Art in the Age of Commerce: The Mona Lisa Curse

What television has to do with art heists, JFK and Andy Warhol.

Over the past half-century, renowned art critic Robert Hughes has watched a certain story unfold in culture — a story of how commerce changed our relationship to art and, in the process, what art stands for as cultural currency. In The Mona Lisa Curse, an ambitious documentary temporarily available on YouTube in its entirety, Hughes — curmudgeonly and keenly insightful as ever — traces the evolution of the art world’s devolution. From archival footage of Hughes, once a suave TIME critic, in his 1960’s prime to insider accounts of some of the greatest art events and deals of today, the series is as much an exemplar of investigative journalism as it is an absorbing and eye-opening piece of cultural storytelling.

I’ve seen with growing disgust the fictionalization of art, the vast inflation of prices, and the effect of this upon artists and museums. The entanglement of big money with art has become a curse on how art is made, controlled and, above all, in the way that it’s experienced. And this curse has infected the entire art world.”

Apart from drugs, art is the biggest unregulated market in the world, with contemporary art sales estimated at around $18 billion a year, boosted by regimens of new-rich collectors and serviced by a growing army of advisors, dealers and auctioneers. As Andy Warhol once observed, ‘Good business is the best art.'”

The Kennedys managed to turn the Mona Lisa into a kind of 15th-century television set — instead of 1.5 million people looking at one image flashed on 1.5 million screens, you had them all looking at it on one screen, which was the picture itself, and that was the only difference. They didn’t come to look at the Mona Lisa, they came in order to have seen it. And there is a crucial distinction, since one is reality and experience, and the other one is simply phantom.”

via VSL

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Fault Line Living: The World’s Most Dangerous Landscapes to Live

Geysers, mud pots, and what Barba Papa has to do with the benefits of geothermal energy.

Fault lines are cracks in Earth’s crusts where tectonic plates converge. As you’d expect, these areas have an extraordinarily propensity for earthquakes due to the constant geodesic activity going on beneath. And yet millions of people around the world live on and around fault lines, in a constant state of alertness, with the sound of the earthquake drill alarm growing more familiar than the doorbell.

Faul Line Living is a 15,000-mile expedition from Iceland to Iran documenting the lives of people who live along the world’s most notorious fault lines. The multi-media project explores the human stories that populate these high-risk natural environments, working with school students, seismologists and citizens of each country along the way to better understand how different communities adapt to the challenges of life in fault zones.

Broken jug, damaged in the 1976 earthquake at Kopaska, belonging to Jon Halldorsson

The Blue Lagoon – despite the wind and rain, the warm waters of the Blue Lagoon provide a fillip to tourists and locals alike

Faul Line Living won the 2010 Go Beyond bursary from the UK’s Royal Geographical Society and Land Rover, a £10,000 award encouraging winners to push past their own limits as a way of promoting a wider understanding and appreciation of geography.

Fun after the rain

Steaming mud pots at Namafjall

On July 31, the UK-based team — Tamsin Davies, Serena Davies and Adam Whitaker — embarked upon their journey into these collision zones of nature and humanity. For 12 weeks, they will drive across the UK, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, learning to use a seismometer and delving into the social anthropology of fault line living through photography, interviews and real-time mapping.

Honeycomb basalt formations at Dimmuborgir

Barba Papa house at Seysdisfjordur

Explore the project’s breathtaking gallery and follow along vicariously on Twitter. Meanwhile, keep yourself grounded by appreciating the geological stability of your own locale.

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Everyone’s Favorite Guessing Game: 7 Must-See What’s My Line Episodes

What girdles have to do with civic activism.

In the 1950’s, the popular TV gameshow What’s My Line? cemented America’s relationship with television as an entertainment medium and a voyeuristic window into celebrity culture. The premise of the show was simple: In each episode, a contestant would appear in front of a panel of blindfolded culture pundits — with few exceptions, a regular lineup of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, actress Arlene Francis, Random House founder Bennett Cerf, and a fourth guest panelist — who would try to guess his or her “line” of work or, in the case of famous “mystery guests,” the person’s identity, by asking exactly 10 yes-or-no questions. A contestant won if he or she presented the panel with 10 “no” answers.

Over the 17-year run of the show, nearly every iconic cultural luminary of the era, from presidents to pop stars, appeared as a mystery guest. Today, we’ve curated 7 must-see What’s My Line? appearances by some of history’s sharpest minds and most compelling creators.

SALVADOR DALI

In a WML episode that aired on January 20, 1952, Salvador Dalí is assigned the line “artist” and identified as “self-employed.” But the real comedic genius of the footage is that the great creative cross-pollinator answers nearly all questions in the affirmative, to the audience’s exponential amusement, not with the intention of misleading the panelists but merely as a reflection of his vast intellectual curiosity and creative output — our kind of character.

There’s nothing this man doesn’t do! What we have to guess is an all-around man.”

WALT DISNEY

On November 11, 1956 — just a few months after the grand opening of Disneyland — Walt Disney appeared as the mystery guest on WML. One particularly interesting piece of the conversation unfolds when Daly asks Disney’s opinion of television, which he had just recently begun dabbling in.

