Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

September 13, 2008

Takashi Murakami and Burned Art

Filed under: Art, Culture, Markets, Prices — Peter @ 10:23 am

Jennifer Lena and I have a new video up, a continuation of our conversation about the relationship between cultural value and monetary value. We’re talking about devaluation, specifically burned art - in the high art and pop art worlds. And we’re circling around a discussion of spheres/circuits/arenas of value.

Burned Art and Murakami from Peter Levin and Jennifer Lena on Vimeo.

Our tech is still low, but hopefully getting better (it looks better when it’s on Vimeo and not embedded). And we are again deeply hoping for some comments, reactions, and thoughts. And our first video is still around as well, if you are interested in seeing where it began.

August 20, 2008

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.

August 15, 2008

All right, stop, collaborate, and listen

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

I'm cookin' MCs like a pound of bacon

August 11, 2008

Geek rap

Filed under: Culture, Ramble — Peter @ 12:35 pm

There is joy in just geeking it out sometimes, and this is right in the middle of it.

On a somewhat tangential but not unrelated note, saw American Teen this weekend. It is a good movie, and there are some scenes of such heart-breaking teen-ness that you want to just lose it. For those who have seen it, the post-Erica scene of her eating lunch is crushing.

We were struck by the fact that the ‘geek’ turned out well post-movie, and despite the framing actually went out with a few girls while in his element. Oh, and the ‘princess’ was awesome, not in the now-colloquial sense of great or cool or good, but in the more historical sense of inspiring awe. But apparently, she’s really matured a lot. A LOT.

FYI, I was closest to Mitch in HS, though not quite as cool or heart-throbby. I had too much inner geek.

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…

July 17, 2008

Politics + XKCD

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 8:44 pm

This is clever.

May 23, 2008

Yes. 18 Minutes of “Close the Edge.”

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 8:25 am

Let’s just take a moment to point to Jon Anderson, lead singer of Yes, singing lead for the Paul Green School of Rock Omega All-Stars. Read, watch, love.

(h/t Making Light)

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.

April 9, 2008

Went to a bat mitzvah…

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 5:53 pm

…and if you think kids are still dancing line dances to Electric Slide, Celebration, or even the Cha Cha Slide, you’d be wrong wrong wrong.

It’s all about Soulja Boy.

Luckily, 13-year-old girls still look a lot like 13-year-old girls. And 13-year-old boys? Jeez, don’t really know even what to say.

March 27, 2008

More inconspicuous consumption

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 9:46 am

There are really good sociological analyses of luxury around, including my current favorite, Rachel Sherman’s Class Acts. One of the more interesting things to think about is how luxury becomes singular in a sea of reproducibility. Kevin Kelly’s post Better than Free catches this trend well, and I’m sure everyone will talk-about-without-reading-in-a-Malcolm-Gladwell-way Chris Anderson’s next book, “Free“.

The flip side is the irreproducible, and here I like the example noted in the NYT today, about Tomas Maier:

…the muted logo-free look that is the brand’s signature is widely regarded as the standard-bearer for a new kind of luxury: subtle, long-lasting and recession-proof. In such a climate, Mr. Maier himself has emerged as a hero, albeit a reluctant one — and, to his admirers, even something of a prophet…

…While competitors were churning out look-alike handbags made of coated canvas, bearing hefty hardware and equally hefty price tags, Mr. Maier perfected his specialty: the Intrecciato series of hand-woven bags, some that take two days of labor to make (compared with about 80 minutes for a standard-issue designer bag). Signature products, devoid of initials, they typically sell for $1,200 to as much as $4,500.

While other designers were producing dart-free baby-doll dresses as if they were so many Fords, he concentrated on deceptively simple, painstakingly constructed styles priced from about $1,200 to $6,000 for an evening dress. The dressmaker touches — ruching, serpentine seaming, hand-beading and elaborate pleats — are recognizable to a small but informed clientele.

It’s cat and girl all over again, that elite means not just displaying wealth for everyone to see, but displaying wealth in such a way that it appears to most people that you are not displaying wealth, but it appears to the right people that you are displaying wealth and taste. The mint on the pillow and the carefully folded toilet paper roll, unobtrusively placed with no presence of an actual serving staff (per Sherman). Thomas Keller rolls this out at the French Laundry, according to Anthony Bourdain’s Cook’s Tour: “More often than not, he’s taking something refined and giving an ordinary - even cliched - name (the best examples being his famous ‘coffee and doughnuts’ dessert, the ‘Caesar salad,’)…” The former being cinnamon-sugared doughnuts with a cappuccino semi-freddo, the latter being Parmigiano-Reggiano custards with Romaine lettuce, anchovy dressing, and parmesan crisps. Huge labor, small sign - if you need to ask, you can’t afford. But better if you don’t even know it’s there.

It’s time to revisit conspicuous consumption and class.

