The Other Side of the (Golden) Railroad Tracks: my first time at a Sotheby’s auction

I’ve never been in a room full of so many millionaires, and there were several hundred. I went to Sotheby’s last night, and it was my first auction. Cezanne’s Nature Morte Aux Fruits et Pot de Gingembre sold for $33 million, the highest price paid that evening. Toward the end of bidding for the painting, bids jumped by increments of $500,000. Witnessing this made me dizzy, but the spell – and the silence – was finally broken when the auctioneer banged his hammer, which looked like a wooden pawn, and he didn’t so much bang it as stamp the podium with it.

The whole bidding process was confusing at first. There was no countdown, no “going once, twice, sold!” Instead, the auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, slowed down a bit – as much as an auctioneer can slow down – when the price got higher and, in his German-colored posh British accent, said things like “Are we all done at $15 million?” or “I shall sell it then” or “Fair warning, last chance.” He seemed to have about a dozen of these phrases, which he combined in every conceivable way to give the bidders a few extra seconds to decide – and then, somehow unexpectedly, BANG! The “hammer” came down and it was time for the next lot.

Eighty-three Impressionist and Modern Art works were sold, many of which were by German and French artists, which required proper pronunciations of the names of paintings by Schiele, Beckmann, Monet, Renoir, etcetera. The auctioneer, wearing a tux with a large, black bowtie, even pronounced “Picasso” with a French accent. This seemed a bit much. After all, Picasso was Spanish – admittedly, he did spend a lot of time in Paris.

Some bids came in over the phone from who knows where and who knows who. Undeniably, a certain mystery surrounds events like these, but so does a certain desire to “make a fashion statement,” as one elderly British journalist wearing a pink tie put it after the show (I overheard the conversation). Amedeo Modigliani’s Le Fils Du Concierge sold for nearly $28 million, but Egon Schiele’s Stehender Mannlicher Ruckenakt sold for a measly $650,000. I happen to love the latter piece, but I couldn’t help but wonder why it sold for the price that it did. In fact, why did any painting sell for the price that it did? There is no one answer of course: There are trends among buyers – one year it’s early Impressionism, next year it’s German Expressionism – and some buyers view their purchase as a stock purchase, something they hope will appreciate in value. There are also those people who truly love art and are willing to pay anything for it, and this does create a type of “inflation.”

But outside of these reasons lies a hackneyed, yet important, question, and it was chafing me the entire time I was at Sotheby’s: What does it say about art when something that is supposedly priceless is given a price and sold like an expensive slave? I think it cheapens art and gives us a false measuring stick. A few years ago, Meyer, the auctioneer at Sotheby’s, sold Picasso’s Garcon a la Pipe (Boy with a Pipe) for $104 million – $34 million more than the estimated price. At the time, it was the most expensive painting ever sold, but what does that mean? What does the price have to do with the painting as a work of art? I’m not asking the question rhetorically, but I’m wondering how the art auction world, where prices can go up by $100,000 per second during bidding, has changed how we look at art.

I admit it was exciting to watch prices leap like mad cheetahs, but the excitement was short lived. It was a delight to see so many beautiful works of art by Rodin, Picasso, Chagall and others, but I couldn’t forget the prices associated with each of their works, at least not right away. Good news: twenty-four hours later, the prices are already starting to become hazy… The fog should roll in soon.

Free Press in Russia — We Should be Grateful for What?

One of the greatest ironies in literary history has to be the discrepancy between Russia’s pathological strangling of free speech and how many great writers and poets—Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Nabokov, Visotsky, to name a few—came out of its womb.

Vladimir Putin has pointed out that the mere discussion of whether or not there is a free press in Russia is a move in the right direction. Such a discussion is surely a good thing, but that’s where it pretty much ends. The Russian government still exercises tight control over the three major television networks and many print publications.

And where the government is not practicing direct censorship, it is being aided by the private sector. A few months ago, the Kommersant newspaper reported that non-media corporations—mostly financial and industrial—are buying media outlets in order to increase their political influence. In short: the quality of Russia’s serious news media is in decline.

The Russian literati mentioned above are surely not turning over in their graves, because they know better.  They’re probably just smiling,  with sarcastically curled lips.

Russian Journalist Murdered — What Else is New?

