is Jon Stewart wrong on the bailout?

let me start by saying that i really enjoy watching Jon Stewart's Daily Show. it is usually a well-written and well-researched show, as the recent well publicised exchange with Jim Cramer showed. as far as i'm concerned, Jon Stewart is on the right side of the debate ethically - and he's entertaining and funny and that counts for something in the difficult business of getting more people interested in the news.

i want to criticise one thing that has been bugging me because i think it is beside the point and it distracts from the real problem. In his interview with Gwen Ifill at the end of January, for example, at 5:25



Jon Stewart, perhaps jokingly, proposes to just use the bailout money to pay consumers to pay off their (bad) loans. although this sounds like a deceptively simple and workable idea, so much so that i've heard it in private conversation repleatedly, i believe it will not work within the current monetary system. accordingly, Gwen Ifill politely told him she'd get back to him on this. unfortunately, it seems she didn't, because in march Jon Stewart proposed the same thing to Joe Nocera, at 3:25.



Joe Nocera replies that there is so much of it (the debt). this is only partially true.

in fact, banks produce money out of thin air by lending. two valuable items are created, the loan and the promise of the borrower to repay it. if loan #1 is now spent and paid into another bank by a seller of goods, a fraction of this, often 10%, can be used as deposit against another loan of nine times that, i.e. nine tenths of the original loan, and so on ad infinitum.

(this is a geometric series that converges to ten. as the bank only needs to have a 10% deposit against the original loan, the original deposit is mulitplied ninetyfold in the long run. in the eurozone, where the required reserve ratio is only 2%, this factor increases to 2450. the uk has a "voluntary" reserve ratio system. you can imagine what that means.)

since the money flows in a closed system, the amount of money is increased. conversely, if a loan is payed back (including interest), money is destroyed. so Jon Stewart's idea is counterproductive because it actually removes money from circulation and exacerbates the current liquidity crisis, as most companies depend on fresh credit to keep going.

or, if you want to look at it this way, Jon Stewart's idea falls short because for it to work, the entire system would have to be changed. i don't think this is likely to happen. now would be the moment to do this and i have heard nothing of it.

on the contrary, the the banking bailout injects money into the system twofold: by taking out loans from the banks (and promising to repay them) and investing that money back into them.

i believe Jon Stewart would look better accepting that this is the only thing that works within the current system, or propose a better system instead.

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the current system is described in a pdf document by the the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, for a more entertaining take on it, have a look at this video.



more Jon Stewart clips on the subject can be found by searching "bailouts" on thedailyshow.com.

but is it? is it art?

i have had many discussions about this question, and none of them were boring. are there any criteria for art to be enjoyable or is it a feeling that just happens? i'll try to answer it from my perspective so that hopefully i'll hear of yours - i'm curious!

DOB original blue

so when does art speak to me? let me use the example of some well-known pieces. it makes for familiar ground and more colourful reading. i will use modern art because only in the 20th century was the artist liberated from the traditional task of depicting that which can be seen, to finally focus on that which cannot.
so i'm at this art gallery for a particular exhibition. there is a lot to see, a recurring theme seems to be this cutesy cartoon character. i don't think much of it, walk on.

Melting DOB E

somewhat later, i encounter its reincarnations, with grinning grills and sharp fangs, interestingly warped. a contrast of sorts. cute and dangerous, one and many, standard and weird, good and evil. that's probably it. a very familiar theme, nothing to see here, move right along.

Tan Tan Bo
Italian max

further on, with me barely noticing, different colours appear, wholly different colour schemes. ok, an extension of the simple idea of contrasts. the negative colour palette is slightly unnerving. standing a portrait on its head can make a smiling face look like it's frowning. a colour negative to me looks ... wrong.

then, a vast multipanelled, twistedly gorgeous painting. no cuteness, no straight-up good vs. evil. a comparatively tiny speech bubble at the center left, whose translation i sadly haven't found on the web so far, helps to understand what it is meant to say.
it's the discomfortingly fascinating unadulterated despair of the bile spewing, moribund DOB that doesn't seem to sit well with the cartoon character. and here it is, the clash of ideas, the juxtaposition of perspectives, the strangeness that makes me ponder a work of art even when i have long left the building.

Tan Tan Bo Puking aka Gero Tan

i can't exclude the possibility that, as i was viewing the exhibition chronologically, the earlier pieces (that i hadn't paid attention to) prepared me for the appreciation of art i experienced at the last one. the end result though, no matter if it concerns the last piece or the entire exhibition, is for me that i felt because i was interested. feeling art to me is linked to motivation, the challenge to grasp its content. the accompanying superflat style of the pieces adds to the content but, by itself, doesn't interest me. it is a technique of simplification that lets the unseen shine more brightly. it may make something look pretty but it is not beautiful. for me, beauty in the post-19th century sense emerges from the inside of an artwork.

