Linky Friday 2/2: Arts and Parts Edition

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37 Responses

  1. Aaron David says:

    CC5- My son moved to Fishtown just yesterday and it is north Philly, called that by at least some current locals. See, these things, neighborhood names and such, change over time as new people come and old residents go.Report

  2. Saul Degraw says:

    This is a test of the emergency Chip Daniels Broadcast System.Report

  3. Saul Degraw says:

    Self-check out and the shoplifting problem, I’m apparently a total moron because I never do this:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/stealing-from-self-checkout/550940/Report

    • Richard Hershberger in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      Then there is the Amazon Go store. Supposedly all those cameras will track who has what. If you can figure out how to palm the expensive item while appearing to take the cheap item, is that even illegal? Probably: mens rea and all that. But how to prove it?Report

      • Cameras watching people are not the only input. There’s also cameras examining shelves for various purposes, and weight sensors on the individual shelves. You have to fool all of that, in combination. One simple example I’d ask about, given a chance to interview the development team, is how they deal with a customer who picks up a jar of spaghetti sauce, then changes their mind when they’re in a different part of the store and sets it down on the pickle shelf.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      And you shouldn’t, because it forces the store to raise it’s prices to compensate for the losses.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      People’s shamelessness always surprises me. Many seem very good at justifying these little cheats and feel entitled to them, entirely without scruples or guilt.Report

    • dragonfrog in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      I think there’s a false positive problem with the things – they detect “theft” so often in the absence of actual theft, that on the rare occasion when they correctly detect a theft nobody believes them. Like a car alarm that screams every time somebody walks by. After a week, anybody could steal that car and no one would even look out their window.

      Nearly every time I use a self-checkout, at some point it turns on the red “A thief is among us” light, and locks up the machine. Every time that happens, a clerk comes over and unlocks the machine without once considering that I might be stealing.

      That’s basically their job – to sit and watch half a dozen self-checkout tills, and unlock them whenever it accuses someone of theft. They’re pretty much constantly on the go – someone is always being accused of theft.Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      Heh. Shoplifters “decide that a discount is in order,” while the stores they victimize “[create] ‘a crime-generating environment’ that promotes profit ‘above social responsibility.'”

      I feel obligated to remind everyone, since it may be difficult to remember at times like this, that there is no left-wing media bias.

      That logic sounds really familiar, though. Something something…asking for it?

      The “THEY ARE CHARGING YOU TO WORK AT THEIR STORE” guy on Reddit seems like a real class act.Report

  4. Richard Hershberger says:

    Ar4: Why is a painting that everyone thinks is a Rothko worth a pile of money, only to be worthless once people figure out it isn’t? Consider that a first edition of, say, Great Expectations is worth more than a second edition. Why is this? It has nothing to do with the contents. Indeed, should the owner of either edition wish to actually read the book, he will probably buy an inexpensive modern edition.Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Richard Hershberger says:

      There was a court case over whether something was an authentic piece by an artist. I think Dan Flavin. The Judge ruled that the work was a Flavin but the expert at trial stated that it was not. This is a non-victory for the owner because even though it is legally a Flavin, the art world is still going to treat it as not one.Report

      • Richard Hershberger in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        Then there is the wackiness over what is and is not an authentic Warhol. Curiously, it seems to be largely unconnected with anything Warhol did or did not do.

        And really, this sort of stuff is why I have a hard time believing that the price of fine art has anything to do with artistic considerations.Report

        • Saul Degraw in reply to Richard Hershberger says:

          I think at one point it did for many painters but concede it could have changed.

          Collecting is a bug and one I might be prone to. As I said earlier this week, there is something about being an art collector as part of identity that appeals to me because it has conoamtations of cosmopolitanism and sophistication.

          Then again, I think I am at odds with the spirit of the current age which wants everything expressed in terms of an overly enthusiastic child.Report

          • Richard Hershberger in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            Never completely. We see this in the performing arts. A theater company will put on Pericles or Timon of Athens because they are Shakespeare, before they will put on a better play by one of his contemporaries. Similarly with some random Mozart or Haydn symphony. But the economics aren’t distorted in these examples the way they are with those art forms that produce tangible artifacts.

            In its more benign form, the tangible arts conflate the art with the collectibility of the object. A manuscript score of a Mozart symphony has collectible value, but this in incidental to the actual art, which lies in the performance. We don’t think the experience less authentic because the musicians are reading off modern printed sheet music. With the tangible arts, this gets confused. This is how we end up with an artist’s messy desk being admired in a museum (while my messy desk is merely evidence that I am a slob).

            In its less benign form it is straight-up market manipulation for financial gain, clothed in a disguise of discriminating taste.Report

            • Art as a commodity in a market has a monetary value. That most people see this as the value of the art is not the fault of the art itself.

              To assess a piece of art’s non-monetary value is to enter a different realm, one of meaning, artistic poiesis, bringing forth. These values currently seem to have less currency than the values of commodity/market.

              There has been considerable backlash for quite a while among artists against the dominance of commodity/market values defining their art. Yet what other choice do they have other than to engage such values?

              Whether tulips or art, commodity/market values quantify a shifting array of factors that frequently line up poorly with the subjectivities of art. This should not be surprising. Perhaps we should be more alarmed if they did line up better.Report

          • Jason in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            Then again, I think I am at odds with the spirit of the current age which wants everything expressed in terms of an overly enthusiastic child.

