Crowds from space

The image above is a satellite photo of the Mall during yesterday's inauguration ceremony. The clumps of dark grains are crowds of people clustered around Jumbotrons to see the proceedings.

Image from Popular Science via Andrew Sullivan.

We live in rapidly changing times

The senators and guests are still eating their lunch following the presidential oath, but the official White House Web site has already changed.

Obama's speech was lovely:

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

And the part about giving up childish things -- that's worth looking into a bit closer. As Obama said, it comes from Scripture, from First Corinthians, Chapter 13. It's often called the love chapter because it proclaims the singular importance of love (in the sense of the Greek agape [αγάπη], love which cherishes and nurtures, but does not want to possess). Here is the verse Obama cited:

11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

To my mind it was a nearly perfect sentiment, expressing an admonition to partisan extremists that they have behaved childishly and the time has come to grow up. Basically he told Washington and America to just GROW UP, but he did so in the words of St. Paul, words which come from the same chapter as these words:

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

And:

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

What Obama did with that brief reference to Scripture has to rank as the gentlest and kindest smackdown ever. Ideological purity and partisan bullshit got us into a helluva mess because we were all behaving like children. It is time to start behaving like grownups.

Right now being a grownup requires that we engage creatively with the world, that we not rely on child-like habits of thought, that we put aside reflexive responses, that we stow away hobby horse ideologies. Now is a time for mature thought and adult action.

Art interventions

A number of feminist and socially conscious blogs have reported that some delightful wag of an artist/vandal/interventionist in Berlin slapped stickers onto ads in Berlin's subway to make the images of smooth skinned celebrities (Britney Spears, Leona Lewis, Christina Aguilera) resemble an open Photoshop window.



It is an act of poetic compression which squeezes issues of desire, its manipulation, oppressive standards of feminine attractiveness, consumerism, alienation from the public sphere, mass media and conformity into a simple trope. That makes it very good art, I'd say -- not because of its estimable content, but because of the way the content is delivered.

Things like this have been done before, of course. As long ago as the 1950s, artists in Europe associated with the Lettrist International and its offspring, the Situationist International, defaced posters in public places. Their process was called "decollage" since it involved not adding an image to a given image (collage), but removing parts of an image to discover what lay beneath.


The image above is an example of decollage by Mimmo Rotella. The quasi-Ab Ex composition is no doubt attributable to the international spread of that style in the post-war period. Artists like Rotella can be seen as practicing a kind of archaeology of public spaces, digging up hidden images beneath the surface and allowing a Surrealist swarm of associations to result.

The Photoshop-like alterations in Berlin, on the other hand, are both additive (literally sticking stuff on posters) and subtractive (uncovering hints of the images' history).

Coosje van Bruggen

Coosje van Bruggen is dead at 66. According to the New York times, she was responsible for the color choices in many of the sculptures she worked on with her collaborator and husband, Claes Oldenburg, beginning with Trowel I, 1976 (pictured above)

The Times obit is here.

Giving it away

The Dallas Center for Contemporary Art is holding an auction this month to raise funds for their new digs. As I do each year, I've donated a painting to their effort. That's my painting above. The title is Bit. It's oil on a digital print on canvas. The auction is online here. Or if you prefer, my piece is here. I can't say I'm charmed by the green background for my little pink beauty (who displays art on a green ground?), but they didn't ask me about it.

Bid early and bid often.

Eliasson

My review of the Olafur Eliasson survey at the Dallas Museum of Art is online here. There's an error: the captions for two images are switched tonight, but I've asked them to fix that.

The image above is Room for One Colour (2002).

TBD=there be dragons

I saw an interview on TV once with evolutionary biologist and noted baseball fan Steven Jay Gould in which he explained his enthusiasm for Joe DiMaggio's legendary 1941 56-game hitting streak. Gould's argument -- informed by his deep understanding of statistics -- turned on the enormous difference between DiMaggio's accomplishement and the mean (average) hitting streaks of all other players in the major leagues. In a later piece in the New York Review of Books, Gould described the statistical research of a scientific colleague into the probabilities of other stand-out baseball accomplishments that showed they constituted no significant violation of what was to be expected in terms of their probabilities. But then he wrote:

But "treasure your exceptions," as the old motto goes. There is one major exception, and absolutely only one—one sequence so many standard deviations above the expected distribution that it should not have occurred at all. Joe DiMaggio's fifty-six–game hitting streak in 1941.

Here's a simple example of a bell curve marked to indicate standard deviations:

(Image from here)

Investopedia defines standard deviation thus:

A measure of the dispersion of a set of data from its mean. The more spread apart the data, the higher the deviation. Standard deviation is calculated as the square root of variance.

It's a measure of difference in numeric value of some sort within a class of like events and it's a measurement of the general likelihood of any member of the class holding that value. What made DiMaggio's streak so fantastic, Gould insisted, was that in terms of probability it never should have happened. Nothing lies that far off the curve. Except Joe DiMaggio.

This came to mind today when I got around to reading a long piece published last weekend in the NY Times Magazine about a risk model called Value at Risk, which is commonly used by financial professionals in their dealings. The author, Joe Nocera, describes VaR as a set of mathematical models which (it was believed) could assess the likelihood an investment would lose money in a given period of time.

Built around statistical ideas and probability theories that have been around for centuries, VaR was developed and popularized in the early 1990s by a handful of scientists and mathematicians — “quants,” they’re called in the business — who went to work for JPMorgan. VaR’s great appeal, and its great selling point to people who do not happen to be quants, is that it expresses risk as a single number, a dollar figure, no less.

VaR isn’t one model but rather a group of related models that share a mathematical framework. In its most common form, it measures the boundaries of risk in a portfolio over short durations, assuming a “normal” market. For instance, if you have $50 million of weekly VaR, that means that over the course of the next week, there is a 99 percent chance that your portfolio won’t lose more than $50 million. That portfolio could consist of equities, bonds, derivatives or all of the above; one reason VaR became so popular is that it is the only commonly used risk measure that can be applied to just about any asset class. And it takes into account a head-spinning variety of variables, including diversification, leverage and volatility, that make up the kind of market risk that traders and firms face every day.

Systems theorist and Black Swan author Nassim Taleb shows up quickly in the article to argue against such a model-based strategy. It's "a fraud," he says. As I understand it, his "Black Swan" concept is a lot like somebody hitting safely in 56 successive major league baseball games. It can't happen until it does.

“Any system susceptible to a black swan will eventually blow up,” Taleb says. The modern system of world finance, complex and interrelated and opaque, where what happened yesterday can and does affect what happens tomorrow, and where one wrong tug of the thread can cause it all to unravel, is just such a system.

Or to put in the words of a risk consultant also quoted in the article:

[Marc]Groz has his own way of illustrating the problem: he showed me a slide he made of a curve with the letters “T.B.D.” at the extreme ends of the curve. I thought the letters stood for “To Be Determined,” but that wasn’t what Groz meant. “T.B.D. stands for ‘There Be Dragons,’ ” he told me.

I have no idea whether Taleb is right in his crusade against models like VaR. But we all know that the bell curve had monsters at its extreme ends, monsters the smart guys didn't even imagine. They shouldn't even exist, according to the financial experts' thinking over the past few years.



Joe, Joe DiMaggio, we want you on our side.