Category: Uncategorized
The culture that is Portland
She understands how privileged she is; she describes her anxiety as a “luxury problem.” But still: The plastic toys in the bathtub made her anxious. The disposable diapers made her anxious. She began to ask herself, what is the relationship between the diapers and the wildfires?
“I feel like I have developed a phobia to my way of life,” she said.
And more generally:
…people could be affected by environmental decay even if they were not physically caught in a disaster.
Recent research has left little doubt that this is happening. A 10-country survey of 10,000 people aged 16 to 25 published last month in The Lancet found startling rates of pessimism. Forty-five percent of respondents said worry about climate negatively affected their daily life. Three-quarters said they believed “the future is frightening,” and 56 percent said “humanity is doomed.”
The blow to young people’s confidence appears to be more profound than with previous threats, such as nuclear war, Dr. Clayton said. “We’ve definitely faced big problems before, but climate change is described as an existential threat,” she said. “It undermines people’s sense of security in a basic way.”
Caitlin Ecklund, 37, a Portland therapist who finished graduate school in 2016, said that nothing in her training — in subjects like buried trauma, family systems, cultural competence and attachment theory — had prepared her to help the young women who began coming to her describing hopelessness and grief over climate.
Dare I suggest this is counterproductive? Here is the full NYT article, via Matt Yglesias. Context is that which is scarce!
Sunday assorted links
1. MIE: “For $995, Love Cloud will fly you and a partner in a private airplane for 45 minutes so that you can have sex.” (NYT)
3. Is the hotel minibar disappearing?
4. Nasal vaccines (NYT).
5. Tim Harford’s ten best books for thinking about numbers and statistics.
6. The debate at the time as to whether Ukraine should have given up nuclear weapons (NYT).
7. MIE: First Norwegian salmon vending machine.
8. Claims about Ottawa, also reflecting “context is that which is scarce.”
The Fanfare meta-Want List
Every year I read through the Fanfare Want Lists for new classical music releases, and collate the new recordings that are recommended by more than one person as one of the five most noteworthy releases of the year. This time around I noticed the following as multiple nominees:
1. Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Beethoven Symphony number nine.
2. Daniil Trifonov, Silver Age, two CDs of Russian music.
3. Pavel Kolesnikov, Bach, Goldberg Variations.
I am happy to give another thumbs up to each.
If you google the word “self-recommending,” the first three items are all connected to me. Yet I learned the term by reading Fanfare, where it is used repeatedly. Of these three items, the Trifonov is the one that comes closest to being self-recommending. The performers on items #1 and #3 are highly regarded, but to invoke the name Daniil Trifonov is a kind of magic, and as far as I know without fail. It is hard to give any praise to #2 that goes much higher than simply stating that Trifonov has produced a recording of that music.
For those who need it, here is a (only slightly out of date) 2009 MR vocabulary guide.
Saturday assorted links
1. Mathematics: “Many papers have errors, yes—but our major results generally hold up, even when the intermediate steps are wrong!”
2. New Gena Gorlin Substack on building and builders.
3. When Leo Strauss asked out Hannah Arendt she sort of cancelled him.
4. Vitalik on Wordcels, liberalism, and more. Some important germs of thought in there.
Friday assorted links
1. Using AI paraphrasing tools to avoid plagiarism checks.
2. MIE: “Shake Shack hooks up with DoorDash for chicken sandwich-themed dating site.”
3. Interesting analysis of which bureaucratic interest groups support Putin.
4. “The first successful pizza restaurant in the world located outside of Naples was founded in Buenos Aires in 1882, when a Neapolitan immigrant baker named Nicolas Vaccarezza started selling the pies out of his shop in Boca.” Link here. Mostly it is about how American pizza is.
