Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

August 21, 2008

Social Science as Art

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 10:58 am

First, look at this post and tell us what you think.

Second, here are some lovely physical representations of graphical social data. As sculpture.

Of course, I would not necessarily trust the social science chops of an artist (when I ran the numbers, it looked more like:

But even with the faulty peaks and valleys, still lookin’ good my friend, lookin’ good.

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August 20, 2008

Will you remember me?

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 10:36 am

In an otherwise interesting article on the Chinese Art market explosion (in the upcoming issue of ARTnews), Barbara Pollack sneaks in this line:

With the sheer abundance of galleries, auction houses, and art fairs in Chine, the larger art world is recognizing the power of the Asian market. Standing in an auction house in New York or London watching paintings by Chinese artists sell for millions, one can grouse about this boom and hint that it will turn out to be a bubble. But strolling in a bustling gallery district in Beijing, with students and turists crowding the cafés and boutiques and filling the huge art showrooms, few would predict a downturn in the near future.

No, I’m sure sky-high prices for Chinese art in a time of global slowdown, acute financial uncertainty, and a search for uncorrelated non-real estate risk could not possibly signal a bubble. Unfathomable! I mean, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

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Something New - Markets and Art

Filed under: Art, Culture, Institutional, Markets, Organizations, Prices — Peter @ 8:48 am

As an experiment in sociology and blogging, Jenn (from whatisthewhat.wordpress.com) and I have put together a brief video on culture and markets, the beginning of what we hope will be a conversation at the intersection of culture, sociology, and economics. We’ll work on the lighting and switch off the big-head/small-head, but we hope you like it.

If you have thoughts, we’d love to hear them, but we hope you’ll be at least a little kind - this is one of those situations where your self-identity as brutally honest should not trump your self-identity as gracious.

And the links to the videos we reference: Fashion File: Making an Hermes Bag, and Contemporary Art Preview

Art and Markets 1: Selling Crafts and Art from Peter Levin on Vimeo.

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August 15, 2008

All right, stop, collaborate, and listen

Filed under: Art, Culture — Peter @ 2:35 pm

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August 4, 2008

On Galenson

Filed under: Art, Markets — Peter @ 10:11 pm

The New York Times printed an article today about David Galenson, and I have nothing really to add. Oh, wait, other than to say that:

1) Economists prey on disciplines with low self-esteem, and the fact that anyone in the art world would even bother with Galenson is evidence that art history, and the arts editors at the NYT, should stop thinking that their own work is shit.

and

2) Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence has the best 2-page take-down of Galenson that I’ve seen.

For the rest of you who believe, per the article, that “…[In] the 20th century did art enter the marketplace and become a commodity, like a stick of butter or an Hermès bag,” I can only say, yawn. Pseudo-provocative economist spouting pseudo-insightful nonsense. Nothing interesting to see here, folks, move right along.

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July 24, 2008

Anonymity, thing of the past?

Filed under: Art, Culture — Peter @ 11:07 am

Jenn notes with sadness the unmasking of Banksky, and how she is both saddened and mildly implicated in the process. Authority and identity are largely left understated in someone like Max Weber’s societal theories on the trajectory towards rationalization, and picked up instead in Foucault’s notions of governmentality.

I wonder what it means for us to no longer (if we ever?) find anonymity satisfactory. Right now, at least, we live in a society where celebrity and markets and a creeping surveillance state have crowded out something like anonymity/symbolic identity? Banksky, Digby, Fake Steve Jobs, US torture and blanket domestic spying; the impulse to find out who just swamps the impulse towards being left alone.

Maybe these are concurrent trends, the surveillance and the paparazzi, and they are just coincidentally conjoined in the current era of constant post-9/11 fearmongering and post-Michael Jackson celebrity gawking. Foucault would say no, that man is a confessing animal, and we demand confession more and more - there is an excellent scene in the sparse-but-powerful book Disgrace, where an accused professor accepts blame but does so while refusing to explain or ‘confess’ appropriately, and is ripped for it. That’s sometimes how I feel nowadays about a variety of issues. Explain yourself, show yourself, unmask yourself.

There is a long history of muckraking for these purposes, journalism to expose the underbelly of corruption in government and in business - Frank Norris’ The Pit, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives. But they don’t seem to compare to the contemporary infrastructure designed to find out more, to learn the intimate details, to expose.

