Some Work of Noble Note May Yet Be Done

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

— Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

Ever since the release of Dr. No in 1962, the James Bond 007 films have acted as a touchstone and running commentary on popular culture and society. For over half a century, a parade of different Bonds, Bond Girls, and increasingly over the top villains have offered escapist fantasies of varying implausibility and ridiculousness which have served, inter alia, as travel brochures, fashion statements, and advertisements for the benefits, drawbacks, and terrors of technological progress. They have done this, for the most part, not because it was their makers’ purpose (or even within their power) to critique society, but rather because they were intended to be hip, with it, and relevant, even at the inevitable expense of any seriousness or credibility. (Roger Moore, anyone?) With various degrees of success, these pop confections have held a mirror up to society. It is no wonder not everybody likes what they see.

These thoughts were inspired by film critic A.O. Scott’s interesting essay on the death of adulthood in American culture, which seems to be making the rounds of the culturesphere. He says many things, but his major point seems to be that popular culture, moviemaking preeminent within it, has elevated a strain of anti-adulthood and fixation on youth long dominant in American culture to the forefront of everything we see. I am not qualified to judge the correctness of his claim, but it certainly does seem to me the flight from responsibility and adulthood and the joys and tribulations of perpetual adolescence have become a leading subtext or topic for a very large number of popular entertainments nowadays. In particular, this cultural conversation seems to be focused on men and boys and their refusal to grow up.

Interestingly, upon reading Scott’s essay, my thoughts turned immediately to the most recent film in the Bond series, Skyfall. It occurred to me this movie can be read as providing a very interesting commentary on the issues of growing up, responsibility, and adulthood for a man nowadays, even if—or perhaps because—it is wrapped up in a popular escapist spy thriller. I claim no special cultural profundity for the film, nor no searing insight for the filmmakers or screenwriters, but I think the mirror which this particular thriller holds up to our current zeitgeist is pretty revealing. Even if the cultural critique I read within it was unconscious, or only semi-intentional, that does not vitiate its insight or force. Perhaps it enhances it. You Delightful Readers can judge for yourselves. If Stanley Cavell can find deep commentary on Hamlet embedded in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, I can certainly tease a bildungsroman out of a Bond film. It’s my blog, anyway.

* * *

I will not tax your patience by relating the plot or other details of the film which you can discover yourself if you like. Nor will I spare you any spoilers. If you have not seen it already, there is no plot element I can reveal that will diminish your appreciation of the movie as cultural critique. In my experience, anyway, it is a measure of the quality of a story that you are willing to reread or rewatch it even when you know how it turns out. Skyfall is that good a movie.

The key plot points I would draw your attention to are as follows:

• At the beginning of the film, Bond is accidentally shot by his competent, no-nonsense assistant while attempting to recover a stolen data file from the top of a train barreling toward a tunnel of no return (cue Alfred Hitchcock and Sigmund Freud). Bond’s assistant, who happens to be black and female, shoots him on the explicit orders of their boss at British intelligence, “M,” who, while white and old, also happens to be female (Judi Dench). Bond, by the way, is an orphan who has a simultaneously fraught and close relationship with M which a casual observer could mistake for a mother–son dynamic.
• After plunging to his apparent death in deep water (cue Carl Jung, opening credits, and Adele’s theme song), we later discover Bond is alive after all, although he appears to be hiding from M and MI-6 in an exotic backwater and spending his time in self-destructive drinking, meaningless sex, and taunting dangerous arachnids for thrills and money.
• Bond comes back home to mother M when he hears she and MI-6 are under attack by a mysterious hacker who can penetrate British intelligence’s defenses at will. M displays no regret, casually informs Bond she has sold his home and all his belongings, and puts him into a crash course to get fit for active duty again, at which he struggles painfully. Nice homecoming.
• Bond tracks the mysterious hacker through various exotic locales and the beds of one or two expendable women to an abandoned island off the China coast, where he discovers a platinum blond Javier Bardem who minces and lisps and puts the moves on our trussed up spy. Bardem, it seems, is Bond’s evil twin, who is pissed at M for betraying him to the Chinese. He has channeled his anger into a worldwide empire of computer intelligence and manipulation, which he sells to the highest bidder. Strangely, though, this evil computer genius uses data screens that look like video games.
• After more plot machinations and an unsuccessful attempt on M’s life by Bardem (for an evil computer genius, he’s pretty lame with a gun), Bond flees with M to his ancient family home in Scotland, Skyfall, where he acquired what an MI-6 psychologist called his “pathological rejection of authority due to unresolved childhood trauma.” Bond himself tells M they’re going “into the past.” For transportation, they use Sean Connery–Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 from 1964’s Goldfinger. Into the past, indeed.
• An epic battle ensues at Skyfall, in which Bond, M, and Bond’s old gamekeeper and surrogate father battle Bardem and his small army, resulting in the destruction of Skyfall (which Bond hates), the Aston Martin DB5 (which only seems to mildly irritate Bond), and Bardem’s army. Bardem tracks a wounded M to a chapel where, while trying to persuade her to shoot both herself and him in the head to end their misery, Bond literally stabs Bardem in the back with a large hunting knife. So much for homosexual tension with your evil twin.
• Finally, after blessing Bond with her approval, M dies.

* * *

Now of course everyone who watches Skyfall knows all about James Bond. (All Bond movies assume it.) He is a charming, ruthless killer, a master manipulator with no empathy who treats friendly and hostile women alike like Kleenex and enemies like target practice. He is unmarried and childless, a man with no duties or responsibilities other than his job, which he often does grudgingly and against orders. Come what may, he always wins, usually punctuating his triumph with a cynical joke. As a cultural symbol of the last half century, James Bond is Peter Pan with a gun. For a British character he is as American as they come.

And yet in Skyfall he is betrayed and (symbolically) killed by women (including his mother), he falls into adolescent irresponsibility and self destruction, he is blocked and belittled by the genius avatars of today’s high technology (one of whom is gay or bisexual and the other is so young he still has spots), and he struggles not very successfully against physical and intellectual decrepitude. What more comprehensive list of challenges facing modern American man can one compile? What greater list of fears and blocks to maturity torture the brains of today’s man: emasculation, obsolescence, irrelevance, sexual confusion, self-indulgence, failure, age?

But Skyfall’s James Bond does not remain on the beach in India to sulk, boozing for breakfast and daring scorpions to sting him. He does not smoke pot and play Parcheesi with his stoner 30-something friends while the world burns or skip dates with beautiful women far out of his class to rearrange his vintage comic book collection. He is no Marvel superhero or genetically enhanced super soldier who can pretend to be invincible. This James Bond is the most vincible hero we have seen. And yet he picks himself up painfully, dusts himself off, and throws himself back into a game he is not sure—we are not sure—he can win, because it is his duty.¹ This is the opposite of the flight from adulthood. This is its embrace: the embrace of duty and responsibility. If there is a bubblegum escapist fantasy thriller which offers a better critique of the flight from adulthood—yet does not shy away from depicting how difficult and costly adulthood is—than this, I do not know what it is.

* * *

At one point, as Bardem’s villain bears down on M’s public hearing to kill her and Bond sprints through the streets of Whitehall to stop him, Judi Dench–M recites the conclusion from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” at the top of this post. The effect is inspirational, as we fully understand by now the effort and will it requires for Bond to push his aged, broken-down body through the streets to rescue both the head of his service and the only woman he has considered his mother for his entire adult life.

And yet Bond is not Tennyson’s Ulysses, a selfish, vain old man who wants to abandon his aged wife—who waited patiently for him for twenty years of wandering—his dutiful son, and his own people, to fling himself onto the wine dark sea once more in search of glory and adventure. No, Bond is a soldier, a dutiful son who dons his buckler and sword to wade again and again into the blood and mud of the battlefield, risking life and limb for the country which is his only family and his only allegiance. At the end of the movie, Mallory–M welcomes him into his new office—the original Bernard Lee–M’s office, down to the paneling, soundproofed door, and paintings on the wall; a fine, full circle the filmmakers have crafted for us²—and tells him as he tosses a new mission brief onto the desk, “So, 007, lots to be done. Are you ready to get back to work?”

Bond replies with a smile, “With pleasure, M. With pleasure.”

That is adulthood, children. That is what it means to be a man.

