Touching Art

Picture: The Onion

'Struggling Museum Now Allowing Patrons to Touch Paintings', reported The Onion back in 2009. The Met's director is quoted, "Please, bring the whole family and smudge up our paintings as much as you like". Not everyone was happy; " 'I touched a crapload of Jasper Johns' paintings,' said Mark Bennett, 67. 'I just don't get why they're supposed to be so special. They just feel like any regular old painting'." Best quote: "Sometimes you have to go the extra mile to grab people's attention ... it takes more than curating exhibits that bring meaning and context to our cultural heritage, more than preserving works of art that capture the spirit of transcendence unique to humankind".

It's scarily credible. The rhetoric captures exactly the tone of museums' own publicity - all about the visitor experience. The crass immediacy of museum publicity obliterates any sense of the transcendent. And visitors must be allowed to do pretty much as they please. First photography, then flash photography (increasingly permitted), and many museums do in practice let patrons touch the art as they please. People line up to take pictures holding hands with statues and guards rarely even bother to intervene when visitors poke and stroke the pictures. 

A more recent story was that kids are to be allowed to touch art at the National Gallery of Canada, CBC Radio tells us. Another spoof, cleverly presented as the recommendation of a consultant to science museums. Kids should also be allowed to paint over stuff from the stores, because no one sees it anyway, they said. 

Final example is a really elaborate spoof. Kids in Museums is an entire campaign with a manifesto demand that museums say "please touch". Loads of museums have fallen for this one, and have actually signed up to the manifesto! Come on Kids in Museums, you've had a good run but it's time to 'fess up. It is all a big joke, isn't it?

Requiring people to refrain from touching is the most minimal demand that museums make of their patrons. Repeated handling causes real damage. Some museums have 'touch' displays where half of a reproduction object is protected and people are encouraged to touch the other half, sometimes with a senor to record how often it's been touched. It's astonishing how quickly gilding is lost and textiles are shredded. It's not asking much that people look rather than handle. But the Kids in Museums spoof would prefer museums to compromise their collections rather than expect people to learn that museum visiting is about looking. It's as if they can't believe that looking alone could be sufficiently rewarding. 

I'm looking forward to a debate in London about kids in museums later this month. This piece by Tiffany Jenkins gives a taster.

Auction Costs

Picture: Wikipedia

Christie's have introduced the maddest auction house fee yet. They now propose an extra 2% seller's premium if lots exceed the high estimate. So if Christie's misidentifies your consignment and sells a sleeper for a fraction of its true value, but a multiple of its estimate, you'll owe them a 'performance fee'! It creates a perverse incentive for Christie's to push for the lowest possible estimate, and it gives sellers an incentive to insist on the highest possible estimate. The estimate becomes a commercial negotiation rather than a guide to its likely sale price. And prices can be driven up by all sorts of idiosyncratic reasons that have little to do with the auctioneer's actions. 

Christie's says the new fee will 'incentivise and reward high performance'. Of course that's just marketing guff, but it's stupid marketing guff because it implies that they need new incentives to perform highly - aren't they trying at the moment? And it's foolish to create an expectation that their performance should be judged on the difference between estimate and sale price. Sometimes they do a superb job, but buyers just aren't interested.

The sellers' premium is mainly a negotiating ploy, only really charged on low-value consignments. It's a suckers' charge for naive sellers who aren't aware that it's negotiable. So I suspect most sellers will avoid this fee, but it will still create unnecessary additional suspicion of estimates, though they are already as much a marketing tool and a negotiation with ambitious sellers as much as a true guess at hammer price. It's a bit ironic because the buyers' premium is in practice a charge on sellers, as I explained in a previous post.

Transaction costs in the art market are notoriously high and notoriously vague. Stepped increments mean that the difference between hammer price and actual cost is hard to work out. It also makes it difficult to assess how lots performed against expectations, because the auctioneers like to compare estimates without premium with sale prices including premium. So something said to have sold around the low estimate might actually have missed it by about a third, if you actually compare like with like. We should therefore be grateful to Felix Salmon, a rare beast who writes intelligently about both art and economics, for he has just published an auction premium calculator online, which lets you work out the premium from the hammer price, and the hammer price from the total.

