errol reconsidered

Errol_morris1

Along with Moore and Ross McElwee, Errol Morris was in the vanguard of directors who challenged the gospel according to verité. While Morris tends to exaggerate his own innovative daring—“from the very first film I made . . . I decided to break all of the rules”—in 1988 he outfitted an otherwise straightforward, interview-based dissection of a Dallas murder case with an assortment of noirish dramatic re-creations, clips from a TV crime series, gigantic close-ups of peripheral objects, bits of symbolic punctuation (such as a swinging pocket watch to evoke the hypnotizing of a witness), and a burbling Philip Glass score to help suture the disparate materials. The Thin Blue Line (1988), a box-office hit by documentary standards, presaged an outpouring of looser, entertainment-oriented doc styles. Paradoxically, its well-earned acclaim proved to be less a product of alluring visuals than of Morris’s having secured the recorded admission of a hardened criminal that the hapless subject of the film, convicted murderer Randall Dale Adams, had been framed, triggering the reopening of the case and Adams’s eventual release from prison.

This startling instance of documentary effectivity, rather than fueling the filmmaker’s investigative juices or honing his self-image as a social crusader, seems to have had the opposite result: a deepening reentrenchment in the realm of personal psychology buttressed by an obsessive concern with so-called moral questions abstracted from their social context and wider consequences.

more from artforum here.

On Technology and Inequality

Also over at the G-Spot, Kathy has a post on the limited role of technological change on inequality in America.

In a recent post, Mickey Kaus attacks Barack Obama for blaming the middle-class squeeze on, in Obama’s words, “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests.” But Kaus attributes inequality to something entirely different. Sayeth Mickey:

I would tend to blame … increasing returns to skill produced by trade and technological change! They are hard to personify and demonize–they’re just problematic trends we all need to confront.

That is a deeply problematic statement. Yes, a decade or so ago most economists probably would have attributed ever-growing levels of inequality to increasing returns to skill produced by trade and technology. But Mickey, the World’s Most Annoying Democratic Concern Troll™, obviously hasn’t been paying much attention lately, which is not surprising.

Kaus, whose brain seemed to stop functioning sometime during the Reagan era, is not exactly doing a lot of intellectual heavy lifting these days. Because if he were, he’d know that more and more economists and policy types are coming around to the view that something other than “increasing returns to skill” is going on here. The short answer to why our society is experiencing near-record levels of economic inequality? It’s the politics, stupid.

Rodrik on Globalization and the Beautiful Game

Rodrik Dani Rodrik at Project Syndicate:

How does globalization reshape wealth and opportunity around the world? Is it mainly a force for good, enabling poor nations to lift themselves up from poverty by taking part in global markets? Or does it create vast opportunities only for a small minority?

To answer these questions, look no farther than soccer. Ever since European clubs loosened restrictions on the number of foreign players, the game has become truly global. African players, in particular, have become ubiquitous, supplementing the usual retinue of Brazilians and Argentines. Indeed, the foreign presence in soccer surpasses anything that we see in other areas of international commerce.

Arsenal, which currently leads the English Premier League, fields 11 starters who typically do not include a single British player. Indeed, all the English players for the four English clubs that recently advanced to the final 8 of the UEFA Champions’ League would hardly be enough to field a single team.

There is little doubt that foreign players enhance the quality of play in the European club championships. Europe’s soccer scene would not be half as exciting without strikers such as Cote d’Ivoire’s Didier Drogba (Chelsea) or Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o (Barcelona).  The benefits to African talent are easy to see, too. African players are able to earn much more money by marketing their skills in Europe – not just the top clubs in the Premiership or the Spanish Primera Liga, but the countless nouveau-riche clubs in Russia, Ukraine, or Turkey.    

Is critique secular?

Saba Mahmood over at The Immanent Frame:

The series of posts at The Immanent Frame that have responded to the question “Is critique secular?” were initially inspired by an event that I, along with Judith Butler and Chris Nealon, organized last year at The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. Given the SSRC’s current focus on religion and secularism, Jonathan VanAntwerpen invited the conference organizers and participants, and a range of others, to post their reflections on this event and the question that framed it (see posts by Talal Asad, Chris Nealon, and Colin Jager—all of whom participated in the symposium). Here I would like to give a sense of the ongoing stakes some of us have in this conversation and why I think it is important to think about secularism in relation to critique given the political bent of our times.

The symposium “Is Critique Secular?” was the inaugural event for a new teaching and research unit in critical theory at UC Berkeley, plans for which had been in gestation for over a year. While the motivations for the establishment of this program were diverse, there is a group of us who are interested in opening up traditional ways of thinking about critique to recent problematizations of notions of the secular, secularity, and secularism.

Trading on America’s Puritanical Streak

Martha Nussbaum on prostitution in ajc.com:

Many types of bodily wage labor used to be socially stigmatized. In the Middle Ages it was widely thought base to take money for the use of one’s scholarly services. Adam Smith, in “The Wealth of Nations,” tells us there are “some very agreeable and beautiful talents” that are admirable so long as no pay is taken for them, “but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of publick prostitution.” For this reason, he continues, opera singers, actors and dancers must be paid an “exorbitant” wage, to compensate them for the stigma involved in using their talents “as the means of subsistence.” His discussion is revealing for what it shows us about stigma. Today few professions are more honored than that of opera singer; and yet only 200 years ago, that public use of one’s body for pay was taken to be a kind of prostitution.

