Category: The Arts

Channel 4 viewers will be asked to identify Britain’s worst building in a new four-part reality series which will culminate in a live broadcast of the building’s destruction.
The series, Demolition, beginning in 2005, will attempt to build on the success of BBC’s popular series Restoration, which was based around a contest to find the historic building that viewers most wanted to see restored.

But in Demolition, which is being supported by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), viewers will nominate the buildings they want to see destroyed rather than saved.

Nominations for Britain’s worst eyesore will be judged by a panel of experts, who will then decide the building’s fate.

The series will conclude with a kind of real-time architectural snuff movie – the live broadcast of the demolition of the building which the judges have condemned.

Surely I am missing something, presumably the TV station is unlikely to own the chosen building. Get this:

A spokeswoman for the RIBA said the logistics of the programme were unclear at this stage. But she added: “We would not have embarked on this if we did not think it was possible to demolish a building.”

Asked if the choice of building would be fixed, she said: “We are going to demolish a building.”

Here is the full story.

How do all you libertarians out there feel about cultural exchange programs? I know you don’t like government funding of the arts, but can this count as a legitimate tool of foreign policy? I am willing to favor these programs if they are applied in a revenue-neutral manner. American libraries abroad and musical performance exports have carried ideas of liberty and free expression across the world. Furthermore the arts programs themselves tend to be vital and customer-oriented, albeit for propagandistic motives.

But sadly cultural exchanges have been sinking in scope and importance:

…a new study, “Cultural Diplomacy: Recommendations and Research,” concludes that U.S. cultural diplomacy — the notion that by exporting American artists, we burnish our image around the world — has become a neglected facet of foreign and domestic policy, too.

Beginning in 2002, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Arts and Culture, working with the Coalition for American Leadership Abroad, also headquartered in the nation’s capital, set out to assess the state of cultural exchanges. The study was published in July.

And the bottom line: “The annual number of academic and cultural exchanges has dropped from 45,000 in 1995 to 29,000 in 2001.” This means that far fewer American artists, including performing artists, are being given chances to ply their crafts on foreign soil. The study presumes that those figures have decreased even further in recent years.

Here is the full story. Here is a link to the original study, along with links to related material on the same topic.

The Louvre Museum yesterday swallowed its pride as it welcomed potential American benefactors for an inaugural official tour of paintings featured in Dan Brown’s best-selling thriller, The Da Vinci Code.

It is a telling concession to popular culture that reflects the intense financial pressure facing l’exception culturelle, the idea that France and the French language can hold their own against Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism. Until now, the Louvre’s official position on The Da Vinci Code had been disdainful. “None of our curators will talk about the book. It’s a work of fiction and we don’t see it as our job to discuss it,” a press officer said last week.

Like many French museums, the Louvre, which only started seeking sponsorship last year, is running to catch up with its global rivals as it weans itself off state subsidies. Private sponsorship funds just 10-15 per cent of the Louvre’s €150m ($184m, £102m) annual budget.

As last year’s crisis in the system that funds France’s subsidised performing artists showed, the days of lavish state funding of the arts are over. The Louvre, on any given day, has to close up to 15 per cent of its display space for lack of staff…

Hosting yesterday’s Da Vinci Code tour for the American Friends of the Louvre, a new fund-raising body, Henri Loyrette, the museum’s director, said he wanted to dispel a reputation for “arrogance” and offer a warmer welcome to US tourists.

And get this:

“The big US museums have been able to build up huge endowments over the years, which allow them to fund virtually all their operating costs from the interest,” says Christophe Monin, head of fund-raising at the Louvre. “We are not so lucky [sic].”

The ever-insightful James Twitchell offers a list:

1. The Mona Lisa

2. Grant Wood’s American Gothic

3. Washington Crossing the Delaware

4. Whistler’s Mother

5. Munch’s The Scream (we will see whether its theft resurrects its aesthetic oomph)

I’ll add Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of George Washington to the list. Nor am I happy about the “Mondrian bag” and “Mondrian shampoo.” Twitchell continues: “Monet, Picasso, Degas, Cezanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh are just on the edge of becoming cliches.” And you’ll have to Google those images yourself, I won’t add to the problem!

We have a classic tragedy of the commons. I like surprise and power in art, but many different suppliers of images wish to be the ones who deliver the effect. The end result is that the surprise is used up too quickly; the images then bore rather than delight. Many of the most serious public goods problems are embedded in the neuroeconomy of the human mind.

The Test of Time is so difficult to predict in art. A given image can appear powerful in 2004 but by 2030 it is trite. Sitting in 2004, it is hard to imagine how the power might go away.