Another Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, a long-time critic of Putin’s policies and the war in Chechnya, was murdered last week. In a generally well-written article about her death, “In a Risky Place to Gather News, a Very Familiar Story,” New York Times journalist Steven Lee Myers made a mistake in writing, “Her murder has made her a symbol of what Russia has become.” This sentence may be beautifully written, but it’s untrue. As a Russian and someone who knows Russian history, I have to offer the following correction: Her murder has made her a symbol of what Russia has been for hundreds of years. To say that Russia “has become” a state institutionally hostile to the freedom of the press is to conveniently forget that the Russian—and formerly Soviet—government always did its best to suffocate even the remotest attempt at free speech, most recently in the 20th century.

Although American grievances about censorship in the United States are often legitimate, they look hyperbolic and metaphorical when compared to Russia’s preying on and devouring of free speech. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Russia is the third most dangerous country for journalists in the world, after Iraq and Algeria (good company). Furthermore, according to CPJ, thirteen journalists have been murdered in Russia since Putin took office. There’ll be more.

But let’s take a trip back in time to the ’60s: Soviet censors at first did not allow Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” to be published. And this was after Stalin’s reign of totalitarian brutality… “A Day in the Life” was only published thanks to Khrushchev. But then Solzhenitsyn was kicked out of the country. This was no aberration. The fact that Russia had so many great writers, yet such contempt for free speech, has to be one of the greatest literary ironies of all time.

Those who spoke out against government propaganda—therefore, for the truth—were “removed” in a variety of ways, not the least of which was a shot to the back of the head. I’m not suggesting that the current Russian government is behind Politkovskaya’s murder, but contrary to what Putin would like us to believe, the government will not make a serious effort to investigate, nor will it loosen its grip on the press. Little has changed.

One Great Magazine (among others) Underutilizing the Potential of the Internet

Writers for The Economist are masterful at producing information-packed little articles, and such an economic approach to word count is useful, but the Internet has given such publications an opportunity to provide depth without necessarily using much more space.
A recent issue of The Economist had a story about the world’s biggest lake. Lake Baikal, which happens to be in Siberia—Russia’s freezer—is “stuffed with endemic plants and animals.” And it’s “home to the world’s largest colony of freshwater seals.” On more than one occasion, the author refers to the natural beauty of the lake and its uniqueness, yet there isn’t a single photo of the lake, its species, or its surroundings.
SUGGESTION:
1. There should be a link to a photo slide show focusing on the lake’s history and uniqueness.

2. And/Or: There should be video: a slow, panoramic shot of the lake, also with insightful, contextual commentary.

The author of the article opens with a paraphrase from a six-fingered shaman. “What does this shaman look like?” was my first question when I read the article.
SUGGESTION:
3. There should be a photo of this man on the Web site. And, perhaps a few minutes of video (with subtitles) of him talking about the lake.

According to the article, a Russian environmental commission approved the building of an oil pipeline within spitting distance from the lake, but—you many want to sit down for this one—Russian President Vladimir Putin intervened to have the pipeline be at least 25 miles from the lake.
SUGGESTION: The author acknowledges that this move by Putin—“who had previously insinuated that environmentalists were foreign agents”—is a bit unusual.
4. There should, therefore, be a table with a brief outline of Putin’s decisions on the environment.

Also, the author doesn’t mention that Putin’s decision came around the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which is no small detail.
SUGGESTION:
5. This fact should be mentioned, and the word “Chernobyl” should be hyperlinked to Economist articles on the topic. This will not distract the reader but only provide historical context to those less familiar with the topic.

6. While I’m on the topic of links, the following words should have hyperlinks to Economist articles on the topic: Putin, Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, tourism (to the region), poverty and joblessness (in the region), oil pipeline, etc.

7. Most readers probably don’t know where the lake is, even if they know where Siberia is. There should be “view map of this region” and “view map of suggested oil pipeline” links at the margin.

Lastly, a downloadable audio transcript of the story should be available. This should be available from other great magazines, too, like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s. I prefer to read the printed word, but desperate times—like standing upright in a packed subway without an inch to spare—call for audio articles. And to make a few rubles, these companies can have a short, 10-second ad: “The following article is brought to you by…”

The Unintended Consequences of Various Technologies

Journalists don’t have much to say about the unintended consequences of technology. I believe it is one of the most fascinating topics out there.

