Spend an hour or two at MoMA, Tate Modern, or some other world class museum and inevitably you’’ll overhear some variation of “my seven-year-old could paint that.”
Mayhaps, Madam, but how much would it fetch at auction?
As a new documentary series, the Art Market (in Four Parts), makes clear, the monetary value of art is tricky to assign.
There are exceptions, of course, such as in the irresistible Picasso anecdote cited in the trailer, above.
Usually however, even the experts must resort to an educated guess, based on a number of factors, none of which can tell the whole story.
I’d have thought a signature as famous as Warhol’s would confer the same sort of insta-worth Picasso claimed his John Hancock did.
The unpredictability of final sales figures has led auction houses to issue guarantees in return for a split of the profits, a practice Sotheby’s North and South America chairman, Lisa Dennison, likens to an insurance policy for the seller.
With the exception of the ill-fated Warhol’s great big goose egg, the numbers batted around by the series’ influential talking heads are pretty staggering. Snappy editing also lends a sense of art world glamour, though gallerist Michele Maccarone betrays a certain weariness that may come closer to the true energy at the epicenter of the scene.
As for me, I couldn’t help thinking back to my days as a receptionist in a commercial gallery on Chicago’s tourist friendly Magnificent Mile. I was contemptuous of most of the stuff on our walls, which ran heavily to pastel garden parties and harlequins posed in front of recognizable landmarks. One day, a couple who’d wandered in on impulse dropped a ridiculous sum on a florid beach scene, complete with shimmering rainbows. Rich they may have been, but their utter lack of taste was appalling, at least until the wife excitedly confided that the painting’s setting reminded them of their long ago Hawaiian honeymoon. That clarified a lot for me as to art’s true value. I hope that the couple is still alive and enjoying the most for their money’s worth, every single day.
The Art Market’s other three parts, “Galleries,” “Patrons,” and “Art Fairs,” will be released weekly through mid-June. And we’ll try to add them to this post, as they roll out.
I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but meditation may have saved my life. During a particularly challenging time of overwork, underpay, and serious family distress, I found myself at dangerous, near-stroke levels of high cholesterol and blood pressure, and the beginnings of near-crippling early-onset arthritis. My doctors were alarmed. Something had to change. Unable to make stressful outer circumstances disappear, I had to find constructive ways to manage my responses to them instead. Yoga and meditation made the difference.
I’m hardly alone in this journey. The leading cause of death in the U.S. is heart disease, followed closely by stroke, diabetes, and depression leading to suicide—all conditions exacerbated by high levels of stress and anxiety. In my own case, a changed diet and daily exercise played a crucial role in my physical recovery, but those disciplines would not even have been possible to adopt were it not for the calming, centering effects of a daily meditation practice.
Anecdotes, however, are not evidence. We are bombarded with claims about the miracle magic of “mindfulness,” a word that comes from Buddhism and describes a kind of meditation that focuses on the breath and body sensations as anchors for present-moment awareness. Some form of “mindfulness based stress reduction” has entered nearly every kind of therapy, rehabilitation, corporate training, and pain management, and the word has been a marketing totem for at least a solid decade now. No one ever needs to mention the B‑word in all this meditation talk. As one meditation teacher tells his beginner students, “Buddhism cannot exist without mindfulness, but mindfulness can exist perfectly well without Buddhism.”
So, no need to believe in reincarnation, renunciation, or higher states of consciousness, fine. But does meditation really change your brain? Yes. Academic researchers have conducted dozens of studies on how the practice works, and have nearly all concluded that it does. “There’s more than an article a day on the subject in peer-reviewed journals,” says University of Toronto psychiatrist Steven Selchen, “The research is vast now.” One research team at Harvard, led by Harvard Medical School psychology instructor Sara Lazar, published a study in 2011 that shows how mindfulness meditation results in physical changes to the brain.
The paper details the results of MRI scans from 16 subjects “before and after they took part in the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness,” reports the Harvard Gazette. Each of the participants spent “an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises.” After the program, they reported significant stress reduction on a questionnaire, and analysis of their MRIs “found increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.”