The same is less true for music, which taps into our nervous systems more directly and is more universal. But still there are examples:

…who can ever listen again to Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March” without seeing that giant foot come down from above, squashing the cartoon figures from Monty Python’s Flying Circus [TC: could this be an improvement?], or hear Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no.2 without seeing that great piano virtuouso Bugs Bunny pounding it out with such wabbit aplomb?

Not to mention Rossini’s William Tell Overture, better known as the theme song for The Lone Ranger. Thomas Schelling once told me that he refused to listen to Bach every day because he wanted to keep those delights for his old age.

The material is from Twitchell’s new and excellent Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld.

A janitor accidentally threw away a piece of art at the Tate Britain exhibition in London. Fortunately, but not surprisingly, the artist was on hand and was soon able to replace the art work.

Last week I asked why contemporary urban architecture has declined in some regards; trace back the link for the full context. My final suggestion concerns the issue of resale value.

I, like many others, have occasionally been tempted to buy a house that looked interesting. I’ve also been tempted to have huge and beautiful murals painted on the walls of my house. I did neither. Why? I feared for resale value.

The quest for resale value encourages standardized packaging. Just look at the mortgage market or the New York Stock Exchange.

In (many) older settings, people bought homes and buildings and stayed in them for long periods of time. Often they were passed down through the generations. If you do not have to worry about resale, simply buy what you want. But the buyers of modern America often will be moving on to another house within three or maybe five years. They think about selling again at the best price possible, as quickly as possible. So they are led to appeal to mainstream taste.

Andy Warhol understood these dynamics better than many other artists. The most saleable Warhols are those from definite “series.” He did flowers, soup cans, Chairman Mao, and so on. These works are easiest to price, market, and brag about in casual conversation. No doubt Warhol, whether you like him or not, was an innovator. But within his ouevre he sought a fair degree of homogenization.

In the music market, in contrast, few people buy CDs for resale value (those that do will focus on the hits). The scope for heterogeneity and innovation is correspondingly greater.

The economics are of course tricky. A world with easy resale is a world with many buyers, which can encourage innovation. But holding the number of buyers constant, a higher demand for resale may well lower innovation.

Last week I asked why urban architecture appears to have declined in the United States. Readers have offered two further suggestions (also read the trackbacks on the original post):

1. Property taxes create an incentive to improve interior quality rather than exterior quality

2. The need to accommodate automobiles makes it harder to design attractive buildings and cities.

The New York Times ran a feature story on exactly this question. Here is a key passage:

As more high-profile buildings by foreign architects rise in the United States, and as computers allow architects to strive for engineering, design and construction complexities never before imagined, a gathering rumble can be heard across the profession about the way America builds. The country has garnered a reputation for overlooking gaping joints, sloppy measurements and obvious blemishes, and refusing to deviate from even the most outmoded standardized practices. Having exported its expertise, in the 80’s and early 90’s, to destinations from Singapore to Dubai, it is now facing stiff competition from Europe and Asia, where the building traditions favor singularity, craftsmanship and durability over speed and cost.

Most recently at Seattle’s new Central Library, Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect, set out to debunk what is perceived as an all-too-common attitude in the American construction industry: if it looks hard to build, don’t, because it will be too expensive. According to Joshua Ramus – a partner at Koolhaas’s firm, Office of Metropolitan Architecture, who is in charge of American projects – no American contractor wanted to take on the building’s highly unusual structure, which is folded like a gigantic mesh party napkin. “They said there was no way anyone could do that on that budget,” Mr. Ramus said of the $165 million library. “We said: `Invest in thinking. It may be expensive but it’s a lot cheaper than bad building.’ “

Construction in the United States relies on the quick fix, said Sara Hart, a senior editor at Architectural Record. “Got a gaping one-inch space between frame and window? Just fill it in with silicone and call it a day. Not perfectly flush or plumb? Who cares!” is the typical American response, she said. “While in Germany or Switzerland, they’d rather die than have a gap of more than one-eighth or even one-sixteenth of an inch.” And though no one is calling Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall slapdash, most American construction aspires to cookie-cutter commercial development rather than high-profile brand-name architecture. Furthermore, in Europe, buildings tend to be smaller and clients accustomed to spending more. One way or another, the conditions have made for considerable bragging rights on the part of European and Asian architects.

