Category: The Arts
Is Amazon Art a doomed venture? Let’s hope so
I do not think it will revolutionize the art world:
Amazon has just announced that it’s partnered up with over 150 galleries and art dealers across the US to sell you fine art through its new initiative Amazon Art.
The site offers over 40,000 original works of fine art, showcasing 4,500 artists. That, perhaps unsurprisingly, makes it the largest online collection of art directly available from galleries and dealers. Partners in the project include Paddle8 in New York, the McLoughlin Gallery in San Francisco, and the Catherine Person Gallery in Seattle.
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon—which will reportedly take a 5 to 20 percent cut on all sales—was planning to launch the new service. At the time, it seemed that plenty of galleries thought that selling art online via Amazon may be distasteful. Clearly, that negative feeling hasn’t stopped Bezos & Co..
Given Amazon’s last attempt at selling art—a project with Sotheby’s back in 2000 — only lasted 16 months, it’ll be interesting to see how the initiative works out.
I expect the real business here to come in posters, lower quality lithographs, and screen prints, not fine art per se. And sold on a commodity basis. There is nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think it will amount to much more aesthetic importance than say Amazon selling tennis balls or lawnmowers.
Should you buy this mediocre Mary Cassatt lithograph for “Price: $185,000.00 + $4.49 shipping”? (Jeff, is WaPo charging you $250 million plus $4.49 shipping? I don’t think so. )
One enduring feature of the art world is that a given piece will sell for much more in one context rather than another. The same painting that might sell for 5k from a lower tier dealer won’t command more than 2k on eBay, if that. Yet it could sell for 10k, as a bargain item, relatively speaking, if it ended up in the right NYC gallery (which it probably wouldn’t). Where does Amazon stand in this hierarchy? It doesn’t look promising.
Their Warhols are weak and overpriced, even if you like Warhol. Are they so sure that this rather grisly Monet is actually the real thing? I say the reviews of that item get it right. At least the shipping is free and you can leave feedback.
I’ve browsed the “above 10k” category and virtually all of it seems a) aesthetically absymal and b) drastically overpriced. It looks like dealers trying to unload unwanted, hard to sell inventory at sucker prices. I’m guessing that many of these are being sold at multiples of three or four over auction price histories. Is this unexceptional John Frost worth even a third of the 150k asking price? Maybe not.
Amazon wouldn’t sell you a kitchen blender that doesn’t work, or that was triple the appropriate cost, so why should they sully their good name by hawking art purchase mistakes? If you’ve built the best web site in the history of the world, which they have, you may decide that quality control should not be tossed out the window. Much as I admire their shipping practices, what makes Amazon work for me is simply that they sell better stuff and a wider variety at cheaper prices. Why give that formula up by treading into a market where such an approach won’t make any money? Why compete in a market where an awesomely speedy physical delivery network means next to nothing?
Overall, I don’t see the advantage of Amazon over eBay in this market segment. One nice thing about eBay is that you can see if anyone else is bidding and also that surprise quality items pop up on a relatively frequent basis, due to a fully decentralized supply network. You also can hope for extreme bargains and indeed I have snagged a few in my time. On the new Amazon project, supply is restricted to a relatively small number of bogus, mainstream galleries, about 150 of them according to the publicity.
eBay has the advantage with “free for all,” and good galleries and auction houses have the advantage when it comes to certification and pricing reliability. I don’t see the intermediate niche that Amazon is supposed to be trying to fill.
I’m a big fan of Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post, but if you’re looking for the case against that move, just click on that Monet purchase and see what happens.
My favorite things Sri Lanka
This is a tough one, and I admit failure in advance, and yes I will call upon the diaspora in this case. But even that doesn’t much help me. Here goes:
1. Popular music: M.I.A., with Arular and then Kala being my favorite works by her.
2. Science fiction writer, lived in: Arthur C. Clarke lived there for over fifty years.
3. Author: Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, I like but do not love his work. Two quite recent Sri Lankan novels are Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel, and Ru Freeman, On Sal Mal Lane, both noteworthy.