I also wrote a premium calculator a few months ago, but couldn't embed it on the blog (technological incompetence). Still happy to send out if anyone wants my sheet, which will give you the underlying formulae to play around with. The one thing you can't do with the online version is adjust for tax (charged on the premium and sometimes on the lot itself, at different rates ... taxation is almost as complicated as auction house pricing). 

What I've been reading (other than art books)

Picture: Amazon

Daniel Drezner The System Worked: How the world stopped another great depression Oxford University Press 2014 £19.99

The financial crisis of 2008 was more serious than the Wall Street crash of 1929. Another great depression was a real and imminent danger. But concerted policy action averted the worst, despite a widespread popular view that the elites got it all wrong and should never have bailed out the 'banksters'. I was glad to see a book trying to put the record straight. Unfortunately this book exceeds its brief. It conflates the initial reaction to the crisis and subsequent attempts to promote growth, and it strains too hard to praise the efficacy of international institutions and international order more generally.

Drezner organises the book oddly, analysing the separate role of interest, power and ideas. But in the crisis period, there was little conflict because interests were aligned (avoid a great depression), ideas were aligned (provide liquidity, bail out systemically important institutions) and so power was deployed collaboratively. Drezner's chapter on 'interest' is limited to private interests, and focuses mainly on banks' lobbying around new regulatory standards. Revealingly he switches at a key point from the term 'interests' to 'sectoral material interests' as if they're the same thing (p. 86).  

His account of financial regulation is weak and confused. He wants to argue that regulators prevailed over banks, and to regard that as a success. In fact a good deal of lobbying was focused on technical aspects of the requirements that might have produced outcomes that no one sought. And the trade-offs between higher capital requirements and less liquidity in loan and derivative markets requires more sophisticated judgment than a simple win/loss assessment. Drezner is ill placed to make these assessments. Minor confusions abound, such as conflating internal models with Value at Risk models (which covered only a tiny part of capital requirements; see p.85), thinking that liquidity is a subset of capital (p. 86). And he quotes Sheila Bair extensively, without noting that she is one of the most controversial characters in the financial crisis whose obstreperousness was widely regarded as damaging to crisis management efforts. 

The absolute howler is his belief that "capital held in reserve cannot be loaned out or invested; the more banks have in reserve, the smaller their profits" (p. 89). That's dead wrong, and it's elementary. A first year analyst should have learned that this is not the case. Capital is a way of funding a bank's lending; it's not gold bars kept in the vaults. If a bank has proportionately more capital it won't affect the size of its profit, but it will affect its return on capital. It's analogous to profiting on a house sale. If you buy a house for £1m cash and sell it for £1.1m, you've made profit that can be expressed as £100k or 10%. If you do the same deal with a £900k mortgage and a deposit of £100k, then your profit is still £100k, but it's also 100% return on your capital. It's not crucial to Drezner's argument, but his failure to understand even the most basic way that a bank's balance sheet operates must give us pause when evaluating his analysis of financial regulation. 

Drezner's focus on international institutions is also peculiar, and makes sense only in terms of his own institutional affiliation - he is a scholar of international relations. His neat tick-box tables of the role that various institutions played in the crisis (like 'providing expertise', apparently) fails to assess the importance of the role that these institutions played. The crisis, in its most acute phase, was managed by central bankers and finance ministers talking to each other bilaterally; international institutions were irrelevant. That wasn't in any sense a failure of international governance or international institutions. International co-ordination took an ad-hoc form because that was the most sensible and pragmatic way to proceed. Subsequently international institutions have played more of a role, but subsequent actions have been more contested and more uncertain in their outcome. 

Drezner is one-sided in his attempt to portray success. He makes much of the avoidance of trade war, but whilst a recognised risk, everyone knew that a trade war would be internecine so everyone had an interest in avoiding it. In other areas there has been more inter-state conflict and much more conflict over ideas than Drezner recognises, at least after the period of 'crisis stabilisation'. His understanding of the wider economic debates is hazy (he does not adequately distinguish fiscal and monetary policy, for example) and given weak growth and simmering crises like the Eurozone it is tough to argue that the 'system' has achieved much more than crisis management.   

One book I can really recommend on the financial crisis is Alan Blinder After the Music Stopped. It's by far the best and most knowledgeable account (and I've read many), alone in combining clarity of expression with depth of understanding. Everyone else sacrifices at least one of those things, and often both. 