Dana Buntrock, an architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Japanese Architecture as a Collaborative Process” (Spon Press, 2001), said she once believed that quality was tied to wealth. “Now I am beginning to wonder if well-built architecture occurs only at a very fragile economic moment,” she said. “You need not only affluence, but a group of people who are well paid enough to remain in the crafts and building trades even though they are intelligent, and you need the overall size of an architectural project to remain relatively small.” While enclaves of craftsmen and small companies cultivating specialty talents, like customized steel work or casting plaster, are growing in the United States, large corporate construction companies still rule the sites, with their supersize-me approach to building.

Some of these claims, of course, beg the “why” question. The article also notes that design approval now requires more sign-offs than ever before, which tends to encourage a least common denominator approach to moving forward.

Index funds are one of the most important practical spin-offs of academic economics. If fund managers are unable, on average, to beat the market index, why not just buy-and-hold the market index, saving transactions costs? Millions of people have profited from this insight.

If you like movies, an analogous tool is available at movies.go.com. Instead of posting a review of a new movie, movies.com tabulates ALL the reviews of ALL the new movies, and archives them forever. I have used this tool for a couple years, and find that – unlike individual reviewers – this “index fund” of reviewers is amazingly informative. For example, based on today’s post, I’m going to try to talk my wife out of seeing The Village and into seeing The Manchurian Candidate. (Aside: If you haven’t seen the original, you must!)

Good as this index fund is, I do have three caveats:

1. Comedies are systematically under-rated. If half of a comedy’s reviews are positive or mixed, it is probably worth seeing.

2. If any review contains the words “measured pacing,” the movie is probably over-rated. I’d only go if the reviews are 80% positive.

3. Contrary to popular stereotypes, action movies are not graded more harshly. Lots of action movies get great reviews. The Bourne Supremacy, for instance, got 11 positive, 0 mixed, 1 negative.

Seventeen years of research, beginning in Germany, have led the Adelaide historian Maike Vogt- Luerssen to believe that the Mona Lisa is the lovesick former Duchess of Milan, Isabella of Aragon, and not the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, as has been believed.

And why is she so sad?

She married at the end of 1488 when she came to Milan but she had a big problem. She married her cousin, a beautiful man but he was a drinker, and he had problems with impotence.”

The Isabella alternative has long been known to art historians, now the evidence in its favor has gone up. Here is the full story, which includes a discussion of the evidence. Here is a recent article which offers a scientific explanation of the mystery of Mona Lisa’s smile.

One of the largest and best-ever exhibits of Haitian art will be opening this week at the Organization of American States, 17th and Constitution Ave., Washington D.C. The showing is part of a more general celebration of the Haitian Bicentennial. I am pleased to announce I will have eight pieces in the show. In addition to the voodoo flags, and a number of paintings, look for the bearded plastic doll on the horse, trampling two bound babies, and wrapped in sequins and jewels (not a joke!). Opening night is Monday, 6 p.m. (invitations required), after that the exhibit is open regular business hours, but not weekends. The show closes July 9th, make it if you can!

One reader wrote me the following:

…artists who put works into the pool are depositing them at full value, tax free, right? If they instead sold these works, they’d lose 50% to a gallery and then another 50% (the marginal tax rate of any minimally successful self-employed person, even me) to Uncle Sam etc. In other words, if they sold art and invested the cash they’d only have 25 cents on the dollar to put into stocks and bonds. The question is whether any money manager could overcome this enormous handicap.

Besides, most artists tend to have more works than they can sell into such an inefficient market. For this and the reasons above, the cost of contributing to this fund may be close to zero for all but the most wildly successful participants.

What does it cost to set an art work aside?

Let’s say that the art trust can store the work at the same cost as a gallery. Then the artist already has done all the storing that he or she wants to do. Storing more works, all other things equal, is a cost rather than a benefit. And tax must be paid once the works are sold, in any case. Furthermore, when it comes time to sell the works and get the best price possible, the trust is no more effective than a gallery, and arguably less so. In fact the trust might resort to a gallery or auction house in any case, simply postponing the selling costs.

Perhaps the artist has pictures that he cannot sell at all. Why not put them into the trust? Fair enough, but if no gallery will take these pictures, how can the trust make them profitable?

The deal makes the most sense when an artist currently has an exclusive dealing agreement with a gallery. Such an artist might prefer to siphon off works to other channels, as a form of price discrimination, but is not allowed to. The sponsoring gallery does not want its market to be ruined. The trust might allow the artist to achieve market segmentation without it being labeled as such.

Nonetheless the artist pays a price for this new outlet. You have to accept a risk position in the pictures of others. Furthermore this price discrimination motive suggests that each artist will be putting his lesser pictures into the trust. You don’t want to “shade price” on your very finest pictures.

