Category: The Arts

All this attention is being devoted to Alaska, so I thought I should do my own evaluation.  Note in advance that politicians don’t usually make these lists, they’re not "favorite" enough for me.  And enough about her for now anyway (though I’ll note in passing, in response to Andrew Sullivan and others, that if voters want to like her, they’ll simply refuse to see McCain in the properly cynical light); but no more comments on this issue for now as I want the blogosphere back!

1. Novel, set in: Jack London’s Call of the Wild or White Fang are the obvious choices.  Did you know that London’s fiction was very widely read in the former Soviet Union?

2. Music: There’s Jewel and Bette Midler and maybe you’re all wondering which one I will pick.  But the excellent Kevin Johansen, also associated with Buenos Aires I might add, is the proverbial rabbit from the hat.  Ha! 

3. Movie, set in: Both Never Cry Wolf and Grizzly Man are very good; the former had a lead character named Tyler before the name became fashionable.  And isn’t Nanook of the North set in Alaska?  Into the Wild is another pick and I doubt if I have exhausted the list.

4. Basketball player: Carlos Boozer is from Juneau.

5. Sculpture: Alaska is probably #1 in the entire United States once you consider the indigenous peoples.  The best works are from the 1950s and 60s and they are not always attributable.  My personal favorite is Thomassie Annanok but of course that is a matter of taste.  Ingo Hessel’s book on Inuit Art is a favorite of mine, noting that it focuses more on Canada than Alaska.

6. Other arts: The Tlingit (some of whom live in Canada) have excellent totem poles, boxes, and carvings.  The Haida are another rich artistic tradition.

7. Novel, set in: Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is the obvious pick plus I hear The Cloud Atlas (The Liam Callanan book, not the David Mitchell one, which is very good but not connected to Alaska) is good.

8. Travel book, set in: Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings is lovely.  I’ve never read John Muir’s Travels in Alaska but it is likely a contender.

9. Blogger: Hail Ben Muse of Alaska, advocate of free trade!

The bottom line: It relies too much on "set in," but overall the list is better than I had been expecting.  Sadly, Alaska is the one American state I have yet to visit.

1. Fiction: I’ve already covered Roberto Bolaño plenty on MR; The Savage Detectives is his masterpiece but it’s all worth reading.  The massive 2666 is due out later this year.  José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night, while hardly read in the U.S., seems to me one of the most gripping novels of the 20th century.  If you read the Amazon reviews you’ll that others who have read it agree.  This is one of the least read first-rate novels I know.  It’s not easy going, however, and it’s taking me a long time to read through a mish-mash of the English and Spanish-language texts.  To top it all off, Isabel Allende has many fun books, most notably The House of the Spirits, which almost everyone will enjoy.  Chile is much stronger in literature than most people think.

2. Popular music: Ricardo Villalobos is the lead figure of Chilean techno, which is now I hear quite a vibrant genre; Taka Taka is quite a good mix album.  What else can you point me to?

3. Poetry: My favorite Neruda is Canto General, his retelling of Whitman’s America but covering the entire hemisphere.  A masterpiece.  Estravagario is excellent and while I haven’t read Residencia de la Tierra, it is considered another one of his classics.  The love poems are very nice though perhaps not his best material.  In any case he is one of the three or four best poets of the twentieth century.  Gabriela Mistral is talented but I cannot say I love her work.

4. Playwright: Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden is good.

5. Favorite small town: There are so many, but how about Villarica, Punta Arenas, or that small port place next to La Serena whose name I cannot remember?  Chile is one of the world’s best countries for lovely small towns.

6. Movie, set in or made in: Sorry folks, but I can’t think of a single one.  What am I missing?

7. Seafood dish: Curantos.

8. Pianist: It’s hard not to pick Claudio Arrau, but, despite his musical intelligence, I don’t actually enjoy most of his (to me) lugubrious recordings.  I have heard he was much better live in concert.

9. Painter: Roberto Matta is the obvious choice.

The bottom line: Writing, writing, and more writing.  More generally, Chile is one of the very nicest countries on Earth.  The key is to get around to those small towns.

Asher has no dealer; his work is not generally for sale.  When I ask the artist whether he resists the art market, he says dryly: "I don’t avoid commodity forms.  In 1966 I made these plastic bubbles.  They were shaped like paint blisters that came an inch off the wall.  I sold one of those."