I recall the early days of MUDDs, where pseudonymity was an adequate substitute for identity; no one ever really asked you who you ‘really’ were, since who you presented yourself to be was, with repeated interactions, enough to establish a reputation and identity. Then ip tracking, web analytics, and more importantly the cultural reassertion of the internet-as-fancy-telephone. After this, you could and did link users to their geographic location, their social class status (via data imputed from zip code, for example), and from there their consumer and political preferences.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just a bit of a depressed reaction from the Banksky news, and the feeling I get that I personally don’t want to know more paired with a sense of inevitability that the anonymous one would inevitably be found out.

I mean, there is someone still looking for D.B. Cooper. I hope they never find him - but they probably will…

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July 17, 2008

Rethinking markets - market metaphors

Filed under: Art, Markets, Pollution, Ramble — Peter @ 2:43 pm

I think it’s time to regroup, and actually do some of the ‘re’ thinking of markets I’m always planning to get around to. I want to do so in the context of three recent observations:

The Examples

The first observation comes from Fabio Rojas, over at the orgtheory blog - though it is slowly becoming the orgborg (almost 20 current or past posters!). In talking about the possibility (likelihood, I’d say) of a downturn in the contemporary art market, and sifting through the comments of restive art producers, Rojas is puzzled by four things:

Interestingly, for me at least, the comment thread turned into a discussion about how the readers (mostly practicing artists) felt about Chelsea (the fancy pants NY art district). A few things came up in this thread, which are obvious to anyone hanging around artists:

* Some folks seem to have bitter feelings towards the booming art market. Winkleman himself seemed perplexed that some readers should wish for the disappearance of the galleries which are responsible for selling the art. It’s like car engineers hating local dealerships.
* Some folks resent the fact that there are types of art which are popular in hip art districts like Chelsea.
* There is often a severe mistrust of dealers, not just specific dealers.
* People believe that markets are irresistable forces that undermine art.

Fabio wants to inject “a little bit of Cowenism,” which as I understand it means economics+incentives+assumption of efficiency-via-markets. Or something. Somebody has to pay for art. So rather than whine about dealers getting their share of the financial compensation for art, or the power of galleries/dealers in setting aesthetic and market standards for the art world, artists ought to be more appreciative of the expansion of the art world via art markets. And we ought to simply recognize art as another market, organized in similar fashion (if a little quirky), and play by those rules. Or, you can get a real job.

The second example comes from the EPA’s recent decision to lower the value of human life. Or rather, to lower the determination of the value of a statistical human life, the hypothetical monetary value of the loss of human life. As a result, decisions are being altered for how the EPA would regulate the environment. The EPA, since the 1970s, has used cost-benefit analysis in its decisions to regulate or not (read Wendy Espeland’s Struggle for Water, and Ted Porter’s Trust in Numbers!). Thus, reducing the value of human life has the practical effect of making regulation less likely - the ‘costs’ of regulation have to be lower than the ‘benefits’ of saving X number of human lives. The more the costs and the lower the benefits, the less likely environmental regulation would be.

Analysis of the costs of human life vary, but the main way to measure it is via the economic principle of ‘revealed preference.’ That is, people make decisions everyday that put them at risk of death, and by measuring these decisions, we could assumedly make inferences about peoples’ own value on life. The probability of a firefighter dying in a fire over the course of their career, combined with the salaries of firefighters in the labor market, yields a kind of indirect decision that ‘reveals’ one’s own value on human life. You may not be willing to be paid $3 million to die, but you might be willing to be paid $65,000 to take a job with a possibility that you could die during the course of your duties.

In practice, the EPA has dropped the value of human life from $7.8 million in 2003 to $6.9 million in 2008. Interestingly, a number of different federal agencies apparently have different valuations of human life, despite attempts to come to a single price. The EPA, in its Solomonic wisdom, decided to split the difference between a couple different studies giving a high and low estimate for the value of human life.

The final example comes from the ongoing housing meltdown, this time the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae edition ¹. These two agencies are quasi-governmental, meaning that they have had a governmental imprimatur to buy and package mortgages, not backed by the federal government per se, but really backed by the federal government. In the coming bailout that you, me, and your grandchildren will be paying for, a number of folks in the business press are suggesting that we’re treating these agencies, and bad homeowners, to a version of ‘capitalism lite’:

Why should responsible homeowners have to foot the bill for the irresponsible behavior of others in a capitalist system? (No, the folks buying homes they couldn’t afford weren’t all hoodwinked by mortgage lenders.)

The answer: A higher power has decided that the anticipated future cost — the risky behavior it encourages tomorrow by rewarding it today — is less than the more easily measured current cost.

The housing market is a mess. Sales and prices are still falling, competition from distressed sales (of foreclosed properties or short sales by the bank) is mounting, lenders are tightening credit standards and employment is falling. Policy makers have decided that short-term pain is intolerable, especially in an election year, with constituents badgering their representatives to “do something” about high gas prices and a lousy economy.

