Is it OK to cook with extra-virgin olive oil?

One of the main things to consider when evaluating whether it is OK to heat extra-virgin olive oil (or any other oil for that matter) is the smoke point of the oil. The smoke point is the temperature at which visible gaseous vapor from the heating of oil becomes evident. It is traditionally used as a marker for when decomposition of oil begins to take place. Since decomposition incurs chemical changes that may not only result in reduced flavor and nutritional value but also the generation of harmful cancer causing compounds (oxygen radicals) that are harmful to your health, it is important to not heat oil past its smoke point. Inhaling the vapors can also be damaging.

{ WH Foods | Continue reading }

Petty does not intend to acquire a Leibovitz. Not one of the 10 “master sets” of 157 of her prints that have been offered privately at an asking price of more than $3m per set; not even a single photo. “No,” he says firmly. “I nearly bought her portrait of the Queen but then I decided against it. She is obviously well-regarded but it is a distinctively American taste, her style of photography.”

It is only one collector’s view but it is a straw in a wind that has been blowing fiercely against Leibovitz, who is struggling to repair her finances, having built up multi-million-dollar debts amid a tangle of personal, professional and property troubles. The woes of one of the world’s highest-paid photographers have mesmerised the media and the art world.

Her troubles emerged publicly a year ago when she was sued by Art Capital, a New York firm that lent her $24m against collateral including her three houses in Greenwich Village and her photographic portfolio. The suit, which she described at the time as “harassment” and was subsequently settled, claimed the right to enter her homes to appraise assets that could be sold to repay the debt.

Leibovitz had been introduced to Art Capital by Ken Starr, a financial adviser whose clients included Hollywood celebrities such as Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone and Martin Scorsese. Starr is now in jail and has pleaded guilty to diverting tens of millions of dollars from his clients’ accounts to his own. Last April, Leibovitz was bought out of the Art Capital arrangement by Colony Capital, a Californian private equity fund, giving her a breathing space.

The Leibovitz story, however, is more than a tale of a photographer who got absorbed into the high-spending world of the people she portrays. It is a reflection of something unexpected – that, despite all her celebrity and talent, Leibovitz lacks earning power as an artist.

If she could sell her prints in galleries or at auction for as much as former fashion and society photographers such as Herb Ritts, Bettina Rheims and Richard Avedon – let alone contemporary artists who work in photography, such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Andreas Gursky and Gilbert & George – her financial worries would ease.

So far, she has not. The most that one of her photographs has fetched at public auction, according to Artnet, the online auction house, is £31,200. That was paid in 2005 for a signed print of a 1986 photograph of the (now dead) artist Keith Haring, naked and daubed with paint. Most of her prints auctioned this year have fetched in the single-figure thousands of dollars, and some in the hundreds. (…)

Leibovitz has one great advantage over the paparazzi – access to people who spend much of their lives trying to avoid being photographed. The Queen only gave her 25 minutes but Leibovitz usually demands two days, or at least half-days, of her subjects’ time, and spends hours on the tiniest details. Her subjects open up to her because she gets close and wears them down.

“Access is amazing – the amount of time you are given with someone. When people relax in front of you then all kinds of magic can happen,” says Hoppen. “If you have a day with Brad Pitt then potentially you can take a great photo, whereas if he walks past you in the street and you grab a picture with your phone, it is not going to happen.”

Leibovitz thus has the potential to do what Avedon and Penn did – to become as highly valued as an artist as a commercial photographer. The fact that she has not achieved it, so far at least, is because of something more vital than access, maybe even talent. It is something that has bedevilled the photography world from the technology’s earliest days. She lacks rarity value. (…)

Photographs were made to multiply – the point of the technology is that a negative can be reproduced. “Rarity is essential and it is something that photography does not naturally have,” says Boloten. “You can print thousands of the things and a collector will ask: ‘Why am I paying a lot of money for a print when Picasso only painted one of each?’” (…)

Photographers who are alive present a bigger challenge in terms of scarcity. At 61, Leibovitz has plenty of her career left and she is known as a prodigiously hard worker, constantly adding to her portfolio. Prices for work of photographers such as Ritts and Mapplethorpe increased in the years following their deaths because that placed an unambiguous limit on supply.

