Some interesting thoughts on the art market:
One interesting feature of the art market is that artists almost inevitably need somebody to sell for them. The artist selling directly does exist, but it’s a minimal part of the art market.There are attempts made to estimate the total value of the art market, for example in the annual reports by Clare McAndrew. She does her best, but she is dealing with transactions that often happen outside the public eye, or even in secret. Nevertheless, we can get an estimate from publicly recorded auction sales, plus McAndrew’s belief that sales are roughly split 50-50 between art galleries and auction houses.
The fact that there are a number of comparable works produced today like the spot paintings, actually works in the favour of sales, because it enables financiers and art advisors to make nice little charts which they can then show to their buyers/investors, or what you might call “specullectors”. I cite that in my book, and joking aside, I like the term. Or COINS, collectors only in name. When the financial services industry is looking to give advice on deploying investment capital, they want to be able to demonstrate, how are these spot paintings performing? What’s the track record, and how can you track their value in the marketplace?
The situation is complicated by the fact that workshops—such as Rubens’—employed lots of assistants. How much was Rubens by himself? Today’s artists don’t always make a work of art themselves; they might just give instructions. This has notably been a problem with the Warhol estate, particularly that series of works that were first accepted as original, and then rejected. I think that the market will always prize, for example, Damien Hirst’s early spot paintings, because those are the ones Hirst was actually involved with. A vast difference in prices reflects that. It’s true that Damien Hirst, when he produces what he produced in Venice, isn’t forging himself—he’s producing luxury goods. Of course, counterfeiting is the bane of the luxury goods industry, absolutely.
The whole point, of course, is that it’s a decentralised register—anyone can access the information. I think it still needs to play out a great deal, until we see exactly how Blockchain could benefit the art world. I think it could definitely be of a benefit to living artists. Where they can make a work of art, and then they can put it on the Blockchain, and that will enable them to protect their own intellectual property. If fakes are produced in the future, this technology will enable one to go back and compare. So digital technologies like Blockchain, from the point of view of new artists, could actually be rather a good thing. It does not, however, necessarily assure an art work’s value.
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/the-art-market-georgina-adam/
This Birkenstock sandal that I've been wondering about:
For Görlitz is where a high percentage of Birkenstock’s cork-and-leather sandals are made; the company is headquartered near Bonn, and the family that has owned the business since 1774 lives mostly outside Germany.
What Reichert didn’t know was that his prophecy for the clunky sandal was about to get an assist from the unlikely quarter of the Paris catwalk in October 2012, when Phoebe Philo, then of Céline, took a black Arizona, lined it with mink, and put it on the runway. Delirium ensued.
“The truth is nobody controlled what Céline did with our shoes,” admits Reichert, and at the time, Birkenstock wasn’t quite ready to take advantage of the attention — the company was still focused on adding new employees (a number that would eventually exceed 2,000) and changing an archaic, fragmented culture. Philo’s twist brought favorable publicity, but at the time, Birkenstock didn’t even have a sales force, let alone a real marketing and PR operation.
“I don’t give a shit about fashion,” Reichert tells me. “Fashion is, pfffttt, what is fashion? Inditex [owner of Zara] is doing fashion 12 times a year. What is this nonsense?” He continues describing his thought process at the time: “But I know people are hungry for pure things. And there’s a huge crowd of people heavily believing in and loving this brand. And it’s not because of the nice people working there, because there are no nice people. And it’s not because of the marketing, because there’s no marketing. There’s nothing. It must be the product. Because they do everything wrong — everything!” He laughs. “I’ve met so many people who said, ‘Yeah, I tried to call your company in 1983, 1989, and nobody was answering.’ ”
The Unlikely Return of Birkenstock https://www.thecut.com/2018/08/cathy-horyn-on-birkenstocks-unlikely-rise.html
The reality of recycling:
To make matters worse, almost two-thirds of Canada’s waste is produced by the industrial, commercial, institutional, and construction-and-demolition sectors—in everything from factories to office buildings—which are serviced by private waste haulers. Unless they can make a profit selling recyclables, which depends on market prices at the time of sale, there’s little incentive for these haulers to recycle. All of this means that you can put your takeout containers and shredded paper into the office recycling bin, but the company that takes it away is under no legal obligation to recycle it. In Toronto, for example, 72 percent of waste material from apartment and condo buildings goes straight to a landfill.
