Category: The Arts
Introductory Korean drama
To an economist like me, this fondness for hospitals is surprising, because hospitals are expensive in Korea and much of the bill is not covered by Korea’s National Health Insurance system. Price-elasticity of demand does not seem to work in Korean drama.
That is from Princeton economist Uwe E. Reinhardt, from a document from his “class” on Korean Drama (pdf). He introduces the “class” with this explanation:
After the near-collapse of the world’s financial system has shown that we economists really do not know how the world works, I am much too embarrassed to teach economics anymore, which I have done for many years. I will teach Modern Korean Drama instead.
Although I have never been to Korea, I have watched Korean drama on a daily basis for over six years now. Therefore I can justly consider myself an expert in that subject.
By the way, I have been watching Boys Over Flowers lately, a Korean drama (it’s also on Hulu). Think of it as a mix of Heathers, Mean Girls, and Clueless, but set in a posh Korean high school, with lots of “Average is Over” value. There is definitely income-elasticity of demand in Korean drama, even if there is not much price-elasticity. There is also plenty on matching models, moral hazard, status competition, and repeated games, and not always with cooperative solutions.
For the pointer I thank Oriol Andres.
Happy public domain day!
I received this email from James Boyle at Duke:
Dear Tyler, An early Happy New Year to you and your family — I hope all is well? You may remember our annual survey of the stuff that would be entering the public domain if we had the copyright laws from 1976.
The list this year is a particularly scrumptious one. The mouseover of the book covers is another pleasure.· Samuel Beckett, Endgame (“Fin de partie”, the original French version)· Jack Kerouac, On the Road (completed 1951, published 1957)· Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged· Margret Rey and H.A. Rey, Curious George Gets a Medal· Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat· Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley, The Untouchables· Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays· Walter Lord, Day of Infamy· Studs Terkel, Giants of Jazz· Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, The Three Faces of Eve· Ian Fleming, From Russia, with Love· A.E. Van Vogt, Empire of the Atomhttp://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2014/pre-1976
Movies:
The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Farewell to Arms, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 3:10 to Yuma, 12 Angry Men, Jailhouse Rock, Funny Face, An Affair to Remember, Nights of Cabiria and The Seventh Seal..
(Is this list depressing when set against 2013?)
In the world of fine arts, Picasso’s Las Meninas set of paintings… only themselves legal because no copyright covered Velazquez’s.. would also be entering the public domain.
Lucian Freud on gambling
Gambling is only exciting if you don’t have any money.
That is from the excellent Breakfast with Lucian: The Astounding Life and Outrageous Times of Britain’s Great Modern Painter, by Geordie Greig.
IBM’s Watson will be made available in a more powerful form on the internet
Companies, academics and individual software developers will be able to use it at a small fraction of the previous cost, drawing on IBM’s specialists in fields like computational linguistics to build machines that can interpret complex data and better interact with humans.
That is a big deal, obviously. The story is here.
Pinternet
Very cool.
*The Power of Glamour*, the forthcoming Virginia Postrel book
The subtitle is Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. I believe this is her best and most compelling book. It is wonderfully researched, very well written, the topic is understudied yet of universal import, and the accompanying visuals are striking.
Here is Virginia’s list of personas to help us distinguish glamour and charisma:
Glamour: Barack Obama, Che, Thomas Jefferson, Jackie Kennedy, Michael Jordan, John Lennon, Leonardo, Spock, Tupac Shakur, Joan of Arc dead, and Early Princess Diana.
Charisma: Bill Clinton, Castro, Andrew Jackson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Janice Joplin, Raphael, Kirk, Snoop Dogg, Joan of Arc alive, and Late Princess Diana.
Except she does it in a nice vertical table which I cannot replicate.
She lists Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela, and Steve Jobs as having had both qualities. The book is definitely recommended, and it is out in early November.
Here is her TED talk on the power of glamour.
*The Goldfinch*, by Donna Tartt
Many people are calling this book the novel of the year (reviews here). It’s pretty good and it held my attention — I read 780 pp. and was never tempted to quit. It is an ideal plane read, but I don’t expect it will stick with me. I put it in the “worth reading if you’ve read most of the other books you want to read” category, but that is not a space you should wish to inhabit.
Tyler Cowen talks to Emily Moore
Here I am interviewed in Tank magazine about my article “An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture,” co-authored with Alex. Excerpt:
EM: Your essay contains one of the most interesting footnotes I’ve ever read: “The interactions between the quantity and subjective quality of art are similar to the interactions analysed by Becker and Lewis (1973) between the quantity and quality of children.”