Related reading:
A.O. Scott, The Death of Adulthood in American Culture (The New York Times, September 11, 2014)

¹ I am not overlooking the element of revenge in Bond’s motivation; it is undoubtedly there. But this is just to say that Bond’s character’s motivations are multifarious and complex, as they are in real life. This makes Skyfall a better film, if a more complicated and ambiguous one in many respects.
² Note how, having reset the location of M’s office back to its setting from the very first film of the series, the filmmakers have also given enough backstory and proof of Mallory’s personal courage and toughness to justify his position in M’s chair. No longer just a fat, slightly ridiculous old man behind a desk, M’s role as leader and father to James Bond has been justified to us and to Bond. This little bit of the patriarchy, at least, makes sense again.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

The Plural of Anecdote Is Bullet Point

Giovanni Tiepolo, The Glorification of the Barbaro Family, ca. 1750

Who have you offended, masters, that you are thus
bound to your answer? this learned constable is
too cunning to be understood: what’s your offence?

— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

I suppose I should feel bad, Dear Readers, that Famous Economist and Man About Town Tyler Cowen had to interrupt his gustatory survey of Oaxacan tamale stands and their culinary influence on Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee growers recently in order to phone in a brief but blistering PowerPoint takedown of my recent critique of two paragraphs of his work. After all, who am I, an obscure, tendentious, financial parasite and peanut gallery denizen, to deprive the grateful masses of even one iota of Professor Cowen’s penetrating insight into all things economic, cultural, and quotidian? He is already famously cutting into his enormous backlog of polymathic munificence in order to mount a sustained, comprehensive attack on creeping inequality-ism being foisted upon an unwitting public by that current media darling and French Communist pest, Thomas Piketty. The last thing he needs is to take even ten minutes of his precious time to dash off crushing telegraphic responses to putzes like me. For shame, ED, for shame. Fie upon me.

But since he did, I suppose it would be the height of irresponsibility and moral turpitude for me not to reply, howsoever briefly I am able, in kind.¹ I wish for your benefit as well as mine, O Long-Suffering Readers, that I knew what the hell he was talking about.

* * *

Since Professor Cowen addresses my cheeky presumption with his famously Delphic and opaque bullet points, let me follow form:

1. He opens his piece with praise for my writing skill. Since this is a compliment, I should thank Professor Cowen, although I suspect it belongs rather more to a species of damning with faint praise—or praising with faint damns—than genuine appreciation, given what follows. Nevertheless, I will plumb the depths of my magnanimous soul and take it at face value. Thank you, Professor.

2. He blasts my piece as blinkered by my “framing of the problem in terms of inequality and inequality alone.” He claims I have, in his own scare quotes, “inequality on the brain.” This I find odd for two reasons:

3. One, given that my original response was to a two paragraph tangent in a lengthy review and critique by Dr. Cowen of Thomas Piketty’s Capital—a work the fundamental premise of which, arguable or not, seems to be universally agreed upon by everyone in Western Civilization and beyond except Tyler Cowen to be the history, causes, and effects of unequal distribution of wealth in capitalist society—I would pose the key question: What the fuck are we supposed to be talking about when we talk about Piketty? Isn’t that the entire point of the culture-wide discussion we seem to be having about this work? It’s like he blasted me for having Plato on the brain while discussing The Republic. I don’t get it.

4. Two, my original reading of the Tyler Cowen passage in question interpreted his remarks to say that certain 19th Century (primarily visual and literary) artists benefited and were able to pursue their work by virtue of inherited wealth or the support of bequests and wealthy family members. His “static blocks of wealth” promoted, in my terms, “cultural dynamism,” which, in the context of his remarks, seems to carry positive connotations, howsoever he fails to explain or describe what he means by it. He seems to chastise Piketty for overlooking that wealth can promote artistic and intellectual activity which enriches society at large. Upon careful rereading, I cannot perceive that my reading of this passage is notably idiosyncratic or egregiously wrong. And yet I challenged it, claiming, inter alia, that

• Cowen never defines what he means by the dynamism he claims for 19th Century European society, and how these artists and their like promoted it. Cultures can be rich, complex, and lasting without exhibiting qualities which the average person would claim to be “dynamic” (viz., Ancient Egypt). Slapping such a label on an entire century without deigning to justify it to the cheap seats is just sloppy argumentation.
  
• Cowen does not justify, by focusing on this particular period of French and European history—presumably to contradict Piketty’s negative characterization of the other socioeconomic effects of increased wealth inequality—why the wealth which purportedly funded these artists’ and writers’ cultural production was particularly notable or different from the sources of wealth and income in different periods of history, when wealth inequality was lower or higher, or why or indeed whether cultural production supported by other peoples’ money in 19th Century France was any more dynamic, complex, interesting, or long lasting than cultural production which has taken place in other, similar or very different (from a wealth inequality point of view) periods of history. (In contrast I claim that, compared to what came before and after, it was nothing unusually dynamic or distinctive from an artistic, literary, or cultural point of view.)
  
• Cowen does not even approach an acknowledgment of the key fact which I assert: that artists, writers, and other laborers in the mines of culture throughout history have almost always been reliant upon monetary patronage of some sort to fund their life and work. This is particularly true of visual artists, with which I am most familiar, and who from time immemorial have mostly carried on their trade in the service of kings, pharaohs, Popes, aristocrats, feudal lords, and other rich and powerful bigwigs who commissioned their work to glorify themselves and the sources of their socioeconomic power. I have no idea whence Professor Cowen derives the assertion my arguments are intemperate, wrong, doubtful, or exaggerated, and he makes no effort in turn to document this, other than to default to an argument from authority (his own, natch) based on five books he claims to have published on the subject. The one book he does cite directly—we may presume to most directly contradict my arguments—does nothing of the kind, arguing principally that market economies and their encouragement of popular culture have salutary effects on high culture. I did not think we were talking about markets, Professor Cowen. I thought we were talking about “static blocks of wealth.” Oops.
  

5. Oh, and while we’re at it, cooking is not an art. Period.

* * *

In fact, if I interpret the opacity of Dr. Cowen’s prose and arguments correctly, we do not now and did not then disagree on one fundamental point: historically, accumulated wealth—whether of rulers, family, or solicitous strangers—has been a huge support to the legions of fine artists, musicians, and writers, and intellectuals who have labored to enrich our culture. With extraordinarily few exceptions, artists have not been wealthy themselves, but rather have had to rely on the kindness of strangers and family to support them as they strive to produce meaningful art. (I am not talking about popular artists, who are another species entirely.)

But this, I would posit to you, is neither an indictment nor an endorsement of equal or unequal wealth distribution. It just is. This is the key point of my previous post, that fine art is fundamentally superfluous and irrelevant to the core activities and economic structures which drive a society. It is a parasite, a lichen or Spanish Moss which clings to the tree of society, lives off it and, if we spectators are lucky, makes the tree more attractive or at least picturesque, without killing it or stunting its growth. Artists will find a way to fund themselves in any society. If artists cannot support themselves, they will find someone else to do so, or they will give up their brushes and pens and get a real job. In many respects, it is easier to be an artist when there are lots of silly rich people around to fund your painting, poems, or plays. In many respects, it is better for culture if there are large, static blocks of concentrated wealth which can be tapped via flattery, boredom, vanity, guilt, or a sense of social gratitude or obligation to fund luxury activities like painting, sculpture, fine music, plays, and the like. Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic legacy is just one example among many.

But I take exception to the argument, which I sense Professor Cowen is making, howsoever he would squirm to deny it,² that art and culture justify the existence of concentrated blocks of wealth; i.e., wealth inequality. I am a huge supporter of the arts, and I would fight hard to preserve their vitality and dynamism, even at the cost of many other valuable things, like improved economic security and opportunity for broader swathes of society than we seem to accommodate at present. But they must be weighed in the balance, and debated, with a clear eye to the facts, and without prejudging the outcome.

Overall, I think Dr. Cowen’s rebuttal is a good example of how easily and quickly one can go awry by an obsession with justifying the status quo by whatever means necessary. It also shows the drawbacks of a relative unfamiliarity with the actual arguments of your opponent, including for that matter the recent post by Yours Truly.

* * *

I trust Professor Cowen can now put the minor inconvenience of my interference behind him, and resume dazzling us with oracular pronouncements of exquisite incomprehensibility. I would not want to deprive my fellow members of society of this boundless font of cultural dynamism.

