their subject matter. Up at the top, you and I, we could put on some armor and confront each other with swords, and Poussin would paint us. That would be a history painting done from the life. That would be at the pinnacle. Then would be a painting of an event, maybe a meeting between great men. Then, below that, there would be a portrait.
You’d keep going down, and eventually you’d get to paintings of still lifes, like flowers and fruit, or paintings of animals. These were the lowest works of art because they featured the basest things. I think that Stubbs, to a certain extent, was the victim of that.
COWEN: Are we now able to see them properly?
GRAHAM-DIXON: Yes. It’s been no problem since Stubbs and Constable, more than anyone else, slightly controversial to say, but I think they paved the way for modernism because they showed, not necessarily deliberately, but they showed that anything could be painted, anything at all, like a piece of mud or a piece of a river could be painted in such a way as to touch on the very highest thoughts and ideas and beliefs and feelings that subject matter is completely, in a sense, irrelevant. Cézanne picked up on that when he said, “I want to stun Paris with an apple. I’ll paint an apple, and I’ll paint it with such astonishing concentration that you’ll see it as an epistemological challenge to all of your philosophy.”
I think that French art gets that from British art because British art has to be like that because that’s all the aristocrats are going to commission. They look down on people like Stubbs, in a sense. If I’m an aristocrat in the 18th century and I want a really important picture, I’ll go to Italy and I’ll buy one, thank you very much, and I’ll buy my history painting from Titian. You, sir, Stubbs, you just paint my horse. It’s my racehorse, and I’m very fond of him. Paint him well and don’t scare him.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And here is Andrew’s very interesting new book on Vermeer.
Markets in everything?
Peter Brook‘s five-hour-plus film adaptation of “The Mahabharata” is set for a BFI Blu-ray release on Aug. 10, presented in high definition from a new 4K restoration of the 1989 production.
The release centres on the triptych version of the film, running 332 minutes, which sits between Brook’s three-hour cinema cut and the six-hour television version he shot concurrently. Based on the ancient Hindu epic, the film was originally produced by Brook with screenwriters Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne, and features an international cast drawn from 16 nationalities.
Here is the Variety article, but will there be a version suitable for U.S. players? The work is highly recommended, real genius. For the pointer I thank Sam Mendelsohn.
Cross-ethnic casting
I complained about the casting of The Odyssey per se (the blind beggar was best), but in general I do not mind cross-ethnic casting. I am glad Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra, Dev Patel played David Copperfield, Denzel Washington played Macbeth, black and Latino actors play white parts in Hamilton, and that Morgan Freeman can play God well (God himself would not be “white,” but God as black is nonetheless a conscious choice), and there was Jessye Norman (among others) singing and playing many traditionally white roles on the opera stage.
Recently in a private conversation I suggested that Nabeel Qureshi be cast as the next James Bond. He has a British accent, was born in (northern!) England, is tall and is good-looking. He does not remind anyone of Roger Moore. He is old enough where you could believe he has some experience as a spy, and at the baccarat table, but young enough where he could do those stunts without it seeming ridiculous.
I recall the talk of a black Bond, a notion which likely would end up dull and cliched. But a Bond of Pakistani ethnic origin? Now that would occasion some debate.
I am not saying it always works. I likely would object to a remake of Zulu with an all-Chinese cast. Or there can be major cultural mistakes which are not cross-ethnic, such as casting a Liverpudlian in the role of a London elite. Everyone in The Sopranos should at least be pretending to fit their roles, and indeed Tony himself grew up in New Jersey. I would have done fine in a cameo role.
My excellent Conversation with Chase Koch
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father’s lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa’s grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De’Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents’ garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it’s like working with MrBeast, how Koch Industries has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the “farm team,” why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old’s urging, where he’s traveling next, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: N.W.A., are they good? I like them.
KOCH: I had my phases. My first business, Tyler, was when I was 15 years old and one of my best friends to this day, Askia Ahmad, he was wiring up car stereos and building custom boom boxes and all that. We basically built a business out of my parents’ garage because they had all the tools and materials and everything. Like, “Let’s build a business out of here. My parents hopefully will pay for the machinery, and then we can sell these boom boxes to our friends at high prices and capture a big margin.” Through that, I learned about the whole gangster rap. Your listeners may be surprised, but it started with me, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Eazy-E, of course—
COWEN: It’s so good.
KOCH: Dre.
COWEN: Snoop.
KOCH: Snoop.
COWEN: You know Snoop, right?
KOCH: It’s so good, so good. Yes.