March 6, 2008

How do you know what you like? Netflix prize edition

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 8:56 am

The Netflix prize has provoked a blizzard of data-mining response to this question: how, given knowledge about how you have rated movies in the past, will you rate particular movies going forward? The main goal of the prize, which is ongoing and worth a million bucks if you can do it, is to ‘improve’ the Cinematch algorithm they currently use to make guesses about what you like. As this fascinating Wired piece notes, it’s the difference between saying, You liked Squid and the Whale? Here’s Margot at the Wedding - as opposed to a fishing documentary on Jacques Cousteau or Moby Dick. A 10% reduction in error will net you $1M.

To that end, Netflix has put a ginormous data set up for your pleasure to work with, and your aim is to ‘mine’ that data and then produce an algorithm that will ‘predict’ what people will rate on their test data set. So they’re basically giving you 9 years of a 10 year data set, and asking you to predict how people rated movies in year 10.

So, data mining heaven. As the Wired article points out:

Many of the contestants begin, like Cinematch does, with something called the k-nearest-neighbor algorithm — or, as the pros call it, kNN. This is what Amazon.com uses to tell you that “customers who purchased Y also purchased Z.” Suppose Netflix wants to know what you’ll think of Not Another Teen Movie. It compiles a list of movies that are “neighbors” — films that received a high score from users who also liked Not Another Teen Movie and films that received a low score from people who didn’t care for that Jaime Pressly yuk-fest. It then predicts your rating based on how you’ve rated those neighbors. The approach has the advantage of being quite intuitive: If you gave Scream five stars, you’ll probably enjoy Not Another Teen Movie.

BellKor uses kNN, but it also employs more abstruse algorithms that identify dimensions along which movies, and movie watchers, vary. One such scale would be “highbrow” to “lowbrow”; you can rank movies this way, and users too, distinguishing between those who reach for Children of Men and those who prefer Children of the Corn.

Of course, this system breaks down when applied to people who like both of those movies. You can address this problem by adding more dimensions — rating movies on a “chick flick” to “jock movie” scale or a “horror” to “romantic comedy” scale. You might imagine that if you kept track of enough of these coordinates, you could use them to profile users’ likes and dislikes pretty well. The problem is, how do you know the attributes you’ve selected are the right ones? Maybe you’re analyzing a lot of data that’s not really helping you make good predictions, and maybe there are variables that do drive people’s ratings that you’ve completely missed.

BellKor (along with lots of other teams) deals with this problem by means of a tool called singular value decomposition, or SVD, that determines the best dimensions along which to rate movies. These dimensions aren’t human-generated scales like “highbrow” versus “lowbrow”; typically they’re baroque mathematical combinations of many ratings that can’t be described in words, only in pages-long lists of numbers. At the end, SVD often finds relationships between movies that no film critic could ever have thought of but that do help predict future ratings.

Fair enough. What’s interesting is that a psychologist working by himself out of him home seems to have pulled from nowhere into something like 5th place. What he’s been doing is exploiting knowledge about bias effects into his model - in other words, he has a better SVD reduction. As the article puts it, “…The computer scientists and statisticians at the top of the leaderboard have developed elaborate and carefully tuned algorithms for representing movie watchers by lists of numbers, from which their tastes in movies can be estimated by a formula. Which is fine, in Gavin Potter’s view — except people aren’t lists of numbers and don’t watch movies as if they were.”

I think what is most responsible for the breakthroughs of the psychologist is that he has a theory of taste, not just a data-mined algorithm. The math is the math (he has his 17-year-old daughter running the calculus), but if you matched a better theory of taste with some elbow grease, it may be possible to beat the bigger data-miners. Any takers?

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.

February 22, 2008

A two-by-two on markets and culture

Filed under: Culture, Markets — Peter @ 9:38 pm

With Brayden upping the ante, Lena suggests a table, but I feel that this may confuse more than illuminate. Welp, only one way to find out:

I also realize it’s tacky to stick neo-classical economics in the low/low box. And the yes/no doesn’t quite work - I originally went with ‘low’ and ‘high’, or ’settled’ and ‘unsettled’. But you get the gist, I hope..

More on Markets, culture, markets

Filed under: Culture, Markets — Peter @ 6:26 pm

I still haven’t addressed the payoff question, but here’s more of my thinking about culture and economic sociology, in pictorial:

The constitutive group, which does in fact tend to study the ’settlement’ (a loaded term, yes, but think of it more like a butterfly alighting temporarily than obdurate institutions) of markets, treats the market itself as the dependent variable: how does a market become something that looks like a market?

The second group, what I think of as complementary (as in, it complements economic studies of markets, doesn’t challenge the idea of markets as such), is more like:

From a paper I’m working on, here’s the problem:
The dichotomy between the constitutive and complementary approaches has resulted in a theoretical limitation for the field. The central problem is not necessarily the lack of conversation between these two groups, as they often do build on one another. It is the either/or conception of culture. Culture acts as either something that affects how markets are built, or else it affects how markets operate. Constitutive activities are necessary to stabilize market actors, objects, and actions, enough so that ‘normal’ market forces – now with cultural variables added as key determinants – can operate. And once these activities occur, markets are seen as acquiring a kind of permanent stability which allows us to then gauge their operation. As a result, we end up with analyses of how creativity and highly contextualized knowledge of fashion is transformed into a commodity for consumer sale (like Patrik Aspers’ work), and studies of how social ties affect performance among garment industry firms (eg, Uzzi’s awesome study of the garment industry in NYC). But very little on the interactions across these processes.