Galleries have tried to solve this through editioning – limiting the number of reproductions of a negative to 10 or 15 high-quality signed prints, preferably made just after the photograph was taken. The dealers who represent photographers and have exclusive rights to sell their prints have become experts in curbing the market’s tendency towards over-supply.

“There were huge editions in the 1960s but the market has gone in a totally different direction,” says Alex Novak, a dealer in Pennsylvania. “The vast majority of prints are now made in very limited editions, and that has helped the contemporary market to remain fairly stable. It crashed and burned in past recessions because there were too many prints. ”

Calculating the optimal supply is a fine art in itself, since galleries want there to be enough liquidity for prints of any photo to change hands fairly frequently – which would be impossible if there were only one. Galleries often base their prices on the last recorded auction price and, especially in a rising market, want a recent reference point.

All of this planning over decades to raise the profile of photography and place limits on supply seems to be working. Photography accounts for a tiny proportion of the auction market – 2 per cent of sales in 2009, according to ArtTactic – but it has attracted growing investor interest. There are now several dedicated art funds, including the Tosca Photography Fund and the Art Photography Fund.

Not only did the total value of the contemporary photography market rise by 285 per cent between 1993 and 2008, according to Art Market Research, but it has been more resilient than contemporary art in the post-2008 downturn.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

photo { Larry Clark, Jack & Lynn Johnson, Oklahoma City, 1973 }

Glover was new to the mortgage business. He was twenty-nine and hadn’t held a steady job in years. (…) As a loan officer at Ameriquest, Glover worked on commission. He knew the only way to earn the six-figure income Ameriquest had promised him was to come up with tricks for pushing deals through the mortgage-financing pipeline that began with Ameriquest and extended through Wall Street’s most respected investment houses.

Glover and the other twentysomethings who filled the sales force at the downtown L.A. branch worked the phones hour after hour, calling strangers and trying to talk them into refinancing their homes with high-priced “subprime” mortgages. It was 2003, subprime was on the rise, and Ameriquest was leading the way. The company’s owner, Roland Arnall, had in many ways been the founding father of subprime, the business of lending money to home owners with modest incomes or blemished credit histories. He had pioneered this risky segment of the mortgage market amid the wreckage of the savings and loan disaster and helped transform his company’s headquarters, Orange County, California, into the capital of the subprime industry. Now, with the housing market booming and Wall Street clamoring to invest in subprime, Ameriquest was growing with startling velocity.

Up and down the line, from loan officers to regional managers and vice presidents, Ameriquest’s employees scrambled at the end of each month to push through as many loans as possible, to pad their monthly production numbers, boost their commissions, and meet Roland Arnall’s expectations. Arnall was a man “obsessed with loan volume,” former aides recalled, a mortgage entrepreneur who believed “volume solved all problems.” Whenever an underling suggested a goal for loan production over a particular time span, Arnall’s favorite reply was: “We can do twice that.” Close to midnight Pacific time on the last business day of each month, the phone would ring at Arnall’s home in Los Angeles’s exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood, a $30 million estate that once had been home to Sonny and Cher. On the other end of the telephone line, a vice president in Orange County would report the month’s production numbers for his lending empire. Even as the totals grew to $3 billion or $6 billion or $7 billion a month—figures never before imagined in the subprime business—Arnall wasn’t satisfied. He wanted more. “He would just try to make you stretch beyond what you thought possible,” one former Ameriquest executive recalled. “Whatever you did, no matter how good you did, it wasn’t good enough.”

