Category: The Arts
Markets in everything — who buys this stuff?
They do:
Like many women who buy runway styles, Ms. Berkowitz wears much of what she buys to charity galas. She gets multiple wearings out of her gowns, including a red Zac Posen one-shoulder gown and a silvery Marc Jacobs dress with a dark-brown sash. She carefully keeps track of which she has worn where and rotates them from season to season.
Christine Chiu wears most items only once. The 28-year-old, who is married to the founder of Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery, goes to events every night of the weekâoften making multiple wardrobe changes in a single night.
"If you're going to a gala for some kind of disease and then you go to a hip art event, you can't wear the same thing," Ms. Chiu says.
I loved this article, recommended.
State support of the arts
Jon Chait (a progressive) is against it, Ezra asks for my view. I favor indirect subsidies for the arts, and indeed to non-profits in general, through our tax system, as we already do. This tax policy is also a major subsidy to religion and, for me, a somewhat difficult decision to accept and also encourage…how shall I put it?…certain features of the American cultural landscape. Nonetheless I believe in "diversification across countries" and I don't want the United States to become too much like Europe.
In America at least, direct arts subsidies have both very low costs and very low benefits.
The issue currently at hand is whether various state-level arts agencies should be abolished or cut back, as is now the talk, including in Texas, Kansas, Arizona, and Washington state. I say these states are doing the right thing. If you're a libertarian, the choice is obvious. If you're a progressive, it is better to spend the money on Medicaid expansion or other more worthy goals. There really is an opportunity cost of this money, and reframing the choice as "so many cents per head" merely disguises that we could use those funds to save some lives. Most of the benefit of arts subsidies goes to the relatively wealthy and well-educated.
I don't see any "intermediate" argument that beats back both the libertarian perspective, on one side, and the redistributive perspective, on the other. The two extreme positions are more defensible than the middle, in this case, and each leads to the same conclusion.
Don't, however, think that cutting state arts funding will much matter for state-level fiscal problems. It won't. The budget problems are mostly about a mix of falling revenue and rising Medicaid expenditures. I am against using such cuts to promote the idea that we are solving our budgetary problems; read David Brooks on this topic.
The real news is that some states are willing to cut arts funding even when they will cease receiving their transfers from the NEA.
If you're an arts snob and wish to mix aesthetics and politics for philosophic reasons, it is better to have arts money spent at the federal rather than the state level. The state agencies are more aesthetically conservative and more oriented toward "economic development" (a myth, for the most part) and local special interest groups. The state-level spending is less meritocratic and the NEA comes closer to serving an "R&D" function for the arts. It didn't help the arts in this country when the NEA had, for political reasons, to start sending forty percent of its budget to the state arts agencies.
The case for state-level support for the arts is strongest, by far, for the state of New York for reasons related to tourism and New York City. But Manhattan, Kansas? Let them watch YouTube.
Addendum: Here is my book on government support for the arts, and the proper roles of the aesthetic and political in liberal thought.
The wisdom of Rocco Landesman
Speaking at a conference about new play development at Arena Stage in Washington on Thursday, Mr. Landesman, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, addressed the problem of struggling theaters. “You can either increase demand or decrease supply,” he said. “Demand is not going to increase, so it is time to think about decreasing supply.”
Here are some of the responses from the sector:
“What does he mean there’s too much supply?!?” wrote Trisha Mead, the public relations and publications manager at Portland Center Stage in Oregon. “What does he mean we can’t increase demand?!? Who determines which theater companies are wheat and which are chaff?!?” In another post, Durango Miller, a playwright and director, said: “Why not just increase funding? Maybe the N.E.A. is outdated and should be replaced by another system for funding the arts in the United States. Or maybe the people who are running the N.E.A. should be replaced.”
My favorite things Egypt
1. Novel: I like all of the Mahfouz I have read, but the Cairo Trilogy is the obvious pick. Here is a very useful list of someone's favorite Egyptian authors and novels.
2. Musical CD: The Music of Islam, vol.1: Al-Qahirah, Classical Music of Cairo, Egypt. The opening sweep of this is a stunner, and it shows both the Islamic and European influences on Egyptian music. Musicians of the Nile are a good group, there is Hamza El Din, and there is plenty of rai. What else? I can't say I actually enjoy listening to Um Kalthoum, but her voice and phrasing are impressive.
3. Non-fiction book, about: Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious. Few cities have a book this good. There is also Dream Palace of the Arabs and Tom Segev's 1967. Which again is the really good book on the 1973 War?
