The Space Outside Your Head: Some Concluding Thoughts
Over the course of writing this blog, I have learned that many of my posts are about art and economics. More broadly, they are about creativity and friendship, and how those things—and their social and public value—co-exist in a market economy.
So a few concluding thoughts on economics, authorship, the art of soccer, the structure of education, and the future of museums…
The first post, Monday Painter/Sunday Banker, generated a number of extended replies—from people I would call colleague-friends. Two bear mention.
The first came from a distinguished, emeritus economics professor I used to work for as a research fellow. No stranger to econometrics, regulatory industries, or wry and joyful erudition, he provided the technical answer to the “what if we did away with all the banks” question:
I can’t get away from the fun you could have with “do away with the banks.” By the middle of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill had put in place that banks make the money supply and MV=PT, where M=money stock. V = the velocity. P=the price index. And T= the physical volume of trade (or PT is current dollar GDP). If there are no banks then M=zero and the equation (economy) collapses, as in 2009.
When I asked if I could reprint his answer, giving him credit, he demurred, saying the credit was mine. It got me thinking. Credit is an open question for the category of colleague-friend—and the broader category of “the author.” I happen to be of the camp that credit is not zero sum (meaning that it is not like a tennis match where one person gains and another loses, so if the win is +1 and the loss is -1, they sum to zero). I think that if you are working in really good teams, you give others credit, they give you credit, and a rising tide lifts all boats. More than one person can win. This is not a failsafe method, but maybe a risk worth taking.
Department of Audience Participation: Wall Label Winners
I hesitate to say that exactly one person replied to the wall label writing contest, and one to the Mad Lib. I could wonder about flaws in the design of the experiment or give a P.E. class pep talk on needing to be “in it to win it.” Instead, here they are:
1. As submitted by one of my more gracious Southern friends, a brilliant writer and party hostess, pen name Franny Davenport:
“Marie Antoinette Takes A Dump”
Interior by Dorothy Draper, 1968
marble, linoleum, leather, gilt, porcelain
Private residence of Larry Flynt
A classic example of Dorothy Draper’s Modern Baroque style.
2. As submitted by Art21 reader Amber Harper-Slaboszewicz:
John Smith’s work has always been interested in geography. Operating at the forefront of the Duende-ist movement, he became fascinated with bottles, striving to reinvent our very concept of freedom. His sumptuous, burly brushstrokes evoke Albuquerque in the 1980‘s. Although Clement Greenberg wrote that his work was utter drivel, mountain bikers have been moved enough by his reconception of touch and semantics that they rhyme.
In this painting Nelson Mandela sits in a quiet chair looking at the viewer glibly. Over his/her shoulder looms a beagle peering at him ferociously.
Well done, Amber and Franny!
If you still want to try on your own, here is the full Mad Lib:
Adam Smith As an Artist
Part 2 of what art and economics have to do with each other. . . .
A few years ago I came across a biographical sketch of Adam Smith, founding architect of economics, in a book by Walter Bagehot, the British essayist, businessman, and former Editor-in-Chief of The Economist magazine. (The Economist‘s “Bagehot” column on British life, politics, and current affairs is named for him.)
I found the essay, “Adam Smith as a Person,” in a general book called Biographical Studies (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 4th Ed, 1899). That book sat on a high, dusty shelf in a section of the London Library called “Miscellany.” A cursory review of Adam Smith bibliographies did not turn it up, though, following from Murphy’s Law, I’ll brace myself for angry scholarly corrections.
Was Adam Smith an artist?
He was a philosopher who founded the field of economics. I think that act of invention, along with the way he did it, makes him an artist. His thinking was as original and—to borrow a business-ism, “game-changing”—as the first Cubist painting.
1. temperament
The godfather of modern capitalism—whose 1776 book The Wealth of Nations laid the framework for the field of economics—was described in Bagehot’s essay as “one of the most unbusinesslike of mankind.”
Bagehot wrote, “He was an awkward Scottish professor, apparently choked with books and absorbed in abstractions. He never engaged in any sort of trade, and would probably never have made sixpence by any if he had been. His absence of mind was amazing.”
Bagehot went on to recount a time a stallworker at the Edinburgh fish market once described Smith as seemingly crazy though surprisingly well dressed—“taking him for an idiot broken loose.” On another occasion, Smith was asked to sign a document and instead of writing his own name, produced “an elaborate imitation” of the signature on the line above his.
Smith was, however, a keen observer of actual economic behavior. For instance, he became disillusioned during a Snell fellowship at Oxford that, he felt, the smartest men had gone into the Church of England over academia because the pay was better. An economic actor himself, he also took two years out of professorly duties to travel around France as the well-paid tutor of a twelve-year-old boy. (Some modern-day artists have this commercial instinct in spades.)
The Friends and Family Plan: Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse
This post is about a show that’s up at Craig F. Starr Gallery until May 27—a collection of artworks by Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse. This isn’t a review because reviews are supposed to be objective, and the curator of the show, Veronica Roberts, is a close friend of mine. But the show itself is about friendships between creative people. So the fact that it’s a friend’s show seemed thematically appropriate.
Veronica Roberts, Mass MoCA 2008. (The first picture above is Mass MoCA volunteers in LeWitt quotation tees.
To me, here’s the big question of the show: as an artist, what does it mean to be open enough to another person to allow them to affect your work? Is that the true marker of friendship—being open enough to receive influence and solid enough to give it too, and being known enough to another person for that to be possible?
