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"Why are original artworks valued more than identical duplicates? The present studies explore 2 mechanisms underlying the special value of original artwork: the assessment of the art object as a unique creative act (performance) and the degree of physical contact with the original artist (contagion). Across 5 experiments, participants were exposed to hypothetical scenarios in which an original object was duplicated. The type of object varied across experiments (e.g., a painting vs. a piece of furniture) as did the circumstances surrounding the creation of the original object and the duplicate. Overall, the results support assessments of performance and contagion as key factors underlying the value of original artwork, and they are consistent with the conclusion that the discrepancy in value between original artworks and perfect duplicates derives from people's lay theories about the domain of art, rather than from associations with particular kinds of art or certain cases of forgery."
"One of Sen's most fundamental contributions in economics is to question the theory of subjective utility and revealed preference. He thinks that we can give a substantive, not formal, account of wellbeing that permits us to analyze the individual's behavior and choices in a more meaningful way"
"In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect. For the past twenty-five years, Nussbaum has been working on an alternate model to assess human development: the Capabilities Approach. She and her colleagues begin with the simplest of questions: What is each person actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them? "
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The basic idea is that in a competitive market, the owner of a resource — be it hours of labor with a particular skill, or hours of a celebrity’s glamour that can be shared with others, or a piece of capital equipment, or a natural resource — will be paid for it an amount equal to the value that one unit of that resource, added to those already employed, would contribute in the form of valuable output that the rest of society is willing to pay for.
Economists call this marginal value not because it is trivial, but because it is the value added by one unit of the resource (for example, one year’s labor) at the margin of an already existing number of units employed. This theory makes a subtle point not always well understood by non-economists.
While collectively, members of a profession may add immense total social value to the rest of society, each member’s income tends to be determined by the value contributed only by the last unit added to that pool of professionals.
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A pediatrician does, of course, add high value to each patient, but each pediatrician only to a limited number of them. By contrast, Bristol Palin may add only a bit of joy and excitement to each person who watches or reads her, but it is a very large number of people and that adds up quickly to a high social value, as economists define that term.
Thus all celebrities, however accomplished, can earn so much more a year than most highly skilled professionals who are in more plentiful supply (or who just do not care to market themselves to the highest bidder for their talent).
Museumgoers often scoff that costly abstract expressionist paintings could have been made by a child and have mistaken paintings by chimpanzees for professional art. To test whether people really conflate paintings by professionals with paintings by children and animals, we showed art and nonart students paired images, one by an abstract expressionist and one by a child or animal, and asked which they liked more and which they judged as better. The first set of pairs was presented without labels; the second set had labels (e.g., “artist,” “child”) that were either correct or reversed. Participants preferred professional paintings and judged them as better than the nonprofessional paintings even when the labels were reversed. Art students preferred professional works more often than did nonart students, but the two groups’ judgments did not differ. Participants in both groups were more likely to justify their selections of professional than of nonprofessional works in terms of artists’ intentions. The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realize.
What rational justification is there for conceiving of all living things as possessing inherent worth? In Respect for Nature, Paul Taylor draws on biology, moral philosophy, and environmental science to defend a biocentric environmental ethic in which all life has value. Without making claims for the moral rights of plants and animals, he offers a reasoned alternative to the prevailing anthropocentric view--that the natural environment and its wildlife are valued only as objects for human use or enjoyment. Respect for Nature provides both a full account of the biological conditions for life--human or otherwise--and a comprehensive view of the complex relationship between human beings and the whole of nature.
This classic book remains a valuable resource for philosophers, biologists, and environmentalists alike--along with all those who care about the future of life on Earth. A new foreword by Dale Jamieson looks at how the original 1986 edition of Respect for Nature has shaped the study of environmental ethics, and shows why the work remains relevant to debates today
in list: Books Noted
"History, in the Googley view, isn't about what people do; it's about what they output with the help of machines. Before 1700 you could see history everywhere except in the productivity statistics.
