This month’s piece on Damien Hirst by Ben Lewis reminds me of one of the most simple yet difficult to dismiss reactions which contemporary art can elicit: “I could do that!” Obviously, I can’t just nip out of the office and produce a skull studded with diamonds and, equally obviously, many of those who respond to art like this are seriously underestimating the skill or invention needed to produce it. But the underlying question will not go away, and it’s been around for quite some time now—how far does something’s value as art rely on an artist’s craft and invention, and how far does it rely on what it is said to signify (and by whom)?
Take the delightful “disumbrationism” hoax perpetrated by Paul Jordan-Smith back in the 1920s. In 1924, irritated by critical dismissals of his wife’s conventional still-life paintings, he adopted the pseudonym Pavel Jerdanowitch and created Exaltation, a deliberately awful picture of a Pacific islander lofting a banana skin over her head. This, he claimed in a suitably portentous blurb, was an example of the new disumbrationist school and symbolised “breaking the chains of womanhood.” Certainly, it’s a striking achievement—
Needless to say, the picture was such a huge critical success that Jerdanowitch went on to produce several further well-received works before exposing himself as non-existent in the Los Angeles Times. Nowadays, I suspect our more enlightened society would hail his hoax itself as a creative masterpiece.
My usual rule of thumb is that, if the discourse explaining a work is more important than the work itself, you might as well throw away the work and frame the explanation; a few years ago, at a Chapman brothers’ exhibition, I found myself thinking that wittier and more provocative things arrive in my inbox on a weekly basis than much of their recent oeuvre. But I worry that I’m missing the point. Is concept-led art the only honest channel for many of the great talents of our times?
In any case, I’m reluctant just to sit back and let posterity sort everything out, which is perhaps why I find satire one of the most satisfying modes for debating current art and theory—from the Onion to Alan Sokal’s wonderful skewering of the pretensions of cultural theory. There’s even a competition named in honour of the great Jerdanowitch himself.
Shorthand thinking means that inflation is now simply identified as an increase in prices. This is a dangerous misconception, as higher prices on their own are in fact deflationary. This point was recognised by some commentators when oil prices soared last year: the effect was correctly compared to a tax levied by the oil producers which depressed demand in general.
Higher prices are in fact a symptom of inflation, in the same way as a high temperature is a symptom of fever, not the fever itself. Inflation is fuelled by a rise in incomes and spending—not by higher prices, which are an attempt by the economic body to bring excessive demand back into balance with inadequate supply. Inflation is therefore appropriately tackled by letting prices rise without extra spending power. The weapon of choice—rising interest rates—is defective because it results in higher incomes as well as having some restraining impact on demand: many benefits, including pensions, are directly linked to inflation, as are many pay agreements. So relying on interest rates to squeeze inflation prolongs the process of regaining control and achieves eventual equilibrium only at the cost of pushing prices to higher levels than are necessary.
You don’t cure a fever by plunging the thermometer into cold water.
Back in the January 2007 issue of Prospect, Peter Shawn Taylor wrote about Canada’s muscular foreign policy under its new conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. One example Taylor gave was Harper’s hawkish stance on the Northwest Passage, the Arctic sea route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. For most of the year, the route is unusable, which means that Canada, while formally claiming sovereignty over the passage, has been happy to turn a blind eye to American ships using it for the few days in summer during which it was navigable.
But now global warming and the melting of Arctic ice have raised the possibility that the passage could become a genuine alternative to the Panama canal—the route cuts almost 2,500 miles from the journey, and nearly halves the distance between Tokyo and London. And so Harper’s assertions of Canadian sovereignty over the passage, reported Taylor, were becoming increasingly outspoken.
Now it seems Harper is putting his warships where his mouth is. Earlier this week he announced plans to move six to eight patrol ships into the passage, saying that “the need to assert our sovereignty and protect our territorial integrity in the north on our terms have never been more urgent.” The US, which claims that the passage should be considered an international waterway, is unsurprisingly crying foul.
