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markfrankel18

Sotheby's and Giacometti's hundred-million-dollar "Chariot" - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...dred-million-dollar-giacometti

TOK arts economics branding

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Nov 14 - Cached
  • The most interesting aspect of the hundred-million-dollar Giacometti is that it isn’t unique. “Chariot” comes from an edition of six—each of which, we can now assume, is worth roughly the same amount.
  • It’s entirely rational to think that value goes down as edition size goes up—that if a sculpture is in an edition of six, then it will be worth less than if it were unique or in an edition of two. But the art market is weird, and doesn’t work like that—or, at least, it doesn’t work like that anymore, since it has become an extension of the luxury-goods market. In order for an artist to have value as a brand, he has to have a certain level of recognizability—and for that he needs a critical mass of work. Artists with low levels of output (Morandi, say) generally sell for lower prices than artists with high levels of output—the prime example being Andy Warhol. The more squeegee paintings that Gerhard Richter makes, the more they’re worth. In the case of “Chariot,” the other versions of the sculpture don’t dilute the value of the art so much as ratify it.
markfrankel18

Giving Yourself Away Online - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ving-away-personal-data-online

TOK technology privacy

shared by markfrankel18 on 16 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Recently, at the Dumbo Arts Festival, in Brooklyn, an artist named Risa Puno stood at a table and gave out cookies in exchange for personal information such as a driver’s license number, a mother’s maiden name, or the last four digits of a Social Security number. This information was entered on a form that assigned values to various pieces of identifying data—one point for your first pet’s name, three points for your home address, five points for your fingerprints, and so on—and different types of cookies required different numbers of points.
  • Maybe, instead of asking why people don’t react rationally to online threats, we should be asking whether it’s possible to react rationally to the contradictory ways in which we engage with the Web
markfrankel18

What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...ember-life-before-the-internet

TOK technology internet

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Aug 14 - No Cached
sleggettisp liked it
  • Harris takes a different path from those that have come before. Instead of a broad investigation into the effects on constant connectivity on human behaviour, Harris looks at a very specific demographic: people born before 1985, or the very opposite of the “millennial” demographic coveted by advertisers and targeted by new media outlets.
  • It was neither better nor worse than the world we live in today. Like technology, it just was.
  • That means being able to notice things like the reduction of interactions to numbers, and how that translates into quantifications of human worth. “I think it has to do with this notion of online accountability. That is, noticing that you actually count seems to be related to a sense of self worth,” he says over the phone from Toronto, where he is based. “So it’s like if a tweet gets retweeted a couple of hundred times, that must mean that my thoughts are worthy. If my Facebook photo is ‘liked,’ that must mean I am good looking. One of the things that concerns me about a media diet that is overly online, is that we lose the ability to decide for ourselves what we think about who we are.” +
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Instead of wondering what should I do, we wonder what did I miss.
sleggettisp

A Picture Of Language: The Fading Art Of Diagramming Sentences - 0 views

www.npr.org/...g-art-of-diagramming-sentences

language

shared by sleggettisp on 23 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • sleggettisp on 23 Aug 14
     
    When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words - not lines. But sentence diagramming brings geometry into grammar. If you weren't taught to diagram a sentence, this might sound a little zany. But the practice has a long - and controversial - history in U.S. schools.
markfrankel18

As If Music Could Do No Harm - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...music-harm

TOK arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Contemplating such works, we can think in two modes at once, the aesthetic and the historical-political—generally a wise way to navigate the labyrinth of art. To debate whether politics is always present or always absent is to play a parlor game irrelevant to the complex, ever-shifting reality in which both artists and their audiences reside.
  • There is much in Wagner that has nothing to do with Hitler; there is much in Wagner that contradicts Hitler. That said, I would never dream of suggesting that Wagner’s operas should be detached absolutely and utterly from politics. It cannot be done; it can never be done.
markfrankel18

Stunted: The White Flags on the Brooklyn Bridge - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...stunted

TOK arts classification

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Illegal public art is in the news. The most notorious instance this summer was the switch of flags on the Brooklyn Bridge, by two German artists, from the Stars and Stripes to all-white versions of the same. Others include a Canadian artist’s scrawls, partly in blood, on a wall in the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum and, in Moscow, the painting of a star ornament atop a Stalin-era tower, in Ukrainian national colors. Internationally, the British midnight muralist Banksy continues his waggish depredations, rivalled of late by a female upstart called Bambi, who likewise stencils images, only with a sexy-feminist spin. The over-all phenomenon could use a name—I propose Stunt art—and some analysis, starting with distinctions.
  • As a category of volunteer art, Stunt art borders the genres of spray-can graffiti and spectacular illegal sport, such as scaling or parachuting from tall buildings.
  • Stuntism is to art as weeds are to horticulture: plants in the wrong place. Authorities, social or botanical, define the wrongness, which becomes more arbitrary the more you think about it. Some weeds are as lovely as tulips. A superb gardener I know welcomes the sceptered majesty of common mullein (distinct from the mannerly hybrid varieties) wherever it opts to sprout. So may it be with Stunt art, in a time given to fanatical constraints on human-natural cussedness.
markfrankel18

