[HN Gopher] The Opportunists
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The Opportunists
Author : samclemens
Score : 77 points
Date : 2021-05-06 06:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| m0llusk wrote:
| This is in a way similar to the engineering to marketing ratio
| with technology companies. Many lean hard on clever engineering
| and end up failing. Early on marketing is essential to
| communicate successfully with potential customers in order to
| solve the problem of who is going to buy the damned thing.
| Without a path to sales what you end up with is like sports car
| with a fabulous engine and no wheels. No matter how clever or
| useful the idea, it will only spread and become successful with
| social propagation.
| carbonguy wrote:
| If the thesis of this book is, as the article summarizes:
|
| > ... artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to
| self-promotion, _but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger
| systems with other aims,_ principally oriented toward money,
| political advantage, or commercial churn. [emphasis mine]
|
| then the question I have is - was it ever NOT this way? Perhaps
| these dynamics are more legible in post-war America, but I
| certainly don't think they're uniquely American.
|
| Granting that I am no student of art history, the little I do
| know makes me think this argument is much more broadly applicable
| than the author suggests - to give one example, consider the
| relationship between Michelangelo and the Catholic Church.
| mrwh wrote:
| Yes, and in fact, why restrict this to _artistic_ success.
| Surely it's true of any type of success? Everything ultimately
| involves tapping into something greater than yourself, to go
| beyond yourself.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| > was it ever NOT this way ?
|
| I dont think so.
|
| The mechanism was always this way. There are a lot of subtle
| notions that did change. what success means, is it about the
| destination or the journey, what price are you willing to pay
| for it, and for what?
|
| For Michaelangelo, did success mean selling his painting to the
| church? Was it just about making it big or was it about
| something more ?
| Blahah wrote:
| The Medici family shaped the history of European fine art
| very significantly with their patronage. A perfect example of
| the phenomenon described in the article.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_and_the_Medici
| notriddle wrote:
| Even if you're right, and you might be, academic anthropology
| has a history of making wildly universal claims that turn out
| to only apply to the WEIRD demographics that they have studied.
|
| It's probably for the best that they're more conservative about
| their claims.
| carbonguy wrote:
| > ... academic anthropology has a history of making wildly
| universal claims that turn out to only apply to the WEIRD
| demographics that they have studied.
|
| A very fair point indeed. It would certainly be unusual to
| have the opposite be true here.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Patronage from the wealthy (especially the church) was a
| primary funding model for European art for the past thousand
| years, but I wouldn't call this unanticipated adoption. The
| work was explicitly commissioned, purchased in advance.
| carbonguy wrote:
| > ... I wouldn't call this unanticipated adoption. The work
| was explicitly commissioned, purchased in advance.
|
| Fair enough - certainly in his own time he was known to the
| Church thus his commissions were not "unanticipated," as you
| point out.
|
| Perhaps in this case the term could apply more to the legend
| and myth that has grown up around Michelangelo as an exemplar
| of the "Renaissance man" - why do we know about him more
| than, say, Domenico Ghirlandaio?
| borepop wrote:
| Shoot, the subject of the book interests me but the review makes
| the whole thing sound rather deflating. Maybe deflating is good.
| After all, I think I admire this period in some ways because I
| associate it with my parents and all the ostensibly "serious"
| thinkers I read in college -- many of whom, I have to admit, are
| fairly overrated.
| [deleted]
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| There's a lot of money to be made in tearing down statues in
| the modern era. It's a sign of the times.
|
| It could be that cultures need mythology to thrive. On the
| other hand you can also make a case for better BS detection for
| any new statues being put up.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I highly recommend Boom if you're interested this history of art
| and what drives the market, arts political context.
|
| Boom focuses more on the mega's and the gross borderline
| (outright) fraud, sales practices, & value pumping schemes.
|
| The book in this review seems like it might delve deeper in the
| cultural and political drivers which would be cool to learn more
| about.
|
| Important to ground the context of contemporary art in politics
| as a heuristic or opposition to 'soviet-style communist' culture
| and growing cuter-culture. Really interesting stories for
| instance the CIA & MOMA [1] [2]. There's also a history of large
| business being one of the first to build collections of
| contemporary art. And of course for profit galleries making
| kings. What is art now that a photo can perfectly reproduce a
| scene.
|
| This review has this great quote "As if on cue, one did." (This
| was Sartre in 1945, when the Nazi occupation ended and he
| delivered a philosophy of freedom that "turned France's wartime
| experience into a metaphor.")"
|
| As a collector myself who can't afford more than works on paper
| (from established artists at least) I can't even get a reply to
| buy something theoretically in my budget for a lot of artists i
| love. PACE etc will only sell these 'lesser works' if you buy a
| ton of other art, prop up their less popular artists, have a top
| level connection. Even Nina Chanel Abney posted on her insta
| getting the classic 'who is in your collection' reply ;) she
| replied i have the largest collection of Nina Chanel!! We're not
| even worthy of knowing the price of pieces on that PDF.
|
| [1] https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
| [2] https://hyperallergic.com/294142/a-visit-to-the-the-cias-
| sec...
| ArtWomb wrote:
| I can also recommend this New Yorker profile of David Zwirner.
| We are all complicit ;)
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/02/dealers-hand
| cafard wrote:
| The review leaves me with no idea whether the book is any good or
| not. It is fair to say that the post-war US had a lot of money
| and a lot of power, and thought that it therefore must have a lot
| of great thinkers, major writers, and first-class artists. Not
| all have held up well; some were I think pretty good.
| hacknat wrote:
| Calling Hannah Arendt an opportunist is too rich for my blood.
| She went to Israel to report on the Eichmann trial, coined the
| phrase, "banality of evil", and said she did not like how the
| trial was being run. As a Jew, she criticized the newly formed
| Jewish state's trial of a former Nazi war criminal. All of her
| friends begged her not to publish the feature, but she did
| anyways, and she received as much hate and opprobrium as you
| would expect.
| schoen wrote:
| I first thought that the book itself was titled _The
| Opportunists_ , but that's just the title of the book review;
| the book is called _The Free World_. Although it sounds like
| the book is fairly critical of many of its subjects, I doubt
| either Louis Menand or Mark Greif specifically meant to sum up
| Hannah Arendt 's work as opportunism.
|
| The closest to this that the review comes is
|
| > One sentiment repeated with variations throughout the book is
| "The timing was good" (for the appearance of Hannah Arendt's
| _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ in 1951, when Stalin seemed to
| have taken the place of Hitler).
|
| In context I think the idea is that some people like Arendt may
| have engaged in sincere journalism and philosophy, which the
| culture and/or the CIA may then have deployed as part of the
| Cold War, not that Arendt (at least) was thinking "what could I
| write that would make me famous and influential right now?".
|
| To modernize this a bit, Ta-nehisi Coates and Jordan Peterson
| were both developing and expressing their ideas for a long time
| (decades, I think) in relative obscurity. Then they suddenly
| became best-sellers in the 2010s, I imagine to a great extent
| because of cultural and political developments outside of
| themselves and their work. Both are presumably profiting quite
| a bit from their success, but I doubt either primarily thought
| tactically or consciously opportunistically about that.
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