Related reading:
Tyler Cowen, 19th century inequality and the arts (Marginal Revolution, May 7, 2014)
Ozymandias at the Art Gallery (May 3, 2014)

¹ You know, of course, if you are regular readers of this site, how completely and utterly I will fail to do so. (Be brief, that is.)
² And if I have misread him, and he is not arguing this, I am arguing against those who would read his remarks to do so. It is not that hard to imagine.

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Ozymandias at the Art Gallery

Henri Matisse, Interior with Goldfish, 1914

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

— T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

Economist-überblogger Tyler Cowen slips a bizarre digression into his recent critique of The Book Which Everybody Intends to Read Once They Stop Reading All the Reviews Everybody Else Is Writing About It,¹ a.k.a. Thomas Piketty’s Capital:

Piketty fears the stasis and sluggishness of the rentier, but what might appear to be static blocks of wealth have done a great deal to boost dynamic productivity. Piketty’s own book was published by the Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press, which received its initial funding in the form of a 1949 bequest from Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., an architect and art historian who inherited a good deal of money from his father, a vice president of Bankers Trust. (The imprint’s funds were later supplemented by a grant from Belknap’s mother.) And consider Piketty’s native France, where the scores of artists who relied on bequests or family support to further their careers included painters such as Corot, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec and writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Verlaine, and Proust, among others.

Notice, too, how many of those names hail from the nineteenth century. Piketty is sympathetically attached to a relatively low capital-to-income ratio. But the nineteenth century, with its high capital-to-income ratios, was in fact one of the most dynamic periods of European history. Stocks of wealth stimulated invention by liberating creators from the immediate demands of the marketplace and allowing them to explore their fancies, enriching generations to come.

Now, I am no economist, and I have not yet read the book either, but my impression so far is that Piketty, if he is criticizing anything, is criticizing the economic stasis and sluggishness he posits attaches to rentier society, as well as deleterious socioeconomic effects he claims significant economic inequality has on politics and society. For what it is worth, economics certainly seems to be the focus of the rest of Professor Cowen’s essay as well, or I am no reader of English prose.

But in medias res Cowen takes a detour to praise the cultural dynamism and productivity of 19th Century France, which he claims results from the substantial socioeconomic inequality of the period. This is a pivot too far.

* * *

It is a pivot too far for several reasons. First, it completely begs the question posed by Henry Farrell:

If you want to argue that Piketty (and other critics of inequality) fail to appreciate how inequality fosters the “dynamic productivity” of culture, you really need to show how culture is more dynamic under high inequality than it is under conditions of low inequality. Otherwise, your argument is beside the point (if all that you’re saying is that high inequality has some cultural payoffs while admitting that low inequality has greater payoffs, your criticism is probably not worth articulating in the first place).

Second, it completely begs the question of comparative cultural dynamism. How “dynamic” was European (French, whatever) culture in the bad old days of inequality in the 18th Century or indeed the modernist period of cultural upheaval, capital destruction, and wholesale collapse of entrenched socioeconomic inequality during the 20th? Was the 19th Century anything special, or was it in fact just another arbitrary division of the calendar superimposed over a self-referential process of cultural development which had endogenous and exogenous sources of extraordinary complexity and diversity? Do we really want to stack transitionalists like Corot, Courbet, and Monet up against innovators like Braque, Picasso, Matisse, the Abstract Expressionists, or even Andy Warhol and start discussing dynamism? Perhaps Professor Cowen better toddle on down to the GMU Art History Department for a short tutorial on Modern Western Art History before he embarrasses himself further.²

Third, I think a careful survey of fine arts and literature for, oh, say the last thirty gazillion centuries would establish that most artists (or culture workers, as Herr Doktor Cowen might like to deem them), have always lived at the edge of personal insolvency and economic irrelevance for most of their productive lives. Artists who have been rich and economically independent during their lifetimes have generally been as rare as hens’ teeth, and often as aesthetically pleasing. (Peter Paul Rubens, banker manqué and factory artist, Jeff Koons, bond trader manqué and factory artist, and Damien Hirst, artist manqué and factory artist, come easily to mind.) In other words, most artists and writers have been scraping by on whatever they can beg, borrow, or steal for millennia. If family bequests or wealthy relations were not at hand, they relied on rich patrons or, failing everything else, garden variety employment. (T.S. Eliot was a schoolteacher, book reviewer, and publishing executive, for example.) The point is, art of almost any stripe is not a profession at which the average schmo (or even average globe-straddling genius) can earn a decent living: somebody needs to support you. For most of recorded history, it has been rich patrons, like the Egyptian pharaohs, the Borgias, or Stevie Cohen. The fact that for some intermittent periods some artists’ patrons happened to share the same DNA is largely irrelevant.

* * *

Lastly, and most importantly, one needs to acknowledge that cultural achievement, dynamism, or meaningfulness—however you want to label or measure it—takes place in a space largely orthogonal to the socioeconomic arrangements, income and wealth distribution, and justice inherent in any particular society. Great art, literature, music, and intellectual argument has often been produced in what most of us nowadays, from the comfortable vantage point of our liberal capitalist democracies, would consider absolute shitholes of society. Ancient Egypt (slavery), Athenian democracy (slavery), Renaissance Italy (everything but slavery, as far as I know), and 20th Century Western civilization (which killed more people through violence and starvation than ever before in history) are shining examples of cultures which produced rich, enduring, dynamic, and productive cultural, artistic, and intellectual legacies. The artists and thinkers who created those legacies often did so with the support and cash of patrons whom progressive thinkers nowadays would like to throw into prisons and lose the keys, if not execute outright.

This makes complete sense, by the way, if you think about it for even a moment. Art and intellectual argument is almost universally a complete luxury, from a societal point of view. People and societies do not want to spend scarce and valuable resources penning poems, composing concertos, painting frescoes, or developing reasoned arguments when they are struggling to avoid starvation, disease, or the cutting edge of their enemy’s sword. Most people don’t even want to think about consuming such cultural delicacies until they have achieved some sort of socioeconomic security and comfort. No wonder artists and intellectuals have starved through the ages: most people don’t give a shit about what they are trying to produce. The ones who do are the people with the resources, leisure time, and egos to satisfy by employing scribblers and daubers to enliven their idle hours. In other words, the very rich.

Now whether our society (or any society) can reach a point of growth and surplus such that more than a tiny minority of driven, obsessive, narcissistic personalities can and want to make a living contributing to the cultural patrimony of their civilization is a question well beyond this writer’s pay grade. But I think it is absolutely irrefutable that great cultural achievement can go hand in hand with staggering social inequality and injustice. From a historical point of view, that is the normal state of affairs.

There is an argument to be made—which I would not make, by the way—that great cultural achievement requires great social inequality to thrive and survive. I think we have had enough recent evidence that this is not true to refute it. But I also think the apologists for increased economic inequality, like Professor Cowen, have a very steep hill to climb in arguing that such cultural achievement justifies the social and economic misery and stagnation which are the primary outcomes of massive economic inequality.

And that, I am reliably led to believe, is the ill Thomas Piketty seeks to cure.

Related reading:
Tyler Cowen, Capital Punishment: Why a Global Tax on Wealth Won’t End Inequality (Foreign Affairs, May/June 2014)
Henry Farrell, Inequality and the arts (Crooked Timber, April 30, 2014)
A Painting Is Not a Refrigerator (October 6, 2012)
Luxe, Calme et Volupté (April 16, 2011)


¹ Yes, I am one of them.
² I mean, I know the guy’s supposed to be a brilliant polymath and all, but Jesus, what ill-informed idiocy. Related: how does an economist define (relative) cultural dynamism, anyway? I’m waiting…

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Venn Diagram

Anselm Kiefer, Sulamith, 1983

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity’s displayed:
I’m looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while
And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I’d have him love the thing that was
Before the world was made.

— William Butler Yeats, “Before the World Was Made”

De gustibus non est disputandum.

