Category: The Arts
The Boom and Bust Rap
The Keynes-Hayek rap video is finally here and it's brilliant. The lyrics cover Keynesian economics and Austrian business cycle theory very well but what I liked best were the many ways in which the visuals, the story and the music subtly and sometimes not so subtly (!) parallel the economics–e.g. note what happens to Keynes after the big party!
It's clear that a lot of thought went into integrating the music, the story and the lyrics in order to make the most of this medium and I give my colleague Russ Roberts and John Papola much props.
Markets in everything: the uncollectible artwork
Felix Salmon reports:
A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is an artwork by Caleb Larsen, currently for sale on eBay. If it hasn’t sold in the next couple of days – the minimum bid is $2,500 – it will go back on eBay. On the other hand, if it does sell, it will still go back on eBay. That’s what it does, as clearly explained in the legal contract accompanying the work:
Artist has created a work of art titled “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009)” (“the Artwork”) which consists of a black box that places itself for sale on the auction website “eBay” (the “Auction Venue”) every seven (7) days. The Artwork consists of the combination of the black box or cube, the electronics contained therein, and the concept that such a physical object “sells itself” every week.
My favorite things Florida
Was Tom Petty correct to think he was cursed by the critics for sounding so "normal"? I'd rather listen to Tampa Red or Cannonball Adderly. You can list many people who spent winters in Florida, or died there, but they don't quite count. Ernest Hemingway had a close enough tie to Key West and I favor his short stories over his novels. Zora Neale Hurston is still worth reading. Carl Hiaasen is true Florida but I've never finished one of his books. Juanes lives in Miami and he has five or so very good pop songs, maybe more. Celia Cruz ended up there too and I suspect many other Latino musicians did as well. In sum that list probably would be very impressive. Purvis Young is a good "Outsider" artist.
Many excellent movies are set in Florida. Where do I start?
Body Heat. The underrated Wild Things. Key Largo. Contact. Deuce Bigelow. Ace Ventura (a favorite). Various space launch movies. The superb Ulee's Gold. Parts of Midnight Cowboy. Didn't Elliott Gould and Robert DeNiro end up there every now and then? I feel there are additional noir movies and parts of gangster movies. I Dream of Jeannie was set there.
Miami has long been one of my favorite American cities and I like Tampa for its dumpiness. Naples is boring.
The economic theories of the MLA
A resolution calling for full- and part-time faculty members to “be eligible for tenure” and expressing the view that “[a]ll higher education employees should have appropriate forms of job security, due process, a living wage and access to health care benefits” passed in a 81-15 vote, but not without concerns from delegates that the wording went too far – or not far enough.
Ian Barnard, an associate professor of English at California State University-Northridge, said he wanted to see the resolution extended to include a call for all faculty to be eligible not only for tenure but also for full-time employment. Simply voicing support for a lecturer to continue to be guaranteed one course per semester was, he said, “really weak … a way for us to cop out,” for departments to avoid paying for health benefits and for adjunct faculty to continue bouncing around among many jobs just to make ends meet.
The full story is here. Why don't journalists demand something similar? You can pinch yourself, but it really is 2010.
By the way, here are some facts:
In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are.
Merry Christmas
My favorite things Nicaragua
1. Author and poet: Ruben Dario is a clear first pick and he is by far the most influential Nicaraguan figure in the history of ideas in Latin America. It still reads quite well. Here are Ruben Dario quotations.
2. Artist: Adele de y Gaza. In general I like the naive painting from the Grenada area. I've only seen pictures of her work in books and I can't even find her in Google. If you're looking to sell one by her, let me know. I am also a fan of Alejandro Arostegui, from Bluefield.
3. Bianca Jagger deserves a mention, if only because I don't know of many other Nicaraguans, but for what category? Favorite Nicaraguan model? Favorite Nicaraguan ex-wife of a Rolling Stone?
4. Album, about: The best third of The Clash's Sandinista is one of my favorite albums, period.
5. Film, set in: Men With Guns, by John Sayles. I don't love this movie, but what am I to pick? I found The Mosquito Coast to be excruciating. Here are other options, none of which I've seen, none of which I want to see.
By the way, if you're wondering what happened to "My Favorite Things Alberta," all I could think of was Six.
Bad Design Within Reach
Warning: this post is about furniture. Fast Company has an article on the decline of the furniture company Design Within Reach. The article focuses on how in an effort to cut costs DWR "copied" designs it had earlier sold as a distributor. A look at the before and after, however, shows that the real problem is that the copies are nowhere near as aesthetically pleasing as the originals.
Take a look at these credenzas. In the DWR version where is your eye first drawn?