That is from the very fun Seven Days in the Art World, by Sarah Thornton.  Here is Felix Salmon on the book.  How about this part?:

The artist Keith Tyson admits that he had a gambling problem when he was a nominee in 2002.  "I had an intellectual interest in chance as well as a fantasy of beating the laws of mathematics," he said.  "The Turner Prize was my first opportunity to bet when I could have an effect.  My odds were seven to two.  In a four-horse race, that is an insult.  I had absolutely no choice.  I’m sure it is solely because of the bets I put on myself that I went from being the underdog to the favorite.  I won’t say how much I took home, but won more from betting than I did from winning what was then a twenty-thousand pound prize."

In other words, prizes, plus a betting market on the prize winner, create especially strong incentives.

Ask David Galenson to name the single greatest work of art from the 20th century, and he unhesitatingly answers “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a 1907 painting by Picasso.

He can then tell you with certainty Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on, as well.

…His statistical approach has led to what he says is a radically new interpretation of 20th-century art, one he is certain art historians will hate. It is based in part on how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks.

Here is the full profile.  Here are previous MR posts on David Galenson.  Here is Galenson’s home page.

I’m hardly here for long, so here goes:

1. Author: There’s Sherwood Anderson and William Dean Howells and Toni Morrison; I’ll pick the latter though none are true favorites of mine.   

2. Director: Wes Craven remains underrated; I still like his The Serpent and the Rainbow, among others.  I can’t think of a notable movie set in Ohio, can you?

3. Painter: George Bellows’s reputation has shot up in the last twenty years; here’s an unusual Bellows print.  I very much like the botanical paintings and prints of Jim Dine, although I can’t find a good one on-line.

4. Popular music: I can’t think of much…Boz Scaggs doesn’t count nor does Peter Frampton.  Lonnie Mack’s The Wham of That Memphis Man! is one of the least known great albums.  Doris Day is a very good singer and do see Pillow Talk if you don’t already know it.

5. Jazz: There is Art Tatum, especially the early Capitol work, not so much the later Pablo recordings.  Billy Strayhorn was often behind the best Duke Ellington arrangements.

6. Classical music recording: George Szell’s Beethoven’s 3rd remains a landmark recording, or try his Piano Concerti set with Leon Fleisher.

7. Philosopher: Willard van Orman Quine. most of all Word and Object.  Now that’s a favorite.

8. Sculptor: Maya Lin did the Vietnam Memorial though she hasn’t had much of a second act.

The bottom line: The achievement from this state is remarkably well-distributed across different artistic fields and genres.  Why?  Is it because the state has so many different cities of at least middling size?  Or is it because the state straddles the East and the Midwest?  Sadly there is no Cincinnati chili for me this time.

Addendum: Angus of Ohio comments.

A small menagerie of new Damien Hirst pickled animals took a bow yesterday, including a new shark, a zebra, a calf with solid gold horns and hoofs valued at up to £12m, and even a unicorn – a white foal fitted with a resin horn, rather than an apparition from a fairytale.

All have been churned out by his small army of assistants this year for an auction at Sotheby’s in September which will sell more than 200 pieces. The auction is predicted to raise £65m, comfortably setting a new world record for the artist, and blazing a trail which other artists will watch with interest, of bypassing the gallery and dealer system and going straight to auction.

Both the Gagosian Gallery, and Jay Jopling’s White Cube, his American and British dealers, have given the auction their blessing, possibly through gritted teeth…

If you are a dealer this is big news and indeed bad news.  But why not?  Hirst doesn’t need gallery publicity or buyer recruitment.  Since galleries tend to sell their best works to loyal repeat buyers ("why?" is a good question), this implies that "seniority" will matter less and less for assembling a good collection.  That favors foreign buyers and hedge fund types.  Here is the link.  Here is Felix Salmon’s very good post on the economics of contemporary art.

In case you did not know.  Here is one example of a fool:

It was only after Mr. Maldonado landed back in California that he did
some research on his purchases. Including the buyer’s premium, he had
paid $24,265 for a 1964 “Clown” print by Picasso. He found that
Sotheby’s had sold the exact same print (also numbered 132 of 200) in
London for about $6,150 in 2004.

Of course the corruption and foolishness runs deeper than the article lets on.  If you shop for contemporary prints in entirely "reputable" Georgetown galleries, they will charge about twice the going auction rate for the prints.  They might tell you that the prints are "hard to find" when in fact usually they are not.  A good New York dealer, used to dealing with well-informed customers, might charge only 10-15 percent above auction (full price including buyer’s premium).  The bottom line is that you should never spend more than $1500 on art unless you know at least roughly what it is worth at auction.  One of life’s good rules of thumb.

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.