Artists both produce and consume their own work. Artists seek not only profit but also fame, critical praise, the satisfaction of creating works that speak to them personally, and the enjoyment that flows from artistic labor. Most generally, artists produce works of a type that please themselves in addition to pleasing the market.

Artists face choices between the pecuniary benefits of selling to the market and the nonpecuniary benefits of creating to please their own tastes. We examine how changes in wages, lumpsum income, and capital-labor ratios affect the artist’s pursuit of self-satisfaction versus market sales. Using our model of labor supply, we consider the economic forces behind the high/low culture split, why some artistic media offer greater scope for the avant-garde than others, why so many artists dislike the market, and how economic growth and taxation affect the quantity and form of different kinds of art.

We attempt to develop a general treatment of how producers weigh their own interests against those of the market when money and satisfaction conflict. (…)

Conclusion - Artists are not unique in deriving nonpecuniary returns from particular forms of labor or in desiring to choose projects of high satisfaction. Academicians, including many economists, also enjoy “working,” especially when they can work on projects of their own choosing. Other examples include chefs, architects, athletes, and volunteers of all kinds. Our model predicts that economic growth has and will increase the number of people entering these jobs and professions. Fogel (1999) argues that this shift from what he calls “earnwork” to “volwork” (work done in large part for pleasure even if it carries with it some payment), is in fact the major story of economic growth.

{ Tyler Cowen, An economic theory of avant-garde and popular art, or high and low culture, 2000 | via FindArticles | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1985 | acrylic, oil, and oil painstick on wood, two pieces }

According to the latest data from the US Department of Energy, the United States is importing 12-14 million barrels of oil per day. At a current price of about $115 per barrel, that’s $1.5 billion per day, or $548 billion per year. This represents the single largest contribution to America’s balance-of-payments deficit, and is a leading cause for the dollar’s ongoing drop in value. (…)

While our economy is being depleted of these funds, at a moment when credit is scarce and economic growth has screeched to a halt, the oil regimes on which we depend for our daily fix are depositing their mountains of accumulating petrodollars in “sovereign wealth funds” (SWFs) - state-controlled investment accounts that buy up prized foreign assets in order to secure non-oil-dependent sources of wealth. At present, these funds are already believed to hold in excess of several trillion dollars; the richest, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), alone holds $875 billion.

The ADIA first made headlines in November 2007 when it acquired a $7.5 billion stake in Citigroup, America’s largest bank holding company. The fund has also made substantial investments in Advanced Micro Systems, a major chip maker, and the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant. Another big SWF, the Kuwait Investment Authority, also acquired a multibillion-dollar stake in Citigroup, along with a $6.6 billion chunk of Merrill Lynch. And these are but the first of a series of major SWF moves that will be aimed at acquiring stakes in top American banks and corporations. (…)

Foreign ownership of key nodes of our economy is only one sign of fading American superpower status. Oil’s impact on the military is another.

(…) The US Department of Defense is the world’s single-biggest consumer of petroleum, using more of it every day than the entire nation of Sweden. (…)

Every day, the average GI in Iraq uses approximately 27 gallons of petroleum-based fuels. With some 160,000 American troops in Iraq, that amounts to 4.37 million gallons in daily oil usage, including gasoline for vans and light vehicles, diesel for trucks and armored vehicles, and aviation fuel for helicopters, drones, and fixed-wing aircraft. With US forces paying, as of late April, an average of $3.23 per gallon for these fuels, the Pentagon is already spending approximately $14 million per day on oil ($98 million per week, $5.1 billion per year) to stay in Iraq. Meanwhile, our Iraqi allies, who are expected to receive a windfall of $70 billion this year from the rising price of their oil exports, charge their citizens $1.36 per gallon for gasoline.

When questioned about why Iraqis are paying almost a third less for oil than American forces in their country, senior Iraqi government officials scoff at any suggestion of impropriety. “America has hardly even begun to repay its debt to Iraq,” said Abdul Basit, the head of Iraq’s Supreme Board of Audit, an independent body that oversees Iraqi governmental expenditures. (…)

Certainly, however, our allies in the region, especially the Sunni kingdoms of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that presumably look to Washington to stabilize Iraq and curb the growing power of Shi’ite Iran, are willing to help the Pentagon out by supplying US troops with free or deeply-discounted petroleum. No such luck. Except for some partially subsidized oil supplied by Kuwait, all oil-producing US allies in the region charge us the market rate for petroleum.

As far as they’re concerned, we’re now just another of those hopeless oil addicts driving a monster gas-guzzler up to the pump - and they’re perfectly happy to collect our cash which they can then use to cherry-pick our prime assets. (…)

President Bush believed that he could convert an impoverished and compliant Russia into a major source of oil and natural gas for the United States - with American energy companies running the show. This was the evident aim of the US-Russian “energy dialogue” announced by Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in May 2002. But if Bush thought Russia was prepared to turn into a northern version of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela prior to the arrival of Hugo Chavez, he was to be sorely disappointed.