The Google folks are Marxists in their historical materialism, but they seem blind to class-related phenomena such as the rapidly growing divide in wealth. Theirs is a happy, trickle-down world. "What rich people have now," Varian says, "middle class people will have in twenty years." What's he talking about? Private jets? Ranches in Montana? Income growth? "
"In this lucid and insightful essay, renowned linguist Roy Harris reflects on the early nineteenth-century doctrine of “art for art’s sake.” This was attacked by Proudhon and Nietzsche, but defended by Théophile Gautier and E. M. Forster. It influenced movements as diverse as futurism and Dada. Over the past two centuries, three main positions have emerged. The “institutional” view declares art to be a status conferred upon certain works by the approval of influential institutions. The “idiocentric” view gives absolute priority to the judgment of the individual. The third is the “conceptual” view of art, which insists that what counts is the idea that inspired a work, not the physical execution. But as Harris shows, the tacit assumptions which once supported this Debate and these positions have now collapsed. “Art” as a coherent category has imploded, leaving behind a historical residue of empty questions that contemporary society can no longer answer. The Great Debate about Art provides much needed signposts for understanding this sorry state of affairs."
in list: Books Noted
"I take as my texts two of Marcuse's most profound and provocative phrases: "surplus repression," which makes its appearance in his early work, EROS AND CIVILIZATION, and "repressive desublimation," from his best known book, ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN. By an explication of the notion of surplus repression, and a close reading of a single paragraph from the chapter on repressive desublimation, I can, I think, lay before you a deeper justification of liberal education that will explain both how it plays a central role in the critique and reformation of society, and why it is so appropriately undertaken at that moment in late adolescence and early adulthood which we in the United States identify as the undergraduate years."
"On the contrary: Charlie Sheen is the tired face of the American dream, in ways that we don't often enough have the backbone, wisdom, or grace to (want to) admit, starting with a hilariously bankrupt definition of "success."
What's wrong with this stunted definition? It's simply, simplistically about zero-sum, near-term WINNING — in a way that chronically, systemically undervalues the future, nature, other people, society, and even our own selves."
"Startup CloudCrowd is even working on a commercial version of the My Boss is a Robot experiment. Offered through Serv.io, the service will allow businesses to purchase blog posts (or "content") that are "Fresh, Hand-Crafted, Topic-specific [and] Custom-Written to Your Specifications.""
"The loss of ownership creates a downward spiral in value, and erodes the very notion of paying for books at all.
Defining ownership down. We used to own our books. With most ebooks we own them in name, but effectively we lease them. As Jane documents, the slide toward more and more attenuated concepts of ownership continues."
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The process is gradual. Mental models change slower than technology. If the Kindle had debuted with an access-based “faucet” model, it would have failed. Consumers would not have traded true ownership for a tethered, metered and monitored product. But we’ll get there soon enough, as each step away from ownership makes the next step more acceptable. Once you realize your Kindle book is not fully yours, you’ll accept it being mostly not yours. Google Ebooks are a further step away from ownership. Eventually you get to a faucet model, as music has done, either low-price (Netflix) or free (Pandora, YouTube).
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As devalued ownership feeds piracy, rising piracy in turn devalues ownership. Anyone with an internet connection can rapidly assemble a “library” of books it would have once taken years to build–so why bother building one?
As the logic churns, content sellers will increasingly seek other ways of “monetizing.” Authors will charge for readings, or merchandise. They’ll try advertisements. They’ll start leveraging all the user data they’re collecting to create even better ads. None of this will replace more than a fraction of the book economy, but they will definitely send a message to consumers: You’re being screwed enough to pay for the privilege.
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"Faced with difficult economic times and university budget cuts, the value of the library to the wider goals of the university is increasingly questioned. Return on investment (ROI) measures are a concrete means of demonstrating to institution administrators and public audiences the vital role academic libraries hold within both their respective communities and on a global scale. While libraries have traditionally been rather modest about broadcasting their own worth, today they must learn to make clear the often unrecognized ways in which they contribute to institutional success. This demonstration of value is exactly what Lib-Value, an IMLS-funded grant project, aims to empower."
Lists some of the virtues of music/art: innovation, craftsmanship, emotional truth, sensuousness, clarity, simplicity, intellectualism, memorability, physicality, theoretical rigor...
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So all these bloggers who reel on endlessly about the pop/classical problem, and how we have to protect classical music in a pop-oriented world: I simply will not partake. I believe in genres defined by specific, pin-pointable qualities, from reggae to heavy metal to totalism to postminimalism to impressionism to spectralism to to space-age bachelor pad music to bluegrass, but "classical" and "pop" are industry-created categories, economic categories, and they leave no traces for me in the music. Whether I'm listening to a song by Loudon Wainwright III or Brian Eno or Charles Ives or Sir William Walton, I want the relation of melody and accompaniment to words elegantly and creatively handled.
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