Category: The Arts

This has long been one of my favorite countries, but these choices are not so tough.  For most of the categories I have clear first picks.

1. Painter: We’re talking favorite here.  Best goes to Rembrandt, but Mondrian changed my life.  For single painting, I opt for Vermeer’s The Art of Painting.  The map in the background (do you get the implicit political and indeed pre-Westphalian Catholic message?) blows me away.  There is also van Gogh, his best works are the drawings.  de Kooning deserves mention, my favorite picture by him is Excavation, which hangs in Chicago.

2. Movie and Director: Paul Verhoeven is the go-to guy, how about The Fourth Man?  But all of his are worth seeing, at least up until Hollow Man.  Starship Troopers remains one of the most underrated movies; most people didn’t get that it was a critique of militarism and consumer society, all rolled into one.  But you can’t make much money attacking your viewers, at least not in Hollywood.  Verhoeven aside, The Vanishing is a strong entry.  The guy who directed Speed is Dutch as well, I believe.

3. Novel: Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven.  An underrated Continental novel of ideas, full of metaphysical speculation.  But for such a literate people, this category is surprisingly thin. 

4. Classical Music: Here is a list, take your pick from an undistinguished lot.  It seems they left out Sweelinck, my default choice.  There is more choice if you count the Flems, such as Josquin.

5. Popular music song: "Venus," by The Shocking Blue.  Yes they were Dutch, and yes this is better than the later (non-Dutch) remake.

6. Conductor – Willem Mengelberg or Ton Koopman or Bernard Haitink.  More generally, the Netherlands has been vital to the Early Music movement.

7. Philosophical odds and ends: Erasmus (an important theorist of self-deception), Grotius (better on property than Locke), and Spinoza (sheer genius) remain worth reading.

8. Female spy: Mata Hari.

Here is a Dutch Celebrities Quiz, see how you do!  Hee.

I am here only briefly, to talk about how America funds the arts.  Of course my favorite thing Swiss is Switzerland itself; in that sense I agree with the natives.  But to get more specific:

1. Sculptor: Alberto Giacometti is the obvious choice, runner-up is Jean Arp.  The smaller the Giaocometti sculpture, the better it is likely to be.  You could say the same for Calder.

2. Drama: I’ll opt for Durrenmatt’s The Visit of the Old Lady or The Physicians, or Max Frisch’s Don Juan, or the Love of Geometry.  I like these better than any Swiss novel.

3. Painter: These days I find Paul Klee repetitive.  Arnold Boecklin and Ferdinand Hodler are both consistently interesting, if not always consistent.  Try this Hodler.  Here is the most famous Boecklin.  Henry Fuseli, who moved to England and became a perverse quasi-Romantic, remains underrated.

4. Novel: I don’t know of a great Swiss novel, unless you count Rousseau’s Heloise for its historical value.  Max Frisch’s Gantenbein is one runner-up.  Robert Walser has his moments.

5. Music: This one gets tough.  Honegger bores me.  I will listen to Frank Martin, though he is not a favorite.  Paul Hindemith was of Swiss-German extraction but born in Germany.  He would otherwise win hands down.  Edwin Fischer was a wonderful Bach pianist.  Swiss popular music is too ghastly to contemplate, as is the folk music.

6. Actress: Can I say Ursula Andress?

7. Movie, set in: I still like George Lazenby’s Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Extra: You’ve also got Saussure, the Bernoullis, and the Eulers, not to mention Le Corbusier.  There is an overall inclination toward the mechanical, the scientific, and the systematizing.  Perhaps that is why music is so weak.

The bottom line: It is not just cuckoo clocks (as Orson Welles had suggested), which in any case do not originate in Switzerland. 

Daniel Gross writes:

…the data shows that art performs well as an asset over time.

He offers plenty of evidence but I am skeptical.  Studies of auction prices are usually biased toward the winners; the losers never go on the block again or are sold quietly at a loss through dealers.  Many pieces turn out to be fakes.  The placement costs in the dealer market can be higher than those at Sotheby’s.  Storage and insurance costs for masterpieces are considerable.  Art is so much fun it can’t earn the same rate of return as equity, otherwise no one would buy stocks.

I got a one way anova
Do you know what that means?
That’s when I got three or more independent levels on the scene.

Statz Rappers.  Hat tip to Amy Perfors.

That is an all-time record, the buyer is Ronald S. Lauder, here is the story.  Here is my post on what $100 million can buy.

From the FT:

I searched the internet for “Don Giovanni abridged”. It turns out,
incredibly, that such a work exists and was performed in New York this
month. Emperor Joseph II, take note.

There is more, including a discussion of Kelvin Lancaster and also yours truly.

From Orlando Ribas:

From Abhishek in India.

From dsr.

Here is one notice.  I regard his The Buru Quartet as, after Orwell, the great political novel of the twentieth century.  At a deeper level it concerns different notions of what a life consists of.  As you read each volume, your understanding of what has come before shifts radically.  Most of it he wrote while in prison.  Of the living writers he was my "no brainer" pick for a Nobel Prize.  Here are other notices of his death.

