Art of the day

Brett Murray, “The Spear” (2012) in the Goodman Gallery The painting of Jacob Zuma was vandalized today, while the ANC was in court attempting to have it removed from the gallery and web sites.

Against conventional wisdom

Here are a few things to keep in mind while I take a brief hiatus. . . 1. Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom, Social Security is not going broke. In fact, last year it ran a surplus and, as David Cay Johnston argues, the growth of that surplus has had two major negative effects: One effect [...]

Volcano

Now I have to actually write my presentation. . .

Protest of the day

The Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples has started burning its artworks to protest budget cuts.

Elizabeth Catlett RIP

source Here is Elizabeth Catlett’s obituary by Adriana Gómez Licón.

Minimalist econart

source A couple of others (from here and here):

The value(s) of art

What is the value of art? Felix Salmon, in arguing that art is not a good financial investment, analyses the current art market and presents a theory of the value of art: The whole point of art is that it has no intrinsic value: that its financial value is a magical number which is some [...]

The China syndrome

Clearly, the bubble in the Chinese art market is attracting the interest of many commentators. Felix Salmon notes (in a confirmation of what Jack Amariglio wrote on this blog back in September) that the prices being fetched by Chinese art in recent auctions are breaking all records—records for the Chinese artists themselves (such as Zhang [...]

Hope springs eternal

Hope springs eternal at the start of each new semester. . . And, of course, in finally admitting that austerity is killing Europe. Not to mention the financial firepower of the oil and gas lobby with respect to the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. And that, according to the World Economic Forum, the seeds of [...]

Cashing in—and cashing out

Who’s cashing in, and what are they cashing in on? And who’s cashing out? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is cashing in, via MITx—its new, interactive e-learning venture—by providing the courses online for free but charging “a ‘modest’ fee for certificates that indicate a learner has mastered the content.” The alternative, of course, would be to [...]