Orange Eater

since the topic of this post is paintings, it is tempting to keep literally illustrating this notion. :) the munich museum of modern art has a room full with works of Baselitz, who, for some reason, at one point decided to paint upside down. one recurring subject is the orange eater, left. i haven't found anything online in terms of why he is interested in this subject, save for the usual babble along the lines of "the intense colour jumps out at the viewer" (read, i have no idea what i am talking about). so if you know why he paints those, let me know. i want to talk about another piece though.

Eagle, Remixed
masdearte.com

the eagle, by the same artist, is also a revisited subject. knowing that the artist paints upside down we can recognise that this eagle is soaring or landing. what intrigues me is that we can choose to ignore that knowledge and let the same eagle plummet, trundle downward, helplessly. that way we can conjure up a dualism that would be difficult to attain if the painting hung the other way round. add to this the fact that the eagle is a national symbol of germany and can be found displayed prominently in german parliament and in the german coat of arms and you may understand why i mention this piece. at one point it hung in the office of the then german chancellor Schröder. i wonder what his reasons were and if he thought the same way about it.

American McGee's Alice

how about computer games? people like them, they are commercially successful. is there art in them? i don't have time to play these days but i can remember back when i did, on occasion i was put in awe. one such example is American McGee's Alice. the premise is that Alice is in a mental institution due to losing her parents at a young age and we are playing for her sanity, inside her mind.

Beksiński 1981

i think the game does a great job of depicting that which we cannot see. something is tangibly wrong, door frames are all skewed, we walk into empty rooms that are suddenly full of strange creatures, objects fly around, and, every so often, the floor literally drops out from beneath our feet. we jump between ice floes of sanity that unrelyably keep us afloat over the cold sea of nothingness. this unnerving scenery evolves as the story unfolds. yes, i think there is art to be found here. still images, however, don't do it justice, it has to be played. a video capture of someone else's gameplay is the next best thing.

American McGee's Alice captured gameplay. mute the comment if you want

so i'm not a purist, i find art in many things. what, then, isn't art for me? i can think of a few issues with some pieces purporting to be art. the act of taking an everyday object, giving it a title and placing it out of context, in a gallery, doesn't make it art for me. i'm not saying that there needs to be skill in creating art. what i mean is that the mere act of provocation is not enough. it's too easy.
in the same way, stating the obvious, too, doesn't do it for me. if there is just one clever idea expressed in an obvious way i think, hm, neat, and walk on. if that single idea is used again and again it gets on my nerves. piling on clever ideas doesn't help. two ideas, even if they are different, disjointly united in one piece with no relation between them other than trying to impress the audience, might as well be hanging at different ends of the gallery.

one subject, one issue, one clever idea is not enough. there need to be at least two, and they need to interact, intersect, compete. which brings me back to Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. in it, the character Sabina is an artist rebelling against socialist realism by having the true nature of the objects of her art break through the surface.

Sabina's paintings, past and present, did indeed treat the same idea, that they all featured the confluence of two themes, two worlds, that they were all double exposures ... On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth ... A landscape showing an old-fashioned table lamp shining through it. An idyllic still life of apples, nuts, and a tiny, candle-lit Christmas tree showing a hand ripping through the canvas.

i read this only recently and found my own idea of what i appreciate in art confirmed. it's good to be reassured.

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ps: hunting down pictures for this post has been fun. through google image search, i found quite a few interesting pages discussing art. here's one, If you could own one peice of art (sic). googling "if you could own one piece of art" brings up a whole bunch more to look at. enjoy. and if you want, tell me your favourite!

why?

so i started a blog.
not the most bleeding edge thing to do, i know.
no, i don't want to join twitter.

but why???

as Kundera wrote, we all choose motifs for the symphony of our lives. so do i. these are certain things that are important to me, i get intense about them and dig deeper.

it's only fool's gold

occasionally a news item just needs a comment, and for that, there are comment forums and letters to the editor. but those are mere blips in a flood of posts and emails and, let's face it, usually unread and therefore inconsequential. and who can blame those who skip over all previous comments and just post their own? after all, we each are the most important characters in our own life story. private emails and social network posts are slightly better, they are at least read by the person they are addressed to.

but how do i make an impact? on more than one person? maybe i can persuade a few people to come here and read this. instead of losing my thoughts in a sea of opinion, perhaps i can convince a small number of you to care and read several of my posts because you liked one. in short, a blog.

i will try to produce output, type fast and not worry about capital letters. :)

i will try my best to produce something substantial that is worth reading. after all, it's so hard to find a grain of gold in the desert.