Inside Glover’s branch, loan officers kept up with the demand to produce by guzzling Red Bull energy drinks, a favorite caffeine pick-me-up for hardworking salesmen throughout the mortgage industry. Government investigators would later joke that they could gauge how dirty a home-loan location was by the number of empty Red Bull cans in the Dumpster out back. Some of the crew in the L.A. branch, Glover said, also relied on cocaine to keep themselves going, snorting lines in washrooms and, on occasion, in their cubicles.

The wayward behavior didn’t stop with drugs. Glover learned that his colleague’s art work wasn’t a matter of saving a borrower the hassle of coming in to supply a missed signature. The guy was forging borrowers’ signatures on government-required disclosure forms, the ones that were supposed to help consumers understand how much cash they’d be getting out of the loan and how much they’d be paying in interest and fees. Ameriquest’s deals were so overpriced and loaded with nasty surprises that getting customers to sign often required an elaborate web of psychological ploys, outright lies, and falsified papers. “Every closing that we had really was a bait and switch,” a loan officer who worked for Ameriquest in Tampa, Florida, recalled. ” ‘Cause you could never get them to the table if you were honest.” At companywide gatherings, Ameriquest’s managers and sales reps loosened up with free alcohol and swapped tips for fooling borrowers and cooking up phony paperwork. What if a customer insisted he wanted a fixed-rate loan, but you could make more money by selling him an adjustable-rate one? No problem. Many Ameriquest salespeople learned to position a few fixed-rate loan documents at the top of the stack of paperwork to be signed by the borrower. They buried the real documents—the ones indicating the loan had an adjustable rate that would rocket upward in two or three years—near the bottom of the pile. Then, after the borrower had flipped from signature line to signature line, scribbling his consent across the entire stack, and gone home, it was easy enough to peel the fixed-rate documents off the top and throw them in the trash.

At the downtown L.A. branch, some of Glover’s coworkers had a flair for creative documentation. They used scissors, tape, Wite-Out, and a photocopier to fabricate W-2s, the tax forms that indicate how much a wage earner makes each year. It was easy: Paste the name of a low-earning borrower onto a W-2 belonging to a higher-earning borrower and, like magic, a bad loan prospect suddenly looked much better. Workers in the branch equipped the office’s break room with all the tools they needed to manufacture and manipulate official documents. They dubbed it the “Art Department.”

{ Michael W. Hudson, How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America–and Spawned a Global Crisis | Continue reading }

image { Peter Garfield }

In 1904, King Gillette — who names their kid King? — received two patents on razors, blades, and the combination of the two. As the patents make clear, Gillette had a clear vision of the markets that he would create: “Hence,” stated the patent application, “I am able to produce and sell my blades so cheaply that the user may buy them in quantities and throw them away when dull without making the expense … as great as that of keeping the prior blades sharp.”

But Gillette did more than invent a new razor and a new blade. As Chris Anderson notes in his recent business bestseller, Free, Gillette invented an entire business strategy, one that’s still invoked in business schools and implemented today across many industries — from VCRs and DVD players to video game systems like the Xbox and now ebook readers. It’s pretty simple: invest in an installed base by selling a product at low prices or even giving them away, then sell a related product at high prices to recoup the prior investment. King Gillette launched us down this road.

Or did he?

{ Randy Picker/Harvard Business School | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Half Face with Collar, 1963 }

{ How to make a penny | via Washington Post | As of 2009, it cost the U.S. Mint 1.62 cents to make a penny }

Why breasts are the key to the future of regenerative medicine

To be in the company of Chris Calhoun is to encounter breasts, and encounter the damn things anytime, anywhere—including over a plate of spaghetti in a bustling Manhattan restaurant.

On this spring afternoon, the 44-year-old CEO of San Diego-based biotech company Cytori Therapeutics pulls out his laptop, launches a PowerPoint presentation, and there they are: conical and cantaloupy, As through Ds, beige and pink and taupe and tan, more breasts than you might see in a women’s locker room, never mind in the middle of a lunch table.