— Latin maxim

Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty—he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world—alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Many, many circuits of this small blue planet around its dim yellow star ago, O Dearly Beloved, I remember helping my college rowing teammates put away the boats and oars one evening after practice. As we bent over exhausted to collect and carry our equipment, a few of us were suddenly struck by the beauty of a lovely sunset, which spread rosy fingers of gorgeous color across the sky and water around the dock and boathouse. Some mischievous wag, no doubt with an eye to provoking exactly what followed, starting proclaiming loudly “Art! Art!” while pointing to the scene, and several of us joined in in boisterous agreement. One upper-class oarsman of distinctly aesthetic and artistic persuasion (who was clearly the wag’s intended target) objected loudly, however, exclaiming that a natural phenomenon such as a sunset could never be art. This, of course, only spurred us jokesters to redouble our banter and offer all sorts of spurious rationales for our baseless badinage. The put upon aesthete was satisfyingly frustrated by our feigned obtuseness, and the rest of us enjoyed a temporary respite from the long, thankless business of training aching bodies for distant races far in the future. In other words, a pleasant time was had by all.

What recalls this memory to mind is a recent peroration by Antipodean philosopher and author John Armstrong, who penned a piece which claims that beauty, or at least the contemplation of beauty, can and should spur humans to become better people. He takes his guidance in this regard from German Romantic philosopher and aesthetician Friedrich Schiller, who Professor Armstrong claims attributed beauty’s appeal and importance to us to its capacity to unite two conflicting psychological drives we all possess—the “sense” drive which “lives in the moment and seeks immediate gratification,” and the “form” drive which seeks order and coherence in the world—into a harmonious whole. Dr. Armstrong does not specify where we should seek this therapeutic, personality shaping beauty, but one may sensibly assume from the examples he uses and the title of a book he has co-authored, Art as Therapy, that he looks primarily for such models and guides to harmony in the realm of art.

Now, while Your Humble Bloggist is an admitted devotee of beauty of all sorts, and an enthusiastic champion of the power and value of Art—which characterizations anyone who has followed my writings here should have no trouble admitting—I simply cannot agree with our earnest Professor that beauty is capable of creating better people, no matter what psychological, emotional, or intellectual mechanisms he might propose. For my reasons, I would point you to the following diagram, which I have constructed out of the goodness of my heart to illustrate the logical conundrums Dr. Armstrong’s assertions entail.

A Comprehensive Theory of Art, Beauty, and Morality in One Microsoft Word Diagram

A quick perusal of same will acquaint you with my own views, which boil down to the hopefully uncontroversial contention that the spheres of Art, Beauty, and Morality in human experience, while they do indeed overlap, are neither coterminous nor coextensive; that is, there is more to each than either or both of the others can comprehend. To defend this argument, I would simply point you to easily identifiable counterexamples to the opposing view: beauty, empty of morality, which is not art (like my oarsman's sunset years ago); art, empty of beauty and morality, which one might find in abundance at any Biennale; and morality, devoid of beauty or aesthetic construction, which one can enjoy in unlimited quantities in the arguments of our politicians and the jeremiads of our paid and unpaid commentariat. That there can be beautiful art, empty of all but the most tenuous and vague moral sentiments, I would point you to a great deal of the Western World’s artistic canon (including, for example, almost the entire oeuvre of Henri Matisse) and most classical music. That there can be unhandsome art of deeply moral intent and impact, which can inspire harrowing, uplifting, and life altering thoughts in a sensitive soul I can illustrate with the paintings of Anselm Kiefer (q.v. above) and numberless examples from world literature. And that there can be moral beauty without aesthetic selection or artifice I would demonstrate by the exercise of courage under great threat, as perhaps we are currently seeing among the citizenry of Kiev and Venezuela.

The happy confluence of all three spheres, Art, Beauty, and Morality in one whole, as designated by the comely asterisk in the diagram above, I contend is only a small portion of the map of human experience. As well as, more importantly, a relatively rare occurrence in most of our lives. And this is not even to address the complications and confusions introduced to a morally therapeutic program of appreciation of art and beauty by the undeniable fact that each, and perhaps most especially the latter, are indeed seen in the eye of the beholder. Which means they are culturally determined, cognitively limited, and far too idiosyncratic to hang a plan of human betterment upon. Frankly, it makes me wonder what sort of wooly headed nonsense Professor Armstrong is blathering on about. There is far too much amoral art and amoral beauty floating around out there to think their contemplation is a reliable source of moral improvement for anyone.

Then one can trot out all the horrible examples of cultured monsters who have perpetrated horrific acts upon their fellow humans throughout the ages notwithstanding and often at the same time as they enjoyed the fruits of artists’ labors and the pleasures of natural and manmade beauty. All one need do is read Paul Celan’s Todesfuge or contemplate the orchestrated theft of fine art from around Europe by Hermann Göring to realize the ability and desire to appreciate art and beauty can in fact be completely divorced from any impulse toward moral betterment or even basic humanity. And I would not be the first to point out that some of the most egregious of such atrocities were committed by denizens of the same nation which produced and idealized such figures as Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, and, if we are being complete, Friedrich Schiller. Not a good scorecard in support of Dr. Armstrong’s hypothesis.

* * *If pressed, I would propose a different formulation. What I believe is that a sensitive, open soul in the presence of art, morality, or beauty may be able, if she concentrates, to extract meaning and value from the experience. But this meaning and value will not necessarily convey simple, uplifting lessons or moral improvement. Rather, these lessons may be something different entirely: in the case of Art, ambiguity, complexity, and obscurity may illuminate certain open-ended pathways of thought; in the case of Beauty, awe, desire, and uncanniness may give rise to fear, frustration, and a feeling of loss. Surely there are certain lessons to be learned, and moral growth to be had, in the contemplation of beauty and art. But I would contend these lessons may not be comforting ones to learn, and in the case of Great Art and Great Beauty, they are almost certain to be neither simple nor clear.

Perhaps that is the biggest moral lesson to learn, after all: the world, and our experience of it, is too big to be shoehorned neatly into any coherent system of belief. That the world, in many respects, is completely indifferent to our own personal lives and fates, and there are meaningful, awe-inspiring, and wonderful things out there which have nothing at all to do with our petty concerns. Perhaps that is the real power of Beauty and Art and Morality: writ large, they are a reminder of our own insignificance, and a spur to the sort of radical doubt that encourages us to seek harder for the meaning and value—the sources and guides to morality—in our own circumscribed lives.

That is a good lesson, but I’m not sure how you’re going to print it in a textbook.

“I see no justice in that plan.”

“Who said,” lashed out Isaac Penn, “that you, a man, can always perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to understand—until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.”

— Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale

© 2014 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Mirror, Mirror

La belle et la bête (1946) – Jean Cocteau

“You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.”

— Jean Cocteau

Much of an investment banker’s¹ life, O Dearly Beloved, consists of spurts of feverish activity interspersed with agonizing stretches of boredom, an activity often characterized as hurry up and wait. We get called by potential clients to come present our credentials for their pissant deals on scandalously short notice, we mobilize a small army of overworked child laborers to produce voluminous pitch materials of ludicrous length and specificity, and we cram ourselves into economy class cattle cars to East Bumfuck, Nowhere, where we subsequently cram ourselves into plywood-paneled boardrooms decorated in early J.R. Ewing or late Bernie Madoff style—along with several other small armies of supplicants from our competition—to simper and grovel and polish the shoes of our would-be client millionaires with our Hermes ties. Then we wait anywhere from 48 hours to four weeks to hear whether we have won the assignment, at which point—assuming the answer is yes—we have to scramble back out to the weeds to kick off the real work with an organizational meeting.

The situation does not improve in the midst of a deal, either. Investment bankers are always scrambling to pull together materials for somebody or other—client, counterparty, or our own internal counterparts in capital markets or leveraged finance—which always seem to be due immediately and which are invariably returned, commented on, or revised by said somebody or other at a noticeably more leisurely pace while we sit counting ceiling tiles with our thumbs up our asses. It’s just the nature of an episodic, project-centered, client service job. Of course, we always hope to have more than one iron in the fire at a time, and we hope even more that all our active deals don’t decide to heat up at once and require our immediate, in-person attendance in Sacramento, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Dallas, and Düsseldorf this coming Saturday at 10:00 am local time. Failing that, I suppose I should be thinking clever thoughts about the next stunningly original M&A deal or financing technique I can spring upon an unsuspecting client base, or figuring out ways to wheedle my way into favor with the firms I don’t already do business with. But even after all that, and after I have rearranged my snowglobe collection for the sixth time into reverse alphabetical order based on the last letter of their purchase location, there are occasionally dead spots in my job where there is. Absolutely. Nothing. To do.

