andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1553 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Jay Livingston writes : I know that in art, quality and value are two very different things. Still, I had to stop and wonder when I read about Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who in 2004 paid $8.3 million for a painting attributed to Mark Rothko that they now say is a worthless fake. One day a painting is worth $8.3 million; the next day, the same painting – same quality, same capacity to give aesthetic pleasure or do whatever it is that art does – is “worthless.”* Art forgery also makes me wonder about the buyer’s motive. If the buyer wanted only to have and to gaze upon something beautiful, something with artistic merit, then a fake Rothko is no different than a real Rothko. It seems more likely that what the buyer wants is to own something valuable – i.e., something that costs a lot. Displaying your brokerage account statements is just too crude and obvious. What the high-end art market offers is a kind of money laundering. Objects that are rare and therefore expensive
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Jay Livingston writes : I know that in art, quality and value are two very different things. [sent-1, score-0.069]
2 Still, I had to stop and wonder when I read about Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who in 2004 paid $8. [sent-2, score-0.057]
3 3 million for a painting attributed to Mark Rothko that they now say is a worthless fake. [sent-3, score-0.332]
4 3 million; the next day, the same painting – same quality, same capacity to give aesthetic pleasure or do whatever it is that art does – is “worthless. [sent-5, score-0.636]
5 ”* Art forgery also makes me wonder about the buyer’s motive. [sent-6, score-0.129]
6 If the buyer wanted only to have and to gaze upon something beautiful, something with artistic merit, then a fake Rothko is no different than a real Rothko. [sent-7, score-0.478]
7 It seems more likely that what the buyer wants is to own something valuable – i. [sent-8, score-0.311]
8 Displaying your brokerage account statements is just too crude and obvious. [sent-11, score-0.077]
9 What the high-end art market offers is a kind of money laundering. [sent-12, score-0.385]
10 Objects that are rare and therefore expensive, like a real Rothko, transform money into something more acceptable – personal qualities like good taste, refinement, and sophistication. [sent-13, score-0.394]
11 I’m in sympathy with Livingston’s general point—I too am happy to mock people who happen to have more money than I do—and Rothko’s art has always seemed pretty pointless to me. [sent-14, score-0.496]
12 I mean, sure, it can look fine on the wall, but it hardly seems like something special to me. [sent-15, score-0.156]
13 But I think Livingston’s going too far, in that he’s forgetting the natural human desire not to get ripped off. [sent-16, score-0.193]
14 Let’s set Rothko aside and consider something I really want: a 10-hour clock: I’m interested in this not because I’m some sort of French-revolution buff but just because I love clocks. [sent-17, score-0.104]
15 ) diner-style clock that says Probability on the top and Statistics on the bottom. [sent-19, score-0.533]
16 So when I saw the 10-hours-a-day, 100-minutes-an-hour, 100-seconds-a-minute clock in the Museé des Arts et Métiers, I had to have it. [sent-20, score-0.61]
17 Malheureusement, there aren’t a lot of these clocks floating around, and they cost a lot. [sent-21, score-0.126]
18 But suppose I find a beat-up one of these and decide to plunk down $10,000 for it and proudly place it on my wall, partly for the joy of having a 10-hour clock to look at, and partly for the thrill of having this old object. [sent-22, score-0.891]
19 Then some art expert comes by our apartment and tells me it’s a fake. [sent-23, score-0.322]
20 Not because the clock is “a form of money laundering” but because somebody ripped me off. [sent-25, score-0.788]
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Introduction: Jay Livingston writes : I know that in art, quality and value are two very different things. Still, I had to stop and wonder when I read about Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who in 2004 paid $8.3 million for a painting attributed to Mark Rothko that they now say is a worthless fake. One day a painting is worth $8.3 million; the next day, the same painting – same quality, same capacity to give aesthetic pleasure or do whatever it is that art does – is “worthless.”* Art forgery also makes me wonder about the buyer’s motive. If the buyer wanted only to have and to gaze upon something beautiful, something with artistic merit, then a fake Rothko is no different than a real Rothko. It seems more likely that what the buyer wants is to own something valuable – i.e., something that costs a lot. Displaying your brokerage account statements is just too crude and obvious. What the high-end art market offers is a kind of money laundering. Objects that are rare and therefore expensive
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Introduction: This looks cool: Ten years ago researchers in America took two groups of three-year-olds and showed them a blob of paint on a canvas. Children who were told that the marks were the result of an accidental spillage showed little interest. The others, who had been told that the splodge of colour had been carefully created for them, started to refer to it as “a painting”. Now that experiment . . . has gone on to form part of the foundation of an influential new book that questions the way in which we respond to art. . . . The book, which is subtitled The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, is not an attack on modern or contemporary art and Bloom says fans of more traditional art are not capable of making purely aesthetic judgments either. “I don’t have a strong position about the art itself,” he said this weekend. “But I do have a strong position about why we actually like it.” This sounds fascinating. But I’m skeptical about this part: Humans are incapable of just getti
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