A passing waiter does a double take at this lively slide show, but Calhoun is oblivious. He’s talking excitedly about how these women’s bodies led him and his team of scientists to a discovery in tissue engineering, a process that could well be one of the most momentous medical advances of the 21st century: the use of stem cells—specifically stem-cell-enriched adipose (fat) tissue—to enhance, heal, and rebuild injured or damaged organs. (…)

Breast augmentation is just one development (so to speak) in the company’s more ambitious plan: to introduce stem cell medicine to the mass market—and not using the ethically fraught kind of stem cells from human embryos. Instead, based on almost a decade of trials that Cytori and its academic partners have performed on cell cultures, lab rodents, and now humans, they believe their engineered flab cells can treat more organs than you find in a French butcher shop. Chronic heart disease? In human studies released in May, the cells improved patients’ aerobic capacity and shrank the size of the infarct (tissue killed by lack of blood). Heart attack? A human clinical trial, also reported in May, found that the cells increased both the blood supply to damaged heart muscle and the volume of blood that the heart pumped. Kidney injury as a result of cancer therapy? In recent rat studies, the cells improved kidney function. Incontinence after prostatectomy? Another recent study reported that, by 12 weeks after injection, the cells had decreased the amount of urine male volunteers were leaking by 89 percent.

If Calhoun and his scientists succeed, they won’t just create more cleavage. They’ll make practical a whole new field, one that medical visionaries have dreamed of for decades: regenerative medicine.

It makes sense to apply Cytori’s technology to enhance breasts instead of, say, repair urinary sphincters as a strategic way to move the patented technology out of rats and into people as soon as possible. Hearts, kidneys, and even sphincters have to work in order for us to survive. But we can live just fine without breast tissue, and, outside of feeding offspring, breasts don’t have to do much. The fact is, the scientific and regulatory hurdles to getting Cytori’s cells into clinical use will be easier to clear for breasts than for other tissue: Breasts simply aren’t as necessary as other organs, so the bar for proving to regulators that the technology works will be lower.

It’s also a booming market. In 2009, women forked over $964 million to plastic surgeons for breast augmentation, which edges out nose jobs as the most commonly performed plastic surgery in the US.

{ Wired | Continue reading | Thanks Steve }

In the financial markets, a lot rides on the word of a company’s top executives. If a CEO tells a lie, a lot of shareholders can get hurt.

Now, after studying thousands of corporate earnings calls, two researchers from Stanford University think they’ve come up with a way to tell when senior executives are fibbing.

It’s a question that people have been wrestling with for as long as humans have been interacting with each other.

“I think since the Garden of Eden we’ve been trying to figure this out — who’s lying and who’s not lying,” says David Larcker, a professor of accounting at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. (…)

Kumar was asked, “Can your books be trusted?” And he replied by saying, “We hire the very best auditors.” Larcker says that can be a big warning sign.

“You basically are not answering the question. You’re basically making reference to somebody else, and those are the kinds of things in psychology you look for,” he says. (…)

Zakolyukina says lying executives tend to overuse words like “we” and “our team” when they talk about their company. They avoid saying “I.” (…) Lying CEOs also tend to use a lot of words that express positive emotion — things are fabulous and fantastic and extraordinary.

{ NPR | Continue reading }

related { Twitter Mood Predicts The Stock Market }

photo { Richard Avedon }

Laws that criminalize insider trading cover corporate insiders and those they tip, but not specifically Congress. (…)

This week the Wall Street Journal reported that during the past two calendar years, 72 congressional aides from both parties made trades in companies that their bosses’ help oversee. Among them are top advisers to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Their timely investments proved profitable, but the staffers deny the trades sprung from inside knowledge, the Journal reported.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Goldman Sachs continues to defend its title in the media as the most maligned and unscrupulous company throughout this past decade’s financial downfall and ’standing ten count.’ Two of the largest and most scrutinized transactions during this period were the currency swaps designed to hide Greece’s debt and the making of the Abacus deal that blindly fleeced investors of billions. We delve into the fine print of these two particular deals to try and evaluate whether Goldman was inherently immoral and unethical or a merely surfer responding to its environment and going with the flow of the moment.