6. Jonathan Cahill.
7. Blackwell’s bookshop is up for sale. Family-owned since 1879.
Thursday assorted links
Gulf of Guinea fact of the day
Worryingly, the security threats in west Africa now include piracy in the Gulf of Guinea. In 2020, all but one of the world’s 28 kidnappings recorded at sea occurred in these waters. Similarly, in 2018, all six hijackings at sea, and 13 of the 18 incidents of ships fired upon occurred in the Gulf of Guinea. Of the 141 hostages held at sea that year, 130 were captured by pirates here.
Here is the full FT story.
The incidence of India’s crypto tax
The crypto tax is the first item listed in a section of the budget memo headed “Revenue Mobilization”. The document [PDF] explains that India wants to tax income from crypto-assets at a 30 per cent flat rate.
By comparison, India currently taxes short-term capital gains made by selling shares at 15 per cent. The budget memo also calls for a one per cent tax on sales of cryptographic assets, payable by parties to the transaction, to widen India’s tax base.
Here is the first article link. As I understand it, the 30% is on net income from crypto, and there is no tax deductions for losses (see this explainer). (Does the tax define gains “year by year,” or “for each bitcoin sold”?)
I am wondering what is the incidence of this tax. Presumably India is a price-taker in the crypto market as a whole, so this initiative should not much affect the global price of crypto, unless you take the policy as a signal about other, future crypto taxes to come around the world.
Under one (unlikely) scenario, all Indians were marginal crypto buyers, and so with a 30% tax they just stop holding crypto. The Coase theorem suggests that others are always willing to bid more, because in many other countries the crypto taxes are lower.
More realistically, many Indians are infra-marginal buyers, with sufficiently high expectations of price appreciation that some of them will stay in the market. The “saner” marginal buyers will drop out, and sell their crypto to non-Indians, and the most optimistic Indian buyers will stay in. Looking forward, crypto in India will be shaped by the giddiest and most bullish asset holders, compared to the status quo. More crypto will be held by fewer, more enthusiastic hands.
The Indian government is also signaling that it will not ban crypto outright. That ought to increase the demand of the “giddy” buyers all the more. If you are going to stay in with the higher tax burden, at least you know that bitcoin and other markets will continue in India.
How does the tax affect the value of the rupee? In the short run, some Indian taxpayers may sell their crypto for rupees, raising the value of the rupee, but probably very slightly. Longer term, the rupee may be worth less because it is a less effective vehicle for investing in crypto, again with the effect here likely being small.
Otherwise, the demand for non-crypto risky assets in India will increase. If those assets can be used for loss offsets, they will be relatively more valuable because crypto cannot be so used.
Insofar as India has a local, “India-only” crypto market, new issues there will have to be lower in price to attract buying interest. That will serve as a tax on those Indians who supply inputs into crypto production.
Indians who have made a great deal from crypto may attempt to give up their Indian citizenship and Indian taxpaying liabilities (how easy is that?).
What else?
Wednesday assorted links
1. English-language music is losing relative ground in global markets (The Economist).
2. Would you take free land in rural Kansas?
3. One woman (Anna Gát) who is giving up drinking.
4. Redux of November post on how the Covid pandemic is evolving.
6. South Korea’s new nose-only mask. And Human Challenge Trial going OK so far.
7. Texas philanthropist who supported the work to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem (NYT).
How political was 1960s music?
That question is debated at length in the comments section of this post. There are obviously political songs, such as the protest songs of Bob Dylan, or “Revolution” by The Beatles, much misunderstood at that. Still, much of 1960s music was far more political in its time than it seems to us today. The mere fact that the singer had long hair, or shook his hips in a “lewd” manner, or that white stars aped black music styles…all of that was intensely political. “I don’t want you listening to no music by no long hairs” was a common parental sentiment at the time, because people mostly did understand what was at stake, namely an overturning of a lot of societal mores. Elvis Presley sounds to us today like another early rock star, but the black vocal affectations and the grinding hips were a big deal for some period of time. Drug songs were political too, and there were lots of those. Just try “Eight Miles High,” or a big chunk of Jefferson Airplane or how about Donovan? Hippie culture also was political. Motown carried ideas of black capitalism, and was actually somewhat of a counter to the more politically radical forms of black music. The Beach Boys are an example of a significant period group who mostly were not very political (though you can find a superficial embrace of consumer culture at first, followed by a collapse into tragedy and sadness), and plenty of the “one hit wonder” songs were apolitical too. Most of the stuff that has survived in collective memory was fairly political. The Byrds album Sweetheart of the Rodeo was political too, and it is no accident that Roger McGuinn ended up as a Ben Carson supporter and a Christian. The album was mostly hated upon its release in 1968, but now is seen as a classic.
