Category: The Arts

It was a bargain, I say.  Here is my review of Don Thompson’s excellent The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art.  Here is one excerpt from my review:

Should we think such purchases are silly or noble? Many people recoil
from the contemporary art market as the home of pretension and human
foible, but as expensive pursuits go, the art market is a relatively
beneficial one. The dead shark cost $12 million to buy but, of course,
it didn’t cost nearly that much to make. So the production process
isn’t eating up too many societal resources or causing too much damage
to the environment. For the most part, it’s money passing back and
forth from one set of hands to another, like a game – and, yes, the
game is fun for those who have the money to play it. Don’t laugh, but
we do in fact need some means of determining which of the rich people
are the cool ones, and the art market surely serves that end.

A former curator from the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg
believes they can. She has developed a new method for dating paintings
in collaboration with Russian scientists which, she says, provides
“indisputable” evidence of whether a painting was made before or after
1945.

According to the inventors, the new patented technology is based on the
idea that man-made nuclear explosions in the 1940s and 1950s released
isotopes into the environment that do not occur naturally. The tiniest
traces of these isotopes, Caesium-137 and Strontium-90, permeated the
planet’s soil and plant life, and eventually ended up in all works of
art made in the post-war era because natural oils are used as binding
agents for paints.

Therefore, they believe that any work of art
originally believed to pre-date World War II, but which registers trace
amounts of Caesium-137 and Strontium-90, can be “definitively” declared
a post-1945 forgery.

Here is the full story.  It’s worth noting that many categories in the art world show rates of forgery approaching 50 percent or higher.

It is here, iffy sound quality (I only tested the beginning) but I believe it is mostly intelligible.  I talk about Facebook, Second Life, Kindle, and many other recent changes in cultural markets.  I make the bold claim — true in my view — that the last five years have seen more changes in "cultural economics" than in any other five-year period in human history.

This was the keynote address to the Association of Cultural Economists International (a very good group, sadly not enough Americans attend); the very able Michael Rushton summarizes some parts of it.  His end take:

Will these innovations kill the live performing arts? He doesn’t think
so: doing lots of stuff on the web probably cuts into the time we might
have spent passively in front of the TV, but at the end of the day we
want to go out and about. Museum visits are rising, not falling.

One resilient puzzle identified in the literature is the “declining
price anomaly.” This effect was identified by Ashenfelter (1989) and is
an obvious repudiation of the law of one price. It refers to the
observation that as an auction proceeds, the prices of the lots
decline, even for identical goods (e.g., wines). Beggs and Graddy
(1997) established the existence of the “declining price anomaly” for
heterogeneous goods using data for Contemporary and Impressionist art
auctions. This has generated great interest and a number of papers now
report somewhat conflicting results in this respect, although the
majority still seems to find evidence in favor of this anomaly (see
Ashenfelter and Graddy 2003, and Ginsburgh and van Ours 2007.) In light
of this controversy, it is of interest to investigate whether or not
Latin American art auctions are also subject to the declining price
anomaly or the so-called “afternoon effect” (“morning after effect”
would be a more appropriate name in this context as Latin Art auctions
occur in two parts, the first starting late in the day, say 7pm, and
the second starting earlier the following day, usually 10am.) In line
with previous research (Beggs and Graddy 1997), we find strong evidence
that the “declining price anomaly” holds for Latin Art data, even after
controlling for auction and artist unobserved characteristics (dummies)
and a huge array of paintings characteristics, including reputation and
provenance.

Here is the link and yes I do believe this is true.  I believe it is mostly neuroeconomics at work, namely that we are more excited by new offerings than by familiar offerings.  Similarly, a painting that has been "shopped around" usually goes for a lower price than a comparable picture coming on the market for the first time in many years; admittedly it is hard to segregate out the selection bias here.  So if the same Jasper Johns print is being auctioned at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., some people just don’t want to wait with their bids.  I wonder also if there is a theorem about how an asymmetric distribution of risk-averse bidders, fearing they might not get the work at all, could generate the same price pattern,

An alternative hypothesis — likely true in part — is that even "identical" artworks differ slightly in quality and the auction houses sell the better one first, if only to create a price precedent and excitement effect for the second one later in the day.

This is stupid but it makes me laugh the more I think about it. The original idea is due to Claude Shannon.  Hat tip to Boing Boing.

Why isn’t there more science fiction theatre?

Lately there has been too much travel, yes, but writings these posts is fun.  I am headed toward Sundance.  Here goes:

1. Author: Orson Scott Card’s The Ender Trilogy (start with Ender’s Game) is a modern landmark which will be read for years to come.  Next on my list is Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.