Another reader wrote:

I’m not persuaded that the art trust wouldn’t be an effective model. It doesn’t seem a lot different than the risk dilution idea of a blackjack team or the cross-trading that goes on between friends in a large poker tournament.

Again, a very good point. But you wish to share risk in this fashion when you know that you (and your team) can beat the market. In this case you are confident but want protection against bad luck. If you felt that the artists in the pool were all above-average, relative to their current prices, you might find the trust attractive. This would require each artist to judge the other artworks in the pool, which involves high information costs.

Perhaps the trust helps solve a “durable goods monopolist game.” That is, the artist wishes to precommit not to sell works in the near future. Buyers may be afraid that if they buy today, the price will be lower tomorrow. Perhaps the trust can take works off the market more effectively than a gallery can. This would provide some argument for the trust. But of course the artist must also prove to buyers that he has locked up his future output to the requisite degree; this may prove difficult.

A final issue is one of trust in the intermediary. Life insurance, or savings banks (pre-deposit insurance), promise to pay you back in a distant future. Virtually all depositors or policyholders have preferred large, solid institutions with high levels of capitalization. Older banks had fancy columns to signal they will be around for the long run. Otherwise there is simply too much risk that a small intermediary will go under. If you are “lending” a painting to an artistic venture, why not look for the most conservative and thickly capitalized institution possible?

In closing, I will repeat my bottom line from my previous post on the topic:

…decompose the transaction. Half of your income stream remains tied up in your own art and thus risky, minus the twenty percent of course. With the other half of your pension you decide to invest in not-yet-totally-famous artists. Would anyone recommend such purchases on their own merits? Is that your idea of insurance?

That being said, it is the market, not I, who will have the final word in this matter.

Fabio points out that good copies of masterworks are very cheap, a fraction of the value of the original. Charles Murray make a similar point:

The technology already exists to make perfect, full-size (or any size) copies of any painting–“perfect” meaning not only absolutely accurate color values and reproductions of line, but the same kind of canvas or plaster, the same three-dimensional ridges and textures in the brush strokes, the same sheen to the varnish, and even the same cracks in the varnish, if so desired. “Perfect” means also that the most acute and best-trained artistic eye in the world would have only a 50-50 chance of picking the original over the copy.

He exaggerates the state of technology but the point remains nonetheless: what if paintings were like recorded music?

Murray continues:

Economically, I assume that the acceptance of copies would devastate the resale value of originals of everything except the first-tier work. But for the first-tier work–the owners of which would have the exclusive right to reproduce it–the amount of money to be made selling copies might well rival current market value.

It is also fun to speculate on which paintings would sell the most copies if only the intrinsic attractiveness of the art mattered. Would the market be comparatively small, on the scale of the audience for classical music? Or would great art attract a mass market? In a world where the price of the painting is not going to impress houseguests, which paintings would be used for interior decoration, and which would be the ones that ordinary people, having become collectors, would put in their private galleries for measured contemplation? How would the works of Titian and Caravaggio fare against Monet and Renoir? How would the early Picasso–the easy-to-enjoy Picasso of “Boy with a Pipe”–fare against the later Picasso?

The most exciting prospect is what low-cost perfect copies would do to visual art as part of our daily lives. As matters stand, great art is something most of us see a few times a year, if that, having no choice but to move quickly from work to work, wondering if we will be able to get to the Impressionists before our feet hurt too much to enjoy them.

My prediction: Contra Fabio and Murray, I think most people would find it oppressive to live with “great art,” as that concept is traditionally understood. They prefer the inferior rendition. They like the ¤¤¤¤ they put on their walls. So there is less of a mass market here than meets the eye. A separate question is whether museums will license their works for such reproductions. If museums could make real money through this route, would they continue to receive charitable donations and government grants? The commercialization of high art would completely redefine the question of who controls an art museum. It is not obvious that this would benefit current museum management.

Take 250 reasonably well-known artists and put their work together in a trust. Later the works will be sold. The payoff to each artist comes half from his paintings, half from the other paintings in the lot. The intermediary takes a mere twenty percent, plus it charges the artists half the costs of storage.

It is a retirement program for artists; supposedly it will minimize their risk and encourage creativity.

I can think of at least five reasons why it won’t work. To see just one, decompose the transaction. Half of your income stream remains tied up in your own art and thus risky, minus the twenty percent of course. With the other half of your pension you decide to invest in not-yet-totally-famous artists. Would anyone recommend such purchases on their own merits? Is that your idea of insurance?

Here is their web site. Here is the home page of the founder, Dan Galai; he has a prolific publication record in economics journals. For more information, see the May 29 issue of The Economist, p.75.