Veronica starts her catalog essay with a story that gave me a lump in my throat the first time I retold it:
In 1970, Eva Hesse died at the age of 34. When Sol received word of her death, he was in Paris preparing a show that would open a few days later. In that short time he made a brand new work dedicated to Eva. It was the first time in his entire career that he made “not straight lines.” Everything before that—whether Yaffa-block-like sculptures of “incomplete open cubes” or his “wall drawings” with their ordered lines you could stencil notebook paper off of—was never anything but straight.
Sol LeWitt, "Wall Drawing #46." Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, uniformly dispersed with maximum density covering the entire surface of the wall (detail). Pencil on wall, 108 x 108 inches. First drawn by: Sol LeWitt in 1970. First installation: Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, May 1970. At Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York; 105-1⁄2 x 89-1⁄2 inches.
LeWitt and Hesse are both, by almost any measure, famous artists. Sol died in 2007. A retrospective of his work is up for the next two decades (through 2033), at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. I thoroughly recommend seeing it.
Eva’s work was in a retrospective in 2002 and 2003 that was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum Wiesbaden, and traveled to the Tate Modern.
In the Craig F. Starr Gallery on East 73rd Street, the space itself supports the intimacy of friendship, with the proportions of a house, and even the careful interior decoration details of someone’s home, down to the fireplace and a breathtaking set of window drapes that exactly match the greenish tint of middle gray of the walls.
In the first room, Wall Drawing #46—the very same inaugural non-straight lines (pictured above), in Eva’s honor—stands as if with its back to the door. Next to it is a set of works on paper, one by each of them. Sol’s is a blank page to which he has added neat elegant grids, a veritable constellation of homages to the square.
Better Not Bigger: What’s Next for Art Museums?
In the next two weeks, museum leaders gather in two places—art curators in New York May 15-17 and everyone in Houston May 22-25—to contemplate the future of the field. How do these conversations affect all of us, and what is possible for museums as very specific stewards of the very broad category of imagination and creative thinking?
I would like to posit that what museums need to do next is not to continue one of the greatest building booms in their history but to redefine art. Instead of being reservoirs for objects, they need to be platforms—part think tank, part school—for conversations about creativity across fields not just about the appreciation of creativity within the arts.
Right now, one place people go when they want to experience wonder in great works of imagination is not museums but TED—short for Technology, Entertainment, Design—the conference that started as a single event in 1984 and then grew into its current constellation of annual gatherings, each a program of 18-minute talks devoted to “ideas worth spreading.” Since TED talks first appeared online in 2005, about 300 million people have watched them.
As TED’s mission statement begins, “An idea can be created out of nothing except an inspired imagination. An idea weighs nothing. . . . And yet an idea, when received by a prepared mind, can have extraordinary impact.. . .”
The power of creative thinking is the ultimate disruptive technology to the physical footprint of art museums and the collections they house. It is exactly at the delicate peak of a sustained building boom that museums must shift their focus from the monumental weight of buildings to the ephemeral power of ideas.
Contest! DIY Wall Labels. . .
My publisher Greg Albers of Hol Art Books got me thinking about museum wall labels again recently. In Greg’s honor, I thought I would host a (drum roll, please)…
Wall Label Writing Contest!
The impetus was the announcement of a panel at next year’s College Art Association meeting called “Your Labels Make Me Feel Stupid”: Museum Labels as Art-Historical Practice.
Here are five pictures, a bonus sixth at the top of this post:
Monday Painter/Sunday Banker
I am so pleased to be a new guest blogger at Art21. We were encouraged to introduce ourselves in our first blog post, and so I thought I would write about art and economics. . . .
In 2004, Daniel H. Pink wrote in the Harvard Business Review:
The MFA is the new MBA!
It was number 9 on the list of breakthrough business ideas of 2004.
James J. Cramer—the television host I associate with loudness and a Daily Show sparring match on par with wrestling trash talk of the ‘80s— tackled the same topic around the same time in New York magazine. He wrote, “Analysts need fine-arts degrees. Like the modernists, they need to think creatively, think outside the walls of the 10-Q filing!” Cramer argued that this would help traders, like all great artists before, to foresee the opportunity to buy underrated AT&T stock that would double in value two days later.
At the time, I was receiving an MFA in painting after already having an MBA. Reading the articles, I felt like a guinea pig in the wild, who happened to be accidentally replicating the lab experiment that followed from the hypotheticals they put forth.
MBA-MFA thinking seems to be making a comeback:
In March, Steve Blank wrote on his blog that “Entrepreneurship is an art not a job.”
Last year, John Maeda, the RISD President, coined the term “artrepreneur,” offering RISD graduates Artrepreneur Starter Kits. (When I asked, John said the term has existed for some time and he resurrected it, like a found object.)
In 2008, Katherine Bell, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review issued an “HBR IdeaCast” titled “The MFA is the new MBA.”
New York Foundation for the Arts now offers an “Artist as Entrepreneur Bootcamp.” Creative Capital and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council jointly run an Artists Summer Institute which is also a business bootcamp. And California College of the Arts offers a “Design Strategy MBA,” to my knowledge the first and only MBA within an art school (and where I teach the core economics class each fall).
From the other side of the conversation, last month, I received a newsletter from Gotham Writer’s Workshop, where I take a class for fun. The lead essay by Jacob Appel painted a picture of the “All-MFA Society.”
I really like it. But what exactly does all this mean?