The Harvard Business Review points to a another survey study in which scientists from the University of British Columbia and the Chemnitz University of Technology “were able to pool data from more than 20 studies to determine which areas of the brain are consistently affected. They identified at least eight different regions.” Highlighting two areas “of particular concern to business professionals,” the HBR describes changes to the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area of the frontal lobe associated with self-regulation, learning, and decision-making. The ACC “may be particularly important in the face of uncertain and fast-changing conditions.” Like Lazar’s Harvard study, the researchers also identified “increased amounts of gray matter” in the hippocampus, an area highly subject to damage from chronic stress.
These studies and many others bring mindfulness together with another current psychological buzzword that has proven to be true: neuroplasticity, the idea that we can change our brains for the better—that we are not “hardwired” to repeat patterns of behavior despite our best efforts. In the TEDx Cambridge talk at the top of the post, Lazar explains her results, and connects them with her own experiences with meditation. She is, you’ll see right away, a skeptic, not inclined to accept medical claims proffered by yoga and meditation teachers. But she found that those practices worked in her own life, and also had “scientifically validated benefits” in reducing stress, depression, anxiety, and physical pain. In other words, they work.
None of the research invalidates the Buddhist and Hindu traditions from which yoga and meditation come, but it does show that one needn’t adopt any particular belief system in order to reap the health benefits of the practices. For some secular introductions to meditation, you may wish to try UCLA’s free guided meditation sessions or check out the Meditation 101 animated beginner’s guide above. If you’re not too put off by the occasional Buddhist reference, I would also highly recommend the Insight Meditation Center’s free six-part introduction to mindfulness meditation. Chronic stress is literally killing us. We have it in our power to change the way we respond to circumstances, change the physical structure of our brains, and become happier and healthier as a result.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with the work of Sigmund Freud—which is just about everyone—knows at least a handful of things about his famous psychoanalytic theory: Ego, Super-ego, and Id, sex and death drives, Oedipal complex, “Freudian slip,” “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”… (a quote that didn’t come from Freud). Most of these terms, except that cigar thing, originate from Freud’s later period—from about 1920 to his death in 1939—perhaps his most productive from a literary standpoint, starting with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he began to develop his well-known structural model of the mind.
During these later years Freud built on ideas from 1913’s Totem and Taboo and fully expanded his psychological analysis into a philosophical and cultural theory in books like The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism. For those who have primarily encountered Freud in intro to psych classes, these works can seem strange indeed, given the sweeping speculative claims the Viennese doctor makes about religion, war, ancient history, and even prehistory. Though peppered with terminology from psychoanalysis, Freud’s more philosophical works roam far afield of his medical specializations and direct observations.
When and how did Freud’s psychiatry become philosophy, and what possessed him to apply his psychological theories to analyses of broad social and historical dynamics? We see hints of Freud the philosopher throughout his career, but it’s during his middle period—when his tripartite model of the psyche still consisted of the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious—that he began to move more fully from case studies of individual psychosexual development and interpretations of dreams to studies of human development writ large. These books are almost Darwinian expansions of what Freud called “metapsychology”—which included his theories of Oedipal neuroses, narcissism, and sadomasochism.
From 1914 to 1915, after his break with Jung, Freud worked on a series of papers on “metapsychology,” intended, he wrote “to clarify and carry deeper the theoretical assumptions on which a psycho-analytic system could be founded.” Seven of the manuscripts from this period vanished, seemingly lost forever. In 1983, psychoanalyst Ilse Grubich-Simitis discovered one of these essays in an old trunk belonging to a friend and colleague of Freud. Published as A Phylogenetic Fantasy, this fascinating, unfinished work points the way forward for Freud, providing some connective tissue between his “ontogeny,” the development of the individual, and “phylogeny,” the development of the species.
It is here, his translators write in their introduction to this rare work, that Freud “concludes that each individual contains somewhere within himself or herself the history of all mankind; further, that mental illness can usefully be understood as a vestige of responses once necessary and highly adaptive to the exigencies of each era. Accordingly, mental illness can be understood as a set of formerly adaptive responses that have become maladaptive as the climatic and sociological threats to the survival of mankind have changed.”