And that is when I check Twitter.

* * *Which led me today, as it so happens, to an article by one Michelle Goldberg entitled “In Defense of Jonathan Franzen,” in which Ms Goldberg defends said literary lion’s rambling and apparently much maligned attack² on social media and the internet by claiming, in a phrase, that Twitter Is Horrible. Well this, I said to myself, said I, is interesting. Because I couldn’t disagree more.

Ms Goldberg did not hedge her condemnation of the social medium in question, either:

In his essay, Franzen compares Twitter to cigarettes. This is inaccurate. Twitter is like doing cut-rate cocaine at a boring party where a lot of the guests dislike you. (As I said, I lived in San Francisco in the ’90s.) You’re not having any fun, but it’s really hard to stop.

And this:

Twitter began to seem like a machine that runs on rage. You see something that disgusts or infuriates you. Tweeting about it provides momentary relief, followed by the brief validation of the retweet. As you scan your feed, you take in other little microbursts of nastiness. So you get angry all over again and respond, perpetuating the cycle.

As I read these choice nuggets, my first thought was not that Ms Goldberg sounds like she had a pretty shitty time in San Francisco in the 1990s, which she apparently did, or that her description of Twitter and its uses sounds remotely like the one I’m familiar with, which it does not. No, my first thought was how thankful I was that I do not follow Ms Goldberg on Twitter. Or even, were I to be completely honest, have to interact with her regularly in real life at cocktail parties. Because I mean, what?

Ms Goldberg has fallen into the trap—common to many with an unreflective view on life—of damning an entire cultural phenomenon on the basis of her own, particular, idiosyncratic relationship with it. Telling me that you believe Twitter runs on rage tells me much more about you—that you are likely to be a person full of rage or very susceptible to feelings of rage—than it does anything useful or universal about Twitter. It is also empirically untrue. My Twitter stream and experience does not run on rage, and I am observant and interested enough in other peoples’ use and experience of Twitter to know that it does not run on rage for many, many others either. From what I can tell, while admittedly not being a Twitter expert, I would venture to guess there are as many uses and forms of Twitter as there are types of people, personalities, and imaginable uses: Cat Pic Twitter, Celebrity Stalking Twitter, Sports Twitter, Investing Twitter, etc., etc., ad infinitum/nauseam.

This is not to say that I and many others do not occasionally fall into the trap of becoming enraged by something we see on Twitter—or, more broadly and correctly, the Internet—and spiraling into an anger-soaked argument or tirade on some issue or other. I certainly do (and usually regret it afterward). But this does not mean such a relationship with this medium is either inevitable or necessary, as Ms Goldberg seems to imply it is for her. This is too bad, but it is easily remedied. If you are following people who enrage you regularly, stop following them. If certain people troll you or constantly try to engage you in energy-sapping arguments, block them. Nowhere is it written that you have to listen to or engage with angry people. Not even on Twitter. If Ms Goldberg is in fact trapped in Rage Twitter, perhaps it would not be presumptuous of me to suggest she try following some different people. Or try to find something in her experience and use of the medium other than rage.

* * *What is generally true—given that its members choose whom they follow and, to a certain extent, whom they allow to follow them—is that Twitter can easily become an echo chamber, reflecting and repeating back to you what you expect and want to hear. This is a well understood weakness of human nature, which has long pre-dated the internet or any of its more recent excrescences. I work hard to curate³ the list of people I follow on Twitter to exclude those who, like Ms Goldberg, seem to approach the universe in a permanent state of rage, or those who distract or annoy me with information or opinions that I have little interest in or use for. This does not mean that I want to follow only people with whom (I think) I already agree. I like having my opinions and preconceptions challenged. But when I find people who can engage in back and forth argument and edification without making bile rise in my throat, I cultivate them. Sometimes I persuade them to my point of view; sometimes they persuade me to theirs. I like to use Twitter to engage with people I would otherwise have little ability to engage. I also use Twitter to learn things, to have fun, and to occasionally make an ass of myself. From my personal perspective, this seems like a much more wholesome way to approach a trivial social media app than the Relentless Pursuit of and Flight from Towering Rage. But hey, that’s just me.

In any event, Twitter is nothing more than a silly messaging service. You are not required by God, Capitalism, or the Powers That Be to participate. Therefore, if Twitter is reflecting something unpleasant back to you (like rage), perhaps you should log off and do a little self-reflection instead. As someone I often engage with but do not follow on Twitter said,

“Twitter is a mirror disguised as a window.”

Just don’t ask me where (s)he got it from.

Happy tweeting.


¹ I speak here, as is often my wont, of my form of investment banking: capital raising and mergers and acquisitions advisory, which center around intermittent projects for various and sundry clients. I do not speak of sales and trading, or capital markets, which tends to be a more uniformly frenzied activity (at least during market hours) interspersed with agonizing stretches of wining and dining counterparties. These are crude caricatures, but I trust regular readers of this forum know to expect such and have done with it. You novices can go sob quietly in the corner (or try to figure out the details from my back catalogue).
² Yeah, I started reading it a while back. As the cool kids say: TL;DR. No link.
³ Sorry, I’ve been told I must use this word when discussing social media. Who told me, you might ask? The cool kids, of course.

© 2013 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

A Painting Is Not a Refrigerator

This is what civilizations and societies always do: remake the past in the present’s image, mistake the current conditions of knowledge and experience and feeling for an unchanging human condition or biological reality.

— Simon Reynolds, “You Are Not a Switch”

Camille Paglia has a very odd, rambling piece in The Wall Street Journal today, talking about capitalism and the visual arts. I am unfamiliar with Ms Paglia’s oeuvre, so I cannot say whether the style of this article is of a piece with the rest, but if it is, I am unimpressed. It reads like a disjointed tour d’horizon, pointing out features of the landscape, interspersed with unsupported and grandiose claims, that never comes to a recognizable conclusion: “Here is a thing, and here is a thing, and this is a fact. Ergo, QED.” Huh?

Her basic thesis seems to be that the visual arts are stuck in the doldrums:

Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Well, okay, one might quibble whether leading contemporary artists like Damian Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami are good artists, or artists who will leave a lasting historical impression on the visual arts, but only a fool (or a cultural critic seriously ignorant of the contemporary art scene) would deny they have indeed been highly influential.

She goes on:

What has sapped artistic creativity and innovation in the arts? Two major causes can be identified, one relating to an expansion of form and the other to a contraction of ideology.

Painting was the prestige genre in the fine arts from the Renaissance on. But painting was dethroned by the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Permanence faded as a goal of art-making.

This is just dumb.

First of all, the dethronement of painting as the prestige visual art—which, by the way, has been a very long time coming, and started far earlier than the 1960s—and the rise of multiple competing media spurred innovation, and unleashed a vast influx of energy and creativity into the field which it otherwise would not have enjoyed. In addition to opening up new aesthetic dimensions to explore and exploit that painting with pigment on a two dimensional surface could not, contemporary arts like video and photography and new industrial techniques for sculpture and printmaking attracted vast new numbers of artists into the field who would otherwise have lacked the talent or interest to make meaningful art in traditional media. (Not everybody can paint.) The fact that ways of creating visual art exploded vastly expanded creativity and innovation, not sapped it. This is just plain common sense, in addition to historical fact.

Second, Ms Paglia’s unsupported assertion that permanence faded as a goal of art just isn’t true. Sure, visual artists have been exploring the aesthetic dimensions and implications of impermanence for some time now, all the way back to Ms Paglia’s self-professed “hero” Andy Warhol and his “happenings” in the 1960s, if not before. But for every shark carcass rotting in a tank of formaldehyde or public sculpture carved out of flowers, contemporary artists have given us plenty of paintings, sculptures, and objects which are designed, if only by virtue of being composed of plastic and metal more durable than any organic pigment, to last much longer than your local museum’s Da Vinci. Lastly, just in case Ms Paglia hadn’t noticed it herself, impermanence has become a permanent psychological, sociological, and economic feature of contemporary society. Does she think visual artists as a class are so insensate to this fact or so reactionary that they would not find exploring the condition of impermanence to be an interesting and important theme for their art? And what better way—as only one of many solutions—to do so than to make the work of art itself impermanent? After all, let art collectors and museum curators worry about how to preserve your decaying ice cream sculpture of Henry Ford: that’s conservation, not art.