4. Movie, set in: I can’t think of one. Bridge on the River Kwai was filmed here.
5. Architect: Geoffrey Bawa, some images are here.
Is Lal Jayawardena the most famous Sri Lankan economist? And I have had excellent Sri Lankan food in Germany, most of all in Berlin. There is a takeaways Sri Lankan place in Derwood, Maryland, Spice Lanka, which I have yet to try. When I was much younger, the Sri Lankan chess player Sunil Weeramantry was always very cordial to me. And my grandmother had a Sri Lankan friend who, when I was a small boy, used to bring us cashews. I liked him. I think of the music — perhaps unfairly — as falling into the “raucous, influenced by cinema, good jolly fun but I’m not going to buy it” category, but I would gladly receive your better-informed recommendations in the comments.
Sorry people, I’ll try harder next time. I don’t follow cricket and I know virtually nothing about cinema here, I hope to learn more.
China allegory of the day
The subtitle of the article is:
A Chinese museum has been forced to close after claims that its 40,000-strong collection of supposedly ancient relics was almost entirely composed of fakes.
Here is one good excerpt:
Wei Yingjun, the museum’s chief consultant, conceded the museum did not have the proper provincial authorizations to operate but said he was “quite positive” that at least 80 of the museum’s 40,000 objects had been confirmed as authentic.
“I’m positive that we do have authentic items in the museum.”
Here is another bit:
Mr Wei said that objects of “dubious” origin had been “marked very clearly” so as not to mislead visitors and vowed to sue Mr Ma, the whistle-blowing writer, for blackening the museum’s name.
“He [acted] like the head of a rebel group during the Cultural Revolution – leading a bunch of Red Guards and making chaos,” Mr Wei claimed.
Shao Baoming, the deputy curator, said “at least half of the exhibits” were authentic while the owner, Wang Zonquan, claimed that “even the gods cannot tell whether the exhibits are fake or not,” the Shanghai Daily reported.
China is in the midst of a museum boom, and it is believed that eighty percent of the fossils in Chinese museums are fake.
Here is a very good piece by Kate Mckenzie on the Chinese economy.
My favorite things Scotland
And so the journey continues.
Let’s put the Scottish Enlightenment aside and turn to some more recent creations. Here goes:
1. Novel: Alasdair Gray, Lanark. Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod deserve notice as well. I don’t relate to Trainspotting. I understand the case for Robert Louis Stevenson and would wish to jump on board, but usually I lose interest before the end of his books.
2. Painter: Henry Raeburn was part of the Scottish Enlightenment I think. So where to turn? Ken Currie? Scotland is not strong in this category.
3. Classical music: Umm…William Primrose was a strong violist.
4. Architect: Charles Rennie MacIntosh, especially the library.
5. Inventor: James Watt, but there is lots and lots of competition here.
6. Actor: How about Sean Connery? Don’t forget Zardoz.
7. Movie: Gregory’s Girl.
8. Movie, set in Scotland: The Queen.
9. Popular music: David Byrne was born in Scotland. I know the Cocteau Twins, Boards of Canada, Franz Ferdinand, and others, they are OK but I do not love them. Dire Straits and Annie Lennox deserve mention, but overall I suspect many of you rate this group higher than I do. Jesus and Mary Chain? While we’re at it, there is Ewan McLennan and Bert Jansch, both of whom I enjoy.
The bottom line: These are people of intellect (remember the Enlightenment!) and also people of action. For explorers and inventors the record is extremely strong. Yet for music and some of the arts the contributions are rather faint.
My favorite things Iceland
1. Saga: First choice goes to Njal’s Saga. It’s the clearest and crispest of the lot.
2. Novel, modern: How about Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s The Greenhouse? This is a boom area. There are one hundred twenty Icelandic novels translated into German each year [correction of earlier estimate].
3. Popular music: Sigur Ros, Agaetis Byrjun. This CD has a transcendental and also anthemic sound, even if the group never quite lived up to their initial promise. Bjork albums I usually find pretentious and I would rather listen to her earlier group The Sugar Cubes.
