2008 was an early end to a decade with no name. The post millennium? The new century? The decadent decade, perhaps? It was an entire era of price without value, a zeitgeist that artists would surely try to capture, symbolically. But how to do it and still sell your work? Perhaps Damien Hirst knew how?

Damien Hirst is very rich and he is not stupid. His most daring work of art was an elaborate joke that could have become a symbol of this decade that closed down early - a platinum and diamond-crusted real human skull, the world’s most vulgar trophy. Like a gorilla hand ashtray or an elephant foot umbrella stand, this $100 million decorative, anatomical, bling trinket needed to be sold to someone very rich and very stupid for it to be complete, a tasteless prize that was bought and therefore self-awarded rather than given.

Who would be the recipient of this severed head which was completely covered in money, but in less money ($25M) than its asking price ($100M)? Would it be a Russian oligarch, a Manhattan property tycoon, a member of the Saud family, a London hedge fund manager, a vapid LA Youtube celebrity or any other of the monstrous avatars of the decadent decade. Sadly, even the diamond skull was a flop, and was rumored to have been bought by Hirst himself, to save face. Like the hedge fund managers, Hirst became rich but didn’t leave the legacy he wanted, and the contemporary art market, which peaked with his $170M takings at the “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” sale, was merely a bubble created by the recently rich who wanted new stuff rather than antiques and wished for the million dollar art equivalent of fast food, to buy taste, immediately.

But this bubble was particularly symbolic. The contemporary art market was leveraged beyond real estate and stocks and artists were part of the culture they could have been dissecting and rebelling against, they were collaborators rather than renegades. The sudden demise of famous living artists tells a better story than the art itself ever could.

Ben Lewis tells the story of the contemporary art bubble in Prospect:

“While British house prices took six years to double at the start of this century, contemporary art managed it in just one, 2006-07. (Over the same period, old masters went up by just 7.6 per cent and British 17th to 19th century watercolours actually lost value.) Contemporary art in the emerging economies did even better. The value of its sales in China increased by 983 per cent in one year (2005-06). In Russia they rose 2,365 per cent in five years (2000-05), while its stock market increased by “only” about 300 per cent…The Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang saw his work appreciate 6,000 times, from $1,000 to $6m (1999-2008); work by the American artist Richard Prince went up 60 to 80 times (2003-2008). The German painter Anselm Reyle was unknown in 2003; you could have picked up one of his stripe paintings for €14,000. Now he has a studio with 60 assistants turning them out for about €200,000 each.”

For almost a decade now, I have run a list of technology predictions for the coming year.

This year is different, there is no list, because:

1. Not that much will visibly happen in the web industry, there’s not exactly going to be a plethora of IPO’s, private equity driven M&A, new VC investments, product launch cocktail parties or company expensable conference junkets. Web 2.0 will die with a whimper rather than a bang, and the clever people will have plenty of thinking time to work quietly on the innovation will drive the next cycle. It should be noted, however, that it looks like the legacy of this time around (Youtube, Flickr, Facebook), is not that impressive compared to last time, or even what happened in between (Google, Paypal, Skype). Perhaps Kleiner Perkins were right to pass?

2. The changes we are seeing are macro changes that take years. We will see the acceleration of the shift online for things like commodity eCommerce (i.e. non luxury and based on price), media rental and broker intermediated transactions. By the end of this recession, there will be fewer shopping malls, Blockbusters or Virgin Megastores; travel agents will be near extinct, and there will be far less realtors. Amazon, Google and possibly even Neflix will be much bigger companies and a hybrid of UK style franchised real estate brokerage (Foxtons) and aggregated online real estate sites (Trulia) will largely wipe out information blocking middle-men like the independent realtor.

3. Short term gloom will mask longer term optimism. After periodic mini rallies, there will be another major stock decline for companies such as Google, after a second wave of economic bad news. This will preface a long steady climb for companies that belong in the emerging, remade landscape.

