[ If this building was priced like an equivalently famous painting, it would cost more than the entire US GDP ]

The top floor of Corbusier’s Villa Stein (one of perhaps the top 500 most important houses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries - i.e. a Van Gogh of houses) is for sale for the same price per sq.ft. (approx $1400) as buildings in the same area of suburban Paris, designed by nobody in particular. Meanwhile, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for an inflation adjusted price of $136 million yet a poster of similar square footage and style costs around $10.

In other words, a work of art that you can actually live in has zero premium over a commodity item, but one that you can look at has a premium factor of 13 million over a commodity one.

There are 2 possible conclusions: architecture is vastly under valued or painting prices are almost entirely irrational.

Given that the cost of a single floor of the Villa Stein would be almost exactly the same as entire US GDP ($13 trillion) in the former case, and that Le Corbusier’s mediocre paintings sell at a vast premium compared to the buildings he is famous for, it’s the paintings that are too pricey.

The world’s two most expensive painting purchases were by Steven Cohen the Hedge Fund manager and David Martinez the corporate debt financier. Both work in finance, where the creative output is money rather than painting, quantitative rather than qualitative. Money hidden in a vault, is a less visible form of status than a picture, so the two can be exchanged, where the highest quantitative measure, status, can be accrued by buying the most famous paintings. If it were a purchase based upon qualitative measures such as the highest value to the buyer, then the sentimental subject matter of the painting would override or skew the ownership of the most famous paintings with the richest people, but that tends not to be the case.

Famous painting prices are based upon the idea that fame equals talent and that absolute fame is absolutely priceless. They are bought for quantitative price rather than qualitative value. They are a form or elite rather than mass hysteria where the wealthy attempt to buy prized individual taste, something you can’t really buy, by purchasing mass taste and therefore inevitably get ripped off.

The sub-conscious force that drives this bubble market is that the action of buying famous paintings is not to buy for private enjoyment but for pubic (even if it’s just your friends) prestige. This is perhaps based on the underlying psychosis that actually possessing rather than merely being surrounded by an acknowledged work of art somehow bestows a portion of the artist’s great taste and vision on the one who possesses it. Is this really any different from magical flesh diets such as the primitive practice of swallowing a lion’s heart for strength or eating powdered Rhino horn to get an erection?

The portability and size of paintings allow them to be possessed and coveted in a way that buildings can’t, but there is another factor. You can move a Van Gogh to the Upper East Side, but its more difficult to do that with the Villa Stein. Paintings are an historical, but irrational, standard benchmark of wealth, rather like diamonds. But the reason for their prestige is no more permanent than the prestige of lyre playing which was the pinnacle art form of ancient Greece, but is not coveted today. Painting is the reserve currency of art - but reserve currencies can change.

The fact that the obvious, near total, fallacy of the art market is rarely questioned seems conspicuously odd. Is there a form of sub-conscious cultural censorship at work? Perhaps the preservation of the painting myth is based on the fear that to challenge it means that you can’t appreciate or understand it? To even suggest that the Emperor is naked is to sound cliched.

But perhaps painting is a religion? When you read a book you can enjoy it even if you know its not true, but for the religious, the Bible cannot purely be a work of fiction, it has to have some truth. Art allows you to have a quasi-spiritual feeling by temporarily suspending reason and disbelief, unlike religion which requires you to permanently do so.

Why should art (temporary belief over reason) be any different from religion (permanent belief over reason)? Why is it more surprising that people worship Van Gogh irrespective of true merit when people worship god? Somehow, to suggest that art is largely religion is, well, heresy, or at least philistinism. Bizarrely, in our secular culture, where Madonna has replaced The Madonna, art is more sacrosanct than religion when it comes to questioning value.

Value is difficult to judge, but perhaps it’s the mark of a true Philistine like a money-is-everything Hedge Fund manager to believe in the price of a Van Gogh. Perhaps painting is a specific case of an art form that has become a religion, the opiate of the rich.

Mark Gimein has a good post about Special Relativity, that makes some excellent points:

That it could just as easily be called the theory of constancy (of the speed of light), and that the best way to read about it is from Einstein’s own layman’s explanation.

But more than that, that it is a theory of a flexible space and time background, introduced to resolve the impossibility of both (a) the summed relative motion (i.e. non fixed speed) of objects to or from light beams and (b) the (always observed) fixed speed of objects to or from light beams when measured against (c) the same fixed, universal co-ordinate system (clocks and measuring sticks).

Instead of ditching (a) or (b), Einstein ditched (c).

(a) was proven mathematically, (b) was proven by observation and (c) was assumed as obvious common sense based on experience.

Special relativity is a triumph of science over the senses and never trusting instinct, yet the Einstein myth sometimes creates the idea of the opposite - of following intuitive hunches. Yes, but only if they could be backed up with evidence. His creative thinking should not be confused with quasi-spiritual or artistic acceptance of intuition without reason.

Summed relative motion is obvious (two trains travel towards each other at their combined speed) and constancy of speed of light is empirically proven, therefore the insight Einstein had was to reconsider what seemed immutable - the fixed background of space and time.