Let’s take the personal computer as an example of the technology and writing as an example of the action we want to examine. Certainly, the use of the computer — as opposed to the typewriter — to write has changed not only how we write but what we write. The ability to type 60 words per minute, to cut and paste with ease, to correct errors and forget they ever existed, to go back and change the slightest bit of punctuation — the list seems endless — has certainly brought advantages; yet, at the same time, it has created just as many unintended consequences… The process we use changes the way we think. Imagine for a moment if we’d have to go back to using a sharpened feather and ink to write. Would we write the same things? Wouldn’t the mere pace of our method affect the pace of our thought process? Thousands of questions like this can be raised… but they’re not.

Whenever new technologies come out, little thought is given to their unintended consequences. To a degree, this is justified: the consequences tend to reveal themselves slowly and — most important of all — covertly.

But isn’t it the job of journalists to look under rocks, no matter how heavy they seem?

Journalism and Entertainment

When talking about journalism and entertainment, it is important to make a distinction. I will purposely present a dichotomy whose parts are the opposite sides of a long spectrum: 1) journalism of entertainment vs. 2) entertaining journalism.

1) Covering the entertainment industry. I don’t consider this journalism. I consider this type of “journalism” precisely what it is covering—entertainment, and nothing more. News of movie-star breakups, rock-star drug use, athlete orgies, and so fourth, is not news. There is no value in those stories.
2) Presenting the news in an entertaining way. Legitimate journalism can certainly be done in a witty, interesting manner. I am tempted to use “The Daily Show” as an example, but a case could be made that it isn’t journalism (or that it’s perhaps too entertaining): there’s no original reporting and the interview questions are pretty soft. On the other hand, it filters out a lot of bullshit, especially that of politicians and television news (and the combination).

An example, among many, of a magazine article I found to be gripping and entertaining was “A Foreign Affair: on the great Ukrainian bride hunt,” which appeared in the June 2006 issue of Harper’s. It presented a serious issue—American men looking for, and sometimes finding, “brides” in the Ukraine—in a way that made you care about the characters involved and even about the reporter’s methods (he went undercover and presented himself as an American looking for a “bride”). But not all issues are—pardon the context—so sexy. There is usually no way to present WMDs or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in a way that is both entertaining and penetrating. They are certainly interesting topics, and should be presented as such, but it is important to keep in mind that the primary goal of a journalist is not to entertain but to inform.

Although journalists should create stories that are relevant, interesting, and when possible witty and entertaining, they should not confuse the meat with the seasonings.

Lastly, I do believe that almost any topic can be relevant and interesting if approached from the right direction. I have already admitted to the slippery nature of the dichotomy I presented in the first paragraph. An interesting and insightful piece can be written about the drug use of a certain rock star, for example, if the journalist asks the right questions of the issue. But asking the wrong questions or sensationalizing the issue makes for a leap across the spectrum—from entertaining journalism to “journalism” of entertainment, from value to nil.

Unique Value of Journalism

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote that it is better not to be a journalist than to write the lies of Pravda. Press in the United States is freer — exactly how “free” it is is debatable — than it ever was in the Soviet Union, so journalists here aren’t confronted with the dichotomy which Solzhenitsyn mentions. Despite this freedom of the press — and the ever growing freedom provided to us by the Internet — most journalism that exists today is either of poor quality (in that it lacks depth and insight) or it is simply not journalism, because of the topics it covers… You want evidence? Just look at most magazines, newspapers, radio programs, Web sites and TV news programs. Separating good journalism from the bad is like looking for tiny diamonds in a large pile of bullshit. There is good stuff on the radio (NPR), the Internet (mostly the Web sites of good magazines), and there are a few good newspapers out there… I can’t think of any good TV news networks. Only two television programs stand out as insightful and good bullshit filters: “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Charlie Rose Show.”
The highest form of journalism, the form I value most, is magazine journalism (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, and a few others) and journalism books (for example: by David Remnick, Sy Hersh and Hunter S. Thompson). In journalism, there is too much of an obsession with the present — often the immediate present — the importance of which is constantly exaggerated. I’m not saying that what’s going on in the present isn’t important, but depth, insight, critical thinking and seeing past the false dichtomy of “seeing both sides of the story” takes time. Reporting on “what happened today” should be the exception rather than the rule; and pandering to the lowest common denominator and sensationalism should not even be considered journalism.

Less news, more depth and critical thinking.