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Before writing a book, Michel Foucault used to write a draft, 500 or 600 pages of notes and first thoughts. Only when he was done with this first draft, did he start the actual book, meaning going to the libraries doing research and digging into the archives, spending months or years probing his subject. He was satisfied only when the final book was the opposite of the initial draft, when the final text was contradicting, almost point by point, the 500-page draft. Only then he knew his book was finished, when he wasn’t that guy who wrote the draft anymore. After he rewrote himself like he rewrote his draft.

Or John Maynard Keynes: ‘When the facts change, i change my mind. What do you do, sir?’

{ stereohell }

photo { The Cobra Snake }

photo { Mark Borthwick }

Artists both produce and consume their own work. Artists seek not only profit but also fame, critical praise, the satisfaction of creating works that speak to them personally, and the enjoyment that flows from artistic labor. Most generally, artists produce works of a type that please themselves in addition to pleasing the market.

Artists face choices between the pecuniary benefits of selling to the market and the nonpecuniary benefits of creating to please their own tastes. We examine how changes in wages, lumpsum income, and capital-labor ratios affect the artist’s pursuit of self-satisfaction versus market sales. Using our model of labor supply, we consider the economic forces behind the high/low culture split, why some artistic media offer greater scope for the avant-garde than others, why so many artists dislike the market, and how economic growth and taxation affect the quantity and form of different kinds of art.

We attempt to develop a general treatment of how producers weigh their own interests against those of the market when money and satisfaction conflict. (…)

Conclusion - Artists are not unique in deriving nonpecuniary returns from particular forms of labor or in desiring to choose projects of high satisfaction. Academicians, including many economists, also enjoy “working,” especially when they can work on projects of their own choosing. Other examples include chefs, architects, athletes, and volunteers of all kinds. Our model predicts that economic growth has and will increase the number of people entering these jobs and professions. Fogel (1999) argues that this shift from what he calls “earnwork” to “volwork” (work done in large part for pleasure even if it carries with it some payment), is in fact the major story of economic growth.

{ Tyler Cowen, An economic theory of avant-garde and popular art, or high and low culture, 2000 | via FindArticles | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1985 | acrylic, oil, and oil painstick on wood, two pieces }

Marketers (and political pollsters) have sliced up the population into increasingly “microtargeted” segments. The three-network era of mass media, which helped create a national hearth of shared references and values, is long gone, displaced by a new media landscape that has splintered us into thousands of insular tribes. We can no longer even agree on what used to be called facts: Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch MSNBC. Blogs and RSS feeds now make it easy to produce and inhabit a cultural universe tailored to fit your social values, your musical preferences, your view on every single political issue. We’re bowling alone — or at least only with people who resemble us, and agree with us, in nearly every conceivable way.

This separation into solipsistic blocs would perhaps not be so complete if people of different political views or cultural values at least lived within hailing distance, and encountered one another on the street or in the store from time to time. But, increasingly, they don’t. Over the last decade, as 100 million Americans have moved from one place to another, they’ve clustered in increasingly homogeneous communities. (…)

This intense geographic sorting helps account for an abiding weirdness in American politics. Congress is split right down the middle, or nearly so; the last two presidential elections have been achingly close; half the nation, almost by definition, must disagree with you politically — and yet you have probably met very few of your antagonists. “How can the polls be neck and neck,” the playwright Arthur Miller lamented during the 2004 election, “when I don’t know one Bush supporter?”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Getting some sun exposure clearly has its benefits; it increases your vitamin D levels and helps ward off insomnia and the blues. But nobody wants skin cancer, cataracts, wrinkles, sagging skin, and age spots. Most of us know enough to lather on the sunscreen before heading off to the pool or beach, but we may not use it when we’re, say, sitting in the shade for hours under a beach umbrella.

However, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., when the sun is at its strongest, you can get a fair dose of ultraviolet rays even when you’re not bathed in sunshine. Ultraviolet A rays, which tan and age the skin and raise skin cancer risk, are strong throughout the day and can reflect off of beach sand and water, exposing you even when you’re in the shade. They can also pass through office and some car windows. Sunburn isn’t a reliable guide to UV exposure. Sunburn-causing ultraviolet B rays are weak in the off-peak hours and don’t penetrate glass or reflect much off of surfaces, so you could be getting high amounts of UVA exposure even if you’re not getting a sunburn.

{ US News | Continue reading }

new york craigslist > manhattan > missed connections
14 st ymca steamroom - m4m
Date: 2008-06-28, 2:47PM EDT

you were in the corner friday night and i came in after seeing you in the shower. we were alone until a third guy came in. hit me up and tell me what you were washing in the shower.

photo { craze | via stereohell }

photo { Daniel Stier }

There are plenty of examples of companies doing a great job innovating in their business models – changing what we call the “unit of business.” Consider these examples from financial services, an industry in which innovation is notoriously difficult. (…)

Example #3: The “keep the change” debit card. Bank of America has come up with an imaginative twist on the conventional debit card. Here’s how it works: The customer uses a debit card to make a small purchase (say a cup of coffee). It costs $1.50. The bank will round the purchase cost up to the next dollar (in this case $2) and put the value of the rounded amount into the customers’ savings account. Moreover, the bank will put a bonus of 5% of the saved amount on top of the savings, up to a total of $250/year. As of this writing, the program has been credited with attracting 2.5 million customers in less than one year, to open more than 700,000 new checking accounts and one million new savings accounts. These customers also “churn” less than typical customers. BOA estimates their retention rate at 95 percent.

{ Harvard Business blogs | Continue reading }

Of course men are boring, because they talk only to achieve a goal. (…) Sometimes you can put two obsessive men together and they’ll talk about drill bits or blues singers or even sports, but it’s not talk as females experience talking. It’s a dry exchange of information, or else a competition.

Lately, I see there’s a breed of men who talk endlessly about their game with women, but it has the same quality of men talking about business strategy, only more paranoid.

{ Godammit | Continue reading }

photo { Square America }

The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon: The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince Americans that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.

But empirical tests have repeatedly shown that they are generally the same. In blind taste tests, many people who swear they can differentiate between bottled-water brands and tap water fail to spot the differences, and studies have shown that both are fine to drink, and both occasionally can have quality problems.

Experts who study bottled water as a cultural phenomenon say differences between the two are largely marketing inventions.

There is abundant irony in such marketing: The supply of clean drinking water across America and in many other countries is an underappreciated scientific and technological achievement that in many ways rivals putting a man on the moon. Trillions of dollars have been spent to get clean drinking water to people at virtually no cost — and it is people in precisely these countries who seem willing to pay premiums of 1,000 percent to 10,000 percent for bottled water.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

related { Which industry makes the most misleading ads? }