How to start art collecting
The answer here depends so much on how much money and how much time and how much interest you have that I can’t give you a simple formula. Nonetheless here are a few basic observations that might prove useful at varying levels of interest:
1. At some you should just start buying some stuff. You’re going to make some mistakes at first, treat that as part of your learning curve and as part of the price of the broader endeavor.
2. Don’t ever think you can make money buying and selling art. The bid-ask spread is a bitch, and finding the right buyers is a complex and time-consuming matching problem.
3. Art is strongly tiered in a hierarchical fashion. That means most fields are incredible bargains, at least relative to the trendy fields. A lot of HNW buyers are looking for large, striking contemporary works they can hang over their sofas in their second homes in Miami Beach or Los Angeles or Aspen. Good for them, as many of those works are splendid. Nonetheless that opens up opportunities for you. I find the price/beauty gradient ratio can be especially favorable for textiles, ethnographic works, Old Master drawings (and sometimes paintings), paintings from smaller or obscure countries, various collectibles, and many other areas.
4. As for the price/beauty gradient, prints, lithographs, and watercolors usually are much cheaper than original paintings. And they are not necessarily of lower quality. Figure out early on which are the artists whose prints can be as good or better than many of their original works (Lozowick, Picasso, and Johns would be a few nominees) and learn lots about those areas. A Goncharova painting can costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, but one of her Ballet Russe designs — an original done by the same hand — can go for thousands.
4b. The “mainstream art market” still discriminates in favor of “original” works, but it already has started laying this convention aside for photographs, and I wonder if further erosion along these lines is not on the way. The “internet generation” is getting wealthier all the time, and do they all hate reproducibility so much?
5. Pick a small number of areas and specialize in them. Learn everything you can about them. Everything. Follow auction results. Read about their history. Read biographies of their creators. Go visit exhibitions. And so on. It is also a great way to learn about the world more generally.
6. If you are an outsider, you can’t just walk up to a gallery and buy the best stuff at a market clearing price. You have to invest in your relationships there. Or consider buying at auction. Whatever your choice, be aware of the logic and why things work that way. Selling practices are also an exercise in reputation management of the artist and of the gallery, and maybe they think you are not up to snuff as a buyer!
7. Visit other people’s art collections as much as you can. You will learn a great deal this way, and learn to spot new forms of foolishness that you had never before imagined.
8. Don’t treat art collecting as like shopping, or as motivated by the same impulses. If you do, you will accumulate a lot of junk very quickly. Thinking of it more as building out a long term narrative of what an artistic field, and a culture, is all about. Fine if you don’t want to do that! It is a demanding exercise, and if you wish to escalate your collecting to higher levels, you need to ask yourself if you are really up for that. Does it sound like something you would be good at?
9. Fakes are rampant in so many parts of the art world, but they are especially likely if the artist is “popular” (e.g., Chagall, Dali) or if the style is easily copied ex post (Malevich). In contrast, if you buy a piece of complex stained glass, it is probably the real thing. The major auction houses are usually reasonably good at rooting out fakes, but there is no institution you can trust 100 percent. And sometimes, as with the recently auction Botticelli and da Vinci paintings, no one really knows for sure (Botticelli pro and con; in any case I don’t like the work, certainly not for $45 million).
