…and it is the blissful taste of the Cara Cara Navel Orange. Also, there is a blog by Steven Jenkins, Fairway’s buyer. For all my complaining, there is quite a bit to say for living in Manhattan.
-
Archives
When art production and consumption disconnect
Feb 3, ’08
3:55 PM
I was speaking about context with a colleague, specifically about Gbenga Akinnagbe, who plays Chris on the Wire (he’s on the left), but also plays Jimmy in the Savages. I was remarking about how scary he looks in the Wire. But this is quite possibly about me, I think, and the belief that more black=more scary (although you can decide for yourself: here he is, on the far left in the Wire, and here is his gallery at IMDB). But he is scarier looking in the Wire by design, and I also think it’s possible that Chris, Snoop, and Marlo (the main baddies in season 4) collectively scared me more than the Barksdale/Bell crew from the earlier seasons because of their ‘you think it’s one thing, but it ain’t, it’s the other thing’ approach to violence.
In any event, none of this compares to Mitt Romney doing impromptu rap.
An Opportunity to learn about Performativity
Feb 2, ’08
4:26 PM
This would be an interesting opportunity for someone who would like to learn, network, discuss:
From Bodies to Black-Scholes: A Two-day Workshop on Performativity and the Social Studies of Finance
Organized by Daniel Beunza (Columbia U.) and Yuval Millo (LSE)
Columbia Business School, New York, 28-29 April 2008
The Social Studies of Finance (SSF) is one of the fastest-growing and most intriguing new fields in the social sciences today. Born from the intersection of sociology of science, economic sociology, management and critical accounting, SSF offers a new vantage point for the analysis of financial markets and their dynamics.
This intensive two-day workshop is convened by Daniel Beunza from Columbia Business School and Yuval Millo from the London School of Economics. It is aimed at presenting the field to newcomers, and is directed at research students and early-career researchers in accounting, finance, management, political science and sociology.
To allow effective discussion, the group size is limited to 12 participants. The workshop’s fee is US$ 200, which includes meals. To apply for the workshop, please send by February 31 your CV and a one-page description of your research and how it relates to SSF to y.millo@lse.ac.uk
For more details
Critics, meet Markets
Feb 1, ’08
10:39 AM
You may have missed the news that mass market games such as Guitar Hero and Wii Games are doing well against traditional video games such as Bioshock, Halo 3, and the Orange Box. But what you shouldn’t miss is the discussion about critics and art nestled pretty far into the article:
…as video games become more popular than ever, hard-core gamers and the old-school critics who represent them are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience.
That is not so unusual in other media. In most forms of entertainment there is a divide between what is popular with the masses and what is popular with the critics. Plenty of films get rave reviews but never make it past the art houses. Plenty of blockbusters are panned.
The reasons for that seem fairly clear. Film, books and music (and food, for that matter) have been around long enough to have developed highly sophisticated cognoscenti whose tastes have little to do with the mass audiences that still drive those markets. Food critics have as much sway over Red Lobster as book critics do over Danielle Steel.
That has not been the case with video games. Game critics and players have been closely aligned in their tastes, perhaps because the writers and buyers came from more or less the same pool of tech-savvy young men.
But judging from the Top 10 list, that paradigm may be breaking down. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing for either the financial or the creative health of video games. The importance of the mass audience in gaming’s spectacular growth is seen most clearly in the success of Nintendo’s Wii, which is far outselling its more technically advanced hardware competitors, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and PlayStation 3 from Sony. The Wii is easy to use, while the 360 and PS3 are aimed at veteran players. Critics and game developers have been known to gripe about the Wii’s selling so well even though there aren’t many “great” games for that system.
The consumer doesn’t care. Wii Play was the No. 2-selling game of last year even though it received an abysmal score of 58 out of 100 at Metacritic.com, which aggregates reviews. Mario Party 8 for the Wii made the list at No. 10 with a similarly bad Metacritic rating of 62. Both Wii Play and Mario Party 8 are basically collections of mini-games, like table tennis, portrayed through simple graphics. To someone steeped in game lore, that’s pretty lame. To someone who just bought a Wii for the family, that’s pretty cool.
Of course, if such games are making the Top 10, that means that some games adored by the gaming experts are now falling short of the best-seller list.
The two and a half interesting things here are: 1) the relatively closer connection between critics and players of video games than in other entertainment industries – including movies, fine arts, music; and 2) the contention that this is about the ‘maturity’ of the industry, rather that some other feature of the art market in question. Intertwined are notions of what a market is (the market ‘doesn’t care’ about critics, as quasi-personified impersonal market-forces), as well as what critics are supposed to do (to someone steeped in game lore). Finally, 2.5) Metacritic is itself an aggregated, assumedly market-like representation of criticism! So we have the market talking to an anonymous, aggregated crowd of critics.