andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1785 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I saw this excellent art show the other day, and it reminded me how much artistic talent is out there. I really have no idea whassup with those all-black canvases and the other stuff you see at modern art museums, given that there’s so much interesting new stuff being created every year. I see a big difference between art made by people who feel they have something they want to say, compared to art being made by people who feel they are supposed to make art because they’re artists. And there’s also the internal logic of art responding to other art, as Tom Wolfe discussed in The Painted Word.
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3 I see a big difference between art made by people who feel they have something they want to say, compared to art being made by people who feel they are supposed to make art because they’re artists. [sent-3, score-3.348]
4 And there’s also the internal logic of art responding to other art, as Tom Wolfe discussed in The Painted Word. [sent-4, score-1.263]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 1785 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-02-So much artistic talent
Introduction: I saw this excellent art show the other day, and it reminded me how much artistic talent is out there. I really have no idea whassup with those all-black canvases and the other stuff you see at modern art museums, given that there’s so much interesting new stuff being created every year. I see a big difference between art made by people who feel they have something they want to say, compared to art being made by people who feel they are supposed to make art because they’re artists. And there’s also the internal logic of art responding to other art, as Tom Wolfe discussed in The Painted Word.
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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
Introduction: Jed Dougherty points me to this opinion piece by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of art at Northwestern University, who writes: Artists are defensive these days because in May the House passed an amendment to a bill eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts. Colleagues, especially those who have received N.E.A. grants, will loathe me for saying this, but just this once I’m sympathetic with the anti-intellectual Republicans behind this amendment. Why? The bill incited a national conversation about a subject that has troubled me for decades: the government — disproportionately — supports art that I do not like. Actually, just about nobody likes modern art. All those soup cans—what’s that all about? The stuff they have in museums nowadays, my 4-year-old could do better than that. Two-thirds of so-called modern artists are drunk and two-thirds are frauds. And, no, I didn’t get my math wrong—there’s just a lot of overlap among these categories! It’s an open secret in my
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Introduction: I opened the newspaper today (recall that this blog is on an approximately one-month delay) to see a moderately horrifying story about art appraisers who are deterred by fear of lawsuits from expressing an opinion about possible forgeries. Maybe this trend will come to science too? Perhaps Brett Pelham will sue Uri Simonsohn for the pain, suffering, and loss of income occurring from the questioning of his Dennis the dentist paper ? Or maybe I’ll be sued by some rogue sociologist for publicly questioning his data dredging? Anyway, what amused me about the NYT article on art forgery was that two of the artists featured in the discussion were . . . Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein! Warhol is famous for diluting the notion of the unique art object and for making works of art in a “Factory,” and Lichtenstein is famous for ripping off the style and imagery of comic book artists. It’s funny for the two of them, of all people, to come up in a discussion of authenticity. Or maybe it
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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: I saw this excellent art show the other day, and it reminded me how much artistic talent is out there. I really have no idea whassup with those all-black canvases and the other stuff you see at modern art museums, given that there’s so much interesting new stuff being created every year. I see a big difference between art made by people who feel they have something they want to say, compared to art being made by people who feel they are supposed to make art because they’re artists. And there’s also the internal logic of art responding to other art, as Tom Wolfe discussed in The Painted Word.
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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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Introduction: Good stuff.
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Introduction: Good stuff , as always, from Laura Wattenberg.
Introduction: Jed Dougherty points me to this opinion piece by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of art at Northwestern University, who writes: Artists are defensive these days because in May the House passed an amendment to a bill eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts. Colleagues, especially those who have received N.E.A. grants, will loathe me for saying this, but just this once I’m sympathetic with the anti-intellectual Republicans behind this amendment. Why? The bill incited a national conversation about a subject that has troubled me for decades: the government — disproportionately — supports art that I do not like. Actually, just about nobody likes modern art. All those soup cans—what’s that all about? The stuff they have in museums nowadays, my 4-year-old could do better than that. Two-thirds of so-called modern artists are drunk and two-thirds are frauds. And, no, I didn’t get my math wrong—there’s just a lot of overlap among these categories! It’s an open secret in my
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Introduction: From Bannerjee and Duflo, “The Experimental Approach to Development Economics,” Annual Review of Economics (2009): One issue with the explicit acknowledgment of randomization as a fair way to allocate the program is that implementers may find that the easiest way to present it to the community is to say that an expansion of the program is planned for the control areas in the future (especially when such is indeed the case, as in phased-in design). I can’t quite figure out whether Bannerjee and Duflo are saying that they would lie and tell people that an expansion is planned when it isn’t, or whether they’re deploring that other people do it. I’m not bothered by a lot of the deception in experimental research–for example, I think the Milgram obedience experiment was just fine–but somehow the above deception bothers me. It just seems wrong to tell people that an expansion is planned if it’s not. P.S. Overall the article is pretty good. My only real problem with it is that
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