Is the eye not drawn first to the stodgy feet? The thick and heavy feet of the DWR version combined with the shorter width give it a weighted down, stolid feel. The original in contrast is light and airy, it almost floats above the floor, an effect which is aided by the shading with its subtle look of fluffy clouds.
Now take a look at the bookshelfs.
The DWR version has a clean look but it's boring–you see it once and you are done. Now look at the original. Does it not draw your attention? In the original the middle shelves do not align vertically with the side shelves and the top and bottom middle shelves are open, not closed. I think the result is a much more interesting and entertaining piece of furniture.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled dose of economics.
Invisible Man
Chinese artist Liu Bolin does not use photoshop, just paint. It helps to know that the government shut down his art studio in 2005. More here
Markets in everything: 8 year old child custody for two Damien Hirsts edition
Kapernekas, a 49-year-old New York art dealer filed a suit
in federal court in Manhattan claiming an interest in the two
Hirsts, which have been valued at an estimated $47.6 million,
court documents show. The custody suit, involving their 8-year-
old daughter, was being heard in New York County Family Court.Kapernekas has agreed to drop the federal suit and claims
on the Hirsts in exchange for: custody of their daughter
(Brandhorst gets visitation and vacation rights); a one-time
payment of $100,000; a $500,000 trust for the daughter’s
education; a loft on Wooster Street in Manhattan’s Soho district
valued at about $5 million to be held in the daughter’s name as
sole owner; $5,000 a month in child support; and $640,000 to
cover Kapernekas’s legal expenses, according to Kapernekas.
The full story is here and the pointer is from Felix Salmon. Felix writes:
Need I add that one of the Hirsts is entitled “In this terrible moment
we are victims clinging helplessly to an environment that refuses to
acknowledge the soul”?
Cool Japanese Barcodes
“I like your lunatic”
Speaking of dinner, when the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt
told a friend, a Parisian doctor, that he wanted to meet a certifiable
lunatic, he was invited to the doctor’s home for supper. A few days
later, Humboldt found himself placed at the dinner table between two
men. One was polite, somewhat reserved, and didn’t go in for small
talk. The other, dressed in ill-matched clothes, chattered away on
every subject under the sun, gesticulating wildly, while making
horrible faces. When the meal was over, Humboldt turned to his host. “I
like your lunatic,” he whispered, indicating the talkative man. The
host frowned. “But it’s the other one who’s the lunatic. The man you’re
pointing to is Monsieur Honoré de Balzac.”
The remainder of the article, which concerns why good writers are not always good speakers, is interesting as well.
Mullah maximization
It turned out the Shah's curators knew what they were doing. They had bought some outstanding contemporary paintings — including Warhol's Suicide (Purple Jumping Man) and the stellar Woman III — to fill the museum that was never built. Say what you want about the Ayatollah, but despite his public rhetoric about the decadence of the West, his regime knew valuable assets when it saw them. The regime hung onto the paintings, rather than burn them along with the American flag.
That is from Richard Polsky's new and fun i sold Andy Warhol (too soon). The book is a sequel of sorts to Polsky's earlier I Bought Andy Warhol. I am also a fan of Polsky's earlier Art Market Guides.
How to achieve artistic immortality
…now a Canadian writer is using science to create a poem that could live forever..
Christian Bök, an experimental poet and associate professor of English at the University of Calgary, is working on a piece he plans to encipher and insert into the genetic code of an "extremophile" bacterium, one that is tough enough to survive conditions that would wipe out the human race.
He notes that others have already stored enciphered text in strands of bacterial DNA, including the lyrics to It's a Small World After All. But his poem will be the first that actually contains instructions for a protein or, as he sees it, a second poem.
That is from a piece by Anne McIlroy in the 5 September Globe and Mail; the article is not yet on-line. "Each letter of the alphabet is assigned to a tiny piece of DNA that codes for an amino acid…", which limits the vocabulary. It is noted that the author is having trouble coming up with the fifty words or so which deserve immortality. Here is background information on the poet. You can follow his tweets here.
I will make the more general observation that Canadian newspapers remain underblogged.
Alex Colville, painter from Nova Scotia
David Hume on the posts of honour
Were MOLIERE and CORNEILLE to bring upon the stage at present their
early productions, which were formerly so well received, it would
discourage the young poets, to see the indifference and disdain of the
public. The ignorance of the age alone could have given admission to
the Prince of TYRE; it is to that we owe the Moor: Had
Every man in his humour been rejected, we had never seen
VOLPONE.
That's from Hume's Of The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences. I discuss related points in my What Price Fame? The proximate pointer is from Dan Klein.