These basic, yet radical, ideas may be said to form a backdrop against which we might read so much of Freud’s mature work as a means for decoding what seems puzzling, irrational, and downright maddening about human behavior. Freud’s scientific work has long been superseded, and many of the specifics of his psychoanalytic theory deemed unworkable, irrelevant, or even damaging. But there are very good reasons why his work has thrived in literary theory and philosophy. There is even a case to be made the Freud was the first evolutionary psychologist, roughly bringing Darwinian concepts of adaptation to bear on the development of the human psyche from prehistory to modernity.
For all the negative criticism his work has endured, Freud dared to explain us to ourselves, drawing on every resource at his disposal—including our most foundational narratives in mythology and ancient poetry. For that reason, his relevance, writes Jane Ciabattari, as a “theoretical catalyst” in the 21st century remains potent, and his work remains well worth reading and pondering, for any student of human behavior.
Today, on the 160th birthday of the father of psychoanalysis, we bring you a collection of Freud’s major works available free to read online or download as ebooks in the links below. Further down, find a list of Freud audiobooks to download as mp3s or stream.
Whether rooted in clinical study and research, detective-like case studies, philosophical speculations, or poetic flights of fancy, Freud’s writing draws us deeper into strange, obsessive, profound, and disturbing ways of thinking about our uneasy relationships with ourselves, our families, and our unstable social order.
Last year, we highlighted the Harvard Grant Study and The Glueck Study, two 75-year studies that have traced the lives and development of hundreds of men, trying to get answers to one big question: How can you live a long and happy life? For answers, watch Robert Waldinger above. He’s the director of what’s now called the Harvard Study of Adult Development and also an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
According to the decades-long study, you won’t get health and happiness from wealth and fame (nor hard work), the mirages that many Americans chase after. Instead they come from something a little more obtainable, if you work at it—good, strong relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and folks in your community. These relationships, the study finds, protect us mentally and physically. They increase our happiness and extend our lives, whereas, conversely, loneliness and corrosive relationships put us into decline sooner than we’d like. The key takeaway here: good relationships are the foundation on which we build the good life. Start putting that into practice today.
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Is there any subject that can’t be covered in a TED Talk?
Apparently not. You can make a TED Talk about anything, even nothing, as veteran improviser and rookie Saturday Night Live writer, Will Stephen, demonstrated at a recent TEDx event in New York City.
What you shouldn’t do is deviate from TED’s established presentation tropes. Stephen may be punking us with his How to Sound Smart in Your TEDx Talk, above, but aspirant TED speakers should take notes. One can’t practice observational humor without being a keen observer. Stephen’s insights are as good a playbook as any for that unmistakeable TED-style delivery:
Use your hands.
Engage the audience by asking them a question that will result in a show of hands…
By show of hands, how many of you have been asked a question before?
Hit ‘em with an endearing, personal anecdote.
Projections will enhance your credibility.
Replay the clip with the sound down, as Stephen suggests, and it’s still obvious what he’s doing — giving a TED Talk. (The familiar camera work and editing don’t hurt either.)
Even if you’re not planning on nominating yourself to become a TED speaker in the near future, Stephen’s lesson should prove handy next time you’re called upon to do some public speaking, whether running for President or delivering the toast at your best friend’s wedding.
And nothing is certainly not the only topic of substance upon which Stephen can discourse. Witness his Tinder Strategy Powerpoint.
Hmm, maybe there are some TED-proof subjects after all…
Free will often seems like nothing more than a cruel illusion. We don’t get to choose the times, places, and circumstances of our birth, nor do we have much control over the state of our states, regions, or nations. Even the few who can design conditions such that they are always secure and comfortable find themselves unavoidably subject to what Buddhists call the “divine messengers” of sickness, aging, and death. Biology may not be destiny, but it is a force more powerful than many of our best intentions. And though most of us in the West have the privilege of living far away from war zones, millions across the world face extremities we can only imagine, and to which we are not immune by any stretch.
Among all of the psychiatrists, philosophers, and religious figures who have wrestled with these universal truths about the human condition, perhaps none has been put to the test quite like neurologist and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, but lost his mother, father, brother, and first wife to the camps.
While imprisoned, he faced what he described as “an unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself.” After his camp was liberated in 1945, Frankl published an extraordinary book about his experiences: Man’s Search for Meaning, “a strangely hopeful book,” writes Matthew Scully at First Things, “still a staple on the self-help shelves” though it is “inescapably a book about death.” The book has seen dozens of editions in dozens of languages and ranks 9th on a list of most influential books.