Well, it’s wonderful. You get to reach people in a sort of an immediate way. With pictures, you work for years and then it’s quite a while before you know how what you’re working on is going to come out, how it’s going to be received, but with television you know, well, in a very short time.”

We’re left wondering what Disney would make of the Internet, with its even more instant gratification yet ever-harder to decipher impact.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

From the impressive pretend-accents and speech impediments to the priceless facial expressions to the facetious disregard for the show’s rules by dodging yes/no questions with lengthy, Yoda-esque answers, Hitchcock’s performance on WML is just that — a performance, and an outstanding one at that.

I was hoping to see Marilyn Monroe here tonight, but I didn’t hear any ooh’s and ahh’s, so I take it you are not Marilyn Monroe. Is this correct?” Hitchcock: “It is impossible.”

Hitchcock’s humor is unparalleled and particularly fascinating in contrast with the dark, often grim undertones of his films.

Daly: “Did you ever make a picture in which you haven’t appeared, in one time or another?” Hitchcock: “The indignity of being a ham is thrust upon me.”

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

In 1954, an elderly yet razor-sharp Eleanor Roosevelt took her seat at WML for a near-silent performance.

Are you now or have you ever been associated with politics?” “The answer to that would have to be a ‘yes’ … but that is also to advise you that, in one way or another, almost every good citizen in this country is associated with politics.”

Well said, Mr. Daly, well said. A powerful statement on civic engagement, delivered with a wink, is just the kind of commentary that made WML as much an entertainment brand as it was a pipeline for the social, political and cultural ideas that moved the era forward.

JEAN DESMOND, GIRDLE TESTER

To step away from the celebrity focus of WML for a moment, let’s return to the show’s original roots — having panelists guess an ordinary person’s occupation, or “line.” To keep things interesting, WML would invite contestants with unusual, bizarre and downright wildcard occupations, from Marilyn Monroe’s calendar salesman to this professional girdle-tester, who actually wins the game by getting all 10 “no” answers.

Judging by that answer, may I assume that this product is not edible?” Desmond: “You’re right, not edible.”

Oh, dear sir, if only you had lived to see the advances in… materials innovation.

LUCILLE BALL

Lucille Ball, the woman who arguably single-handedly catapulted the sitcom genre into its pop culture pedestal, is both witty and charming in her

Perhaps the most priceless moment of this clip, however, is a subtle one that becomes a living hallmark of the medium’s technological deficiency: The telling question, which exposes Ball’s identity, asked on black-and-white national television:

Are you a dazzling redhead?”

JOHN DALY

The final episode of WML aired on September 3, 1967. Besides its grand-finale status, what makes is particularly notable is that on it, host John Daly himself is the mystery guest, an exercise in meta-comedy long before meta was the hottest hipster humor.

The heritage of WML poses one interesting question: In its heyday, the show was essentially the only media property that could “have” any celebrity or cultural figure. The one entity no one said “no” to. And much of this was due to the involvement of Random House founder Bennett Cerf who, through his deep connections in the journalism and media world, was within a few degrees of separation from just about any public figure.

Nearly half a century later, after an epidemic of media fragmentation and audience erosion, we’re left wondering what contemporary culture’s version of WML is, this can’t-say-no-to platform for ideas. The closest thing that comes to mind is TED, spearheaded by Chris Anderson who also rose to status as a publishing entrepreneur. So is TED this generation’s WML, the potent mix of cultural commentary and smart entertainment that frames for its audience the people and ideas that matter in the world? If not, who is? Or are those shoes even fillable in today’s fragmented media landscape? We’d love your thoughts.

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HAPPY: A Documentary

From swamps to slums and why owning nothing can mean having everything.

What makes people genuinely happy? The nature and origin of happiness is something we’ve been exploring for a while, across a variety of projects and media — from Charles Spearin’s The Happiness Project to Gretchen Rubin’s’s identically titled but radically different yearlong experiment to the neurological underpinnings of happiness.

Now, an ambitious feature documentary is on a quest to probe deeper and go further to find what it is that truly makes people happy. HAPPY, from Oscar-nominated director Roko Belic (Genghis Blues), treks the globe from the swamps of Louisiana to the slums of Kolkata to unearth the sources of the world’s most precious natural resource through ordinary and extraordinary human stories and powerful interviews with the leading neuroscientists and psychologists researching the science of happiness.

HAPPY seeks to share the wisdom of traditional cultures and the cutting edge science that is now, for the first time, exploring human happiness.”

Inspired by Belic’s insight that the United States is among the world’s wealthiest nations yet reports some of the lowest happiness levels, HAPPY aims to examine this disconnect between wealth and well-being, indentifying the true currency of happiness.

I went to Africa when I was 18 and I had a very shocking experience. I met literally hundreds of people over the course of a few weeks who owned absolutely nothing. And yet they genuinely were exuding happiness.” ~ Roko Belic

WGSO has an excellent interview with Belic, revealing much of the inspiration for and insights from the film:

The film, a nonprofit project, was funded entirely through Kickstarter, of which we’ve been longtime proponents as one of the most potent platforms for crowdfunding creative ventures.

HAPPY is currently in post-production and we’re counting down to its inevitable awards sweep at Sundance.

via Swiss Miss

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