The Pleasure of Reading to Impress Yourself - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...pleasure-of-reading

TOK arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 14 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • It’s a common and easy enough distinction, this separation of books into those we read because we want to and those we read because we have to, and it serves as a useful marketing trope for publishers, especially when they are trying to get readers to take this book rather than that one to the beach. But it’s a flawed and pernicious division.
  • But there are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one’s range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar world, and being led into empathy with a consciousness very different from one’s own; the pleasure of knowing what others have already thought it worth knowing, and entering a larger conversation.
markfrankel18

Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity | Talk Video | TED.com - 2 views

www.ted.com/..._language_transformed_humanity

language TOK biology

shared by markfrankel18 on 11 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.
markfrankel18

David Byrne: "Do you really think people are going to keep putting time and effort into... - 0 views

www.salon.com/..._if_no_one_is_making_any_money

TOK arts imagination

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • I’m not saying that the artist doesn’t put their feelings into it, or any part of their biography, but that there’s a lot of constraints and considerations and templates that they work with – unconscious decisions or constraints put upon them that guide what they’re going to do.Otherwise, why didn’t people in the 14th century start writing full-blown operas with giant orchestras and whatever?” These things just weren’t available to them. Our imaginations are constrained by all these other things — which is a good thing. There’s kind of a process of evolution that goes on where the creative part of you adapts to whatever circumstances are available to you. And if you decide you want to make pop songs, or whatever, there’s a format. You can push the boundaries pretty far, but it’s still a recognized thing. And if you’re going to do something at Lincoln Center, there’s a pretty prescribed set of things you are going to do. You can push that form, but kind of from inside the genre. So I guess I’m saying that a lot of creative decisions are kind of made for us, and the trick is then working creatively within those constraints.
markfrankel18

Why Do People Persist in Believing Things That Just Aren't True? : The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...ings-that-just-arent-true.html

TOK bias reason

shared by markfrankel18 on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • One thing he learned early on is that not all errors are created equal. Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct. Take astronomy. If someone asked you to explain the relationship between the Earth and the sun, you might say something wrong: perhaps that the sun rotates around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. A friend who understands astronomy may correct you. It’s no big deal; you simply change your belief. But imagine living in the time of Galileo, when understandings of the Earth-sun relationship were completely different, and when that view was tied closely to ideas of the nature of the world, the self, and religion. What would happen if Galileo tried to correct your belief?
markfrankel18

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science | Mother Jones - 0 views

m.motherjones.com/...denial-science-chris-mooney

TOK bias reason emotion science psychology

shared by markfrankel18 on 06 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • "A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."
  • The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.
  • In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • A key question—and one that's difficult to answer—is how "irrational" all this is. On the one hand, it doesn't make sense to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information.
  • Okay, so people gravitate toward information that confirms what they believe, and they select sources that deliver it. Same as it ever was, right? Maybe, but the problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or context, or "narrowcast" and often highly ideological media that have relatively small, like-minded audiences. Those basic human survival skills of ours, says Michigan's Arthur Lupia, are "not well-adapted to our information age."
markfrankel18

Creativity Creep - The New Yorker - 3 views

www.newyorker.com/...creativity-creep

creativity TOK arts language

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 Sep 14 - Cached
  • How did we come to care so much about creativity? The language surrounding it, of unleashing, unlocking, awakening, developing, flowing, and so on, makes it sound like an organic and primordial part of ourselves which we must set free—something with which it’s natural to be preoccupied. But it wasn’t always so; people didn’t always care so much about, or even think in terms of, creativity.
  • It was Romanticism, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which took the imagination and elevated it, giving us the “creative imagination.”
  • How did creativity transform from a way of being to a way of doing? The answer, essentially, is that it became a scientific subject, rather than a philosophical one.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • All of this measuring and sorting has changed the way we think about creativity. For the Romantics, creativity’s center of gravity was in the mind. But for us, it’s in whatever the mind decides to share—that is, in the product. It’s not enough for a person to be “imaginative” or “creative” in her own consciousness. We want to know that the product she produces is, in some sense, “actually” creative; that the creative process has come to a workable conclusion. To today’s creativity researchers, the “self-styled creative person,” with his inner, unverifiable, possibly unproductive creativity, is a kind of bogeyman; a great deal of time is spent trampling on the scarf of the lone, Romantic genius. Instead, attention is paid to the systems of influence, partnership, power, funding, and reception that surround creativity—the social structures, in other words, that enable managers to reap the fruits of creative labor. Often, this is imagined to be some sort of victory over Romanticism and its fusty, pretentious, élitist ideas about creativity.
  • But this kind of thinking misses the point of the Romantic creative imagination. The Romantics weren’t obsessed with who created what, because they thought you could be creative without “creating” anything other than the liveliness in your own head.
  • It sounds bizarre, in some ways, to talk about creativity apart from the creation of a product. But that remoteness and strangeness is actually a measure of how much our sense of creativity has taken on the cast of our market-driven age
  • Thus the rush, in my pile of creativity books, to reconceive every kind of life style as essentially creative—to argue that you can “unleash your creativity” as an investor, a writer, a chemist, a teacher, an athlete, or a coach.
  • Among the many things we lost when we abandoned the Romantic idea of creativity, the most valuable may have been the idea of creativity’s stillness. If you’re really creative, really imaginative, you don’t have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel.
markfrankel18