{ Social Science Research Network | Download PDF }

related { Hegel on Wall Street }

photo { Yann Arthus-Bertrand, airport runways | more }

Strangely, history has never figured into the equation when it comes to exploring why some countries prosper and others don’t. To understand how it might relate, Diego Comin at Harvard Business School, Erick Gong at the University of California, Berkeley, and I started by compiling a list of 11 ancient technologies that were around in 1000 B.C.: Was there written language? The wheel? Agriculture and iron tools? We drew today’s boundaries on the ancient world and assigned each separate technology history to the future country that would form within that territory. Then we expanded the survey to 1500 A.D., looking for the adoption of 24 technologies, including oceangoing ships, paper, printing, firearms, artillery, the magnetic compass, and steel.

We found that there was a remarkably strong association between countries with the most advanced technology in 1500 and countries with the highest per capita income today. Europe already had steel, printed books, and oceangoing ships then, while large parts of Africa did not yet have writing or the wheel. Britain had all 24 of our sample technologies in 1500. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga had none of them. But technology also travels. North America, Australia, and New Zealand had among the world’s most backward technology in 1500; today, they are among the wealthiest regions on Earth, reflecting the principle that it’s the people who matter, not the places. As migration has transformed parts of the world that were nearly empty in the Middle Ages, technology has migrated with them.

{ Foreign Policy | Continue reading }

What followed was a fascinating assortment of statistics and tidbits about how design influences how people shop. (…)

It takes eight seconds to walk by a typical storefront. Once someone is two seconds past the door, they will not turn around. You have to grab them in the first four seconds while they are approaching.

Within two seconds of entering a store, 70% of people know whether they will buy something. Stores use simple window displays and a “front and center” table to clearly and quickly convey what’s hot, and most train a staff member to welcome customers immediately upon entry.

An open door generates 35% more business than a closed door. Doors that are flush to the sidewalk are more inviting than recessed doors. Outdoor planters and a lot of downlight can make a recessed entry more welcoming. How many museum and library entrances are hard to find, dark, and require opening a heavy door? (…)

People like to walk in a loop. They avoid “cul de sacs” that they can see are dead-ends, because they don’t want to get bored walking through the same merchandise twice. (…)

75% of American spending occurs after 5:30pm and on Sunday.

{ Museum Two | Continue reading }

The taste of Kit Kat candy bars, Coca-Cola beverages and Jelly Belly candies are known to stimulate cravings and subsequently influence consumers’ spending habits, but now researchers suggest simply hearing the sound of those brands and others with repetitively structured names can induce similar outcomes.

Across several product categories, audible exposure to repetitive-sounding brand names favorably affects how consumers perceive and choose items and decide where to buy them, reveals a study recently published in the Journal of Marketing.

Researchers said their findings provide the first evidence of this discovery, which could prove beneficial for marketers, advertisers and store managers.

“Companies have spent millions of dollars choosing their brands and their brand names and they’ve been picked explicitly to have an influence on consumers,” wrote University of Alberta marketing professor Jennifer Argo. “We show that it can get you at the affective level.”

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

related { The Coke Machine—part nonfiction narrative, part history of the Coca-Cola Company and the many crimes it has been accused of—works hard to provide answers. | The Atlantic | full story }

image { Marco Fusinato, Mass Black Implosion, 2007 | ink on archival facsimile of score }

{ 1 | 2 }

Earlier this year, the euro was sold as a proxy for a variety of ailments in the eurozone. However, as we argued then and now, the euro will not only prevail, but triumph over the US dollar in the medium to long-term.
Let’s first debunk the myth that economic growth is necessary to have a strong currency – just look at Japan.