But Canada’s new Arctic assertiveness may lead to enemies on further fronts. Harper is keen to assert Canadian sovereignty over the tiny Hans island, which lies at the eastern entrance to the passage. The island is near Greenland, over which Denmark exercises control, and a minor spat between the two countries over control of Hans island a few years ago led to some Canadians calling for a boycott of Danish pastries, in a bizarre forerunner of the mass boycott of Danish products in the Muslim world last year after the Muhammad cartoon scandal.
If you were looking for an example of the unpredictable effects of climate change, they don’t come much better than this.
Just a quick reminder that our July 2007 competition is still open. Readers who can think up a policy for the new prime minister that would help smooth the allegedly turbulent waters of his relationship with Prince Charles are urged to email in their idea, with the inducement of a mystery Prospect prize for the most imaginative.
We’re also soliciting philosophical queries and dilemmas for AC Grayling to grapple with in the next issue of the magazine. No prizes on offer here, other than the warm glow of intellectual satisfaction that will wash over you on seeing your most troubling metaphysical problems elegantly resolved in 400 words. Send your suggestions in here.
Here at Prospect, we are much concerned with intellectuals—a word that has graced our cover several times, from this July’s symposium on Gordon Brown back to our October 2005 report on the world’s top 100 intellectuals. As such lists suggest, it is a term that inevitably invokes ideas of hierarchy and exceptionality, as well as that most troubling of black boxes, “taste.” An intellectual is more than a brilliant investigator of facts: he or she is an evaluator and a generator of ideas.
Clearly, discernment is a vital skill in any field, and the truly discerning are to be cherished. But just how robust an idea will “intellectualism” remain during this century of ubiquitous opinionising? As far as the English language is concerned, intellectuals began to exist in 1652—at least according to the OED, which gives that year for the first use of the word as a noun (meaning “a person having superior powers of intellect.”) Far older are, respectively, the Greek and Latin terms grammatikos and literatus, which mean “lettered” and refer to the class of people able to read and write. These gave English the word “literate” as early as 1432.
It is no coincidence that, while access to the world of letters was itself exceptional, it was enough simply to call someone literate to confirm their elite status; but that, as written culture inched towards mass participation, it became necessary to find new words for the “superior powers” of those whose opinions really counted—a trend enshrined in the nineteenth century’s shifting of the meaning of “intellectual” to describe public figures with opinions of great public worth. Although almost everyone may have been able to read and write, only a few could get published, and only a very few could get published in a manner that credited their words with weight.
Until a decade or so ago, this remained the case. We knew whose words were weighty because they were published accordingly. But things are changing. The masses are increasingly both seen and heard. The masses, in fact, are increasingly looking less like masses and more like millions of individual intellects with quite a lot to say. Nothing will change overnight, but trying to gaze twenty years into the future makes me wonder whether even several new words will be enough to keep a lot of the old hierarchies going.
(1652 was also the year in which the first coffee house opened in London. I’m sure there’s a thesis in that somewhere.)
In the news. In the New Statesman this week, Shiv Malik writes the cover story on the failed attacks; plus Shiraz Maher on terror suspect Bilal Abdulla. Maher wrote for Prospect last year on campus radicals.
Vegas, baby, Vegas! David Flusfeder kicks off his blog on the Daily Telegraph website about the Main Event poker tournament, which begins today. (Subscribers can read his Prospect article on poker here.)
On serious literature. Acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author Ursula Le Guin takes exception to one particular sentence in Slate’s review of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” by Michael Chabon.
Two new web pieces this week. Jack Thurston, trade expert and presenter of Resonance FM’s “The Bike Show,” looks forward to the Tour de France—which this weekend starts in London, for the first time in its 104-year history—with a review of three books published to mark the occasion. And Edward Lucas reviews Rosie Whitehouse’s Are We There Yet? Travels With My Frontline Family—an account of life as the wife of a war correspondent in the Balkans.