4. There will be a short term focus on shoring up existing industries to create jobs, but whatever America does to prop up industrial production will fail in the long term. Things like low end cars perhaps shouldn’t be made in the US. Conversely the reactionary overshoot of financial services regulation and the death of monetarism will mean that America cannot rely on a Thatcher style services economy. Even if technology and culture (media) will be America’s flagship industries, employment creating stimulus programs will mask this change.

5. US military and economic hegemony will inevitably decline, from its post Cold War singularity, and the events of last year are possibly the inflection point. The future role of America’s near total dominance in something seemingly far less important, such as the Internet, will be different. This is a change whose effects are currently impossible to predict. Note this doesn’t mean that America role as a sole superpower is superceded by China or something that melodramatic, just that the abnormal and unsustainable period of near global, single nation dominance will recede. With it, there will be cultural changes. The world will become slightly less Americanized, and that possibly means the diminishing of an historically abnormal culture dominated by what can best be described as recreational shopping.

6. The short term fluctuations in the fortune of web 2.0 companies are completely irrelevant considering the long term changes to the Internet industry and the short term affects elsewhere. In other words, even for those who work in technology, what is happening in the industry is irrelevant compared to both the effect that the collapse of the US banking system could have on our lives in the short term and the effect of secular technological trends.

7. America is in a similar place to Britain at the end of the Edwardian era. Frankly there is a lot more to worry about than a 40% decline in display ad revenue. Om Malik, one of the the most likeable and wise people in the industry put things in perspective best.

“That’s the last bubble I can find in the U.S. I cannot imagine why anybody would give money to the U.S. government for 30 years for less than a 4% yield. I certainly wouldn’t. There are going to be gigantic amounts of bonds coming to the market, and inflation will be coming back. “

Link

Hear hear.

Niall Ferguson reviews Lords of Finance:

“As the world teeters on the brink of another great financial cliff, we can only hope that the modern-day Lords of Finance will co-operate to better effect. I suspect none has much time for bedtime reading these days. But should Messrs Bernanke, King and Trichet need a reminder of what can go wrong when central bankers achieve only the semblance, but not the reality, of co-operation, Lords of Finance is the book they should read.

As a matter of urgency, a Chinese translation should also be sent to Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China.”

(Pedant’s note: A brink is an edge of a cliff. Its funny that the expression “teeters on the brink…” which is normally used as a metaphor, e.g. “teeters on the brink of recession” jars like a mixed metaphor when used in its literal sense, as it is here.)

The Council on Foreign Relations have pulled together a bunch of graphs about the recession. The results are disturbing.

1. Shanghai - down 65.2%
2. Mumbai - down 51.9%
3. Singapore - down 49.2%
4. Hong Kong - down 48.3%
5. Paris - down 42.7%
6. Tokyo - down 42.1%
7. Sydney - down 41.3%
8. Frankfurt - down 40.4%
9. New York - down 34%
10. London - down 31.3%

London has the worst year in its history (but the index in question is only 20 years old), although comes out bottom of the list in terms of severity.

The chart is interesting in that the two places which could be worst affected in the longer term are New York and London, and the markets that are most likely to bounce back are Shanghai and Mumbai. This is partly a function of size and resulting inertia.

Link

Tim Lambert shreds Global Warming denialists such as Matt Drudge.

The recent appropriation of the term ‘denialist’ which is traditionally paired with ‘holocaust’ is a minor PR victory for scientists who are not normally good at this. I like it.

Jesus, if he existed, was almost certainly not born tomorrow - but Isaac Newton was.
Happy Newton Day.

“It was the year that the Large Hadron Collider was finally fired up — and then abruptly shut down — and 2008 also saw significant progress towards the detection of dark matter. Physicists got a little closer to making practical quantum computers and 2008 saw a few nifty inventions to harvest energy from human motion. US president elect Barack Obama made a few high-profile science nominations that could signal a change in the US government’s view of climate change. It was also a good year for Japanese physics, as three Japanese-born particle physicists won the Nobel Prize in Physics.”

Link

The headline sound like an exaggeration, but this is exactly what Paul Krugman has alleged today:

“$400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.
But the costs of America’s Ponzi era surely went beyond the direct waste of dollars and cents.
At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics”

Amazing.