To understand why the euro may continue to strengthen, consider the yen: how has Japan, with its dismal economic growth had such a strong currency? Unlike the US, which requires foreigners to finance its current account deficit, Japan has a trade surplus while financing its budget deficit domestically. (…)

It’s often been lamented that the eurozone has no central finance minister to co-ordinate a fiscal response in a crisis. (…) Rarely observed, however, is the major advantage of not having a central Treasury secretary: it is far more difficult to spend money. In the US, it’s comparatively easy to stuff a trillion dollars into the banking system; in the eurozone, the money has to come from regional, often local, governments which is a far more painful process. (…)

In an effort to impose structural reform, the ECB has held the eurozone on a comparatively short leash ever since the introduction of the euro. As a result, most European consumers, particularly German ones, are far less leveraged than their US counterparts. Tightening in the eurozone won’t, therefore, automatically derail a eurozone recovery.

In contrast, US consumers remain on life support; most of the support by way of extraordinary monetary policies is aimed at reducing the number of homeowners “under water” in their mortgages. Given that it is politically unacceptable to encourage consumers to downsize, the most realistic alternative is to push up the price level to bail out these homeowners. As free market forces would favour further de-leveraging and lower home prices, such a policy is going to require an extraordinary monetary and fiscal effort; this may not lead to sustainable growth, but will show up in assets with the greatest level of monetary sensitivity, i.e. through a weaker dollar, and higher precious metals and commodities prices.

This story is beginning to unfold before our eyes: the Fed is likely to engage in more quantitative easing, amplified by Bernanke’s unequivocal comments that the Fed will resist market pricing of inflation expectations that it deems too low. Those regions that resist this path, such as the eurozone, may experience weak economic growth on the backdrop of relatively strong currencies.

There are many potential pitfalls to the Fed’s strategy; we can, however, be reasonably certain, that the strategy poses grave risks to the US dollar. A strong euro is no accident; a temporarily strong dollar was.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

It’s not hard to find frightening examples of malware which steals personal information, sometimes for the purpose of making it public and at other times for profit. Details such as names, addresses and emails are hugely valuable for companies wanting to market their wares.

But there is another class of information associated with networks that is potentially much more valuable: the pattern of links between individuals and their behavior in the network–how often they email or call each other, how information spreads between them and so on.

Why is this more valuable? An email address associated with an individual who is at the hub of a vibrant social network is clearly more valuable to a marketing company than an email address at the edge of the network. Patterns of contact can also reveal how people are linked, whether they are in a relationship for example, whether they are students or executives, or whether they prefer celebrity gossip to tech news.

This information would allow a determined attacker to build a remarkably detailed picture of the lifestyle of any individual, a picture that would be far more useful than the basic demographic information that marketeers use today that consists of little more than sex, age and social grouping.

Today, Yaniv Altshuler at Ben Gurion University and a few pals argue that the value of this data makes it almost inevitable that malicious attackers will attempt to steal it. They point out that many companies already mine the pattern of links in their data for things like recommender systems.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

related { Many of the most popular applications on the social-networking site Facebook have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. | Wall Street Journal | full story }

image { Polly Morgan, Black Fever, 2010 | taxidermy crow wings, wood, wire }

Differences in our perception of physical beauty have an enormous impact on the fashion, cosmetics, and weight control industries, and more recently on aesthetic surgery trends. Understanding how culture and region alter the perception of beauty is therefore not only of anthropological and social interest but underpins multibillion dollar industries across the globe.

According to Anil Mathur of Hofstra University in New York and colleagues there and at the City University of New York, marketers can hope to expand their reach into overseas markets but they cannot build brand equity if they lack regional knowledge and an understanding of consumer characteristics and preferences across cultures.