10. Don’t buy art on the basis of the artist’s name. This is a good way to end up with a lot of crap and, for that matter, fakes. Just about every famous artist has a fair number of mediocre works, overpriced at that. (That said, if you really just want to “collect names,” you will find it is remarkable on a limited income just how many top names you can wrack up.)
11. Few of the important art collections were built by just throwing tons of money at the task. That is a recipe for being ripped off, and it attracts poor quality sellers to your orbit. You have to understand something more deeply than other people do. Obviously money helps, but you can’t rely on outbidding others as your most important ally.
12. Maybe sometime I’ll tell you the story of how I obtained an especially fine, rare work by throwing a stone at a wild dog in rural Mexico. Or how I tracked another painter down at the mental hospital.
13. Get a mentor!
There is much more I could say of relevance (e.g., how to present yourself to dealers? how to avoid winner’s curse?), but I’ll stop there for now.
Tuesday assorted links
The Neil Young vs. Spotify saga
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
Some see the musician as an intellectual hero for taking a stand. Yet [Neil] Young’s own record in this area is far from pristine. For years, he has spread scientific misinformation about GMO foods. While experts have consistently judged GMO foods to be both safe and useful, Young in one song referred to them as poison. As a guest on the “Late Show With Stephen Colbert” in 2016, Young suggested that GMO foods caused “terrible diseases.” It is hard not to wonder to what degree anti-biotech sentiments like these, ironically, might have fed the current skepticism of Covid vaccines.
I also question whether Young’s motives in the Spotify fracas were purely ideological. Just a few days ago, Young participated in the launch of a (temporary) satellite radio Neil Young channel. I don’t begrudge him that business decision, and I will listen myself. Yet I also recognize that demand for his satellite radio channel could grow now that he is off Spotify. All the publicity stirred up by Young’s departure from Spotify probably won’t hurt, either.
Joni Mitchell by the way ragged on DDT way back when (admittedly the costs of the anti-DDT crusade are sometimes overrated by those on the Right). So many musicians are purveyors of misinformation, I wonder how she and Neil feel about being paired with Lennon’s “Imagine” song on Spotify. And here is the close:
The more you understand that nobody’s position really makes any sense, the more quickly you can embrace your inner Heart of Gold, a song that is still on YouTube, right along with these speeches by Adolf Hitler.
Recommended, not the speeches though.
Monday assorted links
A simple theory of culture
The transistor radio/car radio was the internet of its time. Content was free, and there were multiple radio stations, though not nearly as many as we have internet sites.
People tuned into the radio, in part, for ideas, not just tunes. But the ideas that spread best were attached to songs. Drug use spread, in part, because famous musicians sang about using drugs. Anti-Vietnam War themes spread through songs, as did many other social movements. Overall, ideas that could be bundled with songs had a big advantage. And since new songs were largely the province of young people, this in turn favored ideas for young people.
Popular music was highly emotionally charged because so much of it was connected to ideas you really cared about.
Of course, by attaching an idea to a song you often ensured the idea wasn’t going to be really subtle, at least not along the standard intellectual dimensions. But it might be correct nonetheless.
Today you can debate ideas directly on social media, without the intermediation of music. Ideas become less simple and more baroque, while music loses its cultural centrality and becomes more boring.
We also don’t need to tie novels so much to ideas, although in countries such as Spain idea-carrying novels remain a pretty common practice (NYT). A lot of painting and sculpture also seem increasingly disconnected from significant social ideas.
In this new world, celebrities decline in relative influence, because they too are no longer carriers of ideas in the way they used to be. Think “John Wayne!” Arguably “celebrity culture” peaked in the 1980s with Madonna and the like.
When I hear various complaints about the contemporary scene, sometimes I ask myself: “Is this really a complaint about the disintermediation of ideas”?
In this view, the overall modern “portfolio” may be better, but the best individual art works, and in turn the greatest artists, will come from the earlier era.