2. Actor: James Woods, as he plays in Casino and Virgin Suicides, two fine movies.

3. Best Robert Redford movie: Out of Africa, schmaltz yes but I love it.

4. Film, set in: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid comes to mind.

5. Novel, set in: Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.  The first half in particular is a knockout.

6. Can I have a category for kidnapping victim?  Jeopardy champion?

The bottom line: I love Utah.  I love its baked goods, its Mexican food, its sense of building a new world in the wilderness.  I love that it has a uniquely American religion and I find Salt Lake City to be one of America’s most impressive achievements.  I regard southern Utah as quite possibly the most beautiful part of the United States.  That said, I had a tough time filling out these categories and of course plenty of the usual categories are blank altogether.

There is Barbara Eden and Linda Ronstadt but what other directions can I find?  I’ll try not to resort to retirees, such as Joe Garagiola.  Here goes:

1. Jazz: Charles Mingus’s Ah Um is one of the ten jazz albums that everyone should own.

2. Country and Western: Marty Robbins is good but otherwise I draw a blank.

3. Movie director: Steven Spielberg.  In case you don’t already know them, Duel and Sugarland Express are two of his best movies.  I’m also an advocate of Artificial Intelligence, a brilliant movie about the moral superficiality of human beings.  E.T. was his nadir.

4. Real business cycle theorist: Ed Prescott teaches at Arizona State (which by the way  was just rated as having the hottest students of any school).  If you think through his oeuvre, Prescott has at least three major contributions: time consistency (1977 with Kydland), real business cycle theory, and his work on the equity premium with Mehra.  That’s impressive.

5. Painter and European emigre: Max Ernst lived for twelve years in Sedona.

6. Textiles: Navajo blankets from the 1880-1910 period rank among America’s greatest artistic contributions.  You can buy a first-rate piece for no more than $60,000.

7. Author: Zane Grey fits the category but he doesn’t count as a favorite.  Am I missing anyone important or is this simply not a literary state?

8. Movie, set in:  You have some real winners, including Psycho, Raising Arizona, and the still underrated Tombstone.  3:10 to Yuma I haven’t seen yet.

The bottom line: The list is spotty in parts but the peaks are very high.  I’m also of the opinion that the Northern Rim of the Grand Canyon is the single best sight I’ve seen, ever.  I also love The Biltmore Hotel but alas I am not at that particular lodging right now…

There are few exhibitions worth making a trip to see, but this is one of them.  Here is another angle.  Here are more images.  This one is famous.  Forget that the artist praises the Chinese communist party; pull out your copy of Leo Strauss and visit.

Again lots of peaks but lots of patches too; the distribution is uneven.  Here are a few offhand remarks:

1. Cervantes: Book two of Don Quixote is much better than book one, just in case you never got that far.  The Trials of Persiles and Sigismuda is a nice try but ultimately it fails at being the undiscovered classic.

2. Calderon: Life is a Dream.  The piece of Spanish literature you are most likely not to have read that you should read.  Every smart, well-educated person should know this book.

3. Lope de Vega: If not for the commies he wouldn’t be nearly so well-known.  He is still a good dramatist, though.

4. El Cid: More readable than you might think, and it makes you realize how close they came to being an Arabic society.

5. Miguel de Unamuno: I have some sympathies for him, but if someone tried to write this stuff today, could it even get published?  You could say the same about Jose Ortega y Gasset.  Some people say the two are polar opposites, but who outside of Spain really cares?

6. Federico Garcia Lorca: It might be wonderful on stage but I find it unreadable.

7. Javier Cercas: Soldiers of Salamis.  One of the best novels on wartime guilt, collective memory, and the ambiguous role of the author in a narrative.  Recommended, if you are willing to give it a suitably careful read.

8. Pérez-Reverte: It’s fun stuff, but I don’t know if it will draw attention twenty years from now.  Same with Shadow of the Wind.  If anything it is symbolic of the Americanization of European literature and I don’t mean that in a favorable way.

9. Albert Sanchez Piñol: I loved Cold Skin, originally written in Catalan.  His book on the Congo awaits me.

10. Javier Marias is good, especially A Heart so White. 

The bottom line: Call me provincial, but I see 1660-1980 as a slow patch, at least for a country of Spain’s historic stature. 

Maybe some will call for counting Orwell, Hemingway, and others inspired by Spain.  Will you argue for Pio Baroja?  Or perhaps The Family of Pascal Duarte?  In any case literary culture is strong here and I see the future as bright.  By the way, I’m always looking for recommendations in Spanish contemporary literature.  Is Julian Rios worth reading?

That’s by Peter Doig, who has a big show on at the Tate.

Number of people killed per minute in the Rambo series.

• Rambo: First Blood (1982): 0.01

• Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985): 0.72

• Rambo III (1988): 1.30

• Rambo IV (2008): 2.59

Hat tip to Peter Gordon.