More on the Pirahã. For readers intrigued by Philip Oltermann’s article on the Brazilian tribe whose language appears to refute Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar, there’s more on the subject on the Edge website, including a talk by Daniel Everett.
Novelist David Mitchell interviewed. The Literary Saloon, the weblog of the Complete Review, has found three recent articles on Mitchell, in which he talks about his latest book, or at least talks about why he doesn’t want to talk about his latest book.
Philately for aliens. I don’t imagine that we’ll be linking to the Fortean Times very often, but I’ll make an exception for this feature on UFO-themed stamps.
I’ve started the week £50 better off thanks to a canny spread bet I had placed on Labour’s likely performance at the next general election. A few months ago, anticipating a “Brown bounce” once the chancellor moved into Number 10, I placed a bet “buying” Labour seats at 283, which meant that for every seat over that number that Labour gained at the next election, I would win my stake of £7 (Mike Smithson over at politicalbetting.com has a rather more eloquent explanation).
The good thing about spread markets is that you don’t need to wait for the outcome of the event in question to cash in—you can profit simply by taking advantage of the movement of the market. This is why I was able to make money from the Brown bounce without having any particular view on how Labour is likely to perform at the ballot box. Once the effect of the bounce had become clear in published opinion polls, the markets started to move in Labour’s favour, and I was able to “sell” my bet at 290, making myself a tidy profit of £49 (290-283=7, multiplied by my £7 stake).
Of course, had I turned out to be wrong about the Brown bounce and had Labour’s poll ratings continued to decline, I would have lost £7 for every seat under 283 I sold the bet at (though due to loss aversion I would probably have held off selling until the election itself, with possibly catastrophic results). This is one reason why spread betting is not for the faint-hearted—as I discovered when I made a disastrous move into cricket spreads during England’s test series against Pakistan last year. But I have done well out of political betting—in addition to my Brown bounty, I made a very tidy packet betting on Blair’s departure date after the 2005 election, when the reduction in Labour’s majority seemed to persuade punters that the PM would be out in little over a year—which suggests that a combination of knowledge, canniness and timing can be profitable in betting markets.
The more interesting question is whether betting markets are of any value in making predictions, in a “wisdom of crowds” sense. A gaggle of prominent American economists and political scientists recently published a statement calling for restrictions on prediction markets to be loosened, arguing that greater use of markets that yield payments for correct predictions would “substantially improve decision-making in the private and public sectors.” They point to the Iowa Electronic Market, which since 1988 has apparently predicted the results of US presidential elections better than opinion polls 75 per cent of the time.
Another Wimbledon, and another spate of articles lamenting the state of British tennis. This year, it seem, we’ve done extra-specially badly—never before have all our singles players been knocked out by the first Thursday. The boss of the LTA thinks our players are too fat and lazy to compete. But surely all this gloom is over-the-top. British tennis may not be in a wonderful state, but it is a damn sight healthier than it was when I was a keen junior player, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I remember those desperate days, when our hopes attached to the likes of John Lloyd, Jeremy Bates, Andrew Castle and Annabel Croft—players who never looked as if they had a hope of winning anything. Sure, at the moment we seem to have even less depth than we did then, especially in the women’s game. But we do have—in Andy Murray—a player who is capable of actually winning a Grand Slam (and who would surely have lasted beyond the first Thursday had he played). And before him we had Tim Henman, arguably the best male British player since Fred Perry. (Not to mention Greg Rusedski, although he doesn’t really count.)
People are always banging on about how elitist tennis is. I often play on public courts around London, and I see lots of black and Asian kids playing, many of whom are clearly extremely talented. In general, the standard of young players seems extremely high—certainly, much higher than when I was a junior. So I think we should cheer up a bit. The state of British tennis, for once, looks quite good.
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