In a lovely meditation on the things that we take for granted, Jordan Dworkin walks us through a modern apartment, pausing to see items through the eyes of people who were around when they were invented…
All the items in this room were once out of reach; some not yet invented, others too rare or costly for the vast majority of people. Today, most of us lucky enough to live with them walk past without a second thought.
It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.
But our lives today are a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts to do the same. It serves us, and honors them, to recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace…
As we appreciate our ancestors, we might send innovative birthday greetings to George Joseph Herriman III; he was born on this date in 1880. A cartoonist best remembered for Krazy Kat, which ran from 1913 until his death in 1944, he was never a commercial success; his strip survived via the admiration (and support) of his publisher, William Randolph Hearst. But Herriman was enormously influential, a primary influence on cartoonists like Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware.
The Trump administration’s immigration policy has been a bonanza for the private prison sector– as Vanessa Romo reports, for two companies with ties to the administration in particular…
America’s two largest private prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, are reporting a combined $1.4 billion in quarterly revenue over the spring as immigration detention closes in on record levels.
Those revenues announced Thursday do not include net proceeds of $1.6 billion made by CoreCivic after the recent sale of four of their facilities to the Department of Homeland Security. Patrick Swindle [!], CoreCivic’s President and CEO, told investors on an earnings call that that works out to an average rate of $307,000 per bed.
The earnings — from April through June of this year — come as the U.S. is holding almost 66,000 people in immigration detention, nearing record levels not seen since January, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center. Both companies say they’re also finding other revenue opportunities, like ankle monitors for Haitian immigrants who recently lost their protected immigration status.
Swindle said that CoreCivic’s total revenue went up by just over 27% this spring compared to the same quarter last year, for a total of $684.9 million. CoreCivic exceeded expectations in a period that included the government shutdown, Swindle said. This was accomplished in part by lowering operating costs — meaning the business of detaining people is becoming cheaper — and because of more people being put in detention.
CoreCivic’s sales of detention centers to the government won’t be reflected until next quarter — but they are part of a larger strategy to meet President Trump’s goal of having 100,000 people in detention at once. CoreCivic made a deal to continue operating the detention centers and also hopes to build more. Meanwhile, GEO Group says they’re also in talks to do the same.
GEO Group CEO George Zoley said in his company’s earnings call also on Thursday that thanks to 2025 contracts, total revenues are up to $732.1 million — an increase of nearly $96 million or 15% — over the same period last year.
GEO Group’s government ties run deep. Former GEO Group executive David Venturella is the acting director of ICE. In a recent letter, he told lawmakers he has divested his GEO Group stock.
President Trump also has financial stakes in the two companies, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. An analysis of Trump’s most recent financial disclosure by CREW last month found that the president’s brokers have made 29 trades of private prison stocks since he returned to office. According to the study, the first purchases were made on the 10th day of his second term. The total amount bought and sold was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars split between GEO Group and CoreCivic.
In Thursday’s call, GEO Group noted that their ankle monitoring sales are up. The electronic devices are part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program contract it has with ICE, along with smartwatches and the SmartLink phone app that help the government keep tabs on immigrants outside of detention, Zoley said.
Zoley also told investors that GPS-tracking ankle monitors in particular will likely keep climbing now that Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants has ended.
“Because of this new policy shift as to who will be subject to this immigration enforcement like … the Haitians, we could see a significant increase in the number of people in the ISAP program,” Zoley said, adding “most of them, we believe, would be placed under the ankle monitoring supervision.” He noted that “the app is far less expensive than the ankle monitors.”…
On those “sales of detention center to the government”: it appears the administration has retreated from overpaying for warehouses needy of retrofitting in area that don’t want them, opting instead to buy currently-operating facilities.
The melancholy Jaques is surely right, at the metaphorical level at which Shakespeare operated. But others have been moved to treat that wisdom much more literally. Mathilde Montpetit offers a fascinating example…
“This is an age of formulations”, the actress Genevieve Stebbins [see here] declared in 1886. Auguste Comte had formulated positivism in science, Henry Thomas Buckle had done the same for history, and Herbert Spencer for culture. Even visual art had had its fundamental theories set out, in John Ruskin’s five-volume Modern Painters (1843–60). “It is as though the world”, she reflected, “growing weary of productive activity, sought to pause and reärrange before plunging into further depths; to rescue from the void and formless mass of collected material a system whose symmetry and beauty should embody all that is worth saving”. And why wouldn’t the dramatic arts deserve — indeed, need — the same treatment? But who would be able to do it?