Some of the stigma attached to opera singers was a general stigma about wage labor. Wealthy elites have always preferred genteel amateurism. But the fact that passion was being expressed publicly with the body — particularly the female body — made singers, dancers and actors nonrespectable in polite society until very recently. Now they are respectable, but women who take money for sexual services are still thought to be doing something that is not only nonrespectable but so bad that it should remain illegal.

What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don’t share the woman’s values. Nonetheless, it is this one fact that still-Puritan America finds utterly intolerable.

[H/t: Ruchira Paul]

Early Cross-Cultural Exchanges

Swan_neck_jarMy late friend Eqbal Ahmad used to collect Gandharan Art. It was beautiful. Pre-Islamic culture was denigrated in Pakistan, and he felt the need to do his bit to preserve it.  But perhaps most important, it was for Eqbal, who was shaped in the struggle against colonialism, a reminder that the first major conquest of what would become the East by what would become the West was also productive and syncretic. Now a new exhibit looks at the influence of Western modernism on Islamic art. Holland Cotter reviews an exhibition of Islamic art at Hunter College, co-curated by 3QD contributer Alta Price.

The show is notable for several reasons. First, it tackles a little-studied subject. We’ve had major exhibitions on the influence of Islamic culture on Europe. We’ve had relatively few that trace influence the other way, Occident to Orient. (“Royal Persian Painting: the Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925” at the Brooklyn Museum a decade ago was a stellar exception.)

Possibly because “Occidentalized” sounds unexotic, 18th- and 19th-century Islamic art has been largely ignored. Few of the 30 small decorative objects at Hunter have been exhibited before, though all are from the collection of a major museum.

Which brings us to another — some might say the primary — attraction of the show. The owning institution is the Metropolitan Museum, where the Islamic galleries are closed for renovation. This Hunter show, unassuming as it is, is by default the largest display of the Met’s Islamic collection in the city.

“Re-Orientations” is actually the offshoot of a larger project: a yearlong seminar led by Ulku U. Bates, professor of Islamic art at Hunter, using material in the Met holdings to examine the early effects of Western modernism on Islamic cultures, its impact kicking in at different times in different places.

Peacock Feathers: That’s So Last Year

From Science:

Pea It’s been a truism since Darwin’s day: Female peahens prefer a male peacock with a gorgeous train–the fancy feathered fan he unfurls to wow the gals. But a new 7-year study questions this long-held notion, reporting that females in a feral population of Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus) showed no such preference. The controversial paper contradicts previous, lauded studies that did reveal a link and that are part of the canon of evolutionary biology. Because natural selection cannot explain the evolution of seemingly useless male ornaments, such as elaborate feathers, Charles Darwin proposed that they arise through sexual selection. In most species, females choose the male they want to mate with, presumably by evaluating traits that give clues to genetic health. For example, the peacock’s train is longer than his body and decorated with gaudy eyespots. The number of eyespots may correlate with the quality of the male’s genes, so a female peahen should pick the fellow with the highest count. In the most cited study of the peacock’s train, evolutionary biologist Marion Petrie of Newcastle University in the U. K. snipped off the eyespot portion of some males’ tail feathers; the females snubbed these males. Furthermore, chicks fathered by more ornamented males had higher long-term survival than other chicks.

Mariko Takahashi’s team planned to confirm these results. But despite observing 268 matings, the team was unable to pinpoint any single male trait that females preferred, they report in April’s issue of Animal Behaviour.

More here.

Blind to Change, Even as It Stares Us in the Face

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Change Leave it to a vision researcher to make you feel like Mr. Magoo. When Jeremy Wolfe of Harvard Medical School, speaking last week at a symposium devoted to the crossover theme of Art and Neuroscience, wanted to illustrate how the brain sees the world and how often it fumbles the job, he naturally turned to a great work of art. He flashed a slide of Ellsworth Kelly’s “Study for Colors for a Large Wall” on the screen, and the audience couldn’t help but perk to attention. The checkerboard painting of 64 black, white and colored squares was so whimsically subtle, so poised and propulsive. We drank it in greedily, we scanned every part of it, we loved it, we owned it, and, whoops, time for a test. Dr. Wolfe flashed another slide of the image, this time with one of the squares highlighted. Was the highlighted square the same color as the original, he asked the audience, or had he altered it? Um, different. No, wait, the same, definitely the same. That square could not now be nor ever have been anything but swimming-pool blue … could it? The slides flashed by. How about this mustard square here, or that denim one there, or this pink, or that black? We in the audience were at sea and flailed for a strategy. By the end of the series only one thing was clear: We had gazed on Ellsworth Kelly’s masterpiece, but we hadn’t really seen it at all.

The phenomenon that Dr. Wolfe’s Pop Art quiz exemplified is known as change blindness: the frequent inability of our visual system to detect alterations to something staring us straight in the face. The changes needn’t be as modest as a switching of paint chips. At the same meeting, held at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, the audience failed to notice entire stories disappearing from buildings, or the fact that one poor chicken in a field of dancing cartoon hens had suddenly exploded. In an interview, Dr. Wolfe also recalled a series of experiments in which pedestrians giving directions to a Cornell researcher posing as a lost tourist didn’t notice when, midway through the exchange, the sham tourist was replaced by another person altogether.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

The Bean Eaters
Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and clothes,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.