Category: The Arts

It feels like an eon since I have traveled, plus I have been at home with the sniffles and a nasty cough.  So here goes:

1. Music: Right off the bat we are in trouble.  Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News but she is overrated (overly mannered and too self-consciously pandering to the crowd).  We do have Patsy Cline and Maybelle Carter, the latter was an awesome guitar player and a precursor of John Fahey, not to mention the mother of June Carter.

2. Writer: There is Willa Cather, William Styron, and the new Thomas Wolfe.  Cather moved at age ten to Nebraska.  Some of you might sneak Poe into the Virginia category, but in my mind he is too closely linked to Baltimore.  If you count non-fiction, add Booker T. Washington to the list.

3. Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Person: I have to go with Helen Keller.  If you choose her for "20 Questions," no one will hit upon her category.

4. Movie, set in.  The first part of Silence of the Lambs is set in Quantico, Virginia.  No Way Out, starring Gene Hackman and Kevin Costner, is set in DC and around the Pentagon.

5. Artist: Help!  Can you do better than Sam Snead?  George Caleb Bingham was born here, but I identify him with Missouri.

6. The Presidents.  I’ll pick Washington as the best, simply because he had a successor, and Madison as the best political theorist.  Jefferson’s writings bore me and Woodrow Wilson was one of the worst Presidents we have had.

The bottom line: Maybe you are impressed by the Presidents, but for a state so old, it makes a pretty thin showing.  It has lacked a strong blues tradition, a major city, and has remained caught up in ideals of nobility and Confederacy. 

There are three lectures, available here.  Here is a previous post on Galenson, here is basic background on his work on the time path of creative achievement within artists’ lives.  Thanks to Tim Sullivan for the pointer.

You must look to Pablo Neruda and his suspiciously titled Hymn to the Glories of the People at War.  Here is one brief bit (in Spanish).  Here is a broader index of related poems.  The visual presentation of the material is beautiful.  Here is English-language background on Neruda in the war.  Here is Neruda as Chilean diplomat to Spain.  Here is a dual English-Spanish presentation of one part of the poem.

In my eyes, once you get past Rilke, Yeats, Eliot, and the 1920s, Paul Celan and Wallace Stevens are the only twentieth century poets who compare to Neruda.

David Galenson writes:

Art scholars have puzzled over the behavior of Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, and Sigmar Polke – important modern painters who have made frequent and abrupt changes of style. Yet in each case the scholars have assumed this behavior to be idiosyncratic, and have consequently failed to recognize its common basis. Versatility is in fact often a characteristic of conceptual innovators, whose ability to solve specific problems can free them to pursue new goals. This contrasts sharply with the practice of experimental artists, whose inability to achieve their goals often ties them to a single style for a whole career. The phenomenon of the conceptual innovator who produces diverse innovations is an important feature of twentieth-century art; Picasso was the prototype, and he was followed by a series of others, from Marcel Duchamp through Damien Hirst. Versatility has furthermore been a characteristic not only of modern conceptual painters, but also of conceptual innovators in other arts, and conceptual scholars. Recognizing the common basis of this behavior increases our understanding of human creativity.

Are you too thinking "Kenneth Arrow"?  How about Leibniz for that matter?  Here is "the last man who knew everything."  Here is the paper. 

Andrew Gelman points us to David Stork’s web page on Art and Optics which very effectively refutes the Hockney-Falco thesis that renaissance painters used mirrors and optics to create their paintings.

Here is my Trotter lecture, delivered in August in New Zealand.  Some of the ideas will be familiar if you have read my Creative Destruction, but the arguments are reworked with truly exciting New Zealand examples.

Believe it or not, some art lovers hold this to be a stupid question. 

But not I.  So consider a simple model and imagine the rest.  You are an artist and you have better and worse ideas, as defined by either marketplace success or critical acclaim (or both).  You can, to some degree, allocate your ideas across different size canvases.  Some ideas only work well in the small, and some ideas only work well in the large, but still there is some flexibility.  You are most likely to allocate your best ideas to the most saleable medium.  And since larger pictures usually sell for more than smaller ones, why not put your better ideas into the larger pictures?  You won’t waste a tremendous idea on a mere snippet of work, except perhaps as a practice or draft.  The marginal revenue product (or "marginal critical acclaim product") will be higher for the bigger pictures.  Of course we assume that the substitution effect outweighs the income effect.  (Micro question: what assumptions about costs do we need?  Does it suffice to assume that, given the cost of producing ideas, we can produce larger paintings at less than proportional cost?  If you are Ellsworth Kelly, doubling the canvas size just isn’t that big a deal…) 

There are caveats.  If the picture is too large, and cannot hang above a sofa, perhaps it sells for less.  So throw out monotonicity.  You will put your best ideas into the most saleable medium, which does not always mean "bigger." 