Mathur and colleagues have now tested a physical vanity scale across China, India and USA and have established that the scale could be used across culturally diverse countries. (…)

The team found that while the details concerning beauty perception may differ, their data supports the notion that physical vanity is a universal construct that applies across cultures.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

artwork { Modigliani, Seated Nude, 1916 }

For the past ten years sales of recorded music have declined so steeply as to become a cautionary tale about the disruptive power of the internet. The rise of illegal file-sharing and the end of the digital “replacement cycle”, in which people bought CDs to replace tapes and records, caused spending to collapse. (…)

The rise in digital music-sales is scant compensation. People tend to buy tracks, not albums, from sites like Apple’s iTunes. They can obtain their favourite music much more cheaply than they could in the CD era. And even digital sales are now stalling. In Japan, mobile and online single-track sales rose only a shade during 2009. So far this year Americans have bought 841m digital tracks, mostly from Apple’s iTunes, according to Nielsen Soundscan—down from 847m at this point last year. Apple now offers plenty of other opportunities to spend money, from iPads to more than 250,000 apps. Music executives believe the company is cannibalising the musical part of its own business.

Yet the music business is surprisingly healthy, and becoming more so. Will Page of PRS for Music, which collects royalties on behalf of writers and publishers, has added up the entire British music business. He reckons it turned over £3.9 billion ($6.1 billion) in 2009, 5% more than in 2008. It was the second consecutive year of growth. Much of the money bypassed the record companies. But even they managed to pull in £1.1 billion last year, up 2% from 2008. A surprising number of things are making money for artists and music firms, and others show great promise. The music business is not dying. But it is changing profoundly.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

{ Richard Avedon, Stephanie Seymour, Model, New York City, 1992 | gelatin silver print, signed, numbered ‘5/5′ in pencil, copyright credit and reproduction title stamps (on the verso) 57¾ x 46in. (146.6 x 116.8cm.) | $182,500 | The stylist for this shoot was Polly Allen Mellon, the dress is by Comme des Garçons, Ms. Seymour’s hair is styled by Oribe, her make-up is by Kevin Aucoin. | Christie’s }

There is a contemporary art genre still under the radar of many collectors and dealers: performance art. Performance art is, however, finally coming in from the margins with a flood of prestigious exhibitions and museum initiatives that throw new light on a medium often seen as a relic of the 1970s. And anyway – how is it possible to speak of buying and selling, or collecting, an art form that has no object, only a process and an experience? (…)

At what point did acquiring performance art switch from owning objects associated with the actions, such as videos and photographs, to possessing the “idea” behind the piece? Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal has evidently turned collecting criteria on their heads. He sells his performance art pieces by means of verbal transactions in the presence of a lawyer with no written contract. Instructions on how to re-enact his works are delivered literally by word-of-mouth, with collectors under strict orders never to photograph or video his “constructed situations”. Yet they sell in editions of four to six for $85,000 to $145,000 each, according to The Art Newspaper.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

photo { Roy DeCarava, Dancers, 1956 }

A startup called Recorded Future has developed a tool that scrapes real-time data from the Internet to find hints of what will happen in the future. The company’s search tool spits out results on a timeline that stretches into the future as well as the past.

The 18-month-old company gained attention earlier this year after receiving money from the venture capital arms of both Google and the CIA. Now the company has offered a glimpse of how its technology works.

Conventional search engines like Google use links to rank and connect different Web pages. Recorded Future’s software goes a level deeper by analyzing the content of pages to track the “invisible” connections between people, places, and events described online.

“That makes it possible for me to look for specific patterns, like product releases expected from Apple in the near future, or to identify when a company plans to invest or expand into India,” says Christopher Ahlberg, founder of the Boston-based firm.

A search for information about drug company Merck, for example, generates a timeline showing not only recent news on earnings but also when various drug trials registered with the website clinicaltrials.gov will end in coming years. Another search revealed when various news outlets predict that Facebook will make its initial public offering.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

quote { Melville, Benito Cereno, 1856 | Continue reading }