Everyone's Trying Really Hard Not to Call the Germanwings Co-Pilot a Terrorist - Mic - 3 views

mic.com/...rmanwings-co-pilot-a-terrorist

TOK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Daniel Lamken on 28 Mar 15
     
    The Breivek analogy in this article has some resonance to the notion of media reporting to a certain audience--in this case, western/white, though first impressions necessarily need revision. At this time, we don't know enough about Lubitz, a curiosity in this instant-access age of information. Even his now inaccessible facebook information reduces our impression to a seemingly relaxed tourist enjoying the backdrop of the Golden Gate bridge. To the point of the article, we crave to have more 'backdrop', more cues to connect any dots. Some crave to have preconceptions confirmed, others to reverse common assumptions. For my part, I jotted first impressions via poetry, which doesn't purport veracity but should still, as John Keats reminds in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', probe to know beauty and truth, the former of which defies understanding in this event. Thus, my first impressions: http://lostmenagerie.blogspot.cz/2015/03/meanwhile-tuesday.html
markfrankel18

Fighting Whitewashed History With MIT's Diversity Hackers | Atlas Obscura - 0 views

www.atlasobscura.com/...ry-with-mits-diversity-hackers

TOK history bias technology

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Since Wikipedia is a compendium of information that already exists elsewhere, it reflects this long-standing bias. In addition, Wikipedia’s editorship–the tens of millions of volunteers who add, tinker with, and argue about articles–is not particularly diverse. “It’s largely younger, largely male, largely white,” Ayers says. “And people often write about their own interests, which is natural and makes sense. But what that means is that we have a lot of articles about software and famous military figures, and not a lot about, say, traditional women’s handicrafts or activists in the developing world.” For a site that aims to “really reflect the fullness of our collective human experience,” Ayers says, this is a big issue.
  • As the hackers dig in, roadblocks keep popping up–some common to all historical efforts, others unique to this one. One hacker, trying to separate a psychologist couple into two independent pages (“it’s like she’s glued to her husband’s side!”) has difficulty finding sources that credit the female half of the pair with anything. Another recalls making a prior effort, only to find her changes immediately reversed by the overzealous editors Hyland was talking about.
markfrankel18

The Price of Denialism - NYTimes.com - 1 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...the-rules-of-denialism

TOK science reason bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • In other words, we need to be able to tell when we believe or disbelieve in something based on high standards of evidence and when we are just engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning and letting our opinions take over. When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do this because at some level it upsets us to think that the theory is true.
  • So how to tell a fact from an opinion? By the time we sit down to evaluate the evidence for a scientific theory, it is probably too late. If we take the easy path in our thinking, it eventually becomes a habit. If we lie to others, sooner or later we may believe the lie ourselves. The real battle comes in training ourselves to embrace the right attitudes about belief formation in the first place, and for this we need to do a little philosophy.
markfrankel18

Facebook math problem: Why PEMDAS doesn't always give a clear answer. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...ive_a_clear_answer.single.html

TOK math

shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • You might expect 10 ÷ 5 is the same as 10/5 is the same as 10 over a 5 with a vinculum between them, but each has its own eccentricities. We’ve already noted that ÷ can mean “divide the number on the left by the number on the right” or “divide the expression on the left by the expression on the right.” But it gets really tricky when people assume that a slash replaces a vinculum. Does ab/cd = (ab)÷(cd) or ((ab)÷c)÷d? Does a/b/c mean (a)÷(b)÷(c) or a÷(b/c) or (a/b)÷c? (Answer: Use some parentheses!)
  • The bottom line is that “order of operations” conventions are not universal truths in the same way that the sum of 2 and 2 is always 4. Conventions evolve throughout history in response to cultural and technological shifts.
markfrankel18

He's a Creep, but Wow, What an Artist! - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...artists-assault-fans.html

TOK arts ethics

shared by markfrankel18 on 26 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 26 Nov 17
     
    "It's an age-old question, and it re-emerges with the revelations about sexual predations that men with power inflicted on women and, in some instances, other men: Can we appreciate art even if it was created by someone who behaved deplorably?"
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