Hang on. She’s not done yet:

But there is a larger question: What do contemporary artists have to say, and to whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s.

And what is missing from this airless ideological echo chamber, according to our narratrix? Why religion and capitalism, of course. (This is an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, after all.) ¹

But this is just loony too.

* * *

Put aside, for a moment, the fact that contemporary art has made the nature of modern societies, including capitalist ones,² a central theme and topic. To be sure, most artists’ treatment of contemporary socioeconomic mores has been critical rather than laudatory, and it is reasonable to expect the political monoculture Ms Paglia postulates in the art world (and which I have no particular reason to doubt) might have something to do with this. Put aside the facile conflation of art world and academy which Ms Paglia uses to bolster her ideological point, a conflation which ignores substantial areas of difference between the two and the irrefutable fact that many (most?) successful practicing artists never went to college. And put aside the fact that ongoing recession in the economy and the recent global financial crisis has soured the opinion many members of society have of capitalism, a fact which perhaps indicates the great unwashed are less out of synch with the critical stance artists take toward their society than Ms Paglia would have us believe.

No, what is really loony is her implied notion that denizens of the art world were ever anything but card-carrying members of a hermetically sealed sociopolitical echo chamber. Visual art is now and always has been a hand-crafted luxury good, produced by a relatively small community of artisans in tiny numbers for an equally tiny community of wealthy patrons and collectors. Fine artists have never been in touch with “the general audience,” whatever that is supposed to mean. They produce and sell art for and to the sociopolitical elite, whatever that elite happens to be at the time. In the past, the art-sponsoring elite consisted of Popes, Borgias, and wealthy Dutch merchants, among others. Today it consists of the pillars of modern financial capitalism, wealthy plutocrats and corporate institutions. This forms a particularly ironic counterpoint to Ms Paglia’s assertion that fine art is hostile to capitalism, given that the hedge fund grandees, Philip Morris corporate art buyers, and trust fund parasites contemporary artists sell to are its greatest boosters. Do you really think Steve Cohen is unaware of the political agenda of pieces in his collection? Do you really think he cares?

Let’s face it. The general population normally doesn’t give a rat’s ass about fine art. Sure, they make an annual pilgrimage to the local art museum, for some “kulcha,”—normally when out-of-town relatives visit, natch—and they visit museums and historical cultural sites when they travel abroad. But in each instance almost all of them look blankly at the artwork of any era, mumble how their child could do better and scoff at the newer ones, and can’t wait to get back to some football and pizza at the hotel. You want to know what kind of art the common man likes? Leroy Nieman prints and Thomas Kinkade paintings. The common man in Renaissance Italy was just as oblivious: he might ooh and ahh over the realism of the sword cut in Jesus’s side on the painted altarpiece, but he didn’t linger in church for aesthetic contemplation. The concept of fine art for the common man is nonsense. They have no interest in it. Why should they?

* * *

What is particularly bizzare in the end about Ms Paglia’s disquisition is her schizophrenic take on what she sees as the solution to the problem she has manufactured identified. In one breath, she says “young artists must be rescued from their sanitized middle-class backgrounds,” presumably by being taught how to woodwork, throw a pot, or scumble oil paint across a canvas, like the heroic Americans of her youth who grew up with steel mills, shoe factories, and leaded gasoline. In the next, she glorifies clear-eyed, commercially savvy Promethei bringing sleek and streamlined industrial design to the masses. Industrial design, Ms Paglia laments at the end, which lacks the spiritual dimension of great works of art.

What conclusion, if any, is she actually trying to draw?

Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.

Thus young artists have been betrayed and stunted by their elders before their careers have even begun. Is it any wonder that our fine arts have become a wasteland?

College students are the common man, Camille, in numbers if not socioeconomic status. Most of them will have little interest in or interaction with fine art of any kind over the course of their lives. Far fewer of them, plus some talented non-college graduates, will ever actually pick up a brush, chisel, or video camera. An even smaller subset of these will ever make an impact at all. Their output will be tiny, scattered, and subject to being lost, ignored, or appreciated for all the wrong reasons. Most will never be able to support themselves or their families.

If there is a tragedy about fine art, it is that it is simultaneously so small, unprotected, and unimportant on a personal scale and potentially so important on a cultural and historical one. You can’t socially engineer your way around that. It is the nature of the beast.

That is what fine art is, Ms Paglia. It has always been a wasteland.

Related reading:
Breakfast in Fur (June 24, 2012)
L.H.O.O.Q. (July 29, 2007)


¹ Hence the title, unexplained or even addressed in the article, “How Capitalism Can Save Art.” You may note that I do not address her point about fine art’s divorce from religion. First, I am not so sure this is true, at least when it comes to spirituality, but it is incontrovertible that religious institutions no longer sponsor fine visual art in the way they used to. Should that change, I am sure you would see a veritable resurgence of religious artwork. Artists gotta eat, too, you know.
² I hope and presume Ms Paglia realizes there are and have been non-capitalist societies in the world and that they have included at least their fair share of artists.

© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Breakfast in Fur

The Cereus, which only blossoms for a night, withers away without any admiration from another in the wilderness of the southern forests; and these forests, receptacles themselves of the most beautiful and luxuriant vegetation, with the richest and most aromatic perfumes, perish and collapse in like manner unenjoyed. The work of art has no such naïve and independent being. It is essentially a question, an address to the responding soul of man, an appeal to affections and intelligence.

— G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art¹

Peter Aspden has written a piece in the Financial Times which I am still struggling to get my head around. It largely seems to be an unstructured lament about the corruption of art by commerce, but he does make the counterargument that the marketing of consumer goods emblazoned with the words and works of live and dead artists can somehow “be seen as an act of revenge by art on society.” Huh? This seems desperately, even comically wrong to me.

It is true that a number of artists he mentions by name—Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, etc.—and many he does not have made careers which seem nothing less than performance pieces commenting on the dominance, allure, and corruption of commerce, money, and fame in contemporary society. Their work, and their lives, are grounded in ironic commentary on the place of wealth in society and its effect on the production and consumption of art, mediated through alternately hostile scorn for and obsequious subservience to it. It is a clever and potentially subversive program which I would find more entertaining if the basic subject matter—money, the people who have it, and how they spend it—were less mind-crushingly banal. I would also find its subversiveness more compelling were its practitioners less patently desperate to join the ranks of the plutocracy they mock.

But Mr. Aspden is exactly wrong if he thinks these court jesters are exacting some sort of revenge on commerce or that they are controlling it in any way. No, they have embraced the Great Whore of Babylon wholeheartedly, and they indulge themselves and their audience with ironic detachment and sarcastic mockery of the creature while they take her coin and enjoy her favors unshamefacedly. They are prostitutes who wink at the spectators while they take their customers’ money. They are in control of their own corruption, no more.

* * *

And commerce has been beating at the doors of art for, oh, approximately forever. Fine artists used to be simple craftsmen, of relatively low social status, who worked for those who could afford to pay them for decorative, nonutilitarian luxury baubles; namely, the rich. Only in relatively recent times did a myth emerge of the artist as some sort of tortured Prometheus, braving Olympian disapproval to bring the fire of wisdom and meaning to the huddled masses. But even then, and even now, fine art only exists at the sufferance of people with so much surplus wealth they can afford to throw it away on rotting shark carcasses and gilded sculptures of Michael Jackson with his chimpanzee.

And the common folk and bourgeoisie have always wanted a little taste of artistic glory too, even if it was no more that a poorly registered print of the Mona Lisa on a postcard. Mr. Aspden himself notes that museums have been selling reproductions of the works of dead artists for decades. Whom does this benefit? Certainly not Leonardo da Vinci or Vincent van Gogh.

As best I can tell, Mr. Aspden seems most upset that the estate of Francis Bacon—another dead artist, natch—is profiting from the sale of his wit and work on cashmere throws and coffee cups.

I’m not so sure about Bacon, though. His work was of a different order, and if we are to regard him as a masterly commentator on existential isolation and mortality, we are surely traducing his work by spreading it so thinly, on mugs, towels, silk scarves. We may live in a cheerfully ironic age, but there are limits. Bacon was trying to say something important about the human condition in his work. He struggled to say it, and we are captivated by the romance of that struggle. But the minute that the results appear on a kitchen tray, some of that subtle alchemical reaction between artist and spectator cannot help but be altered. We have lost something. The descent into kitsch is a one-way street and there is no turning back.