Picture: Amazon

Moorad Choudhry, David Moskovic & Max Wong Fixed Income Markets: Management, Trading, and Hedging 2nd edition Wiley 2014 £63.23

This book, written by some of my colleagues, is a better place to start if you want more fully to understand the financial system. It is a technical book that starts from first principles, but ends up with some important insights for the debates Drezner tries to follow. It's an excellent textbook, but it goes well beyond standard textbooks in the insight it provides into current real-world dynamics. The final chapter on correlation is particularly important for the light it sheds on correlation, which is a key concern in regulatory debates.

The key message here is the astonishing disjoint between the sophistication of market practice and the crudity of the popular debates. Studying some of the ideas in this book is essential for informed contribution to debate about financial regulation.

Picture: Amazon

For lighter relief, this book about Amazon is a great fast read. Brad Stone is a fine storyteller. But it's not a convincing narrative. Bezos's wife gave it an excoriating review on Amazon.com, and even from my own knowledge this book didn't add up. I recall a few years ago there was a scandal about differential pricing, where Amazon was using algorithms to identify less price-sensitive customers and charge them higher prices. That isn't mentioned here, because Stone's narrative is about Amazon as a relentlessly customer-focused business. No doubt it does have a strong customer focus, and it has always sought sales volume over profitability, but it is also a business seeking to make money. That tension is barely noted in this lightweight and one-dimensional account.

Bezos comes across as a rather monstrous boss, and Amazon as a ghastly place to work. Some of the best bits are the great put-downs ("This is the B-team document, Get me the A-team version", "Do I have to get the certificate that says I'm CEO to get you to stop challenging me on this?" etc...). But it clearly suits some people (the share options help), and maniacally focused entrepreneurs are rarely noted for their interpersonal skills. Stone is too willing to see this as a sign of genius, though he also shows Bezos to be a sucker for management fads and beholden to celebrity management gurus, which doesn't indicate particularly acute critical faculties. And speaking of absent critical faculties, it's a travesty that this won the FT/Goldman Sachs 'business book of the year' award against far worthier rivals - including Alan Blinder's outstanding account of the financial crisis.

  

Robert A. Ferguson Inferno: An anatomy of American punishment Harvard University Press 2014 £21.91

David Skarbek The Social Order of the Underworld: How prison gangs govern the American penal system Oxford University Press 2014 £18.99

I've just read these two superb new books on American criminology. Ferguson's is a forensic critique of America's punitive criminal justice system, outstanding for its range and sophistication. It includes serious philosophical critique as well as legal and sociological analysis. The analysis is elucidating and the critique is damning.

Skarbek's book is very different, a focused study drawing on a wide range of sources to develop a rational choice explanation for the development of American prison gangs. I found it completely convincing and utterly fascinating. It's a short, punchy book that intersperses extended anecdotes between analytic chapters. He argues that gangs developed as a form of self-protection when the old 'prisoners' code' broke down when the American prison system grew exponentially as US politics became more punitive. Skarbek concludes with measured but effective criticism of mass incarceration, but he seems to appreciate the enormity of the barriers to overcoming the hold of gangs in US prisons.

These two compelling but tragic works are both among my best books of the year.

National Gallery Membership

Picture: National Gallery

I've just become a member of the National Gallery. Some months ago the National Gallery abolished exhibition season tickets, promising to replace them with a nebulous 'friends' scheme. The details have finally been announced and, credit where it's due, it looks good. There will still be unlimited exhibition entry, which is a great relief. And a free tote bag (above). Yippee! It will actually save me money, so I do hope it doesn't turn out to reduce revenue for the gallery. I'll happily donate back the money I save if they ban photography.  

The only disappointment is the thick dollop of guff accompanying the announcement. Nicholas Penny is quoted as saying that the scheme "allows us to understand what our visitors want and to provide an exceptional visitor experience for every single person who walks through our doors." I don't believe that anyone of Penny's intelligence and eloquence could write such errant nonsense. How does a £50 a year subscription give the NG any greater understanding of its visitors, let alone enable provision of 'an exceptional visitor experience' for everyone. Will it reduce overcrowding or stop flash photography in the galleries?