Assumedly, this means that we should be treating them as just capitalism (or ‘capitalism classic,’ maybe). That is, let the banks fail, let markets separate the wheat from the chaff, let the capitalist system to its work. This is the financial crisis writ small, I think. The argument goes something like, let Bear Stearns fail, banks should close, people making stupid decisions should be punished. Capitalist markets are about market signals, punish with poverty, reward with prosperity. Let the government get out of the way of these signals.

This reminds me of my recent trip to Canada (rocks and trees and water!), where our tour guide kept saying that since the government no longer lets the forests catch fire, they overgrow, get diseased, and now no wildlife really live in them. Fire is natural. Analogously, downturns in capitalist economies are natural. Get in the way of them (with government!), and we get disease, rot, and no more wildlife. Er, innovation.

The problem

Here is the problem. In each of these cases, MARKETS ARE A METAPHOR. In the real world, markets are a metaphor. Say it with me, now. Markets are a metaphor. We’ve arrived at a socio-cultural place where so many people believe that markets are things found in nature that it’s just out of control. Even in the best of cases, say, a core financial capital trading environment, it is a metaphor.

Of course, that it is a metaphor does not make it inconsequential. On the contrary, what this insight should tell you is that if someone tries to convince you with an authoritative, ‘well, you know, markets!’, you should call BS. The extraction and distribution of resources is a political question², subject to formal and informal rules of authority, cultural, and social practices.

There are resources, yes. Raw materials, found in nature, as well as in human ingenuity. Lots of coordination among lots of people is necessary to get at some of these resources, to be sure. And these resources do have to be distributed, with enough subjectively-understood fairness that people continue to want to participate. These things are all true. But there is a big big difference between saying markets=what economics tells us markets are, and markets=how these resources are extracted from the social and natural environment in the world-that-is. I’m not just saying that markets are different where the rubber hits the road, compared to the textbooks of neo-classical economics. I am saying that economic markets do not describe some found reality. They describe an existing set of institutional arrangements. People who believe markets are natural are like people who believe that mathematics taps the mind of God because a nautilus’ shell grows like the Golden Spiral. It has the benefit of being completely arrogant. And the added benefit of being not, you know, true.

Markets are one means of creating incentives for extracting resources and distributing their rewards. Doing so in other ways may require such a shift in what we are currently about that it seems crazy. This is a fancy way of saying that markets are hegemonic; they have achieved ‘theoretical closure’; they have an aura of ‘naturalness’; they are taken-for granted. In Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, he comes across a pastoral, slow-food organic farmer whom he asked about how a place like New York City would fit into his vision of local food economies: “…he startled me with his answer: ‘Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?’” (245). Unthinkable! Our society would change a lot, lot lot, if we were to really consider extracting, using, and distributing resources in more radically new and different ways. (Another aside, don’t you just want to kick the asses of those who get the vapors over manufacturing that isn’t carbon-neutral, but don’t give a shit about manufacturing, or farming, or service work for that matter, that doesn’t pay a living wage?)

What has happened here? My own guess is a relative collapse of imagination, combined with a hearty stake in the existing state of things, particularly for the first world (and those aspiring to get there). And that the only alternative to markets is state-determined extraction and distribution of resources (ie communism/socialism) is a testament to the enduring power of Marx to inspire along with a long-term successful stoking of anti-communism as a political maneuver. Are there really no other ways to coordinate and extract resources, and then to distribute those resources, than markets or via the state?

In the meantime, why shouldn’t artists be ticked off at dealers who make money from their labors? To me, a little bit of Cowenism is kind of a version of hectoring laid-off factory workers about the aggregate benefits of comparative advantage, or being ticked at college students who don’t love globalization.

And the EPA doesn’t place a monetary value on life, don’t be moronic (or rather, try to pay the EPA to snuff out a colleague and see what happens). It makes decisions about how and how much to regulate polluters. Cost-benefit analysis is kabuki theater to give well-meaning, and sometimes not so well-meaning, to a decidedly political process of balancing the interests of industrial polluters and the rest of us. ‘Valuation of a statistical life’ is a metaphor, being used to allow polluters to continue to pollute irrespective of the rest of us. Is this that difficult to understand? And Wall Street has never had the interests of the rest of us at heart. Never in its two hundred year history. That it has made some rich, spread some wealth, allocated financial capital to where and when it was needed, provided a powerful ‘information mechanism’ is all true. But we should start comparing these things to the degradations Wall Street has also fostered. Every time someone hides behind ‘markets,’ I feel like getting all Dolores Umbridge ³ on ‘em. So enough BS with assuming markets real things discovered in nature and not social practices bolstered by rules, culture, and practices, already; let’s start working on other ways to tackle the problem.