Really? I fail to see how the endless reproduction by museums and purely commercial enterprises of artistic masterpieces on postcards, cheap prints, coffee cups, neckties, and tote bags has done anything to cheapen the content or import of artists far more talented that Mr. Bacon. Do we value Botticelli or Bernini any less because their works have been reproduced on jigsaw puzzles? Of course not.

For surely the value of great art is in an important way orthogonal to the socioeconomic matrix in which it is produced and experienced. It cannot be tamed in the form of consumer goods. Likewise, kitsch cannot demean or degrade the message of Hamlet or the beauty of van Gogh’s irises. Kitsch can only demean and degrade bad or mediocre art, of which we will always have more than enough. Some bad art itself takes the form and essence of kitsch, like the immensely popular images of LeRoy Nieman or Thomas Kinkade. Popularity does not mean art is great, or lasting, or meaningful, but neither does popularity signal great art’s death knell. If Francis Bacon’s art really has something meaningful to say, I am sure it will withstand a few cashmere throws draped around the upwardly mobile living rooms of London.

Surely the socially aspirational deserve the right to signal their sophistication and taste as much as the wealthy, no? ² Besides, I very much doubt the ladies who lunch will start stocking their tea caddies with reproductions of Méret Oppenheim’s ode to oral sex.

Related reading:
L.H.O.O.Q. (July 29, 2007)


¹ As quoted in A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns, Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, 1964 edition, pp. 426–427 (as remembered). Emphasis mine. I have what I may presume is T.M. Knox’s more accurate translation of Hegel’s Aesthetics at hand, but I have always preferred Hofstadter and Kuhns’ more flowery translation of this passage, to which I was exposed in my halcyon youth. So sue me.
² Of which this blog, too, is another example. Yes, I partake of the condition of modern art: I am self-aware, and my subject is mostly myself. You people aren’t doing anything to entertain me.

© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

Kindle This

And what is the faculty in man to which imitation is addressed?
What do you mean?
I will explain: The body which is large when seen near, appears small when seen at a distance?
True.
And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to the illusion about colours to which the sight is liable. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.

— Plato, The Republic, Book X, Trans. Benjamin Jowett

Let it be rightly understood at the outset, Dear Readers, that I love books. Not just reading, not just literature: books. You remember: those physical objects fashioned out of paper, ink, glue, and board which have served as portable, semi-permanent delivery vehicles for all sorts of writing for hundreds of years. I have hundreds and hundreds of books at home; filed vertically on shelves, stacked horizontally on floors, and teetering menacingly on almost every flat surface near to hand. Mrs. Dealmaker used to complain about my compulsion, but then she succumbed to her own form of the disease. Now our read and unread books face off against each other in competing piles across the master bedroom floor. We have lots of books.

That being said, I do not qualify as a book collector in the usual sense. I have little interest in first editions, rare antique books, or expensively bound limited editions. I couldn’t care less if the author of a work autographed the frontispiece. Leather and calf bindings bore me. I am not a fetishist of books-as-valuable-objects. No, what I seek out are books which have two key criteria: content which interests me and an aesthetically pleasing design. This does not mean they must be hardcovers; in fact, by number I now own far more paperback books than hardbound. But in order for me to lay down my ill-gotten gains on a book, it must have content I reasonably expect to find challenging, interesting, and/or entertaining for more than one reading, and it must be published in a form which will not nauseate me to gaze upon. These two criteria, you may or may not be surprised to learn, prove a remarkably effective prophylactic against spendthrift behavior when I visit the average bookstore or online book vendor.

To date, I have not succumbed to the siren call of a Kindle, iPad, or other form of e-reader. I have nothing against the devices, which combine several features and conveniences which I find intriguing. The most important of which, I must say, is the ability to carry dozens if not hundreds of books in one lightweight, portable package. Given how many books I start and put down, and how many I have in various stages of reading at any one time, such a device might be a convenient alternative to my current travel routine, which normally boils down to a choice between dislocating my shoulder by lugging four or five hardcovers and paperbacks in my carryon or being reduced to leafing through the SkyMall catalog when I run out of business reading. It might also boost my consumption of newly released fiction and non-fiction, which I currently avoid because I have no interest in spending $39.95 on shoddily produced, crappily designed hardcover works which I have every expectation and intention of throwing in the trash as soon as I have finished them. (Did I mention that I think 99% of books published today aren’t worth the energy it will take to pulp their remainders?)

* * *

All of which is exculpatory preamble to a few remarks I wish to make in response to Tim Parks’ recent paean to e-readers in, of all places, The New York Review of Books. Mr. Parks does a creditable and evenhanded job enumerating the pros and cons of e-readers versus traditional books,¹ but he is not content to suggest that old habits of reading and a slightly suspect fetishism around books-as-objects are tolerable losses in the face of the new medium’s conveniences. No, he contends that e-readers are better for literature:

Literature is made up of words. They can be spoken or written. If spoken, volume and speed and accent can vary. If written, the words can appear in this or that type-face on any material, with any impagination. Joyce is as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman. And we can read these words at any speed, interrupt our reading as frequently as we choose. Somebody who reads Ulysses in two weeks hasn’t read it any more or less than someone who reads it in three months, or three years.

Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to end. More than any other art form it is pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself. ...

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.

Put aside, for a moment, Mr. Parks’ schoolboy aesthetics. Literature is more “mental material” than any other art form? Really? More than music (auditory), painting (visual), dance (kinesthetic)? Put aside his breathtakingly simplistic view of cognitive psychology. Does he really think our conscious minds function in a coherent, linear, narrative way using and reproducible by formal language? I don’t know about Mr. Parks, but I’ve tried to observe myself in thought many times and under many conditions over the years. For what it’s worth, there is nothing about my conscious thought that remotely resembles the literature of Tolstoy, Joyce, or even Danielle Steel. (I won’t even address my unconscious thought.) Everything we are beginning to learn about how humans think supports this view: conscious thought is nothing like literature. That’s part of the reason we like literature so much, in my opinion: it flatters us not only that our lives make much more sense than they do but also that we are much more in control of our thought processes than we really are.

* * *

No, my real objection to Mr. Parks’ argument has to do with the naive Platonism he attempts to sell us. His entire argument seems to boil down to the assertion that there is some sort of “pure text” at the base of every work of literature—words in inviolate sequence, to use his coinage—and that e-readers, by collapsing and standardizing our access to them, somehow make our experience of literature purer and more authentic. But this is just bullshit. The experience of literature—and reading in general—is always and everywhere a solitary interpretative act on behalf of and by the reader. Readers read literature in time, in space, and through some sort of medium. Time spent reading—pace, duration, intervals when one puts down the book—directly and ineluctably affects the reader’s experience of the text. Readers who read Ulyssess in three years may indeed have read the same text as those who read it in two weeks, but they certainly have not had the same aesthetic and cognitive experience. In addition, solitary reading involves the visual faculties and aesthetic senses, too. Font, line leading, margins, and even pagination affect a reader’s experience of a text, often subconsciously. No-one who has ever compared a cheap, cramped, badly-typeset version of a novel to a well-designed, spaciously laid out one can help but notice the difference. And noticing the difference in and of itself alters the experience of the work. Joyce may be as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman, but I dare you to find him the same author in twelve point Comic Sans.

A book, properly considered, is a recorded performance of a piece of literature, just like a CD is a recorded performance of a particular piece of music. While musicians have more artistic discretion in interpreting a piece than a book designer and publisher do, the latter are not aesthetically invisible. They subtly influence a book’s format and packaging: font, margins, page breaks, cover art, etc. The sequence, timing, pace, and even completion of the work—its interpretation—lie in the hands of a reader, but the packaging and presentation of the physical object is not. And because reading is a performance, the time and place where you read is important, too. Reading Lord Jim on a plane is not the same as reading it on a tropical beach. The former is forgettable; the latter is not, as I can personally attest.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is the same music, whether it is interpreted by the Berlin Philharmonic or the Boise Symphony. But nobody ever hears Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: they hear a performance of it. By the same token, nobody ever reads Ulysses, they read a version of it, as presented to them through the medium of some sort of delivery device at a particular time and place, and interpreted according to their own engagement, interest, aptitude, and sensitivity. A Kindle or an iPad is just another delivery device, constrained or liberated, as the case may be, by its technical and aesthetic capabilities and limitations. There are many texts where an e-reader’s ability to standardize, flatten, and minimize aesthetic variation may very well be an advantage. (I think in particular of current non-fiction, biography, history, and other trade books.) But to pretend it is therefore somehow more transparent to a work of literature than a physical book is wishful thinking.

