Category: The Arts

They're picking a guy named Rocco, Rocco Landesman, to head the National Endowment for the Arts.  The report noted: “Rocco is bored,” Mr. Brustein said, “if things just go routinely.”  He is described as having an "affinity for country music, horse racing and baseball."

I never read Maureen Dowd's column but the picture today is great.

The topic is eBay and the antiquities trade.  It turns out that looting has gone down, the opposite of what was expected from the expansion of eBay.  Supply is so elastic, and so many fakes are made, that looting is less worthwhile than it used to be:

Our greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities
trafficking and lead to widespread looting. This seemed a logical
outcome of a system in which anyone could open up an eBay site and sell
artifacts dug up by locals anywhere in the world. We feared that an
unorganized but massive looting campaign was about to begin…But a very curious thing has happened. It
appears that electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the
antiquities trade.

…many of the primary
"producers" of the objects have shifted from looting sites to faking
antiquities. I've been tracking eBay antiquities for years now, and
from what I can tell, this shift began around 2000, about five years
after eBay was established.  …Today, every grade and
kind of antiquity is being mass-produced and sold in quantities too
large to imagine.

…Because the eBay phenomenon has substantially reduced total costs by
eliminating middlemen, brick-and-mortar stores, high-priced dealers,
and other marginal expenses, the local eBayers and craftsmen can make
more money cranking out cheap fakes than they can by spending days or
weeks digging around looking for the real thing. It is true that many
former and potential looters lack the skills to make their own
artifacts. But the value of their illicit digging decreases every time
someone buys a "genuine" Moche pot for $35, plus shipping and handling.
In other words, because the low-end antiquities market has been flooded
with fakes that people buy for a fraction of what a genuine object
would cost, the value of the real artifacts has gone down as well,
making old-fashioned looting less lucrative.

I thank Lawrence Rothfield for the pointer.

More information here.

1. Singer: Amalia Rodrigues, fado specialist.  I am also a fan of Sara Tavares, especially this CD.  Carmen Miranda is often thought of as Brazilian, but she was born in Portugal and I believe she grew up there as well.  She was good.

2. Popular music: Nelly Furtado has Portuguese ancestry, although I believe most of the demons who inhabit the MR comments section would count her as Canadian.

3. Novelist: Jose Saramago.  But I don't like them all.  Blindness, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and The Double are the primary ones to read.  Baltasar and Blimunda I should try again.  The Stone Raft is good.  Currently I am reading, and enjoying Antunes's Fado Alexandrino.

4. Philosopher: Can I count Spinoza?

5. Painter: I guess I pick Paula Rego.  I can't think of a classic painter here. 

6. Poet and essayist: Pessoa.  I've been influenced by his work.  The Book of Disquiet is his masterpiece.

7. Composer: Manuel Cardoso is the only one I can think of.  He's OK.

8. Former colony: Brazil.  But there's stiff competition.

9. Economist, one eighth of him: Can you guess?  The eighth is from the Madeira Islands with the family name Alfonso.

The bottom line: I am worried by the gaps here, including classical music, cinema, painting, and sculpture.  Yet #8 makes up for it all.  I suspect that too much royal patronage is the reason why there are so many notable Portuguese explorers and so few recognized composers.

I enjoyed this one and I wonder what the sequel will look like:

Drawing inspiration from a best-selling Japanese manga adaptation of Das Kapital, Chinese theater producers are planning to bring Marx's masterpiece to the stage.

Yang Shaolin, general manager of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, told the Wen Hui Bao that, together with Fudan University economics professor Zhang Jun and other experts, he is preparing a dramatization of Das Kapital. They've already decided on a director: He Nian, who directed the stage adaptation of the hit martial-arts spoof My Own Swordsman (武林外传).

He Nian says he will combine elements from animation, Broadway musicals, and Las Vegas stage shows to bring Marx's economic theories to life as a trendy, interesting, and educational play.

I thank Robert C. for the pointer.

What a strong, strong state this is.  Where to start?

1. Director: Robert Altman, with Gosford Park as my unusual choice of favorite.  Nashville I find unwatchable.

2. Popular music: Chuck Berry; "13 Question Method" is his best little-known song.  Throw in Eminem and Wilco and Burt Bacharach for good measure.

3. Ragtime song: "Euphonic Sounds," by Scott Joplin.

4. Jazz song: "Koko," by Charlie Parker.  Don't forget "St. Louis Blues."  Count Basie, Mary Lou Williams, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young all could be put into the Kansas City jazz tradition.

5. Painter: Thomas Hart Benton, with George Caleb Bingham as a good runner-up.

6. Sculptor: Donald Judd.

7. Writer: Duh.  But after that, I don't find Heinlein or Laura Ingalls Wilder or William Burroughs to be readable (sorry!)

8. Poet: T.S. Eliot, with Marianne Moore and James Langston Hughes as runners-up.

Virgil Thomson belongs somewhere, but in what category?  Note also that Kansas City has a superb collection of Chinese art and St. Louis has wonderful contemporary German art.

The bottom line: Amazing!  Kansas City and St. Louis were on the rise while America was experiencing one of its cultural peaks. 

1. New Yale econ classes (open, on the web), including Robert Shiller on finance.

2. How good is Shane Battier? (by Michael Lewis), and comment by Al Roth.  So why aren't the Rockets better is my question.