¹ back
As an aside, I’d like give a shoutout to that subset of jerks who knew you could not afford the homes you bought and bought them anyway, feigning shock over the future costs of those giant fake mortgages. Thanks, guys! Way to give a crap about the rest of us!)

² back
You know, you don’t have-a a patron saint for the United States, but there are some American saints. Just the last couple of years they made-a some. The first was-a about-a two years ago. Her name was-a Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. Mother Seton-is-a what they call her. And she’s got-a these nuns of her own order who lobby-they’re real heavy-they came to Rome and everything. And it’s amazing, you see. To be made a saint in-a the catholic church, you have to have-a four miracles. That’s-a the rules, you know. It’s-a always been that-a. Four miracles, and-a to prove it. Well, this-a Mother Seton-now they could only prove-a three miracles. But the Pope-he just waved the fourth one. He just waved it! And do you know why? It’s-a because she was American. It’s all-a politics. We got-a some Italian-a people, they got-a forty, fifty, sixty miracles to their name. They can’t-a get in just cause they say there’s already too many Italian saints, and this woman comes along with-a three lousy miracles. I understand that-a two of them was-a card tricks. Next thing you know, they’re gonna be making Kreskin a saint. Saint Kreskin-they’ll probably call him. It’s a good one.

³ back
Dolores Umbridge: [walks in front of Harry with a straight face] Yes?
Harry Potter: [hesitates and looks at his scarred hand] Nothing.
Dolores Umbridge: [bends down] That’s right. Because deep down you know that you deserve to be punished. Don’t you Mr. Potter?

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June 2, 2008

Anchoring, art-style

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 9:34 am

At the Tate Modern, there are a number of paintings by Pablo Picasso. Ten are currently on display (well, as of last week, this obviously changes). Interestingly, however, there is no room where you can see ‘the Picasso paintings’ in one place. Contrast this with the room of Gerhard Richter’s, or the gallery of Rothkos.

Of these ten pieces, they are displayed in the following rooms/exhibit spaces:

Anchoring categories with Picasso

Exhibit Name	Room Theme	Title of Art
Level 5: States of Flux	After Impressionism (Room 3)	Girl in a Chemise (1905)
Level 5: States of Flux	Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism (Room 2)	Seated Nude (1909-1910)
Level 5: States of Flux	Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism (Room 2)	Bust of a Woman (1909)
Level 5: States of Flux	Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism (Room 2)	Bowl of Fruit, Violin and Bottle (1914)
Level 3: Poetry and Dream	Surrealism and Beyond (Room 2)	Head of a Woman (1924)
Level 3: Poetry and Dream	Beyond Surrealism (Room 2)	The Three Dancers (1925)
Level 3: Poetry and Dream	Surrealism and Beyond (Room 2)	Dora Maar Seated (1938)
Level 3: Material Gestures	Distinguished Voices (Room 5)	Goat’s Skull, Bottle and Candle (1952)
Level 3: Poetry and Dream	Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso (Room 5)	The Kiss (1967)
Level 3: Poetry and Dream	Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso (Room 5)	Nude Woman with Necklace (1968)

Five (well, 6 if ‘Beyond Surrealism’ and ‘Surrealism and Beyond’ are counted differently, as the Tate suggests) different exhibits for the pieces. For instance, the Bust of a Woman hangs next to Albert Gleizes’ Portrait of Jacques Nayral.

Why this? Why no Picasso gallery? Because Picasso is serving a different purpose than Rothko or Richter - rather than showcasing an artist, he is anchoring various categories of modern and contemporary art. Picasso provides the entry point for any number of schools of art, because he was influential in creating them, but also because he is understood as the epitome of a contemporary artist. More versatile than Warhol, more accessible than Cezanne, Picasso currently provides the starting point for understanding surrealism, vorticism, the contemporary ’sublime’ (paired with Bacon).

Categories need centers, and commensuration depends on a ‘third metric’ that can stand outside of other, otherwise qualitatively distinct objects to render them compare-able. Just as cardinals or robins stand in for a central kind of ‘birdness’ against which hummingbirds and penguins can be ‘measured’, in late modern art, Picasso-ness is a measure against which other kinds of art categories can be understood.

Sure she’s good, but is she ‘Picasso-good’?