Longer songs are not better than shorter songs.  I’ve never paid attention to all of "Nantucket Sleigh Ride."  But the best songs will be close to around three minutes long, the dominant size or "medium" for hit songs.  Songwriters and composers won’t put their best ideas into snippets.  The best movies will be around two hours long, rather than a skit.  Some artists will break these patterns for personal reasons; Peter Jackson wanted a three-hour King Kong for the (ha-ha) sake of the story.  This may be a case of the income effect weighing in and financing self-indulgence.

Books should be better than short stories.  Again, put your better ideas into the better-paying medium.  Of course if customers use length as a signal of quality, these tendencies will be further strengthened.  Intermediaries, such as networks, record companies, and your agent, will help enforce the constraints.

And how long are the best blog posts?  The best comments to your wife?  The best flirtations?  The best comments on blog posts?

Thanks to Robin Hanson and Ilia Rainer for useful discussions of this point, and to Ilia for the question.

1. Tango CD: Astor Piazzola’s Tango: Zero Hour.  If you are looking to download a single song, try Carlos Gardel’s El Dia Que Me Quieras.

2. Novel: Cortazar’s Hopscotch [Rayuela].  I read one chapter (almost) every day, which amounts to about three pages.  I expect to finish in July, and no I don’t understand it in English either.  It does hold my attention, and is rapidly becoming one of my favorite novels.  Looking elsewhere, Eduardo Berti is a much underrated author.

3. Short story: Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius, by Borges.  Could this be the best short story period?  Here is an excerpt.

4. Film: Nine Queens is the obvious choice, and yes it is implicit commentary on their economic crises.  Here is a longer list.  For "Film, Set In," you might try Kiss of the Spider Woman.

5. Pianist: Martha Argerich.  Try her Chopin, or perhaps her Prokofiev.  She is one of the sexiest women:

6. TV show: I only know one Argentinian TV show — Epitafios — but it is a blockbuster.  Noir about a serial killer in Buenos Aires; sometimes they show it on HBO. 

7. Social science: Domingo Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism.  The Argentinian Tocqueville, you might say, and just translated into English last year.  If you relish the idea that rural areas are barbaric, you will find intellectual company in this book.

8. Painter: Guillermo Kuitca.  Try this one, or here is a classic Kuitca image.

The bottom line: This is one of the best places on earth, and yes I am here now.  Comments are open, if you would care to add to this.

Here is Rafael’s Adoration of the Magi:

Thieves simply drove up and loaded a two-ton Henry Moore statue into a truck.  But why?  Some commentators fear the statue — worth millions if sold properly — will be melted down to scrap and sold, possibly for no more than $9000.  It is hard to sell famous stolen artworks, and the number of clandestine buyers is smaller than many people think. The Financial Times (22 December, p.6) suggests another hypothesis:

…stolen masterpieces have other uses.  Criminal gangs sometimes use them as surety in deals: a drug dealer might give a supplier a 3 million pound painting in return for a batch of cocaine.  When he has sold on the cocaine, he pays back the supplier and the supplier returns the painting.

Is the use value of paintings so high for thieves?  It is odd to value collateral by its cost of production (i.e., its theft), or its non-realizable "white market" value, but nonetheless this sounds like a coherent equilibrium.  If you can steal a multi-million two-ton statue, and prove it, obviously you are a man to be trusted.

This one is not as bad as the last edition, but ugh nonetheless.  Women are selling paintings, not of their breasts, but rather made by their breasts.  (Do larger-breasted pictures go for more?)  Here is the story; the accompanying photo is work-safe (barely), but not recommended.  Thanks to Paul Lawson for the pointer.

The Soviets pioneered the technique but capitalists have perfected the art of the photoshop (takes a moment to load).  Perhaps this explains this.

1. Jazz musician: Umm…should it be John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk?

2. Bluesman: Reverend Gary Davis remains underrated.  Try "Maple Leaf Rag" or "Sally Where’d You Get Your Liquor From?"  For country music — really just another form of blues — you have Earl Scruggs and Merle and Doc Watson.  George Clinton did funk.

3. Female singer-songwriter: Tori Amos, favorite album Little Earthquakes.  Her most underrated album is Strange Little Girls.  Nina Simone is another good candidate, although she did mostly covers.

4. Movie, set in: I hate Bull Durham, so you will have to help me out here…Is part of Sherman’s March set in the state?

5. Writer: Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel.

6. Basketball player.  You-know-who was actually born in Brooklyn, so I say Meadowlark Lemon.

The bottom line: The state is strong on music, sports, and barbecue.

Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape.  A picture book for those who love Duisburg, Gary, Indiana, and the Pulaski Skyway.  Addendum: Here is a working link to Infrastructure.

Murderball, just out on DVD.  I know, some of you thought "I don’t want to see a movie about cripples."  That was a mistake of instrumental reason.

Seu Jorge, The Life Aquatic Studio Sessions.  David Bowie songs on acoustic guitar, sung in Portuguese, not just the cuts from the movie.