Putin never permitted American firms to acquire substantial energy assets in Russia. Instead, he presided over a major recentralization of state control when it came to the country’s most valuable oil and gas reserves, putting most of them in the hands of Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas behemoth.

Once in control of these assets, moreover, Putin has used his renascent energy power to exert influence over states that were once part of the former Soviet Union, as well as those in Western Europe that rely on Russian oil and gas for a substantial share of their energy needs. In the most extreme case, Moscow turned off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine on January 1, 2006, in the midst of an especially cold winter, in what was said to be a dispute over pricing but was widely viewed as punishment for Ukraine’s political drift westwards. (The gas was turned back on four days later when Ukraine agreed to pay a higher price and offered other concessions.)

Gazprom has threatened similar action in disputes with Armenia, Belarus, and Georgia - in each case forcing those former Soviet SSRs to back down.

{ Michael T Klare/Asia Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Peruvian Maid, 1985 | acrylic and oil painstick on wood }

Mary Boone is a NYC art dealer with galleries in Soho, Chelsea and on 5th Avenue above the men’s Bergdorf Goodman department. She used to represent Jean Michel Basquiat. Problems between the equally charismatic Basquiat and Mary Boone have been a constant part of their relationship.

Mary Boone represented Mr. Basquiat for four years. She called him a talented but erratic artist, often distracted by the glittery art world that seized on his work in the early 1980’s.

‘’He was too much into what people said about him. If your goal is to make great paintings, then you listen to an internal voice, to yourself,'’ she said.

‘’He was ambivalent about his work and his success. The only thing he wasn’t ambivalent about was being a painter,'’ said Miss Boone, who added that he often expressed concern about whether his works were popular and selling well.

By the time he joined Miss Boone in 1982, she said, he also had become a regular user of addictive drugs, although he denied having a habit. Other acquiantances said Mr. Basquiat picked up a heroin habit in the early 1980’s, and increased his use after he became wealthy. Several friends and business associates said the artist was frequently offered drugs, both by dealers and private collectors, in exchange for his work.

Miss Boone said Mr. Basquiat’s use of drugs made him an inconsistent artist and sometimes rendered him virtually incapable of working.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Mary Boone as a punching bag), 1984-85 }

It’s not a good time to be an art critic. Much of what’s written is pale. It is weak and descriptive to no purpose. Or at the other extreme it is pure jargon, laughable if read aloud to the uninitiated. Junk. In fact, if art critics actually believed that anything we said or wrote mattered, we would probably be shooting ourselves in droves.

It is, however, a good time to be an artist. The heroic days of hard drinking at the Cedar and a fistfight with Jackson Pollock are over. But on the positive side of the ledger you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want and there’s someone out there fully prepared to take it seriously. Some lament this fact; they want a criterion back. I don’t. Critics are the owls of Minerva, flying around at dusk. We don’t command and determine the facts, and never did. Merely do we pick at corpses, sorting a few things out, making explicit what was already there, etc., etc.

The 2008 Whitney Biennial is a feast and a free-for-all as far as the artists are concerned. You can make a realist painting (for God’s sake) or you can stick some poles and a stretch of metal fence into a block of cement. (…)

But it is very difficult to say what the work relates to or where it is coming from. Even a knowledge of art history antique and contemporary won’t help you much. These days art isn’t an insiders game so much as a contest in private languages. The artists are often working in their own heads and they don’t feel much compulsion to translate.

This puts the critic and the curator in a hilarious position. Stripped of most of our authority, we fall back on tortured syntax and dubious vocabulary in order merely to say, in essence, that it is tough to talk about art these days. Here’s a typical sentence from the Biennial catalog: “Charles Long’s interest in opposing formal and metaphysical forces informs a complex sculptural lexicon marked by radical stylistic shifts that are difficult to categorize.”

The simple translation of this sentence: “Help, I don’t really know what Charles Long is doing or why.”

{ The Smartset | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982 | acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas }

There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them.

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary, people who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.

“I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn’t know it,” Dunning said.

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly. “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in “self-monitoring skills,” the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market — and repeatedly lose out — and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.

In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to “grossly overestimate” how well they had performed. (…) Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study were likely to underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were — a phenomenon psychologists term the “false consensus effect.”

{ San Francisco Chronicles | Continue reading }

previously { The Dunning-Kruger effect }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brain, 1985 | acrylic, gresso, oil painstick, and paper collage on wood boxes with bootblack stand, twenty-seven boxes }

I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I’ve conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving.

This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago–at a touch, on my laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.

{ How to Think | MIT Technology Review | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (An Advertisement for Soda), 1981 | crayon on paper }