4. Annual tournament: Ram groping.
5. Sea bird: The puffin, followed by the guillemot.
6. Video: Daniel Tammet learns how to speak Icelandic in a week. That’s hard.
7. Economist: Erik Brynjolfsson, although I do not believe he was born in Iceland.
8. Movie: Maybe 101 Reyjkavik? I have yet to see The Deep.
9. Movie, set in: Die Another Day, an underrated Bond movie in my view.
10. Vista: How about Höfn?
I am excited that we are arriving this morning. And as for the food, don’t forget the glories of skyr.
Kickstarter and the NEA
Indeed, people have been saying since last year that Kickstarter funds more art-related projects than the NEA. And it’s true! For 2012, the NEA had a total federal appropriation of $146 million, of which 80 percent went toward grants. Kickstarter funded roughly $323.6 million of art-related projects if you include all design and video-related projects, which make up $200 million of the total.
That is from Katherine Boyle. Note that the actual comparison has less weight on the NEA side than this portrait might suggest. The NEA itself notes: “Forty percent of the NEA’s funds go to the 56 state and jurisdictional arts agencies and the six regional arts organizations in support of arts projects in thousands of communities across the country…” To be sure, these are “grants,” but there is still room in the process for overhead — that ogre of non-profit work — to intervene as yet another grant has to be made.
Whither the poet laureate?
Perhaps he could write such poems in his spare time. Or perhaps better not?:
Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate, wondering aloud why the government never asks him to write poems, has inadvertently answered his own question.
“I wish that my government had asked me to write poetry about immigration policy, about Idle No More, about Canada’s complicity in the Middle East, the Enbridge pipeline,” Fred Wah, a Saskatchewan-born poet now living in Vancouver, recently told an audience at an Edmonton literary festival.
“I haven’t been asked to do any of those things.”
…He warned that the taxpayer-funded position risks becoming “homogenized and diluted,” and expressed frustration that during his two-year term in Ottawa he’s been asked to produce just one work — a “mediocre” poem about Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee.
That’s the British Queen Elizabeth by the way, not the Queen Elizabeth who sits on the Bangalore city council. Here is more, via Pierre Lemieux on Facebook.
Detroit facts for today
…the city’s per capita income, averaged over its 684,799 residents, is just $15,261 per year. (That’s less than half the income of neighboring Livonia.) Auto insurance alone eats up a good $4,000 of that, for residents with a car.
And then comes the litany of municipal woes: Detroit has the highest violent crime rate of any major US city, at five times the national average; there were 344 murders in 2011, of which just 39 were solved. Right now, the average response time, if you put in an emergency call to the Detroit Police Department, is 58 minutes.
Detroit’s infrastructure is crumbling: 40% of its street lights are out of order, and it has 78,000 abandoned and blighted structures, of which 38,000 are considered dangerous buildings. Those buildings account for a large proportion of the 12,000 fires Detroit has every year. At the moment, firefighters are instructed not to use the hydraulic ladders on their firetrucks unless there is an immediate threat to life, because the ladders have not received safety inspections for years. Detroit also has just 36 ambulances, of which generally no more than 14 are in operation at any given time. And in terms of the city’s IT infrastructure — well, you can probably guess; suffice to say that a recent IRS audit characterized the city’s income tax system as “catastrophic”.
As far as Detroit’s balance sheet is concerned, there is $9 billion of debt, excluding pension liabilities, and also excluding healthcare and life insurance obligations which are calculated at roughly $6 billion. Debt service in 2013 is projected at more than $240 million, or about 22% of total revenues. Worryingly, under the section of the proposal headed “Realization of Value of Assets”, one finds the priceless collection owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts…
That is all from Felix Salmon.
Where does the right to publicity lie? (hard to discern)
The Screen Actors Guild and several players’ unions have filed briefs supporting Mr. Hart, saying that athletes, actors and other celebrities must have the right to control the use of their identities and to harvest the financial fruits of their fame. The movie industry, book publishers and news organizations, including The New York Times, have lined up on the other side, saying that allowing celebrities to control speech about them runs afoul of the First Amendment.
The dueling briefs cited a grab bag of cases that are hard to wrestle into a coherent legal framework.
