Category: The Arts

Thanks to everyone for reading and supporting MR.  Here, in honor of Canada, is a sleighrace from the 19th Century Dutch-Canadian Nicholas Krieghoff.

One of my favorite contemporary painters, Canadian-born Agnes Martin, just died at the age of 92.  Her soft colors and straight lines did much to bring beauty back into art.  She was no minimalist but most of all a believer in spirituality and the pure aesthetic.  Here is the story.  She lived a secluded life and had expressed a desire for no obituaries, but here is one nice painting by her.  Here is a nice print.

1. What did ancient Greek statues really look like?  Here is one answer, courtesy of Michael at www.2blowhards.com.

2. "[Researchers] found that English had more of a swing than French, a rhythm produced by a tendency in English to cut some vowels short while stressing others. The melodies of the two languages also differed, with pitch varying far more in spoken English than French.

The team then did the same kind of analysis on music, comparing the rhythm and melody of English classical music from composers such as Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams, with that of French composers including Debussy, Fauré and Roussel. "The music differs in just the same way as the languages," said Dr Patel. "It is as if the music carries an imprint of the composer’s language.""

Here is the full story.

3. Digital analysis may provide a new and near-certain means of distinguishing real artworks from fakes, story here.

4. The UK music industry is seeing record sales performance; downloads, legal and illegal, do not seem to be hurting the sector.  Sales of music DVDs are especially strong.

5. France is putting on a show of Pakistani truck art.

October 27, 2004: If Dylan Thomas hadn’t drunk himself to death in 1953, he might be celebrating his ninetieth birthday today, perhaps with a successor to the grand and glorious poem he wrote to celebrate his thirtieth.

He left us with a small number of poems so heart-wrenching that I cannot read them, even for the two hundredth time, without all of the symptoms of an emotional crisis. Take In Country Sleep, where a father reassures his daughter that she has nothing to fear from fairy tale villains—but only from the Thief who comes in multiple guises to take her faith and ultimately to leave her “naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come”. In Country Sleep was a standard bedtime poem in our house, and my daughter soon learned to anticipate “the part where Daddy cries”.

Then there’s the prose. Nobody is better at nostalgia and grief for time’s relentlessness:

The lane was always the place to tell your secrets; if you did not have any, you invented them. Occassionally now I dream that I am turning out of school into the lane of confidences when I say to the boys of my class ‘At last, I have a real secret!’

“What is it? What is it?”

“I can fly!”

And when they do not believe me, I flap my arms and slowly leave the ground, only a few inches at first, then gaining air until i fly waving my cap, level with the upper windows of the school, peering in until the mistress at the piano screams, and the metronome falls to the ground and stops, and there is no more time.

And finally there’s the voice, the great booming melliflous irresistible voice lovingly preserved by Caedmon on about a dozen CDs that you will thank yourself for buying. The Caedmon collection includes a performance of the haunting “play for voices” Under Milk Wood narrated by Thomas himself; for an even greater treat, get the BBC Radio version with Richard Burton—or listen to it on the web. (Warning: Do not rent the highly regrettable movie version with Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.)

For a brief 39 years, as Time held him green and dying, Dylan Thomas spun words and images of surpassing beauty that will live as long as the English language. May he rest in peace.

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.