The NG has recently been obsessing about 'audience engagement', more than a decade after it became fashionable. It's ironic because it is one of the most imperious and disengaged institutions I know. They recently overturned their photography ban without consultation and without announcement. There was a lively global debate about the wisdom of the change, but the NG itself took no part in it. E-mails go unanswered. I recently queried the glazing of some Rembrandt portraits that had returned from an exhibition. The glazing was duly removed after I'd got in touch, but I got no acknowledgement. They recently put out a tweet about the Rembrandt exhibition that was manifestly incorrect. It's impressive to be wrong in just 140 characters when writing about the NG's biggest exhibition. But there was no response and no correction. 

I don't mind being ignored. I'm not seeking a 'relationship' with the gallery, and if I'm honest I rather like the old-fashioned haughtiness. Usually the curators really do know best. What I object to is firstly that the curators have been sidelined by 'experts' in marketing and communication, who put out utter guff. And second that they persist in telling us how much they want to 'engage' the audience and have a 'dialogue' with us, though that 'dialogue' goes no further than soliciting and repeating mindless gushing praise. 

Feel free to continue ignoring my tweets and e-mails, dear NG. File them away with the green biro letters if you must. But do stop with the 'engaging the audience' nonsense if all you're going to do is re-tweet enthusiastic praise.

Green

Picture: Amazon

Michel Pastoureau Green: The history of a color Translated by Jody Gladding, Princeton University Press 2014 £24.95

This enjoyable and wide-ranging cultural history of the colour green brims with intriguing insights and gives a nicely oblique slice of art history. It avoids technical and scientific questions about colour reception almost entirely. This is a cultural, social and symbolic history of green, which establishes its changing and contingent status and associations. It was only in the nineteenth century that the distinction between primary and secondary colours was definitively established; until then green took its place as an equal of red, yellow and blue. In medieval times green was the colour of water; blue took over later. But in the romantic period it gained new association as the colour of nature and of freedom. 

Art figures large in Pastoureau's account, and his telling of the difficulties in creating an acceptable green pigment are fascinating. I hadn't realised, for example, how rare it was to create green by mixing yellow and blue. There are no recipes for mixing blue and yellow to make green from antiquity to the early middle ages, and it doesn't become well-known until the eighteenth century. Even then, Oudry rails against Royal Academicians who mix colours rather than using traditional greens, regarding it as a deviant process. But those traditional greens were problematic too:

"Over the course of the centuries, European painting had little luck with green pigments: plant greens did not hold up, earth greens did not cover well, malachite greens were expensive, those with a natural ultramarine base even more so, copper greens were corrosive, toxic, and turned black or brown over time, and greens with a Prussian blue base faded and turned grayish or yellowish. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, all the great painters complained of the greens that were available and, like Veronese, dreamed of 'green pigments as good in quality as the reds'." (p. 187-90).

Pastoureau eschews the timid hedging of much academic writing, and the grand sweep of its narrative is commendable and enjoyable. But it must be read cautiously. His grandiose judgments sometimes lack both evidence and nuance: "The seventeenth century was a dark, often gloomy, sometimes very black age; the eighteenth century, on the other hand, was bright and colorful, vivid and rainbow-hued" (p. 167). Of course there's some truth to that, but it's stated so baldly and so absolutely as to be bunkum. He later asserts that green was rarely used for everyday objects or for décor and furnishings until the 1950s, but there are plenty of Robert Adam drawings that show green colour schemes, to give just one counter-example.  I also noticed that the illustration of Poussin's Stormy Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe is a detail, but is not identified as such (p. 145).

A particularly strange claim is that, "Calvinist painters, who loathed polychromy, who sought the somber tones and vibratory effects of grisaille, granted green a greater role than Catholic painters did. Not only great artists like Franz Hals or Rembrandt but also the minor masters of northern Europe turned to landscape painting" (p. 141). There are plenty of luscious Flemish landscapes of the same period by Catholic artists that are as green as they come. And lots of those Calvinist landscapes were dour and brown (lots of Jan van Goyens, for example, or early Cuyps). But to use Rembrandt and Hals as examples of great landscape painters is extraordinary. Rembrandt did paint a few landscapes, but none is particularly green. And Hals painted no pure landscapes at all.

