Category: The Arts
The rice fields of Japan
I thank Yan Li for the pointer. Here is more information.
*A Textbook of Cultural Economics*
The author is Ruth Towse and you can buy it here. This excellent book now sets the standard for the field. Here is the home page of Ruth Towse.
Ebert’s Voice
Esquire has an moving profile of Roger Ebert who has lost his lower jaw and ability to speak to cancer. I found this paragraph about resurrecting a lost voice–almost ala Jurassic Park–to be compelling:
Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him
some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he
spends a lot of his time. CereProc tailors text-to-speech software for
voiceless customers so that they don't all have to sound like Stephen
Hawking. They have catalog voices – Heather, Katherine, Sarah, and Sue
– with regional Scottish accents, but they will also custom-build
software for clients who had the foresight to record their voices at
length before they lost them. Ebert spent all those years on TV, and he
also recorded four or five DVD commentaries in crystal-clear digital
audio….CereProc is mining
Ebert's TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it
cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc
finishes its work, Roger Ebert won't sound exactly like Roger Ebert
again, but he will sound more like him than Alex [the generic voice] does. There might be
moments, when he calls for Chaz from another room or tells her that he
loves her and says goodnight – he's a night owl; she prefers mornings –
when they both might be able to close their eyes and pretend that
everything is as it was.
I have fond memories of listening to Ebert teach the classics like Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard and Vertigo during lazy summer seminars at the Virginia film festival many years ago.
Mustafa Maluka, South African painter
You will find more images here. I have been reading the very good book South African Art Now.
Karl Case, poet
It's about the housing bubble and subsequent crash and the poem is here. Excerpt:
So now we come to the end of this ode
Without much to say for certain.
I hate to say, that where we are
Not beginning or final curtain.
The truth of the matter at the end of the day
Is that markets will make you humble.
Just when you think that it's time for a drink
They will turn and fortunes will crumble.
Will the price of Haitian art go up or down?
Here's a report on the destruction of Haiti's cultural heritage and many Haitian paintings, including the supreme achievement of Haitian art, the murals in the Episcopalian cathedral. Furthermore the "Nader Museum" in Petitionville has largely been destroyed; that was probably the single best collection of Haitian art.
OK, so the supply curve shifts up and to the left. But will the prices of the remaining stock rise? It's not so simple and that's because of how reputation drives art prices. In part people buy art to be affiliated with something grand and glorious. A so-so Rembrandt is worth more because the first-rate Rembrandts exist. If the first-rate Rembrandts were destroyed, the so-so work might fall in value, not rise.
Art works also require buyers to promote them. If not many people own an artist, not many people are speaking up for that artist. Again, we see the higher quantities can increase rather than decrease price. Arguably Andy Warhol's prices have benefited from Warhol's work being widely held and sold in deep, liquid markets.
Here is Wikipedia on Carel Fabritius and here is his goldfinch.
If you are curious to see some of the Cowen Haitian art collection, go through my home page. (Addendum: Links are broken right now, I'm working on getting them fixed.)
This account of the damage also offers a good slideshow on Haitian art.
What about the data? Natasha and I have bought four Haitian art pieces since the earthquake. Their prices were exactly the same as what we had been quoted before the quake. So far the jury is still out.
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”?