3. China markets in everything fact of the day, hat tip to this very good China law blog.

4. NEA arts money ended up back in the stimulus bill.

5. Gramophone magazine, all the archives from 1923, now on-line and searchable.

The list came out quite well:

1. Actress: Jennifer Lopez.  Seriously.  Out of Sight is quite good and the badly misunderstood The Cell makes perfect sense once you realize it is a retelling of parts of Sikh theology.  Rita Moreno gets honorable mention.

2. Cellist: Pablo Casals (his mother was Puerto Rican and he ended up living there).  His Bach Suites, while profound, are largely unlistenable due to the scratching and scraping.  Nonetheless there are still revelations to be found in the trio recordings, Schubert, bits of the Beethoven, etc.

3. Artist: Jean-Michel Basquiat.  Sneer if you wish, but his 1982-1984 period is very good, most of all the sketches.  There are many bad Basquiat works, however, and lots of fakes.

4. Economic historian and colleague: Carlos Ramirez.  Don't forget his paper on the bailout.

5. Poet: Juan Ramón Jiménez, who left Spain for Puerto Rico.  Here is his Platero y Yo.  Although he won a Nobel Prize in 1956, this very pure poet remains underrated in the United States.

6. Reggaeton song: Gasolina, by Daddy Yankee; note that reggaeton originated in Panama.

7. Guitarist: Jose Feliciano.  Here is his Star-Spangled Banner (excerpt) and here.  Here is Jose and Johnny Cash.

8. Musical, about: Paul Simon's The Caveman (not WSS, which I actively dislike).

9. Art museum: The two notable collections of pre-Raphelite art in this hemisphere are in Wilmington, Delaware and Ponce, Puerto Rico.  Each is worth a visit.

10. Building: Puerto Rico has many fine homes and a surprising amount of Art Deco, plus the colonial buildings and fortifications in San Juan.  Here is the over the top fire station in Ponce.  But overall I'll pick the metalwork on one of the country homes, somewhere between San Juan and Ponce.

The bottom line: The achievements are strong and varied, noting that I've used a looser notion of affiliation than in some comparisons past.

I was asked to do a radio interview with KPCC while I was at TED.  The interview had just started and I’m talking about organ donation when into the studio walks Robin Williams!  Naturally all chaos ensues and Robin takes over… but not before I manage to squeeze in an economics joke with Robin playing the straight man!  Some kind of first there.  I’m not sure Robin got the joke but I think this made the host laugh all the more. No one can out talk Robin, however, so he riffs on organ donation and fiscal stimulus for some time.  Eventually Robin goes on his merry way and the host and I get back to organ donation, bounty hunters, voting and other cool stuff.  An amazing experience for me.  Real audio here (try here if that doesn’t work)

Here is an obituary.  He was arguably the very finest of the 20th century print makers at creating textures.  Here is one amazing example of his work; even on the internet the talent is evident.  Here is a Terry Winters print with him.  Here is a simple Braque print done with Crommelynck.  Jasper Johns also did fine work with Crommelynck, whose talents he stood in awe of.  Jim Dine benefited greatly from his collaboration; here is Dine's sculptural tribute to Crommelynck.  Crommelynck printed this Picasso etching, as well as doing many other fine Picasso works.  The talents of print makers are very often underappreciated.

If you are curious as to my (generally positive) views on John Updike, see these previous MR posts.

Many organizations that spent years building large endowments to
provide more stable sources of support have seen them decimated. A
number of our most loyal donors have watched their own investment
portfolios be depleted and cannot provide their traditional funding.
Our audience members cannot buy as many tickets as they have in the
past. And our board members are less able to involve friends and
associates in our fundraising galas and other activities.

This perfect storm has already weakened the fabric of our nation’s arts ecology. Over the past several months, the Baltimore Opera Company,
Santa Clarita Symphony, Opera Pacific, the Los Angeles Museum of
Contemporary Art and others have closed or come close to closing. There
probably will be a torrent of additional closures, cancellations and
crises in the coming months.

Of course they want a bailout but this is for me not a priority.  Given the new distribution of wealth, arguably we need more culture for lower-income people and less culture for the rich.  I don’t think the old distribution of wealth is coming back anytime soon.

It’s something to watch when the egalitarian and elitist tendencies of modern liberalism clash so strongly.  When it comes to high culture it’s like this:  "I don’t think they should have so much money, but I sure like what they spend their money on."  Yet if deflationary pressures are going to benefit lower class individuals with jobs, something has to give and that is, in part, the discretionary arts spending of the wealthy.

The longer plea for aid is here.  I thank Christopher Janak for the pointer.

This is from the excellent Seth Roberts, now in Beijing:

The 2008 China International Petroleum Equipment and Technology Exhibition concluded last Friday in the eastern city of Dongying. 3000 guests from over 40 countries attended and everything appeared to run smoothly. Yet the majority of the foreign delegates were hired just to make the event look "international". Among the 200 fake delegates was Jez Webb, The Peking Order‘s energy correspondent.

Most guests had responded to an ad on theBeijinger.com with the curious title: “Free trip to Shandong, 200 foreign visitors invited (Be paid)”. We would, depending on our age, receive between 600 and 700 RMB (£60-70) for two days “work” – two 6 hour bus journeys to and from the city, full board in a luxury hotel and a couple of hours walking round an exhibition, pretending that we were involved in the petroleum industry.

You’ll note the monopsony market structure behind the offer.  The story is full of interesting further detail.