TC: Becker’s work considered how families might regard “more investment in each child” as a replacement for “having lots of children”, and that is indeed a common substitution as economic development proceeds. Analytically, we can think of artworks as similar to children in this regard. Quality, in the sense of an artist pleasing himself or herself, can substitute for quantity. Syd Barrett perhaps knew he had nowhere left to go, aesthetically. Proust and Cervantes didn’t need to write so many other works, perhaps because they felt satisfied with how thoroughly they expressed their visions through what they did. Balzac took a different course and achieved a different kind of creative satisfaction, yet precisely for that reason he may resonate less with people today than the more idiosyncratic visions of Proust or Cervantes.
The original article you will find here.
Banksy Comments on the Nobel Prize?
Mashable: Street artist Banksy set up a stall in New York’s Central Park Saturday, selling his original pieces — worth tens of thousands of dollars each — for $60.
The event was documented on video and posted on Banksy’s website. It took several hours for the first artwork to be sold, to a lady who managed to negotiate a 50% discount for two small canvases. There were only two more buyers, and by 6 p.m. the stall was closed with total earnings of $420.
For comparison, in 2007 Banksy’s work “Space Girl & Bird” was purchased for $578,000, and in 2008 his canvas “Keep it Spotless” was sold for $1,870,000.
What would Fama, Shiller and Hansen say about these asset prices?
Maximizing revenue for non-reproducible art is a matching process, the artist must find the handful of buyers in the world willing to pay the most (see An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art) so perhaps one can explain this as a failure of marketing.
An alternative explanation is that modern art is a bubble, people buy only because they expect to sell to others–take away this expectation and the art doesn’t sell. (Fashions and fads can help the latter explanation a long but there still needs to be an expectation of a future sucker buyer.)
Or perhaps Banksy is commenting on an earlier Nobel winner.
Price ambiguity as a buyer sorting mechanism
This is from Peter Aspden’s FT ten point guide to mastering the contemporary art market:
So you quite like the look of something, and you ask how much it costs. “Two,” may be the reply. The air of vagueness is a test. You will know, from your studies of the artist in question, whether that means £2 (no), £200 (unlikely), £200,000, or £2m. But if the gallerist’s assistant is American, she (almost always a she) may be talking dollars. Don’t ask. Make a rough calculation in your head that covers all possible options. Any physical reaction is ill-advised, other than the barely perceptible raising of an eyebrow. Finally, ask if she will accept roubles. You’re on the front foot now.
Keep in mind that art sellers very often have preferences over the quality of buyers they sell to. Higher quality buyers lead to referrals, perceived gallery quality, and also do more to boost the artist’s reputation, which in turn helps the value of the gallery’s inventory.
Colin Camerer wins a MacArthur Genius grant
The notice is here. Camerer is an economist at CalTech, a founding pioneer of neuroeconomics, and a former child prodigy, the standard set of links on him is here. You can follow Colin on Twitter here.
And don’t neglect these three winners (among others):
— Jeremy Denk, 43, New York City. Writer and concert pianist who combines his skills to help readers and listeners to better appreciate classical music.
— Angela Duckworth, 43, Philadelphia. Research psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania helping to transform understanding of just what roles self-control and grit play in educational achievement. [TC: Duckworth’s home page is here and her research focuses on conscientiousness as a major factor behind educational success]
— Vijay Iyer, 41, New York City. Jazz pianist, composer and bandleader and writer reconceptualizing the genre through compositions for his ensembles, as well as cross-disciplinary collaborations and scholarly writing.
One of those new service sector jobs you have heard about (artisanal markets in everything)
Someone just paid David Rees, of Beacon, N.Y., $35 to sharpen a pencil.
“I think people think: ‘Wow, I can’t believe he actually did it,'” Rees said. “I wasn’t sure what would happen when I sent this guy my money.”
Now before you write him off as some con-artist whittling away on pre-packaged No. 2s from a farmhouse upstate you should know Rees is a sharp guy. He considers himself an artisanal pencil sharpener.
“Internet commenters have definitely made this argument before,” Rees said. “Now, a pencil is a completely transparent communication tool. There’s no secret to it.”
As for his pencils, he began sharpening those after leaving a job as a political cartoonist to work for the 2010 Census, where he spent all day recording his findings with a No. 2 pencil.
“I thought there’s got to be a way to get paid to sharpen pencils for people,” he said.
1,804 flawlessly sharpened mostly No. 2 pencils later, Rees has penned a book on his art form, collected an arsenal of different sharpeners, and taught classes to students who sharpen better than he does.
The article is here. And yet our artisan is not happy:
When Rees started, he hoped every busted tip would lead the writer to pay for a sharpening. Instead, most customers order David’s pencil points and display them as artwork.