The courts have, on the one hand, rejected right-of-publicity suits arising from a painting of Tiger Woods, a comic book evoking the musicians Johnny and Edgar Winter, parody baseball trading cards and a fantasy baseball game that used the names, statistics and biographies of Major League players. But courts have allowed suits over the broadcast of a human cannonball’s entire act, a comic book using a hockey player’s nickname, an ad evoking Vanna White’s skill at turning letters on “The Wheel of Fortune” and a reference to Rosa Parks in a song.
If there is a legal principle that unites these rulings, it is hard to discern. What is clear, though, according to an expansive 2011 Supreme Court decision, is that video games deserve full First Amendment protection.
Here is more, by Adam Liptak. Here is a Gloria Franke paper (pdf) on some of the underlying legal (and economic) issues.
Sentences to ponder
While the ethics behind holograms of deceased celebrities might be questionable (in the words of a parody Twitter account called Aaliyah’s Ghost, “The best duets imo are the ones where both artists are alive & agreed to work together”), copyright permissions and objections from various estates, in addition to the high costs, have so far prevented “resurrections” from becoming a more widespread trend. For its closing ceremony, the London Olympics scrimped on costs, reviving Freddie Mercury for a duet with Jessie J by broadcasting his image on a flat screen rather than a hologram body. It is hard to imagine the Tupac hologram moving forward without permission from his mother Afeni Shakur. The Marilyn Monroe estate, on the other hand, contested plans for a “Virtual Marilyn” concert organised by Musion partner Digicon Media.
Here is more, from the always interesting Joanne McNeil.
Should the Detroit Museum sell off some of its art?
Virginia Postrel says yes:
…great artworks shouldn’t be held hostage by a relatively unpopular museum in a declining region. The cause of art would be better served if they were sold to institutions in growing cities where museum attendance is more substantial and the visual arts are more appreciated than they’ve ever been in Detroit. Art lovers should stop equating the public good with the status quo.
On the fiscal front, Detroit has a much stronger claim on its museum’s assets than the typical U.S. city government. During the 1920s, when the local economy was booming and the museum was still building its collection, the DIA relied on annual appropriations from the city not just to fund operations, as many museums do, but also to buy art. That marked “a significant departure from the norm for major American art museums,” observed art historian Jeffrey Abt in his detailed 2001 history “A Museum on the Verge.” City dollars paid for the core of the museum’s collection, including the Van Gogh, Bruegel, Matisse and Bellini.
We easily can imagine that more people would see those artworks if they were located in Los Angeles or other larger and growing cities. Nonetheless I believe such a sale would set off alarm bells for conservatives, related to Arnold Kling’s “civilization vs. barbarism” axis. Detroit would be sending a signal that it will never even try to go back to what it was, much as if a university spent down most of its endowment and relied on borrowing. Still, perhaps that is where we are at with Detroit.
Another issue is that deaccessioning makes all donors feel less confidence in the stewards of their gifts. If I see Detroit selling off its artworks, should a collector donate his Haitian paintings to the Figge Museum, in Davenport, Iowa? What if the farmland bubble bursts? Might they sell those paintings to Miami or maybe western North Dakota? How many donors know that Detroit has this special history of municipally funded art? But again, letting Detroit and the Detroit Museum rot also won’t do much for donor confidence at the national level; it is a precarious institution in any case and perhaps the purchaser will take better care of the pictures and also market them more effectively (otherwise why buy them?).
In any case, I expect previous norms against deaccessioning to weaken with the onset of The Great Reset.
The world’s longest interview
Defying the stereotype of the tight-lipped Scandinavian, popular Norwegian crime writer Hans Olav Lahlum set the world record for the longest interview on Thursday after spending more than 30 non-stop hours chatting in an online broadcast.
Lahlum, who rarely paused for more than a few seconds, discussed topics ranging from U.S. presidents to his fictional characters during the online show hosted by VG Nett, the online arm of Norwegian tabloid VG.
The new record awaits approval from Guinness World Records.
Fast-talking Lahlum, who is also a left-wing politician, historian and top chess player rarely stumbled during the gabfest, which also covered such scintillating topics as his preferences for mixing puddings and kebabs.
“I think I can safely say that tonight I might go to bed a little earlier than usual,” he said as he and interviewer Mads Andersen beat the old record of just over 26 hours.
