Category: The Arts

Gerald Dworkin writes to me

by  Tyler Cowen in

How about best shortest sentences?   My favorite is Ring Lardner’s: Shut up, he explained.  For five words Woody Allen:  I am two with nature.

Please give us other candidates, either from others or your own.  Here is my previous post on six-word novels.

From Wired, here are more six-word stories.  I like:

He read his obituary with confusion.

And, from Orson Scott Card:

Please, this is everything, I swear.

Paintings to see before you die

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a Guardian list, via CrookedTimber.  It is not bad, but surely Giotto’s Padua murals (this panel is clearer) should be added, Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tuyp is far better than his Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, and how about Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic?  I am not anti-Picasso but Guernica is in my view overrated.  How about this one?  El Greco’s Toledo picture is another contender. 

Try this list too.  Your thoughts?

My Gap Shorts Make the FT

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Economists and bounty hunters would appear to have little in common.
Duane “Dog” Chapman is a tattooed ex-convict with his own reality
television show, currently threatened with extradition to Mexico for
apprehending a US rapist there. Alex Tabarrok wears Gap khaki shorts
and is interested in tort reform. Only one of them is an economist.

That’s Tim Harford writing in the Financial Times. 

I wonder if I can get an endorsement deal out of this?

When should we consume culture in small, sequential bits?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I almost always read novels in bits.  That is, I put the book down for a few times before finishing it.

I rarely watch movies in bits.  That just seems wrong.  But, assuming we are watching on DVD, why?  Why do pauses ruin a movie but not a book?  I can think of a few hypotheses:

1. Movies manipulate our neurophysiology over a two-hour time horizon.  If we restart in the middle after a two-day pause, we are not worked up in the right manner.

2. Most books are longer than most movies, but there is otherwise no good reason for the difference in our consumption pattern.

3. We like the idea that we are "reading Camus," and thus we wish to stretch it out.  Few people get comparable status or feel-good values from watching movies and thus there is no need to prolong that experience.

4. We don’t actually like reading enough to keep on paying attention for so many hours in a row.

The ever-wise Natasha notes that we are mostly likely to read action novels — such as The da Vinci Code
— straight through without pause.  But action movies are the easiest to
watch in bits.  Ever try just a half hour of Jackie Chan?  Wonderful.  But breaking up a good drama is criminal.

Your thoughts?

Has serendipity disappeared?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Terry Teachout writes:

I take a look at the financial woes of Tower
Records and the wider implications of music downloading.  One frequently
overlooked effect of downloading on the culture of music is the extent
to which it discourages in-store browsing, and the serendipitous
discoveries that can only be made by wandering at will up and down the
aisles of a deep-catalog record store.

I am (surprise) less pessimistic.  I see one kind of serendipity as replacing another.  The new serendipity relies on Internet browsing.  Which CDs can be described in an intriguing way on a blog or an Amazon listing?  The old serendipity depended more on the quality of the album or CD cover.  I see the new serendipity as favoring the tastes of the highly literate, and as favoring artists with interesting biographies.  Older methods favored groups with good album art, which tends to be correlated with a sense of the unusual or outrageous.  I do not see why the new serendipity should be worse than the old, although admittedly it discriminates against those with Internet connections.

Addendum: Terry Teachout asks that I link to his longer discussion.

Are new concert halls worth it?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a good NYT article, and here is my favorite part:

“This is all redistributing people’s expenditures from one activity to another,” said David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago who focuses on the arts.

Tyler
Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University and the
author of “Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts
Funding,” said there was little solid research measuring the economic
impact of arts centers on a city, although there was for sports
stadiums. Such research shows no benefit for a city’s growth, he said,
adding that he was skeptical about economic claims for new concert
halls.

“The glorious tales are typically exaggerations,” said
Mr. Cowen, who also contributes a monthly economics column to The New
York Times.

Random rants on music and books

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Bob Dylan’s latest has received rave reviews just about everywhere.  Who can doubt an honest effort from the elder statesman?  In reality it is little more than a repackaged version of his last two (superb) albums and thus mostly predictable and mostly boring.  By the way, it is becoming clearer — against all former odds — that he was often a horrible lyricist but he remains, even in his dotage, a remarkable vocalist.

2. I loved the first half of Samuel Beckett’s Watt, but then lost the thread of the book.  Beckett’s fiction remains underread, if only because we’ve yet to figure out just how good it is (or isn’t).  The best parts are astonishing, but at times I feel I am listening to one of those unfunny British radio comedy shows.

3. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children is a novel about thirty-somethings, in a pre- and post 9-11 NYC, transitioning (or not) into adulthood.  That is a recipe for literary trouble.  But I bought it anyway, trusting Meghan O’Rourke, and yes it deserves the sterling reviews.  I kept expecting Megan McArdle to show up as a character and give them all a good talking-to about microeconomics, which is exactly what the characters need.