Still, there's lots else that is fascinating. I loved the detail of an altarpiece by Lorenzo Lotto with the feet of St Anthony the Monk in green stockings, showing how he "tried to convey with [his] pigments the instability of the green colorants used by dyers and to emphasize how their use was limited to the least valued pieces of clothing" (p. 114). One reason for this was that they dyers' guilds restricted their members to only certain colours and fabrics, so blue and yellow pigments would not have been available in the same shop for mixing to make green. The greens that were available were poor-quality natural green dyes. And I loved that the book covers Egyptian statues, medieval manuscripts, traffic lights, flags, Jane Fonda and Babar the Elephant. Pastoureau riles the pedant in me, but I still enjoyed this book more than a dozen dry and careful tomes that run fearfully from synthesis and judgment. 

Don't let pictures clutter your house!

George Nelson & Henry Wright Tomorrow's House: A complete guide for the home-builder Simon & Schuster 1945

I picked up this hybrid how-to book/manifesto for modernism at a London flea market because it had some good pictures of modernist houses. But there's some wonderfully ridiculous accompanying text that mixes chummy helpfulness with supercilious bossiness, a sort of Alain de Botton of its time. There's a whole section on pictures, which I'm sharing because it's so hilariously ridiculous. It's also rather revealing of a certain strain of authoritarian modernism prevalent at the time. Read with horror:

"Pictures on the wall are another, and a particularly irritating, way of cluttering up interiors. The pictures in most houses are so appallingly ugly or commonplace that it is impossible to understand how they got there in the first place. ... A picture is not a decoration. It represents in a limited area some experience an artist has had which, when communicated to other people, gives them a certain amount of pleasure and a better understanding of the world around them. In this sense a picture is not entirely unlike a book. But who would sit and read the same book over and over and over again day in and year out?" 

Pictures, just irritating clutter! They tells us, "anyone with eyes in his head and a minimum of honesty must confess that any picture, however fine, becomes boring if looked at for very long." The solution? Storage cabinets! You can keep "a dozen or a hundred favorite pictures" in a storage unit and rotate them. 

"Whether they are originals or reproductions, incidentally, doesn't matter a bit, except to those snobs who are unable to appreciate art except in terms of how much it costs. The reproductions on the market today, so many of which are the same size as the original and very faithful in their rendering of color and even of texture, are just as good from the viewpoint of the average man as the originals. This is indicated clearly enough by the fact that you can't tell half the time whether you are looking at an original or reproduction until you are about six inches away from it - and who wants to look at a picture at a distance of six inches?" 

And you don't need to worry about storing frames. They can stay on the wall - just change the pictures! "With four frames of different sizes ... you could change your pictures whenever you wanted to, and in about the same way that museums have always done it." Yeah, that's how they do it ... leave the frames on the wall and swap the canvases around from time to time.

The Alain de Botton bit comes in with the contextualising: "We are not interested in passing on home decorating advice - useful as such an activity may be. the purpose of this book is to build up an attitude towards the house and all of its parts, an attitude which will help produce a living design adapted in every way to the physical and emotional requirements of the family." So there!

It's all quite amusing, and we can look back on it as harmless fun. But if there's a lesson for today, it's that we should be careful of being too absolutist about new fashions. That glib attribution of snobbery to those with different views is all too familiar today, too. And I suspect many of our fads will come to seem just as ridiculous. 

Exhibitions, missable and unmissable

Picture: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The most exciting upcoming exhibition this season is Bartholomeus Spranger: Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague at the Met in New York. Spranger isn't a household name, and he isn't one of the very greatest artists. But this show is much more worthwhile than a routine 'big name' blockbuster because it draws attention to an artist who is too often neglected. Spranger is not well represented in major museums, and he's a bit out of the central narrative of art history (eccentric Bohemian mannerists are denied their week's lecture in most survey courses, more's the pity). The Met has a great record of mounting shows like this, usually accompanied by brilliant catalogues. I'm making a special trip to New York to see it. And as an added treat, there's the Leonard Lauder collection of cubist art and Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry. This is what exhibitions should be about - fresh light on original and interesting subjects. I can't wait!

Meanwhile in London there's a tedious roster of rather predictable blockbuster exhibitions opening this autumn. Most are obvious shows of artists who have been exhibited exhaustively and exhaustingly, but are well enough known to draw crowds. 