* * *

Art is not art, in any meaningful sense of the word, if it is not interpreted by an audience. This is true of literature, too. Sure, there may be some ur-text which an author intended to publish when she wrote it, but that work cannot exist outside the physical, experiential world in which it is consumed by its readers. The same is true of painting, music, dance, or indeed any artistic medium. A shiny metal and glass tablet imposes an technological aesthetic on the works you read it with: uniform, limited, ephemeral. This may be just fine, and even preferable in certain instances. But don’t pretend reading Don Quixote on a Kindle is the same as reading it in a book. Those are two different artistic experiences. And neither one is any closer to the “true” nature of the work than the other.²

Eventually, Plato asserted, a thoughtful person may come to understand that the shadows on the wall of the cave are not the real objects making them. But even Plato knew that no-one can really free himself from his chains and turn to look at the fire.

Related reading:
Tim Parks, E-books Can’t Burn (The New York Review of Books, February 15, 2012)
Pixels Don’t Breathe (May 17, 2011)


¹ Although he does rather embarrass himself in the last paragraph with naive technological utopianism. Every advantage he claims for e-readers there is either questionable, exaggerated, or untrue. I suspect e-readers burn rather nicely, given the proper fuel.
² There is an affirmative case to be made for the superiority of a physical book, too. Given that one cannot separate the nature of the physical delivery mechanism from the experience of the underlying literature, why should one not try to enrich, gloss, and extend the aesthetic experience of the literature by enhancing the aesthetics of the mechanism? Taken to an extreme, this results in one-of-a-kind books which integrate bookmaking entirely into the artistic enterprise. In a mass-produced example, it can lead to works like Anne Carson’s facsimile of her handmade book, Nox, in which the experience of the text is inseparable from its resolutely physical embodiment. More commonly, it leads to books like my dog-eared copy of Penguin’s Lord Jim, which is a talisman of all the experiences I have had with that novel. It pleases me to look at it on the shelf, and this pleasure is itself a continuation of my literary engagement with Joseph Conrad’s creation. Try to cram all that in a wedge of plastic, glass, and metal.

© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.

A Certain Moral Flexibility

Marty: “When I left, I joined the Army, and when I took the service exam, my psych profile fit a certain... ‘moral flexibility’ would be the only way to describe it. I was loaned out to a CIA-sponsored program, and we sort of found each other. That’s the way it works.”
Debi: “So you... you’re a government spook?”
Marty: “Yes. I mean no. I was before, but I’m not now. Uh, but that’s all irrelevant, really. The idea of governments, nations is public relations theory at this point.”
Debi: “I don’t want to hear about the theories. I want to hear about the dead people. Explain the dead people. Who do you kill?”
Marty: “That’s very complicated, but I think in the beginning it matters of course that you have something to hang on to, you know, a specific ideology to defend, right? I mean, taming unchecked aggression, that was my personal favorite. Other guys liked live free or die, but you know... you get the idea. But that’s all bullshit. And I know that now. That’s all bullshit. You do it because you’re trained to do it, you’re encouraged to do it, and ultimately, you know, you... get to like it. I know that sounds... bad.”
Debi: “You’re a psychopath.”
Marty: “No no no. A psychopath kills for no reason. I kill for money. It’s a job. That didn’t sound right.”

— Grosse Pointe Blank

Your Dedicated Bloggist and Dilettantish Cineaste finally got around to watching Margin Call in the private screening room of the Volcano Lair yestereve, O Dearest of All Readers. Because I am feeling unaccountably magnanimous this evening, I thought I would share with you a brief report of my reactions to the film and a few thoughts which it inspired, out of the goodness of my heart. While you must not expect great film criticism, I believe I can offer a little professional insight which may enhance your experience should you decide to view it.

For let me first say that I recommend the movie unreservedly, not only to professionals within the investment banking industry but also to outsiders still in possession of their moral compass. The lighting, cinematography, casting, and dialogue is, for the most part, pitch perfect, and the movie conveys exceptionally well the mood and atmosphere of the sales and trading end of a big investment bank. The story is simple enough: a junior risk manager played by Zachary Quinto takes over a risk model from his recently fired boss and mentor; he discovers his bank has already begun to seriously violate risk limits in the structured trading book it maintains to warehouse mortgage-backed securities it structures and sells for enormous profit; he concludes the firm faces potential losses which could wipe it out entirely; and he runs his warning up the chain of command, where it ultimately lands in the lap of the firm’s CEO. Where and with whom, as the saying goes, the shit decisively hits the fan.

The film takes place over approximately 36 hours, starting from mass firings at the bank during one trading day, Quinto’s fateful discovery that evening, the hurried, all-hands meetings and consultations among firm management overnight, the liquidation of the firm’s toxic portfolio the following day, and a coda the following night. It is an ensemble performance, and Quinto, Penn Badgley, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Simon Baker, and Jeremy Irons all do excellent work. Just like real life, there are no heroes, and just like real life the characters spend little time reflecting or moralizing about how they got into this mess. They decide, they act, and just like most corporate bureaucrats they limit their moralizing to variations on “I told you so” and “It’s your fault, not mine.”¹

The moral center of the film is carried by Kevin Spacey, who plays the slightly sallow, squidgy Head of Sales and Trading, a 40-year veteran of the firm with the scars to prove it and a personal life in tatters. He is the only one who stands up to Irons’ CEO when the latter decides to liquidate the firm’s entire portfolio of MBS securities. Tellingly, however, his objection is that dumping these toxic securities on unwitting buyers in a fire sale will destroy both his and his salespeoples’ reputations and careers, not that selling securities you know are about to implode to clueless counterparties is wrong per se. Also tellingly, the film is honest enough to show Irons overcoming Spacey’s scruples with a big, fat check, and Spacey accepting it because he “needs the money.” No-one is innocent here, except perhaps those too junior and ignorant to have done more than act as cogs in the immense corporate machine. The callow immaturity of Penn Badgley’s 23-year-old, who gossips about the rumored wealth of his superiors while his firm teeters on the brink of annihilation, is the film’s answer to those who might think that innocence begot by ignorance is some sort of virtue.

Like anyone who works inside the temple, I do have some minor quibbles with the way the film portrays my industry, but they are of little consequence.² The investment bank is able to extricate itself, at some considerable cost, it seems, from its predicament over the course of one trading day. This keeps the story clear—save yourself and your firm at the cost of your counterparties and your reputation—but correspondingly unrealistic and oversimplistic. Any bank which really faced such circumstances would find its distress telegraphed within minutes of commencing its liquidation, with the consequent disappearance of buyers, massive selling by everyone else in the market, and determined financial attacks on its funding and asset base by hedge funds and lenders alike. No bank could withstand the kind of massive markdowns of its inventory, sold or not, which the movie portrays without calling its very existence into question. Margin Call is not a realistic depiction of what happened to Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers.

Nor does the movie attempt to explain the financial crisis, or any large component of it. It depicts nothing outside the walls of the firm or actions of its characters. It is a miniature, which drops the viewer in medias res, to look at the behavior of high-powered, well-paid professionals under considerable pressure. It is a study in how bureaucratic organizations respond to life or death threats, and what people who have little choice do to survive. Like most survival stories, it is not a pretty sight.

Perhaps the people in my industry are more callous and calculating than others. It is certain we are more willing than some to sacrifice our own in the name of survival. But I will leave it to you, Dear Reader, to decide whether Margin Call is simply an indictment of investment banking, or an indictment of humanity itself.


¹ Nor are there any cardboard cutout villains, unless you consider naked ambition, backstabbing, scapegoating, buck-passing, and covering your ass villainy. I, on the other hand, consider those standard corporate policy at any organization larger than twenty people.
² No CEO of a major investment bank would wear his hair as long as Jeremy Irons, for example. Period.

© 2012 The Epicurean Dealmaker. All rights reserved.