Frankl’s thesis echoes those of many sages, from Buddhists to Stoics to his 20th century Existentialist contemporaries: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Not only did he find hope and meaning in the midst of terrible suffering, but after his unimaginable loss, he “remarried, wrote another twenty-five books, founded a school of psychotherapy, built an institute bearing his name in Vienna,” and generally lived a long, happy life. How? The interview above will give you some idea. Frankl maintains that we always have some freedom of choice, “in spite of the worst conditions,” and therefore always have the ability to seek for meaning. “People are free,” says Frankl, no matter their level of oppression, and are responsible “for making someone or something out of themselves.”
Frankl’s primary achievement as a psychotherapist was to found the school of “logotherapy,” a successor to Freudian psychoanalysis and Adlerian individual psychology. Drawing on Existentialist philosophy (Frankl’s book was published in Germany with the alternate title From Concentration Camp to Existentialism)—but turning away from an obsession with the Absurd—his approach, writes his institute, “is based on three philosophical and psychological concepts… Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.”
You can hear how Frankl works these principles into his philosophy in the fascinating interview, as well as in the short clip above from an earlier lecture, in which he rails against a crude and ultimately unfulfilling form of meaning-making: the pursuit of wealth. Even us materialistic Americans, renowned for our greed, Frankl notes with good humor, respond to surveys in overwhelming numbers saying our greatest desire is to find meaning and purpose in life. Like no other secular voice, Frankl was confident that we could do so, in spite of life’s seeming chaos, through—as he explains above—a kind of idealism that brings us closer to reality.
Note: You can download Frankl’s major book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” as a free audio book if you join Audible’s 30-Day Free Trial program. Find details on that here.
Despite our fondest intuitions and most cherished of cultural notions—manifested for decades in aspirational “Great Books” courses and reading lists—there is no “compelling evidence,” wrote University of York professor of philosophy Gregory Currie at the New York Times in 2013, “that suggests that people are morally or socially better for reading Tolstoy.” Or anything else for that matter.
Like Currie, Lee Siegel at The New Yorker casts doubt on these supposedly celebratory findings. Should we require that books prove their utility, that they make us “better” in the way that, say, dietary supplements do? Is empathy really a moral quality, or simply an ability that allows the unscrupulous to better manipulate others?
This recent tempest of social science and skepticism notwithstanding, novelists have long argued that their craft requires, and fosters, better understanding of other people—or in the famous words of Kafka, which Siegel quotes dismissively, literature is “an axe to break the frozen sea inside us.” Foremost among such artists is Leo Tolstoy, who—says Alain de Botton in his School of Life video above—“was a believer in the novel not as a source of entertainment, but as a tool for psychological education and reform. It was in his eyes the supreme medium by which we can get to know others—especially those who, from the outside, might seem unappealing—and thereby expand our humanity and tolerance.”
Were Tolstoy a lesser writer, a theory like this might have produced unreadably didactic books unlikely to find much of an audience. His great literary skill makes his books engrossingly entertaining despite these intentions. Nonetheless, De Botton shows us the ways in which novels like Anna Karenina (find it in our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books) teach ethical concepts like “sympathy and forgiveness.” And whether you read Tolstoy expressly to become a better person, or find personal improvement a side-effect of reading Tolstoy, I don’t think we need social scientific arguments to read Tolstoy. Indeed, though great novels may teach us many things we did not know about human complexity, their value can reside as much in the questions they ask—and that we ask of them—as in the supposed answers they provide about humanity.
In high school, I had a history teacher who was, in his spare time, a millionaire owner of several marinas. He taught, he told us, because he loved it. Was he a good teacher? Not by the lights of most pedagogical standards, but he did intend, amidst all his lassitude and total lack of organization, to leave us all with something more important than history: the secret of his success. What was it, you ask? Naps. Each day he touted the power of power naps with a proselytizer’s relentless enthusiasm: 15 minutes a few times a day, the key to wealth and happiness.