“The whole point of the business is to remind people to appreciate yellow, No. 2 pencils because they’re really cool and interesting,” he said. “And to make a ton of money.”
But at this point, work feels like work.
“You do anything long enough for money, it just starts to become a job,” he said.
So as he nears the nice round number of 2,000 sharpenings, Rees suggested that soon he’d like to clean out his sharpeners for good, leaving the world a much duller place.
His website sells his book and sharpened pencils. The books ship quickly, the pencils take approximately six weeks to ship, and cost more than the book.
As I argue in Average is Over, marketing — in the broad sense of that term — is a growth sector for the future. You might recall that three years ago he was charging only $15 per pencil.
For the pointer I thank Samir Varma.
My favorite things Minnesota
I am here for but a short time, speaking at the university, but here is what comes to mind:
1. Folk singer: Is that what he is? Bringing it All Back Home remains my favorite Dylan album, of many candidates.
2. Rock music: The Replacements were pretty awesome for a short while. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince has an impressive body of work, with Sign of the Times as my favorite or maybe Dirty Mind, though when viewed as a whole I find the corpus of work rather numbing and even somewhat off-putting. Bob Mould I like but do not love, the peaks are too low.
3. Jazz: The Bad Plus come to mind.
4. Writer: Must I go with F. Scott Fitzgerald? I don’t like his work very much, so Ole Rolvaag is my choice.
5. Coen Brothers movie: Raising Arizona or Fargo. The more serious ones strike me as too grim.
6. Director: George Roy Hill, how about A Little Romance?
7. Columnist: The underrated Thomas Friedman, who ought to be considered one of the world’s leading conservative columnists but is not.
8. Scientist: Norman Borlaug. I hope you all know who he is by now.
9. Advice columnist: Ann Landers, most of the time she was right, much better and sharper than her sister Dear Abby, plus she coined better phrases.
What else? Garrison Keillor belongs somewhere, even though he isn’t funny. Thorstein Veblen is often unreadable but on status competition, and its Darwinian roots, he was way ahead of his time.
Overall this is a very strong state, and on top of that I feel I am missing some significant contributors with this list. Are there painters or sculptors of note from Minnesota? I can’t think of any.
Will accurate 3-D reproductions disrupt art markets?
From Amsterdam:
The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam has developed high-quality 3D reproductions of some of its finest paintings, with what it describes as the most advanced copying technique ever seen. Axel Rüger, the museum’s director, said: “It really is the next generation of reproductions because they go into the third dimension. If you’re a layman, they are pretty indistinguishable [from the originals]. Of course, if you’re a connoisseur and you look more closely, you can see the difference.”
Each reproduction is priced £22,000 – somewhat more than the cost of a postcard or poster. But the museum is hoping to increase access to pictures which, if they were sold, would go for tens of millions of pounds to Russian oligarchs or American billionaires.
The 3D scanning technique has so far reproduced Almond Blossom(1890), Sunflowers (1889), The Harvest (1888), Wheatfield under Thunderclouds (1890) and Boulevard de Clichy (1887). Further ventures into Van Gogh’s back catalogue are planned.
Over the internet it is hard to tell how good they are, but I would bet $50 I cannot be fooled, not yet at least. And even if I could be fooled, I wouldn’t pay that much for one. The article is here, with one photo, and of course Alex and I analyzed this scenario some time ago.
The pointer is from Ted Gioia, one of my favorite people on Twitter.
How to eat well in Jakarta
There are three main tiers for eating: the stalls, the food courts and restaurants in the fancy malls, and the fancy restaurants and buffets in the fancy hotels.
Oddly, standard stand-alone “restaurants” play less of a role here than in any other major city I know. (Stand-alone stores are also less important, could it be that the hot weather and traffic encourages a clumping of retail visits into large malls?) And the very small restaurants can be good, but overall I think they are dominated by the stalls.
When it comes to the stalls, you will stumble upon a bunch and then you can simply choose what looks good. Stalls in the better parts of town appear more salubrious and indeed probably are.
The food courts are good, and clean, but too homogenized for my taste. Plastic trays reign.
The fancy buffets I would never go to if I lived here, but they are a good way to sample many dishes during the course of a meal. I recommend them for tourists and newcomers. The key to eating well from them is to choose those dishes which require outside aid for their assembly.
The key question is then the optimal ratio of stalls to fancy buffets, and that depends on how many days you have in town. The fancy buffets are also better for some of the fancier dishes, for instance as might involve lamb or crabs, or for dishes from other regions of the country.
And that is how you eat well in Jakarta. Knowledge of specific restaurants is not the key here.