Stylized Facts

We have long entrusted the task of representing our ideas of value to members of two professions that might seem to have little in common: banking and art. And, in the last seven hundred years or so, it has happened more than once that visual and financial inventors have come up with strikingly similar representations

GOLD, GOLDEN, GILDED, GLITTERING
REPRESENTATIONS OF VALUE, OR THE UNEXPECTED DOUBLE HISTORY OF BANKING AND THE ART WORLD

DISCUSSED: Shadowy Holding Companies, The Questionable Ontology of Finance Itself, Very Public Vanitas, Financiers' Tastes, A Whole New Shark, Begetting the Federal Reserve, Tiny Areas of Color, Vast Amounts of Liquidity, An Unexpected Madonna, Duccio's Compatriots, Double-Entry Bookkeeping, Leaves Blowing in the Wind

In 2007, with financial markets ballooning on every side, the artist Damien Hirst cast a real human skull in platinum, encrusted the cast with 8,601 diamonds that might or might not have come from "conflict-conscious" sources, and called his construction For the Love of God. Images of the macabre object circulated with incredible speed, and there was cheery debate about whether the accomplishment of the work was in the realm of aesthetics or that of the market, whether what mattered were the artist's choices or the fact that the piece had lived up to its announced intention to be "the most expensive piece of art by a living artist" and had sold for $100 million.

Two years later, with financial markets imploding on every side, it was reported that the work had in fact been sold to a holding company that turned out to consist of Hirst's gallerist, his business manager, his friend the Russian billionaire art collector Viktor Pinchuk, and Hirst himself. There were then those who, staring at their own newly empty stock portfolios, found in the title apt expression of their feelings. The work itself, with its diamond-laden eye sockets and its original inhabitant's grinning teeth, seems unperturbed by any hollowness of value in the financial or art markets. It does not matter to this cynical epitome of our glittering age whether it was made for the love of anything but more zeroes.

-- Rachel Cohen is the author of A Chance Meeting, and of Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, which is forthcoming from the Yale University Press Jewish Lives series in fall 2013. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Five months before he died, Paul Cézanne attended the unveiling of a bust of Émile Zola, his old soulmate, at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix. Numa Coste, friend to both, addressed the gathering. He reminded the attendees of Zola's autumnal insistence that "one thinks one has revolutionized the world, and then one finds out, at the end of the road, that one has not revolutionized anything at all." The elderly painter cried at the words.

John Rewald, preeminent authority on late-19th-century French painting, extended Zola's regrets to Cézanne himself. Concern with revolution was irrelevant, Rewald wrote in his 1986 biography of the painter. What mattered was that Cézanne had succeeded in adding "a new link in the chain to the past." Implicit in Rewald's tribute was recognition that artists build upon antecedents. Great art is as much the harvest of what came before--angles off precedents, bends in common practice--as individual endowment.

It was the concession of a scholar of the old school, for whom the discipline of history preceded the poetics of art appreciation. By contrast, Alex Danchev, self-described "unorthodox Professor of International Relations," is a jack-of-all-disciplines writing under the dispensations of the cultural studies movement. Traditional history, from Danchev's perspective, is a gray, unsmiling thing with the smell of the stacks about it; cultural studies, conversely, is blithe and nimble. In a 2009 essay on the presumed intersection of art and politics, Danchev illustrated the difference:

Cézanne is supposed to have said of Poussin that he put reason in the grass and tears in the sky. Reason and tears may be as good an encapsulation of International Relations as any.

Even metaphors obey some kind of logic. This one signals wide interpretive latitude: "Reason and tears" is a gnostic generality for rent; it can be leased to any purpose.

-- < ahref="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/postmodern-c-zanne_665182.html?nopager=1">weeklystandard's MAUREEN MULLARKEY

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There's nothing psychological about rowing.

It's all engineering and physics. From this point of view, the erg is dynamic:
the resistance is no more than the force we apply (Newton - action and reaction are equal and opposite);
and Work (which is what moves the boat) is the product of force and length.

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