The Royal Academy has had some great recent exhibitions like Chiaroscuro Woodcuts, and the highlight of this season in London is their Moroni show. There are an awful lot of Moroni portraits at the National Gallery (they even once considered selling some), but I'm looking forward to a rounded presentation of this talented artist. But the RA has also hosted some of the flimsiest recent shows, which don't pretend to be anything more than entertainment. Catalogues have been a travesty - some colour pictures with captions, plus a few brief essays by celebrities. I'm already put-off by the excessive and daft publicity for Moroni, which presents him as a precursor to Caravaggio and Manet. Oh puhleeze.

They've out-done themselves in the promotional material for Rubens, which re-assures a public unschooled in the classics that "the show would make them not worry about details they did not understand". Curator Van Hout just wants to "cheer the public up". That's the most shamefully dumbed-down publicity I've seen for a major show. Yes, exhibitions are there to be enjoyed. But surely at least part of the point is to challenge and educate too. A more focused exhibition of Rubens' tapestries at the Getty looks more worthwhile. Manageable size and meaningful focus. And they do good catalogues at the Getty.

Then there's Late Turner (again) and another Constable show at the V&A. The pairing is supposed to allow us to assess their relative merits, which is a rather obvious conceit. Turner is clearly the better painter (although I must confess to preferring Constable). There aren't many great British artists, so they just get exhibited over and over again in predictable ways. Late Turner especially will be mobbed, I'm sure. I'd like to see it, but will pass on the crowds. 

Picture: MS

Then there's Rembrandt: The Late Works, another obvious topic and a guaranteed blockbuster. The term 'blockbuster' used to be used to deride exhibitions, using a word from the entertainment business to rebuke museums for failing to provide anything more worthy. Now it's adopted proudly; the NG boasts that this will be a blockbuster, meaning that we should go to marvel at the huge crowds rather than the great pictures.  

The earliest stirring of my interest in art was reading a book on Rembrandt in my junior school library. I remember marveling at The Blinding of Samson, which I've since seen several times in Frankfurt. And we had a print of The Man with a Golden Helmet, then thought to be by Rembrandt, in the school's corridor. I'd love to see this exhibition, but I'm not sure I'll be able to go at all. The busiest shows are literally un-seeable. I once traveled specially from Edinburgh, at a cost I could barely afford at the time, to see the El Greco exhibition at the National Gallery. I left after about ten minutes, because every picture was surrounded by a crowd three or four deep. You could just about catch a glimpse of the top of large pictures, then shuffle to the front and see a bit more a few minutes later. Now that I live in London, I have been able to buy season tickets and visit each exhibition several times to see a little bit on each visit. Now they've stopped offering season tickets, and there's no news on their replacement. They promise a 'friends' scheme, but no information has yet been provided and requests go unanswered (perhaps because they've got rid of their information department). Meanwhile timed entry slots begin to sell out.

It would be arrogant to make any claims about my knowledge or appreciation of Rembrandt, but I can confidently say that few people can have studied him as intently as me. I have seen almost all of his pictures, making special trips to Minneapolis, Moscow and St Petersburg. I traveled to Holland simply to see Jan Six, which I made an appointment to see at the Six House in Amsterdam. I've read all that I can find about Rembrandt over a period of decades, and I've traveled to exhibitions of his work. The picture above is a shelfie of most of my Rembrandt books. But despite living in London, it seems likely that I will miss this major exhibition of his work. If you want more than a quick glimpse through a crowd, then I'm afraid this won't be for you. One of the pictures from Australia is one of the last Rembrandts that I haven't yet seen, but it's just not worth struggling to glimpse it through a crowd at the NG. Looking at art is supposed to be a pleasure, but going to these blockbusters is a painful chore.

Of course exhibitions shouldn't be only for people like me. But at the moment the cater generously to favoured professionals, with private out-of-hours tours in ideal conditions. You'd be surprised just how many of the people enthusing about the current crop of blockbusters will have seen them privately. And they do all they can to entice people with limited interest, trying to boost footfall and engage new audiences. But once you have become interested and you seek greater engagement, you are taken for granted. The main thing they offered us was the season ticket, which has now been taken away. Can it really be their intention that people like me shouldn't visit this exhibition? Let's see if they ever respond to me on the season ticket replacement they have promised.