4. Movie, set in: Cairo Time. This recent Canadian film avoids cliche, brings modern Cairo to life, and is an alternative to many schlocky (but sometimes good) alternatives, such as The Mummy, Death on the Nile, Exodus, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on. There is Agora. Egyptian cinema surely has masterpieces but I do not know them. If you're wondering, for books, I could not finish Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings.
5. Favorite food: I was impressed by the seafood restaurants on the promenade in Alexandria. Food in Cairo did not thrill me, though I never had a bad meal there.
6. Philosopher: Must I say Plotinus? I don't find him especially readable.
7. City: I enjoyed Alexandria, but I can't say I liked Cairo beyond the museum (much better than any Egyptian collection outside of Egypt) and the major mosques. The Sphinx bored me. The air pollution prevented me from walking for more than an hour and there was cement, cement. and more cement. The ride between Cairo and Alexandria was one of the ugliest, most uninspiring journeys of my life. The Egyptians were nice to me but I never had the sense that anything beautiful was being done with the country. Let's hope that changes.
8. Opera, about: Philip Glass, Akhnaten. But wait, there's also Aida, with Callas. And there's Handel's Israel in Egypt. Handel set a lot of his operas in Egypt, including Berenice and Giulio Cesare.
Diane Rehm is Egyptian-American but I don't know her show. The new biography of Cleopatra is smooth but the narratives made me suspicious. Was Euclid Egyptian?
Uncelebrated biographies
Nathan Labenz asks:
This got me thinking: what are the most compelling and informative biographies that remain uncelebrated?
"Uncelebrated by whom?" is of course the follow-up question. Nonetheless I will put forward a few names: Jeremy Bentham, Leo Kanner, Norman Borlaug, Brahms and Stravinsky, Antoine Oleyant, a wide variety of 19th century German chemists, engineers, and scientists (who led a second Industrial Revolution), Montaigne, Thomas Bernhard, various French mathematicians, Simon Newcomb, Ramon Llull, Norbert Wiener, Babbage, and I would even say David Hume.
What are we to make of James K. Polk these days? I am not sure.
Relative to their importance, their lives and exploits don't seem to receive much attention. In general, there are few good books (or movies) about the lives of famous economists. Both Hayek and Friedman still lack good biographies, same with Samuelson and Arrow. Smith, Keynes, and Nash are covered, but how many others? Why aren't there more scintillating biographies of engineers and second-tier scientists? It is harder to find important painters, even of the lower tiers, who have not received adequate biographic attention.
In praise of picture books
No, I don't mean the pictures, I mean the text. Picture books are one of the best ways to learn basic information about a topic. First, by viewing the photos you are more likely to remember some aspects of the material. It works for kids and maybe it works for you too. Second, the text is stripped down to essentials. Third, the authors of picture books are often relatively "agenda-less," since most people don't read the text, the selling point is the pictures, and the book is so expensive that the publisher doesn't want to rule out the broadest possible audience.
I would not use picture books to resolve disputes over details or to find the best conceptual framework. The text in picture books has some of the same strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia pages. It's odd to see a similar blandness in both the lowest cost and highest cost corners of the publishing world.
Lately I have been "reading" Ottoman Architecture, by Dogan Kuban, Toyokuni (oddly I can't find it on Amazon or remember the author's name), Textiles: Collection of the Museum of International Folk Art, by Bobbie Sumberg, and Architectura, by Miles Lewis. You can walk into any public library and take home more splendid picture books than you will have time for. How many you can carry is another constraint.
What are the highest prices for video art?
Bill Viola's Eternal Return sold for $712,452 in 2000. The rest of the top ten is all by Viola, Nam June Paik, Matthew Barney, and Bruce Nauman, with the #10 work going for $234,814. I like video art, but to buy it…to me that is one very expensive movie ticket. I did, however, shell out for a Netflix subscription, so at the margin I can watch Black Narcissus for nothing.
The data are from the new and interesting book Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, by Noah Horowitz.
Are unions the enemy of the arts?
At Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, the average stagehand salary and benefits package is $290,000 a year.
To repeat, that is the average compensation of all the workers who move musicians' chairs into place and hang lights, not the pay of the top five.
Across the plaza at the Metropolitan Opera, a spokesman said stagehands rarely broke into the top-five category. But a couple of years ago, one did. The props master, James Blumenfeld, got $334,000 at that time, including some vacation back pay.
How to account for all this munificence? The power of a union, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. "Power," as in the capacity and willingness to close most Broadway theaters for 19 days two years ago when agreement on a new contract could not be reached.
The full article is here and I thank Victor N. for the pointer.
Merry Christmas!
Literary reputations
Somewhat on the way down:
Overall, in other searches also, I see a golden age for "high fiction" in the 1950-1970 period.
Holding steady:
Dwindling:
Up, but down since 2000
On the way up:
Other than very recent authors, these are harder to find than you might think.