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May 23, 2008

Museums as value-chargers

Filed under: Art, Culture, Markets, Uncategorized — Peter @ 8:01 am

I have not worked out the distinctions between value and values, or the separate spheres arguments of Zelizer as it fits more generally into economic sociology - efforts to bend her work to my frameworks don’t generally work, and it’s a failure of my frameworking. Still, this excerpt from Kopytoff seems incredibly insightful to me:

When things participate simultaneously in cognitively distinct yet effectively intermeshed exchange spheres, one is constantly confronted with seeming paradoxes of value. A Picasso, though possessing a monetary vale, is priceless in another, higher scheme. Hence, we feel uneasy, even offended, when a newspaper declares the Picasso to be worth $690,000, for one should not be pricing the priceless. But in a pluralistic society, the “objective” pricelessness of the Picasso can only be unambiguously confirmed to us by its immense market price. Yet, the pricelessness still makes the Picasso in some sense more valuable than the pile of dollars it can fetch - as will be duly pointed out by the newspapers if the Picasso is stolen. Singularity, in brief, is confirmed not by the object’s structural position in an exchange system, but by intermittent forays into the commodity sphere, quickly followed by reentries into the closed sphere of singular “art.”
- Igor Kopytoff. 1986. “The cultural biography of things”, pp. 82-83 in Appadurai, ed. The Social Life of Things

The idea here is radical in its insight that objects float into and out of commodity states. We have an old paperback copy of Anna Karenina that is clearly a mass market paperback. But it was given to my partner by her dad, who passed away a couple years back. The book, with its missing cover and folded pages, is no longer a commodity but is now an object imbued with memory. It’s specific to her though, and it would revert back to commodity if she were to give it away to Goodwill. Currently though, it has no price as we think about it.

But some things lose their value for being brought in and out of this commodity state. It can only be commoditized for the first time once. This is why social ties, once monetized, are difficult (but not impossible) to revert back. And if art is to remain valuable by virtue of its cultural value, art world participants have to be careful about how and when they manage the culture/market spheres.

This reference to Charles Saatchi’s joining the efforts of the Art Trading Fund sings to me about how the monetary sphere/cultural sphere dance works.

Damien Hirst is commissioned by Saatchi to produce “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” in 1992 for £50,000 (about $100,000). It is displayed in his gallery until 2005, when it is sold to Steve Cohen of SAC Capital for $8M. Then, just as suddenly as it was moved into the sphere of commodity, it is snatched back into the realm of culture, placed on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for three years, from 2007-2010.

I like the fact that everyone knows that the Met is recharging the cultural batteries of the shark, depleted by its run-in with the marketplace. And of course, as Roberta Smith’s article points out, the Met does not represent some culture-only venue, but a marketplace in its own right. All sides are both totally cynical and totally authentic - art needs to be displayed, and art is a commodity. After another 10 years off the market (probably less), we’ll hear of another sale, another moment of commodification. And then it will be off for another traveling show at Bilbao or somesuch. Just you wait and see.

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May 20, 2008

Chagall v Cezanne

Filed under: Art, Markets — Peter @ 7:16 am

I was a panelist yesterday discussing art markets, at the Christie’s education center. Great group of people, and really lovely of Marisa Kayyem to invite me. One of the more interesting moments was in our discussion of the primacy of market prices as a measure of value for a work. I had put up a slide noting that ‘centrality’ was the commensurative measure for fine art: that pieces that were closer to the ‘center’ of categories would be considered more important, and hence would command higher values. Someone rightly asked me about the fact that sometimes ‘centrality’ for experts (i.e., art historians) differed from ‘centrality’ for the public; and shouldn’t I clarify the distinction between market value and cultural value.

This led to a surprisingly common discussion - the distinction between Marc Chagall and Paul Cézanne. Chagall is well-liked by the public, and when his pictures comes to auction, they sell well. All the time. Cézanne is considered ‘challenging’, and his art tends to command less high prices. Of course there are large numbers of variables here: the quality of pieces that come to auction, private sales, number of works produced. And yet, Cézanne is considered much, much more central by experts. Chagall is more highly valued by the market.

I am not very articulate about it yet, but there is a funny way that art world participants both completely believe and completely reject ‘the market’ as a measure of value. Following art sales is like tracking baseball scores for many (most?) people; seeing Mark Rothko’s paintings sell for records after such a lull in sales in the 80s, or the rise of Lucien Freud are tracked carefully by participants in the high-end art world. Still, Chagall v. Cézanne - the market sometimes rewards popularity more than important artists. Those former market markers are to be tracked, the latter to be dismissed.

So I (snarkily) suggested that if you believe the market, then, well, really believe it - if prices for Chagall are higher than Cézanne, maybe art historians are simply wrong. Uproar (well, art historians don’t really uproar - more like polite murmur). But what’s interesting is this selective use of the market as an indicator of value when it confirms expert valuations, a sort-of belief in it when it changes somewhat expert valuations (let’s reconsider Klimt!), and a disbelief in it when it contradicts expert valuations. I don’t yet have a complete grasp on why this is, the circumstances under which it operates, or how it really works.