COWEN: What’s Snoop like?
KOCH: Snoop? Okay. This goes back to what I was mentioning on the power of music to unify people. So I’ve been with Stand Together. For the listeners that don’t know, it’ll give context to your question. Stand Together is an organization that has really a community of like-minded leaders that all believe in one thing, in the power of human potential, and that every human has a gift.
We all know that there’s so many barriers in society that are holding people back, whether it’s barriers in education, barriers in regulation, so you can’t start a business, barriers in our criminal justice system, you name it. What Stand Together does is we have basically a comprehensive strategy that addresses everything from education to policy to bottom-up empowerment in communities to drive real social change. I’ve been a part of this for as long as I can remember.
My father’s been working on social change for 60 years. My passion for music, as you can see from your last line of questioning, with Stand Together and that whole community, we never tapped into culture. When I say culture and what the next generation pays attention to—sports, music, YouTube, entertainment, creators, media. During COVID, I had this idea that we’ve never tapped into music to drive social change.
And on one specific point:
Back to your question on energy, 4 percent of the overall capital consumed at Koch is in refining, which is basically where my grandfather started the company. I think that surprises a lot of people because I think a lot of people are still stuck in this, “Well, you’re this energy company.” No, we’re not. We touch the majority of the economy now, and we’re in everything from forest products, consumer products, software, as I described, glass manufacturing, to energy and fertilizers as well.
Interesting throughout.
Is Alexander Calder the great American artist?
I am not ready to make this claim, but I wondered this after seeing the marvelous exhibit at Fondation Vuitton. To Calder’s credit:
1. His work is both beautiful and deep. It also can be fun. Unlike many other high-status artists, most Americans like or could like his work.
2. It is immediately recognizable and the body of work has a coherence as a whole.
3. He invented a new form — the mobile — and showed it could be art.
4. His works have iconic placement in many major American cities, namely Chicago, Grand Rapids, New York, Los Angeles, Cambridge, Philadelphia, Houston, Minneapolis, Seattle, and a bunch more. Who else can match that list?
5. He worked in multiple genres with great success, including not just sculpture (of various kinds, including wire sculpture and bronze sculpture) but also painting, works on paper, and jewelry (!). He worked with metal and wood and wire and string in his sculptures. The exhibit is wonderful in showing all this.
6. He built things, a very American endeavor, and he trained as a mechanical engineer. Mobility is also a very American idea.
7. He lived during the major period of American growth and hegemony, namely 1898-1976, very American years to have been on the scene.
I would note that most people think first of his large installations, which to me are his least interesting works. The small sculptures I admire the most? In this regard he remains underrated.
Who else are possible candidates for this designation? A while back Jasper Johns might have been an obvious leader for the title, and he remains in contention. But perhaps it is all a tad too formal and serious?
Rothko and Pollock are too one-dimensional, no matter how much you may admire the dimension. The Hudson River School does not boil down easily enough to a single artist, plus it is mainly just painting. Winslow Homer is a possibility. Warhol is another candidate, as his work is both seminal and “very American,” but currently it feels overexposed? (I am not anti-Warhol but perhaps his influence peaked some while ago.) Roy Lichtenstein did very well in sculpture as well as painting and prints, and he is in the running as well.
But I no longer think Calder is such a crazy choice for this designation. Do go see the show! The people we saw the show with were amazed at how much they had underrated his depth, breadth, and quality.
Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics
Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end. From Jackson:
From the episode summary:
Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be
Excerpt:
Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.
…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?
Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.
There is much more of interest, self-recommending!
My Conversation with Joanne Paul
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she’s drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.
Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More’s persecution of heretics, how Holbein’s portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne’s upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain’s current stagnation, the subject of her next book, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: As you point out in the book, and you’re well aware, he oversaw the persecution of heretics. He oversaw torture. He was misogynistic when he wrote about women. Was he just a bad guy? Is that the correct picture of More, or am I supposed to admire him? He took a stand on principle, and he died, but what was the principle, really? To defend Catholicism, which then was also an instrument of torture?
PAUL: As a historian, I take one of my principles as to not try to put people into a box of good or evil.
COWEN: I’m not a historian. Should I just dislike him?
PAUL: No, I think you should be interested in these contradictions. I think you should be interested in the complexity that is the human experience. I think we should ask questions about why someone who is clearly very educated, clearly very intelligent, clearly very worldly in many ways, has also these beliefs that we rightly and should condemn. With Thomas More, I think he comes to these beliefs out of a place of fear. I think that’s something that we should take note of. He was afraid of what he would consider the Lutheran heresy. He was afraid of how it would lead to the breakdown of his society, and he was convinced by those people who held that to be the case.