            +100 (wait, is that overly enthusiastic?)Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            Molly Crabapple has done some wonderful writing, and here is an essay on art and finance.
            My favorite part:

            Artists too have their myths. The lies told to artists mirror the lies told to women. Be good enough, be pretty enough, and that guy or gallery will sweep you off your feet, to the picket-fenced land of generous collectors and two and a half kids. But, make the first move, seize your destiny, and you’re a whore.

            Report

  5. Oscar Gordon says:

    Ar4: Of course, the astronomical prices drives the forgeries.

    Mu2: Another case for the need to tighten up copyright law.

    CC1: Allow me to complain about gentrification without really offering up any ideas about how to fix what I see as a problem, because we must obviously, for the 165,213th time, call attention to this problem.

    CC2: She’s right that moving alone is not the answer, but she doesn’t actually make the case as to why we should invest tax money into a struggling rural community. What does the public get out of it? She seems to assume that there is some greater, perhaps esoteric value in helping people stay put and bringing services to them, rather that bringing people to where service already are, but she never actually makes that case.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      PS Good links @saul-degraw !Report

    • She seems to assume that there is some greater, perhaps esoteric value in helping people stay put and bringing services to them, rather that bringing people to where service already are, but she never actually makes that case.

      Being a regular traveler across the Great Plains — an area with all of the problems of Appalachia but w/o the East Coast’s attention — I’ll make a couple of observations.

      Every Great Plains community has an old-widows club — women who have outlived their husbands, in many cases having moved to town when the husband died. They live in small paid-for houses on very modest incomes. No way they could afford to live in an urban/suburban setting. There’s a balance in costs between paying to move them to the services (and presumably making up the difference in cost of living) or paying to provide services where they are. I worry less about services that are provided by things (broadband, sewers) than about services that are provided by people (medical care).

      The need for agricultural production is not going to go away, so there’s always going to be some people on some parts of the Plains (eg, wheat has its own set of climate and soil requirements, which are different from those of corn). It shouldn’t be a sentence to a second-class existence.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Michael Cain says:

        Then we should be clear about the goal. There is a difference between allowing the Old Widows Club to live out their days with some broadband* and a few other physical services, or supporting the people who work the farms; and moving large scale personnel services out to these rural areas in order to support the ability of residents to do… what exactly? How much migration of commerce is moving to the rural areas? If we plop a community school in the middle of a bunch of small towns, are the small towns struggling to find employees to fill roles such that the school can create programs to satisfy those needs?

        This is the kind of argument that needs to be made.

        Let’s say the two big employment shortfall areas in rural America are Home Health Care Providers and Tech Savvy Ag workers. Then sure, there is value in putting up a Community College with those kinds of programs (& other classes, obviously – no reason to be purely VocTech if there is demand). But if the majority of the students in this school are going to graduate and move to the city…

        So the author should make that argument, and bring in data to support it.

        *Especially if you can do this largely through wireless towers, although I’m not sure how much bandwidth such towers can handle these days.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      CC1: Just because there is a problem, doesn’t mean that there is a solution to said problem.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to LeeEsq says:

        Just because there is a problem, doesn’t mean that there is a solution to said problem

        Exactly how many times do I have to hear about the problem if there is no solution? If there is no solution, at some point this goes from “raising awareness” to “signalling something that is tangential to the problem”.Report

    • James K in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      @oscar-gordon

      She’s right that moving alone is not the answer, but she doesn’t actually make the case as to why we should invest tax money into a struggling rural community.

      She also assumes its actually possible to solve the problem that way. Rural communities exist because there was economic value in the natural resources they are near (minerals, arable land, whatever). If that fact has changed, either because the resources are not as valuable anymore, or fewer people are needed to harvest them, then there likely isn’t a way to bring a functioning economy. Most modern industries depend on agglomeration effects, which calls for high population in a small space, which further leans against rural communities.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to James K says:

        Exactly! Hell, she might be right, perhaps her ideas are a good way to deal with the hollowing out of rural America, but she isn’t even trying to make that case except as what is largely an emotional plea, and frankly, I have a real problem with spending tax money for things that ‘feel good’ without good evidence that those things that actually solve a problem.Report

      • North in reply to James K says:

        Agreed. She seems to be hand waving frantically to try and support her thesis that people should be able to live and prosper wherever they want even if it’s the most desolate area in the country. It’s the literal twin to the argument that people should be able to live and prosper wherever they want even if it’s the most desired and dense part of the country.

        For ruralia it doesn’t seem that complicated; you don’t need the numbers of people you once did to get the bushels of insert crop here off the same acreage. So the number of towns is going to shrink unless they find an alternative economic model. Maybe it’s a retirement community or a cabin community or what have you but an alternative is needed. Otherwise all the broadband subsidies are going to amount to nothing, the community school is going to turn into one of those abandoned building porn photographs and all those roads and utility wires are just going to be another burden on your state budget.

        I’d also note that in MN at least the denizens of the rural areas have this attitude that their hard earned tax dollars are sucked away to subsidize the urban areas and this is more than a little galling considering that the reality is not only the opposite but ludicrously and lopsidedly the opposite.Report

  6. Kazzy says:

    Ar2 probably means I no longer go unless I spring for the membership. I was usually good for a few visits a year — some with the boys — paying a reduced fee.Report

  7. PD Shaw says:

    I have a fondness for that Turner watercolor which accompanies the link to this page. I had a print of it framed behind my desk for 20 years or so. Since it was always there, I never really saw it after awhile, until someone sitting across from me would get a strange look, ask what the heck is that? And while I turned to look to see, they might add, Did someone spill coffee on it?

    The largest collection of Turner’s in the U.S. is in Indianapolis btw/.Report