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February 28, 2008

No seriously, how do you know what you like?

Filed under: Art, Culture — Peter @ 2:49 pm

This article from the NYT today highlights “art anxiety,” the inability for wealthy folks to purchase real art for fear that they will either pay too much, or be outed as having poor taste. There’s interesting stuff here, though I’ve mostly given up on the Times’ feature articles nowadays (good gracious they’ve moved from interesting to trite to maddening as I’ve gotten older and more thoughtf….wait a second, maybe it’s not them, maybe it’s me!):

Art paralysis takes many forms. In addition to the would-be buyers who are intimidated by galleries, there are those worried about making an unfashionable choice; those obsessed with investment value; and those who return to a gallery for months, even years, never buying a thing. (Some of these suffer from a form of art paralysis that Stephen Nordlinger, the president of the Foundry Gallery in Washington, calls red dot syndrome — a desperate longing only for those pieces bearing the red dots that show they’ve been sold.) And then there are the people whose reasons make no sense at all, at least to those doing the selling.

Theoretically, the structure of the art market is, I think, to blame. In order for art to be commodified as a culturally-laden fetish object, it has to be taken out of the realm of normal consumption, and placed into a more rarified space. One of the effects of this move is to make that space inaccessible. I particularly liked the Chelsea gallery owner who quoted a painting’s price in UK pounds. Ask for a price, get a snooty ‘no’ - persist and get the price in pounds. Any questions?

From a marketing perspective, the problem is that if you make the space less rarified, you at the same time make it less likely that the art market would be able to sustain high prices.

Per the anxiety itself, I’ve argued before, I think it takes training to know what you like, as opposed to what you are expected to like given the conventions of a field. Chasing ‘good taste’ is immensely challenging precisely because it is so far out of your hands. Without cuing up the Free to Be You and Me music, I would suggest that cultivating your own sense of self-via-taste is harder, and much more likely to make you overtly iconoclastic, but also possibly more rewarding.

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January 25, 2008

How do you know what you like?

Filed under: Art, Culture — Peter @ 8:20 pm

While partaking in a stupendous lunch, the conversation turns to the question of how do people know what they like?

Drinking deeply from his Effervecense de Pomme, PL chimes: There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Tipping her fork into her delectably deconstructed Nicoise Salad, JL rejoins: Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. It is not without pre-established harmony, this sculpture in the memory. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. Bravely let him speak the utmost syllable of his confession. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. It needs a divine man to exhibit anything divine. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

PL digs into his Fuji Apple Tart: Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Well, perhaps not quite so Emersonian, but our conversation did turn once again to experts, tastes, and professional critics - not just where preferences come from, but how do you know what you like? The example I favored (and favor) is cooking, which makes my point but does so at the expense of losing the social. Ignore that for now.

Cooks, it seems to me, resolve along a curvilinear continuum. At one are novice cooks. They rely on recipes, following them closely to make dinner. The novice cook relies on the tastes of the cookbook author, assumes (not unreasonably) that because this person is an expert, their combination of ingredients and techniques is a good approximation for what is going to be tasty.

At the other end of the spectrum are professional chefs. Professional chefs don’t rely on recipes as such - but neither do they rely on their own personal tastes. Or rather, their personal tastes at the point when they are professional chefs approximate the tastes of the field. Classical French, Northern Italian, Japanese. Their tastes conform to the field’s tastes, with variations due to creativity, syntheses of cuisines, and the like. But when a chef adds more star anise to a dish, it’s not so much that they personally like star anise, it’s that they believe that star anise makes the dish better. There’s a distinction there.

In the middle are those whose personal tastes figure more prominently than either the novice or professional. I call these the Grandma cooks - their recipes may have once begun their lives as recipes, but are now tailored to the tastes of themselves and their families. Grandma Sylvia puts in parnips rather than carrots because Jon won’t eat orange foods; her own tastes and the tastes of those people she cooks for matter more.

So this is the point: someplace between those who know nothing and therefore rely completely on experts; and those who are the experts, and whose tastes are oriented to a broader field; in between are those for whom personal tastes figure more heavily. I’d like to hypothesize that this characterizes a number of cultural arenas, including art (both buyers and maybe painters), music, and of course cooking.

Do you believe me?

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January 11, 2008

The Fightclub of Underground Art

Filed under: Art, Culture — Peter @ 12:37 pm

That’s Tourettes without Regrets. But of course that’s not the punchline, it’s MC Jelly D that I want you to know about.