I think that there are important lessons in that for us today, the way that we can become convinced that a group will lead to the breakdown of our society, that fear can lead to that hatred and indeed that violence. I think that’s an important lesson. If we just reject, oh, he was bad, then I don’t think we understand the way in which someone like Thomas More can become convinced that way. In terms of his role in opposing heresy, yes, he advocated for the persecution of heretics. He thought it was right and just that they were burned at the stake. I think that at times his role in that has been overstated, and I think we just need to understand what it was in historical reality.
He imprisoned heretics. He interrogated them. We don’t know if he tortured them. That was something he was accused of at the time. He said he didn’t. I don’t know that we’ll ever find evidence either way on that. There were three cases that he oversaw as Lord Chancellor of those who were burned at the stake. I only say that because I see on social media and the like and people presenting me with the suggestion that hundreds were put to the flames by Thomas More personally. I just think we have to understand what it is that we are actually talking about.
And:
COWEN: What precursors of the scientific revolution do you see, other than education? That’s coming in the 17th century. Is there more emphasis on calculation or measurement or accounting? What are the roots in the Tudor period?
PAUL: A lot of that comes from the Renaissance, as indeed humanism does. There’s this reintroduction of a lot of classical texts, an advocacy for reading these classical texts, particularly Greek texts and learning Greek. A lot of it is coming from an engagement with Greek mathematics and science. The other thing, and this is something I really emphasize when I’m teaching the scientific revolution with my students, is that we have to remember that the scientific revolution isn’t this grand triumph of science over religion or mysticism or what have you, that these two things very much go hand in hand through the 16th and into the 17th century.
The scientific method, for instance, comes from alchemy, which we might think of as an occult science. The methodology for scientific experimentation comes out of this desire to find the philosopher’s stone. Someone like John Dee is this polymath, as well as this occultist, Francis Bacon, has his interests in these sort of mystical elements as well. The growth and interest in what we might think of as mystical texts, a lot of them having to do with Judaism, as well as these Greek texts, comes together to form, I think, something that looks like the foundations of the scientific revolution.
A good episode with many points of interest. And I enjoyed Joanne’s recent book Thomas More: A Life.
*The Migrants: A Memoir with Manuscripts*
Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is one of the very greatest books of the last twenty years. So I buy whatever else he puts out, and I did not regret my purchase of this one. Imagine an intersecting tale of a boyhood in New Zealand (!), the medieval manuscript collecting habits of Colonial Secretary Sir George Grey, and a Bildungsroman of both aesthetic taste and personal maturation. The back cover notes that “Christopher de Hamel has probably handled more medieval manuscripts than anyone else alive…” That he is such a special person shines through in all of his writings. By the way, I learned that Dunedin is the Gaelic word for Edinburgh.
The new book you can order here.
Music markets remain deglobalized
It might seem surprising, in a world of global stars, that the 6m Danes, many of whom are fluent in English, listen mainly to homegrown music. And until fairly recently they did not. In 2019 only five songs in Denmark’s top 20 were in Danish. By last year the figure was 18.
A similar trend is under way in other countries—and in other forms of entertainment. From Asia to the Americas, music charts are increasingly dominated by local sounds. Hollywood television-streaming companies are commissioning more local productions in foreign markets, causing consumption of American shows to fall. Social networks are connecting the whole world, but so far people are mainly using them to consume local content. And as video gaming expands, it too is becoming increasingly tailored to local cultures…
In 2023 Will Page and Chris Dalla Riva noted in a London School of Economics paper that a number of European countries including France, Germany, Italy and Poland had seen rising domestic shares of their top tens in the preceding decade. Since then the phenomenon seems to have spread. Mr Page, formerly chief economist at Spotify, finds that 55% of streams of songs in Sweden’s top 20 last year were in Swedish, up from 29% in 2019. Norway’s figure rose from 13% to 38% in the same period.
That is from The Economist, and of course it echoes themes from my earlier Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures. And Brazil most of all?
Latin America has gone the same way (see chart 1), Brazil astonishingly so: in the first week of June 96 of the top 100 artists on YouTube Music in the country were Brazilian (foreigners included Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson). Last year Thailand had a solidly local top ten, while Indonesia and the Philippines each had eight local tracks in their respective charts; Nigeria’s top ten were all local, as were nine of South Africa’s, according to the IFPI, which represents the recorded-music industry.
The same trends are happening for television as well, albeit less radically.