Residential recycling itself also comes with a significant environmental footprint of its own, especially tied to transportation and carbon emissions. In some circumstances, recycling could actually end up as an environmental liability. “In rural areas you have trucks going half a kilometre between houses picking up recyclables,” Hoornweg says. “It makes no sense.” Once you tally up the emissions associated with picking up products, sorting them at a mrf, and sending a batch to far-flung end markets, it’s not difficult to imagine that it’s sometimes better to send recycling to the dump.
https://thewalrus.ca/why-recycling-doesnt-work/
The writer on Sapiens with some interesting thoughts on what the future holds for us:
It present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past this made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you lived, say, in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for you to know much about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily newspapers or public libraries. Even if you were literate and had access to a private library, there was not much to read other than novels and religious tracts.
In contrast, in the 21st century we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies.
In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it.
et since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans
More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.
So at 25, you introduce yourself on a dating site as “a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop.” At 35, you say you are “a gender-non-specific person undergoing age- adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before”. At 45, both dating and self-definitions are so passé. You just wait for an algorithm to find (or create) the perfect match for you.
Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the first world war. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the 21st century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harari-extract-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century
For Görlitz is where a high percentage of Birkenstock’s cork-and-leather sandals are made; the company is headquartered near Bonn, and the family that has owned the business since 1774 lives mostly outside Germany.
What Reichert didn’t know was that his prophecy for the clunky sandal was about to get an assist from the unlikely quarter of the Paris catwalk in October 2012, when Phoebe Philo, then of Céline, took a black Arizona, lined it with mink, and put it on the runway. Delirium ensued.
“The truth is nobody controlled what Céline did with our shoes,” admits Reichert, and at the time, Birkenstock wasn’t quite ready to take advantage of the attention — the company was still focused on adding new employees (a number that would eventually exceed 2,000) and changing an archaic, fragmented culture. Philo’s twist brought favorable publicity, but at the time, Birkenstock didn’t even have a sales force, let alone a real marketing and PR operation.
“I don’t give a shit about fashion,” Reichert tells me. “Fashion is, pfffttt, what is fashion? Inditex [owner of Zara] is doing fashion 12 times a year. What is this nonsense?” He continues describing his thought process at the time: “But I know people are hungry for pure things. And there’s a huge crowd of people heavily believing in and loving this brand. And it’s not because of the nice people working there, because there are no nice people. And it’s not because of the marketing, because there’s no marketing. There’s nothing. It must be the product. Because they do everything wrong — everything!” He laughs. “I’ve met so many people who said, ‘Yeah, I tried to call your company in 1983, 1989, and nobody was answering.’ ”
The Unlikely Return of Birkenstock https://www.thecut.com/2018/08/cathy-horyn-on-birkenstocks-unlikely-rise.html
The reality of recycling:
To make matters worse, almost two-thirds of Canada’s waste is produced by the industrial, commercial, institutional, and construction-and-demolition sectors—in everything from factories to office buildings—which are serviced by private waste haulers. Unless they can make a profit selling recyclables, which depends on market prices at the time of sale, there’s little incentive for these haulers to recycle. All of this means that you can put your takeout containers and shredded paper into the office recycling bin, but the company that takes it away is under no legal obligation to recycle it. In Toronto, for example, 72 percent of waste material from apartment and condo buildings goes straight to a landfill.
Residential recycling itself also comes with a significant environmental footprint of its own, especially tied to transportation and carbon emissions. In some circumstances, recycling could actually end up as an environmental liability. “In rural areas you have trucks going half a kilometre between houses picking up recyclables,” Hoornweg says. “It makes no sense.” Once you tally up the emissions associated with picking up products, sorting them at a mrf, and sending a batch to far-flung end markets, it’s not difficult to imagine that it’s sometimes better to send recycling to the dump.
https://thewalrus.ca/why-recycling-doesnt-work/
The writer on Sapiens with some interesting thoughts on what the future holds for us:
It present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past this made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you lived, say, in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for you to know much about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily newspapers or public libraries. Even if you were literate and had access to a private library, there was not much to read other than novels and religious tracts.
In contrast, in the 21st century we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies.
In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it.
et since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans
More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.
So at 25, you introduce yourself on a dating site as “a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop.” At 35, you say you are “a gender-non-specific person undergoing age- adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before”. At 45, both dating and self-definitions are so passé. You just wait for an algorithm to find (or create) the perfect match for you.
Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the first world war. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the 21st century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harari-extract-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century