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December 9, 2007

ye. gods.

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 1:11 pm

Brian Wilson’s Lost Rap Recording. Via Unfogged.

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December 4, 2007

How to price cultural stuff

Filed under: Art, Prices — Peter @ 12:17 pm

Tricky tricky Dr. Lena. In her discussion of the great Canadian post-Woodstock, train-tour extravaganza, she asks the question: how should we price cultural stuff?

There are two main ways, though we should frankly see both as conventions. The first is cost-plus, as she rightly points out. The ‘plus’ is something to fuss about, and how much to pay artists does just regress the problem back into costs. In other words, deciding an appropriate ‘cost’ for artists reproduces the problem. Artists may say, well, “pay me cost-plus, where cost is expenses to get out there, lodging, time-for-my-talent.” And then we say deciding an appropriate ‘cost’ for time-for-my-talent reproduces the problem. And so on.

Which leads to the second method, something like ‘what the market will bear.’ In practice, this means what people are willing to pay, combined with what you’re willing to accept. But - the world doesn’t come with supply-and-demand curves attached. Most markets are not totally variable-priced markets - markets where every price is individually negotiated. Capital markets are exception more than rule, and even when organizations do try to achieve this ideal, we think they kind of suck (I’ve long thought it would be fascinating to walk down the aisle of an airplane in flight surveying passengers about how much they paid, then making your results public. And by fascinating I mean riot-inducing.)

So, the interesting part is in how the theory of ‘what the market will bear’ meets the practice of ‘how much do we charge for this concert/album/art?’ And all of JL’s subsequent discussion is indeed the practical implementation of this second strategy.

Of course, this doesn’t answer her question, which is, what’s the appropriate comparable: 1) compare by artist?; 2) compare based on format?; or 3) compare based on venue? My real answer to that specific question is, I have no idea. It certainly appears that the concert organizers are pushing for ‘based on venue’, while some people recognize ‘based on artist’. I would say that the ‘based on format’ is harder, since the format is the unique part.

To get more general, let me hypothesize that comparables are more likely to be based on things that are, well, comparable. A CD of a totally unique band with a totally unique sound would be more likely to be priced based on ‘other CDs’. Outsider artists doing unique photography would be compared with other outsider artists (rather than other photographs). This is certainly an empirical question, but there’s my stake in the ground.

There is still a paper or book or something to be written about baselines, but this is not it. My nephew (who loves Mr. Krabs from Spongebob) will tell you that you need money to buy one of his toy cars from him, but the amount of money you need is incomprehensible. It’s all ‘coin money’ to him, regardless of whether it’s 3 dimes, two quarters, or 20 pennies - he has no baselines and so no means by which to compare.

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November 15, 2007

Value and art, SK style

Filed under: Art, Front Page, Prices — Peter @ 10:44 am

I participated in a panel earlier this week at Columbia called ‘Unraveling the Art Market’. It was me, two incredibly insightful women from the Christie’s Art education program, and an artist named Steve Keene. Keene does these paintings on wood in mass execution fashion, 60-80 a day, and he sells them for $10-$15 online, sometimes less in person. He was brilliantly engaging, and in the middle of discussions about the multi-million dollar secondary art market, it is worth thinking more about what he’s doing…

For him, the art is one continuous, giant piece, and he sells off little pieces of it as it becomes finished. Starting with bands in the punk music scene, his notion of selling the art is like the idea of going to a (bygone era) concert and having the band try to sell the 15-20 tapes they made to people in the audience. He noted that for many, buying his art was their first art purchase, and that when they leave their apartments, his art is maybe something that might get left behind.

Two of the more interesting features to note. First, people sometimes try to resell his work on eBay, which annoys him, since: 1) he doesn’t get the money for it (and he needs it); and 2) because his art is supposed to be what it is - cheap, mass. People who buy his art, as he says, sometimes get annoyed that it doesn’t increase in monetary value, since 1) this indicates that it’s not a good investment; and 2) it indicates that its cultural value is not rising as well. That is, price is assumed to be an indicator of cultural value. If it doesn’t get more expensive, how can we know it’s really good?

Second, once a few of his pictures landed in the hands of JFK Jr. When he died, the pieces were put into a sort of estate sale/garage sale of Kennedy stuff, at Sotheby’s (the sale is here - reg required), and the lot (here - reg required) was estimated at $2000-$3000, and it sold for $12,000. SK was thrilled and hesitant, since he was not identified as the paintings’ author but he didn’t want to tell them and have the buyer feel silly for buying something he sells for $5. Anyhow, it’s the clearest example of identifying the value of Kennedy provenance yet.