4. The best world music release of the last year or so remains Amadou and Mariam, Dimanche a Bamako.  It is also the best pop album of the last year.  The two Mali musicmakers are blind and also married to each other.  I don’t see how anyone could help but love this music.  After a year from its purchase, I’m still listening to it.

5. Steven Slivinki’s Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government is exactly what the subtitle suggests.  How did that happen?  One factor is that the Republicans found Democratic rule too horrible a prospect to bear and they became more populist.  Let’s hope the Democrats don’t make a comparable mistake.

6. Stephen Miller’s Conversation: The History of a Declining Art.  I loved the title, hated the subtitle.  Much of the book, which considers the preconditions of good conversation, is fascinating and, despite its popular level, goes beyond the muddled arguments of Habermas.  It collapses when it argues that the quality of conversation is declining in the modern world.  The evidence consists solely of examples of bad modern conversations.

Lynne Munson reviews my book

by  Tyler Cowen in

She covers Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding, in The Weekly Standard.  Here is the link, which offers only a bit of the review to non-subscribers.  Here is an excerpt from the critical part of her review:

…few critical observers would agree that contemporary American art has put its best work forward in recent decades, when our artists and art institutions have enjoyed more riches than at any other time in history.  Contemporary American artmaking has been monopolized for nearly a half-century by postmodernism, a politics-obsessed formulaic approach that has yielded such shock-art masterpieces as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (which finds itself in numerous museum collections).  Artists who do not work in the postmodern mode are excluded from museum exhibitions and the best galleries.

Of course, no better can be said of the products of the European art world, whose denizens have, at best, striven to vie with their postmodern American counterparts for the prize of Most Shocking.  But to argue, as Cowen does, that "the American model encourages artistic creativity [and] keeps the politicization of art to a minimum," is to be unaware of how narrow and prescriptive American artmaking has become.  The simple fact is that artmaking in America has been taken over by a single bad idea, despite the ample and diverse funding it receives.

Her last sentence is a good illustration of how two people can look at the same facts and see such very different patterns.

Jeff Koons and the Test of Time

by  Tyler Cowen in

It will be so rich, 200 years from now, to look back at the art that Jeff is creating today. It might all look quite quaint and sweet, and the graphic quality will look retro. And, of course, the vacuum cleaners will look like pieces of a stagecoach. But it will let people know that we did understand the weirdness of our world.

Read more here.  I sympathize with Jeff Koons.  One of my goals in writing this blog is to help people understand the weirdness of our world.  Here is one sculpture by Jeff Koons; try this too.

My favorite things Austrian

by  Tyler Cowen in

I will restrict myself to the current borders:

Novel: Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew.  This book, set in an insane asylum, is hilarious and is perhaps the least known of the Continental masterpiece novels of ideas.  Der Untergeher [The Loser] is another brilliant book by Bernhard.  Yes I will put these over Musil and of course Kafka worked in Prague and doesn’t count.  Broch’s The Death of Virgil is a dark horse pick.

Music: This combination of category and place is a bit ridiculous, no?  Just to mix it up, let’s pick Schoenberg’s Op. 31, Variations for Orchestra, or Webern’s Symphony in C, or Piano Variations, Op. 27, played by Pollini or Uchida.  For Berg I’ll pick the Violin Concerto in A minor, or perhaps "Lyric Suite."

If we must look elsewhere, my favorite Mahler is the 9th, the live Karajan version.  Favorite Bruckner is the 8th, the first Karajan version and the Bruno Walter recording of the 4th.  Capriccio and Metamorphosen might be the most underrated Richard Strauss.  My favorite Schubert CD stars Ely Ameling and Jorg Demus, and then Schnabel or perhaps Clifford Curzon doing the last Piano Sonata in B flat.  The Hollywood does an amazing version of the String Quintet in C.  Britten and Pears recorded the ideal Die Winterreise.  I’ve yet to find the perfect version of Schubert’s 9th but I love Furtwaengler’s interpretation.  Favorite Haydn, if we can count him as Austrian, would be the last six piano sonatas and the String Quartets, Op.76.  Mozart I’ve already blogged.

Book about: How about Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, a beautiful portrait of declining Vienna by a man who killed himself?  Another good pick is Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna.  Carl Schorske is not to be forgotten either.

Draftsman: Egon Schiele did incredible drawings.  Try this one.  Here is a beautiful painting by Schiele, who died at age 28.

Movie, set in: It is hard to go against The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.

Movie: What is the best Austrian movie?  Here is a list, good luck.  I’ve never seen one all the way through.

Movie star: Duh.

Here is an impressive list of Austrian scientists, including economists.  Karl Pribram and Rudolf Hilferding remain underrated as economists.  Mises is underrated as a theorist of public choice.  Hayek was arguably the first neuroeconomist.  Wieser anticipated much of modern "social economics."  Freud was a brilliant literary analyst.

The bottom line: There are gobs and gobs and gobs.  We haven’t even touched upon design.  But the overall trajectory is not exactly positive once you crack the mid-1930s.