We all thought he was benignly nuts, but maybe he was on to something after all. It seems that many very wise, productive people—such as Albert Einstein, Aristotle, and Salvador Dali—have used power naps as sources of refreshment and inspiration. Except that while my history teacher recommended no less than ten minutes, at least one of these famous gents preferred less than one. Dali used a method of timing his naps that ensured his sleep would not last long. He outlined it thus, according to Lifehacker:
1. Sleep sitting upright (Dali recommends a Spanish-style bony armchair)
2. Hold a key in your hand, between your fingers (for the bohemian, use a skeleton key)
3. Relax and fall asleep (but not for too long…)
4. As you fall asleep, you’ll drop the key. Clang bang clang!
5. Wake up inspired!
Dali called it, fittingly, “Slumber with a key,” and to “accomplish this micro nap,” writes The Art of Manliness, he “placed an upside-down plate on the floor directly below the key.” As soon as he fell asleep, “the key would slip through his fingers, clang the plate, and awaken him from his nascent slumber.” He claimed to have learned this trick from Capuchin monks and recommended it to anyone who worked with ideas, claiming that the micro nap “revivified” the “physical and psychic being.”
Dali included “Slumber with a key” in his book for aspiring painters, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, along with such nostrums as “the secret of the reason why a great draughtsman should draw while completely naked” and “the secret of the periods of carnal abstinence and indulgence to be observed by the painter.” We might be inclined to dismiss his nap technique as a surrealist practical joke. Yet The Art of Manliness goes on to explain the creative potential in the kind of nap I used to take in history class—dozing off, then jerking awake just before my head hit the desk:
The experience of this transitional state between wakefulness and sleep is called hypnagogia. You’re floating at the very threshold of consciousness; your mind is sliding into slumber, but still has threads of awareness dangling in the world…. While you’re in this state, you may see visions and hallucinations (often of shapes, patterns, and symbolic imagery), hear noises (including your own name or imagined speech), and feel almost physical sensations…. The experience can essentially be described as “dreaming while awake.”
The benefits for a surrealist painter—or any creative person in need of a jolt out of the ordinary—seem obvious. Many visionaries such as William Blake, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge have made use of waking dream states as wellsprings of inspiration. Both Beethoven and Wagner composed while half asleep.
Scientists have found waking dream states useful as well. We’ve already mentioned Einstein. Brilliant mathematician, engineer, philosopher, and theoretical physicist Henri Poincare also found inspiration in micro naps. He pointed out that the important thing is to make ready use of any insights you glean during your few seconds of sleep by writing them down immediately (have pen and paper ready). Then, the conscious mind must take over: “It is necessary,” wrote Poincare, “to put in shape the results of this inspiration, to deduce from them the immediate consequences, to arrange them,” and so forth. He also suggests that “verification” of one’s hypnagogic insights is needed above all, but this step, while critical for the mathematician, seems superfluous for the artist.
So the micro nap comes to us with a very respectable pedigree, but does it really work or is it a psychological placebo? The author of the Almost Bohemian blog writes that he has practiced the technique for several weeks and found it “relatively successful” in restoring energy, though he has yet to harness it for inspiration. If you asked empirical sleep researchers, they might tend to agree with my history teacher: “Sleep laboratory studies show,” writes Lynne Lamberg in her book Bodyrhythms, “that a nap must last at least ten minutes to affect mood and performance.” This says nothing at all, however, about how long it takes to open a doorway to the unconscious and steal a bit of a dream to put to use in one’s waking work.
Aside from the very specific use of the micro nap, the longer power nap—anywhere from 10–40 minutes—can work wonders in improving “mood, alertness and performance,” writes the National Sleep Foundation. Short naps seem to work best as they leave one feeling refreshed but not groggy, and do not interfere with your regular sleep cycle. The Sleep Foundation cites a NASA study “on sleepy military pilots and astronauts” which found that “a 40-minute nap improved performance by 34% and alertness by 100%.” Lifehacker points to studies showing that “power naps, short 10 to 15 minute naps, improve mental efficiency and productivity,” which is why companies like Google and Apple allow their employees to doze off for a bit when drowsy.
One stress management site observes that the 10–15 minute power nap does not even require a pillow or blanket; “you don’t even need to go to sleep! You just need a comfortable place to lie on your back, put your feet up, and breathe comfortably.” Such a practice will not likely turn you into a world famous artist, poet, or scientist (or millionaire marina-owning, altruistic high school teacher). It will likely rejuvenate your mind and body so that you can make much better use of the time you spend not sleeping.
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