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November 7, 2007

Art market craziness

Filed under: Art, Prices — Peter @ 7:22 pm

As my friend Chuck says, even the crappy Picasso’s are bringing in $30 million. What in the world is going on? The all-art index is up 21% in the first half of 2007, compared to 14% for the S&P500. The November ArtNews reports that Sotheby’s and Christie’s are offering upwards of $1 billion in guarantees this year. Sotheby’s and Christie’s sold $7.5 billion in art in 2006, and more this year. Add Phillips de Pury & Co. (which emphasizes contemporary, where the action is), and it’s surreal.

(more…)

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October 26, 2007

art, bodies, remains, morality, value

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 3:54 pm

There is so much to find interesting in this article on a debate in France over whether or not to return a mummified, tattooed, Maori head. The argument is whether the head should be considered ‘human remains’ and returned as “an act of ‘atonement’ for colonial-era trafficking in human remains,” or an artifact that qualifies as a piece of art. If it is art, it falls under the jurisdiction of a 2002 law stating that works of art are “inalienable.” It is kind of a big deal, in that if the head is considered a body part, all sorts of heads, bones, and mummies would be sent from museums back to their countries of origin, where they would presumably be re-buried. The American Museum of Natural History in NYC apparently has 30 heads.

So what’s interesting here?

First, it is a mummified, tattooed, Maori head.

Second, there is a distinction between the law on the one hand, which calls for a categorical either/or distinction between art/artifact and human remains; and the reality on the other hand, that the head is obviously both a cultural artifact and a desecrated body part and symbol of European colonialism. This will be resolved not by changing the object itself, but through a political argument and resolution over what the head ‘is’. Of course, the head will still be both artifact and body part. But the administrative powers-that-be will make it into one or the other.

Third, another museum in France, the Quai Branly, argues that: a) the heads should definitely stay in France, since they are important cultural artifacts and sending them back to have them buried (and hence destroyed) is “a way of erasing a full page of history”; b) the four heads in the Quai Branly’s collection are “stored in a very special area, and absolutely will not be put on public display,” with access available only for a few experts; and c) they don’t know the heads’ value.

Hidden someplace in this example is something that’s been on my mind with regard to the new-new fashion of hedge funds buying up contemporary art. Art really is a funny kind of commodity, and it really does dance on the boundaries between culture and market. These kinds of controversies are surprisingly common in the Art World, and not just with antiquities and cultural artifacts - British authorities declined also to prosecute Elton John for owning and displaying “Clara and Edda Belly Dancing,” a photograph of two girls dancing around, one of whom is naked. So only buy the “safe” art? That doesn’t seem like a good solution either, since it doesn’t maximize on economic value..

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June 11, 2007

Where do Art Prices Come From?

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 10:37 pm

Summary: A study of the ontology of art prices. Art specialists act as market intermediaries who do the important work of making prices know-able. This project consists of two pieces, a quantitative analysis of the relationship between auction estimates and final prices, and a qualitative analysis of interviews with art specialists, private art advisers, and appraisers associated with the Internal Revenue Service.

This project was, in its first iteration, the subject of a research seminar I taught at Barnard College. The members of that seminar were: Whitney Wilson, Jessica Katz, Jessica Blanco, Lena Kim, Cara Ciani-Nangle, Jane Cooper, Michelle Lu, Juliette Premmereur, Emily Luski, and Maria Baibakova. Thank you for your support, you were the most interesting class I’ve taught at Barnard.

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December 12, 2006

Thoughts on entanglement

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 7:54 am

A conversation with a student got me thinking about ‘entanglements’ and the role of specialists in dis-entangling art world participants. Michel Callon has done work looking at the theoretical role of economics (as a discipline) on the creation of markets (as real-world instances of economic theory). He argues, with examples, that one of the things that needs to happen is that normal people have to be transformed into economic actors, just as commodities have to be formed from things-in-the-ground to discrete commodities. He argues that one of the main ways economics affects markets is to make more possible these ‘calculative agencies’ - two good examples are cost-benefit analysis and William Cronon’s chapter from Nature’s Metropolis on the making of wheat futures.

As I said to the student, the presentation last week on embeddedness made me think about the creation of market actors in our case. In the Art world, museums have to be made from places-where-we-appreciate-Art to publicity/provenance makers; buyers from appreciators to either patrons or speculators or collectors; etc. All these actors have to have the pieces of them that think about Art (temporarily) downplayed, and the pieces that are part of the market-making machinery foregrounded. Specialists link all these pieces of buyers, advisors, galleries, museums, and consignors together. It only appears as though they are just estimating prices.

This is just first-pass speculation…

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