Or was it? Einstein was taught by Lorentz and the idea of spatial contraction (admittedly, of objects not the space itself) to resolve the speed of light paradox was principally his. Like all things the truth is less clean than the fable. Special relativity was a conceptual breakthrough (principally in the linking of space and time), but still part of a continuum of thought.

Anyway. Mark’s post is a really good digest of the background of Special Relativity in qualitative terms: see here.

[ Andrew Sullivan posts a Churchill style Victory V, to symbolize Obama's response to Iran. Unfortunately, it's shown from the back, and where Churchill comes from this means "fuck off". ]

Twitterers are twatting, 10 a second, in breathless support of Iranian democracy, painting little icons green and spewing vapid, cliche ridden, 140 character essays which represent the general level of depth and understanding of Persian politics.

The general train of thought seems to be this - we have democracy, democracy is good, Iranians want democracy, Mousavi says he represents democracy, he must be good.

Except nothing is quite that simple.

The Iranian election results are weird, and they look rigged in the details. In the overall outcome, however, they do not look rigged - Mousavi was always way behind even in polls by neutral foreign observers.

Mousavi may indeed look like the moderate, but these things are relative. He may not have called for the extermination of Israel in the manner of his odious opponent, but he was involved in killing 30,000 political opponents, supporting the US Embassy hostage taking and Prime Minister of a repressively religious regime. Sure, he might be reformed, but resumes with their listings of past achievements are important when looking for a job at McDonalds let alone running a country.

But then again, the Khomeini regime was put in place in ‘79 by majority will, to replace a brutally repressive and corrupt secular dictator, the Shah. On one level it was a triumph of a democracy, on another it was a democratic installment of the anti-democratic, as happened tragically in Algeria. Democratic election of the undemocratic is to tolerate intolerance.

The Shah was put there by the US and UK. A democratic Iran would not be a triumph of America bringing democracy to the world and more than it would be a triumph against America and the UK who paid street gangs with bundles of cash to beat the crap out of people and start the coup which ousted the democratically elected leader in the 50s. Coincidentally, it was my former room mate’s father who organized the coup.

Perhaps the twatting is understandable, Iran, after all, has a notably young population gagging for reform and Mousavi seems up for it. But unless you are Iranian the sentimental support on social networks normally remarkable for their transient superficiality smacks of fashion rather than reason, like sticking a Che Guevara poster on a dorm room wall.

In particular lets not get carried away as Andrew Sullivan does for The Atlantic:

“The rejection of al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan; the ground-up election of Obama in America; and now the rising up of Iranians for freedom and civility with their neighbors: these are the green shoots of recovery from 9/11 and its wake”.

These are pendulum cycles, and elsewhere like in Britain, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria etc. they are swinging back to the right. This is not an Obama trend and if it were it wouldn’t represent an American trend because the American influenced trend in the region is not democracy.

A more sober Tweet might be: we have democracy (but we took it away from Iran), democracy is good (unless you elect anti-democratic people), Iranians want democracy (Iran has elected un-democratic people before), Mousavi says he represents democracy (he didn’t used to), he must be good (if you believe what he says now rather than did in the past).

But, of course, you can’t say something like that in 140 characters.

In the end these things are relative, as the image at the top of Sullivan’s post, accidentally and ironically shows. It displays two fingers, painted green, in a Churchill style Victory V under the heading “Obama’s Response”.

Unfortunately it is photographed from the back, which, where Churchill came from, traditionally means “fuck off”.

Last week, a pair of middle-aged Japanese men were caught trying to smuggle a single suitcase into Switzerland that contained bonds representing the world’s 4th largest US debt (more than all of the UK and just short of Russia). One alarming theory was that they were Japanese government agents on mission to dump dollar assets before others realized and joined in, thus devaluing any remaining assets. These were bonds, James Bonds.

American officials confirmed the notes were forgeries, but it has fueled conspiracy theorists and dollar doomsayers - since, well, they would say that, wouldn’t they.

The sheer strangeness of the story is perhaps at least symptomatic of volatile times for the dollar.

More details here.

Andrew Brons, a UK Fascist, once a member of a group that bombed synagogues has been elected as a political representative of an organization (European Parliament) which has no mandate to govern and where it is illegal to promote race hatred, irrespective of freedom of speech.

He is a European MP who wants to dismantle Europe, voted for in an election where 60% of people couldn’t be bothered to vote.

In other words, Europe is being governed by a body which can’t govern, by politicians which break its own laws as policy and advocate its own destruction.

Welcome to Europe, a place where nobody lines the street to wave a European flag and where politics is turning towards flag waving nationalism of the most egregious kind.

Link

CERN, the place where the web was invented, has developed The Grid. But what is the difference between this and cloud computing as offered by people like Amazon?

Link

“Purely mathematical approaches to the economy have a big drawback: the irrational behaviour of people.”

This seems like nonsense. Are people more chaotic than the weather?

Most things are chaotic, and provably unpredictable at the micro level, but that does not make them unstudyable, in terms of mathematics. Secondly, people are clearly not totally irrational, so one might expect the rational behavior of people to be the unusual feature in an otherwise totally chaotic system.

Link