The videos are great but according to the Washington Post, Hubbard was being impersonated.

Here are images by a few painters I like:

Feng Zhengjie

Fu Hong

He Sen, who seems to only paint women smoking.

Li Dafang

Wang Xingwei

Zhang Xiaogang

Shi Xinning reminds me of Mark Tansey.  Try his Christo’s Temple of Heaven, Pride and Prejudice, or Chairman Mao in Vegas.  Here is his Duchamp painting, which of course is also about the Chinese fascination with capitalism:

The value of “accountability” is often counterproductive when applied to direct subsidies for art. To be sure, accountability is critically important in many contexts. For instance CEOs should be accountable to shareholders. But we do not stress accountability in every sphere of human activity. For instance, tenured college professors are not (usually) accountable to university administrators for the content of their ideas. Instead we believe that an ethic of academic freedom will best promote the mission of the university. Supreme Court Justices are not accountable for the content of their decisions, although Congress may respond by passing new laws, or the Constitution may be amended.

Along these lines, direct subsidies stand the greatest chance of making a positive difference when they are insulated from many pressures of accountability. We should return to the stylized facts about artistic discovery, namely that there are many failures for every success. Too much direct accountability causes the funder to be excessively afraid of failure. This limits risk-taking and in the longer run limits the number of successes. Accountability works best when the quality of the average outcome is a good indicator of the tails of the distribution; this is not generally the case with the arts.

By the way, here is the last paragraph of the book:

Given that so much of the aesthetic is hidden, what appears to be the subordination of poetry to philosophy is an illusion, albeit a creativity-enhancing illusion. Rather than subordinating poetry to philosophy, at most I have subordinated the public conception of art to philosophy. Poetry remains secure in its diverse and hidden niches, and indeed is healthiest when philosophy directs the public conception of art toward a regime of markets, indirect subsidies, and decentralization. In this sense we can put philosophy at the service of art, and not at war with it. I wish to overturn the victory that Socrates pretended to award to philosophy over poetry, and to paint an alternative vision of the broader compatibility between the two enterprises.

Of course, in dreaming of arriving on butterfly wings, Bonnard could
not have known that young artists in the year 2006 would operate in a
commonplace world of budget air travel, proliferating art fairs and
museums for contemporary art, where peripatetic pilgrims encounter
endless objects once and mostly never again. This, the artist and
writer Art Spiegelman pointed out to me recently, may be the biggest
change in art during the last half-century or so: that more and more
artists make works they never expect will be lived with, looked at day
in, day out by the same person; that much art is made for fairs or
museums, designed to grab a distracted passerby’s attention without
needing to be experienced twice.

Here is the story, which is about the new Bonnard exhibit in Paris.

Often governments support the arts best when they are intent on some other purpose:

The very existence of government jobs subsidizes the arts. Even in the best of times, most writers find it difficult to make a living from book sales alone. Many accept government jobs, hoping they will have time to pursue their own projects. Bureaucracy, despite its deadening effects, stimulates creativity by creating a realm of personal freedom for many employees.

William Faulkner worked for a time as postmaster at the University of Mississippi postal station. He called his section of the post office the "reading room." Nathaniel Hawthorne worked in a customs house, after failing to get a postmaster job. Walt Whitman revised his Leaves of Grass while working for the Department of the Interior, although his superior fired him because he regarded the book as immoral. Herman Melville worked in a customs house as well, although not at the time of his greatest literary productivity. William Charvat estimated that between 1800 and 1875, 60 to 75 percent of American male writers "who even approached professionalism either held public office or tried to get it." 

The role of government jobs is no less prominent in the history of literature more generally. Chaucer was a career public servant, Dante pursued politics, Goethe was a bureaucrat for much of his life, and Anthony Trollope held a job in the postal service, during which time he wrote most of his sixty novels. William Wordsworth, Daniel Defoe, and the Roman poet Horace worked as tax collectors. Jonathan Swift was clergy in a tax-supported church. Stendahl worked in the Napoleonic bureaucracy. In the social sciences, Adam Smith worked in the customs house and Edward Gibbon was a member of Parliament and lord of trade.

It is a moot point whether we should count prison as a government "job," but many notable literary works have been written in enforced confinement, most notably Cervantes’s Don Quixote and de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Prison literature has been a growing genre in the United States since at least the 1960s. A longer list of incarcerated writers includes Boethius, Villon, Thomas More, Campanella, Walter Raleigh, Donne, Richard Lovelace, Bunyan, Defoe, Voltaire, Diderot, Thoreau, Melville, Leigh Hunt, Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Maxim Gorky, Genet, O. Henry, Robert Lowell, Brendan Behan, Chernyeshevsky, Dostoyevsky, and Solzhenitsyn.

I don’t have to tell you whose book that is from.  I wrote it, of course, while working for a state university.