How to be precise

    Slicing the ginger root for my tea yesterday urged me to consider why the verb "gingerly" is derived from the plant. What does it mean exactly to take delicate action upon a subject? The online thesaurus provided "precisely" and "accordingly" as its most equitable synonyms, but I can't help but feel dissatisfied with its supposed parallels. To take action gingerly, yes, entails a certain precaution, but not necessarily a causation for accuracy. It means to move small, to move dearly, to take gentle care with the way you have chosen to perform such action, more so for the sake of feeling rather than production of correctness. I've recently taken it upon myself to re-read Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years, half the reason being that I didn't fully comprehend it the first time, the other half being that I strongly regret having spent my adolescence in a terrible hurry to read all the books. I must unlearn the predicate that you must read everything in order to begin. Reflecting on how I have performed gingerly within my own life, I think a great deal about personal debt. One of the strongest, most effective ways to reduce the induced debt of generosity is to act gingerly. To master the art of accepting a gift so gingerly, that the sender cannot discern the gift does not belong to them anymore, is the most effective method for discharging personal debt. But how must one differ between debt and obligation?

    An excerpt I do not recall reading the first time was about the peculiarity of early Celtic legal systems. A wildly curious fact about early Irish systems was that the concept of honor could be precisely quantified. Every free person had their "honor price", the price they were obliged to pay for insulting another's dignity. For instance, the honor price of a king, was seven cumals or seven slave girls. Such was the designation for any sacred being, also attributed to a bishop or a master poet. One had to pay an honor price if one simply insulted someone of any degree of importance, especially at the humiliation of another through satire. Mockery was considered an incredibly refined art in Ireland and the most talented poets were considered close to magicians, with talents able to weaponize one's entire dignity, thus life.  

    Jeff Koons. Simultaneous brand and art world and supposed apocryphal legend, I've often heard him referred to as the Ronald Reagan of sculpture. His entire legacy forcibly retains the concept of art as a commodity and he refers to his career history as a commodities broker frequently by using Wall Street phrases that elicit disgust in the art community like "increasing my market share," to describe why he places such reactionary work in so many gallery shows. He is considered by many as the masterful poet the culture has bestowed the honor of satirizing contemporary materialism. In 1991, Koons married Ilona Staller, known as La Cicciolina, a Hungarian pornography star and member of the Italian parliament and transmogrified their relationship into a sculpture painting series depicting them in a variety of lovemaking positions. One work in particular, titled Red Butt, is a 90 in x 60 in silkscreen depicting the artist having anal sex with his wife. In 2003, Christie's sold one of the four versions of Red Butt for $369,000; there were nine bidders. Some consider it revolutionarily ingenious, of equating the new to the extraordinary. Some consider his career a satirization of art, seeing Koons as the demonaic consequence delivered upon us for our eternal sin of pedestaling Warhol the Misogynistic Sexist. I can't really find myself agreeing with either. 

    I have noticed that for contemporary artists like Koons and many critics, beauty seems to be a discredited idea. The modernist message has regurgitated over and over that art must show life as it is, that if you aim for beauty, you will end up with kitsch. This is a mistake, however. Kitsch tells you how nice you are, it offers easy feelings for the cheap. Rather, I believe we reach beauty through setting our interests aside and letting the world dawn on us. There are many ways of doing this, but art is undeniably the most significant, since it presents us with the image of human life, both our own life and all that life means to us—it asks us to look on it directly, not for what we can take from it, but for what we can give to it. So what does it truly mean to create in a system that attempts to quantify a beauty that cleans us of our self-obsession? To see how humans attempt to recork the opened wine bottle, to measure such subject in fiscally quantitative terms is equal parts fascinating and horrifying.

      

     When writers claim that contemporary art as an investment has outperformed the larger art market over the past quarter of a century, or that contemporary art has done better than gold or UK government bonds, they are usually citing a research study called the Mei Moses Index. Jianping Mei and Michael Moses are researchers at NYU who have developed an index measuring art price trends. The Index has a numerous flaws (too many to account for in a mere blog post), the main one being that it measures only paintings that have sold at least twice at auction. The Index excludes work that auction houses have refused to accept for resale, which means that only successful artists, thus those with rising values at auction, are counted. This is analogous to looking only at stocks from the S&P 500 Index that have increased in value  and concluding that investment in shares is a good thing. The Mei Moses Index does not include private sales, dealer sales, or sales at art fairs and its price indices are built based on a model for which the price is the function of the fixed characteristics of the work (its quality? determined by "critics"?) and elements that vary with the most current culture crisis. Two approaches have been proposed: the repeat-sales approach which is based on data for works that have been sold more than once, with the proposed price index controlling for the heterogeneity of the work, and the index measuring the change in price over time, with the quality held constant. The second approach is the hedonic modeling method. A third approach is called hybrid modeling, which is a mix of the two and combines information in repeat sales and on single sales in one model. Data on artworks is provided by different sources. The Artfact and Artprice are among the strongest in terms of the number of artists in their database, which is reported as 500,000 and 405,000 respectively. However Artfact covers both fine and decorative art from 1986 to the present; whereas Artprice covers fine art only, from 1960 to the present. The changes in the dealer market coincide with the cultural and societal changes taking place after the financial crisis with more privacy and the ability to remain anonymous. Now, the art markets are depending more on quality trust and becoming an integral part of the alternative investments portfolio. The increase in the art consuming population and dematerialization of the art affirmed by elite critics that have established themselves as the eternal verdict through unknown standards, and the growing museum industry are all contributing to such maturity. 

     Old White Guy George Gilder says in Wealth and Poverty that "those who felt that money could not simply be created were mired in an old-fashioned, godless materialism did not realize that just as God could create something out of nothing, His greatest gift to humanity was creativity itself, which proceeded in exactly the same way. Economists who distrust religion will always fail to comprehend the modes of worship by which progress is achieved. Chance is the foundation of change and the vessel of the divine." Investors can indeed create value out of nothing by their willingness to accept the risk entailed in placing their faith in others' creativity because the creation of money for him was a gift, a blessing, a channeling of grace; a promise, yes, but not one that can be fulfilled, even if the bonds are continually rolled over, because even if the bonds are continuously rolled over, because through faith ("in God we trust" again) their value becomes reality.     

    Some have tried variously to separate criticism and self-consciousness. To say that the subject of criticism is the self and the other is to say there is but a single subject, not two. If criticism is the skeptical narration of our dreams, how are we to address the vulgarity of the expression: "the universality of criticism"? Artists without exception seek the particular. It has never been the artist's desire to set forth a truth that holds good in all worlds, in all contexts. Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them, by giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they are and will remain forever incoherent. Incoherence exists, which is why composition—art—exists. Visual artists, poets, and musicians are releasing free content online faster than ever before. Brat Tromeol says that "there is an athleticism to these aesthetic outpourings, with artists taking on the creative act as a way of exercising other muscle groups, bodybuilding a personal brand or self-mythology, a concept or a formal vocabulary. Images, music, and words become drips in a pool of art sweat, puddling online for all to view. The long-derided notion of the “masterpiece” has reached its logical antithesis with the aesthlete: a cultural producer who trumps craft and contemplative brooding with immediacy and rapid production." 

If poetry, if satire, if prolonged care, if art is the "mutual permeation" of the "world of the body" and the "world of the spirit", then description is an inexact, reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are. We are afraid, perhaps, that without our images and methods, to reduce creation without gingerly intent, chaos will break loose; worse still, that unless we use images of some kind, ourselves, our own creation will itself be chaos.