Falling off a cliff:
Typing in "Arnold Bennett" is like shooting fish in a barrel.
*Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet*
That is the new book by Jennifer Homans and it is one of the very best non-fiction works of the year, impeccably written and researched. Here is the excerpt of greatest interest to most economists:
None of the Russian ballet's many admirers, however, would be more central to the future of British ballet than John Maynard Keynes. Keynes is usually remembered as the preeminent economist of the twentieth century, but he was also deeply involved with classical dance and a key player in creating a thriving British ballet…
For Keynes…classical ballet became an increasingly important symbol of the lost civilization of his youth…With Lydia at his side, Keynes plowed his talent and considerable material resources into theater, painting, and dance, even as he was also playing an ever more prominent role in political and economic affairs on the world stage.
The couple's Bloomsbury home became a meeting place for ballet luminaries (Lydia's friends) and a growing coterie of artists and intellectuals who saw ballet as a vital art…When Diaghilev died in 1929, many of them joined Keynes in establishing the Camargo Society, an influential if short-lived organization devoted to carrying Diaghilev's legacy forward — and to developing a native English ballet. Lydia was a founding member and performed in many of the society's productions…Keynes was its honorary treasurer.
In the mid-1930s, Keynes also built the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, funding it largely from his own pocket…As Britain sank into the Depression, Keynes's interest in the arts also took on an increasingly political edge: "With what we have spent on the dole in England since the war," he wrote in 1933, "we could have made our cities the greatest works of man in the world."
I did, by the way, very much enjoy Black Swan (the movie), despite its highly synthetic nature, a few disgusting scenes, and its occasional over-the-top mistakes. So far it's my movie of the year along with Winter's Bone, the Israeli movie Lebanon, and the gory but excellent Danish film, Valhalla Rising.
My favorite recording of Swan Lake (and my favorite classical CD of 2010) is conducted by Mikhail Pletnev (controversial but there is a good review here), who was recently cleared of child abuse charges in Thailand.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
I find it increasingly hard to resist the notion that he is the most enduring director of our time. I've now seen Syndromes and a Century (the best place to start), Blissfully Yours, and Tropical Malady and wish to rewatch them all. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (not yet on DVD) won the Golden Palm at Cannes this year. Themes of his movies include dreams, medicine and its authority relationships, sex and eroticism, homosexuality, the nature of cinema itself, memory, sudden fractures of reality, surrealism, and the modernization of Thailand. [Insert Dancing About Architecture cliche here.] You could frame most of the shots from these movies and turn them into stunning photographs. The plot structure is stronger than it appears at first. These movies also have notable (though quiet) soundscapes, as you would find in a Tarkovsky film.
If you expect to disagree, try then the excellent Ong Bak.
For the original pointer to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, I thank Andrew Hazlett. Here is an MP3 on pronouncing his name properly.
How willing are you to believe another human being?: the case of Picasso’s alarm installer
A 71-year-old retired electrician is at the centre of a legal battle after coming forward with more than 200 hitherto unknown paintings by Pablo Picasso, a French newspaper reported Monday.
Experts who have examined the collection have estimated it could be worth some 60 million euros (80 million dollars), Liberation reported.
…Le Guennec said he had worked installing alarm sytems at a number of Picasso's residences, including a villa in Cannes in the south of France, during the last three years of Picasso's life — he died in 1973.
He said he had had been given the works as presents, either by Picasso's wife or from the artist himself. The collection included 271 works, Liberation reported.
For the pointer (more here) I thank Chris F. Masse.
The career of a paper mill writer (MIE)
From one of those people who writes other peoples' term papers for a living:
I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America's moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.
The article is interesting throughout. The fellow can write a 75-page paper in two days, has never visited a library for his work, and earns far more — $66k last year — than most ostensibly professional writers.
For the pointer I thank David B.
A theory of optimal tattoos
David Stearns, a loyal MR reader, asks:
How would you pick a tattoo, if you decided you were going to get one? How would you pick something that your future self is most likely to be glad to have? A favorite piece of art? Follow Leeson's lead and get an economics-related tattoo? Names of family members are off-limits, as are answers like "get a small dot in my armpit that nobody would see."
I would pick a country which I loved visiting, such as Mexico or Brazil, both of which have distinct shapes. It would be an excuse to narrate previous visits and I don't think it would repulse many people, other than the fact that it is a tattoo. An artwork in tattoo form would look low-brow. A Celtic geometric design would be another option. The obvious alternative would be to pick something which looked criminal, but I don't think that would mesh well with my other strategies in life. For some men it would pay off.
Here is Dan Ariely on tattoos.