I’m ready to start getting on to these kinds of interactions.

Photo credits, various but all from Flickr, w/Creative Commons licenses:
Apple
Apple pie
Baked apple
Apple preserves
Apple opened

February 18, 2008

White people like…

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 11:09 am

Not on markets, and a little outside my own expertise as an economic sociologist, and yet:

This blog has gotten a lot of attention lately, cataloging the things that White People Like. It is funny and pointed, in a really interesting way, and some of the reactions - ie the 1300 comments on Unfogged, are worth checking out.

I think Ogged catches my own sense of the thing, arguing that what makes it funny is not quite the self-mocking mirror that one can hold up to one’s own experience (or rather, my own experience), but the perfection of the trope against its unspoken counterpart - non-White people. Or as Ogged puts it, the screwed. So things like recycling, dogs, and Netflix are just so insignificant against the backdrop of dramatic, categorical, privilege. And I am not pushing an essentialist line here, I think that ‘White people’ stands in for privilege rather than a particular skin color. Not all White people are ‘White people’ in this fashion.

Anyhow, check it out for the funny, or check it out for the deep social commentary dressed up as fluff.

February 14, 2008

Economic Sociology, Culture, Markets

Filed under: Culture, Markets — Peter @ 2:04 pm

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, wrote about it in an in-process manuscript, and I’m just trying to work out the argument out loud for a bit. Bear with me, it’ll probably be a few posts.

Limitations on how we think about markets and culture. This is two parts a limitation of our theoretical tools, and one part a limitation that stems from doing sociology from the kinds of markets we are studying. From a theoretical point of view, we remain in something of a false dichotomous bind, between those kinds of markets that have a culture, and those kinds of markets that are culture. The paradigm of embeddedness - and with over 2500 citations, I’m not going to jump into that argument, but instead I think fairly assume for the moment that embeddedness=structural embeddedness=networks - suggests that economic activities are influenced by the fact that they occur in repeated rather than one-off interactions. More broadly, the embeddedness framework implies a split between the economic activity, something purely economic, and the culture/structures/networks that have effects on that economic activity. In effect embeddedness argues for more sociological independent variables for economic dependent variables.

This is not the radical critique of someone like Harrison White, who wants to shift the whole discussion from actors and ties to analyses of ties and structures of ties themselves. But the movement in that direction has not been taken up by economic sociology but by the network people in the proto-socio-physics camp. Duncan Watts in sociology leading to its apotheosis in the Reality Mining of the MIT Media Lab. A post for another day.

On the other side of this dichotomy are those who argue that markets are culture. That is, markets are themselves cultural phenomena. This is close to, but not identical to Viviana Zelizer’s critique, that markets are subsumed by culture. I think she’s right for many cultural anthropologists, but the contemporary economic sociology research points to something a little different (and I claim myself to be more a part of this camp than the first). Here, the aim is to understand the determinants of markets - so, what is a commodity, agency, exchange, interests. Markets become the dependent variables, and a rather wide range of other kinds of variables become the explanations for markets. These include institutions, law, conventions, formulae, theory. Callon and the performativity crowd potentially fits on this side of the divide.

This divide maps onto a distinction made by Ann Swidler with regard to culture (and thanks to KH for pointing this out to me, though he’s not responsible for my argument here) - that the kind of markets that are analyzed come into play when taking one position or the other. When markets are settled, we are likely to look at culture as it affects them; when markets are unsettled, we are likely to analyze the determinants of them. Many studies of manufacturing jobs are now about cultural effects on labor and performance outcomes, not about the making of labor (this was certainly the main gist of Marx and industrial sociology, but as we have split organizational and industrial sociology from economic sociology it has dropped out as such). In capital markets, there is a wide split between those looking for sociological effects on finance - and I might include behavioral finance on the settled/’markets-have-culture’ side of the argument - and those looking for the creation of calculative agencies. And while I’ve placed various markets along this axis, even the same market can slide along this axis as it moves in time from settled to unsettled. So we look at network effects on volatility for options markets (Baker 1984; markets have culture, settled market), but the role of formulae in the making of the options market (MacKenzie and Millo 2003; markets are culture, unsettled market). The origins of the CBOT in the 19th century are about the making of futures; the contemporary work is about effects of regulation on market exchange.

I want to argue that this limits what we research and how we go about researching it. I’d like to suggest that are culture/have culture, and are settled/are unsettled ought to be an orthogonal rather than a two-dimensional axis.

February 3, 2008

When art production and consumption disconnect

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 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.

February 1, 2008

Critics, meet Markets

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 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.

January 30, 2008

U2 is a process, not a structure

Filed under: Culture — Peter @ 7:16 am

Before the new U2 3d drives us all into fits of discussion over the relationship between art and commerce, let’s just take a step back to 1981, shall we? Note to self: shimmery droplets of water effects=good.

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?