Shortly after surpassing the previous record, Lahlum plunged into a weighty discussion on world literature in general and Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in particular.
“Do you have a plan for how you will get Lahlum to stop talking when the interview ends?” one viewer asked VG on its online forum.
There is more here, and the article explains this is part of a broader Norwegian trend toward “slow TV”:
Norway, a pioneer in slow programming, has spawned several lengthy television hits in recent years, and public broadcaster NRK earlier this year aired a 12-hour show centered on a burning fireplace with experts discussing the intricacies of fire wood.
In 2011, it broadcast 134 hours non-stop of a cruise ship going up the Norwegian coast to the Arctic, bagging the world record for the longest continuous TV program along the way.
And an earlier broadcast of an eight hour train journey from Oslo to Bergen was so popular, NRK had to repeat it.
As I’ve mentioned before, so far the Norwegians are having an awesome century.
For the pointer I thank Øystein Hernæs.
Oops, and double oops…
Au pair programs are in danger of ending, a possible victim of legislation now moving through Congress…
At issue is a provision of the bill that would bar any labor contractor from charging a fee to foreign workers being brought into the country. Supporters say the measure is aimed at preventing the exploitation of foreign workers.
The roughly 13,000 au pairs who enter the U.S. each year are considered participants in an “exchange visitor program” run by the State Department. The Senate bill would change their status to “workers,” meaning the new bar on charging upfront fees would apply to them.
The story is here. I predict they will find some semi-legal way around this stipulation, should the bill pass, but still this is a big mistake. Au pairs should not be considered controversial immigrants.
The second oops is this, from the Detroit Institute of Arts:
Museum officials here said Friday they strongly opposed any forced art sales, after the powerful emergency manager of the city indicated that its prized holdings could be sold to pay off creditors in the event of a bankruptcy filing…legal experts say that in a municipal bankruptcy, it is possible for a city to sell assets, even cultural icons. James Spiotto, a bankruptcy attorney and author on municipal-finance issues based in Chicago, said that “in order to provide essential government services like public safety, roads and education, certain other programs are going to be curtailed or eliminated. So it’s not surprising that the sale of art is on the table.”
Putting that museum into private hands would not have been a bad idea. You also can take this as an illustration of the more general point, which I am fond of stressing, that once you consider wealth, hardly anywhere is actually bankrupt or insolvent. Debt problems are most of all problems of politics.
*A History of England in 100 Places*
This 2011 book by John Julius Norwich is both an excellent travel book and one of the very best ways of learning more about the history of England. It is remarkably wide-ranging and properly treats economic and technological (and artistic) history on a par with political history. Here is one short excerpt:
Of all the villages of Suffolk, Lavenham — pronounced with a short ‘a’ as in have — is the most enchanting. It is a monument to the huge boom in the wool industry that occurred between about 1380 and 1550, and seems to have changed amazingly little since. Here you will find not just individual timber-framed houses but whole streets of them, their overhanging jetties leaning and lurching like drunken platoons. The Guildhall in the Market Place was built in the 1520s by one of the three guilds founded to regulate the wool trade. Another, now known simply as the Wool Hall, dates from 1464; it stands on the corner of Lady Street and now forms part of the Swan Hotel.
…These churches [TC: they are sometimes called “Wool Churches”] demonstrate, better than anything else could, the fabulous wealth of their benefactors, the late medieval wool merchants, some of whom, by the end of the fourteenth century, had become rich enough to replace the Florentine financiers who underwrote the royal debts.
Definitely recommended, you can buy the book here.
Hoarding and aesthetics
Here is an excerpt from an interesting piece by Bonnie Tsui, from Pacific Standard, I liked this excerpt:
…hoarders literally see and treat their stuff differently. The physical world of hoarders…is much ore expansive than what the rest of us perceive, and is often free of the rules that we are wont to impose. Even more intriguing, Frost told me that some of the neurological hallmarks of hoarding might indicate a giftedness in the aesthetic appreciation of the physical world, rather than pure illness. One of his patients had a pile that built up in the middle of her dorm room over the course of a week; she started perceiving shapes, colors, and textures, and it became a work of art — something with aesthetic value. “She couldn’t dismantle it, because that would destroy it,” Frost said.