Such a man did exist, but he had died in 1871, leaving his findings unpublished. Luckily, some of his apostles still lived. Stebbins breathlessly narrates her journey to deepest darkest Nanterre to find the Abbé Delaumosne. “What I can I do for you, my child?” he asks. In the Cathedral of Sainte Geneviève and Saint Maurice, he bestows upon her the holy teachings: the French singer and orator François Delsarte’s system of dramatic expression.
Stebbins had first learned about the Delsarte System from Steele MacKaye [see here], an American playwright and actor who had met Delsarte in Paris and “like a John the Baptist, came back to America to prepare the New World for [His] coming”. In 1876, Stebbins had retired from the stage to devote herself entirely to a Delsartean training at MacKaye’s hands: by 1880, she was teaching it herself. The Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression, first published in 1885, was both a philosophical synthesis and a practical guide, providing both intellectual background and exercises for the cultivation of dramatic genius.
Written in the voice of an ongoing set of lessons, taking place over the course of a year, Stebbins was chatty and encouraging: “Very well; you really are making remarkable progress. I wish all my pupils were as intelligent”.
Delsarte was a strict Trinitarian, in part inspired by the work of the seventeenth-century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (and, it seems, Charles Sanders Peirce [see here]). For him, everything came in threes, especially movement: “All motion is expansive which is objective, which has relation to the exterior world. So Delsarte has named motion from yourself as a centre, excentric. Again we fold in, contract, concentrate our motion in subjective states of mind. So motion to a centre Delsarte has named concentric. Motion between these two extremes, being well balanced, he has aptly termed normal”. These three types of movement could be combined with the three essences (mental, moral, vital) and multiplied into a “ninefold accord”, within which most movements could be graphed [as above].
Every possible element of a gesture or expression was deconstructed and fit into this rubric, with specific exercises for the “Fingers, Hand, Fore arm, Entire arm, Head, Torso, Foot, Lower leg, Entire leg, Entire body, Eyelids, Lower jaw . . .” Stebbins provided helpful charts, like one that shows the “Simple Combinations of Upper Lid and Brow”. On the next page, she clarified that since both the brow and the lid each have nine possibilities each, there are in fact eighty-one possible combinations (she gave eighteen). The Delsarte System presented here, Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter has shown, was full of Stebbins’ own innovations. She had developed the “energizing” techniques to go along with the relaxation ones, and created a whole set of exercises that are still used today in many acting classes…
… What this system was meant to be, Stebbins repeatedly emphasized, was a training system, a form of “aesthetic gymnastics”. So:
When before the public in the pulpit, on the platform, or the stage, forget all rules, or rather make no effort to recall them. Your motto there should be heart-work, not head-work.
“Then why study art’s rules and formulæ?” I hear you ask.
Because much of your practice will cling to you, without conscious thought; because nature rarely showers all her gifts on one head. Inspiration may be yours without bodily power to express; or you may be virtuosos without “the still small voice within.”
As we rehearse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that Wings premiered at the Criterion Theater, in New York City. A “romantic action-war picture,” it featured Army Air Corps aviators in battle (and in love). While most features at the time were shot on lots or studio-controlled locations with limited casts and budgets, Wings was shot on location at Kelly Field in San Antonio over 8 months; hundreds of extras (including some 300 pilots were involved in the filming, including pilots and planes of the Army Air Corps) on a (then massive) budget of $2 million. The investment paid off: While Wings was recognized for the expressive emoting of its (silent) cast, it was acclaimed for its realistic action sequences and technical prowess, and became the yardstick against which future war– but especially aviation– films were measured. It won the first Best Picture in the inaugural Academy Award ceremony (in 1929), and remains the only fully-silent film to do so. (A “sound” version of Wings was ultimately produced, but has no audible dialogue, only a synchronized musical score with sound effects.)
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post… J. F. Martel explores why art matters, arguing that when early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images…
In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls, almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. [See here.] Today, the images are believed to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia, Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.
Cave paintings at Lascaux, France. Courtesy Wikimedia
These discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might reveal to us about the nature of reality.
Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ – art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art. Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity…
[Martel develops his case (fascinatingly). He concludes…]
… The idea, then, that human beings invented art, that art ‘belongs’ to humanity, is true only after the fact. In a more primordial sense, art invented humanity by giving humans access to the process through which it brings forth a world, along with everything else.
What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.
But again, we are led back to two kinds of art. Artifice is art that imitates nature: an attempt to represent the world on human terms, resulting either in imperfect reflections (according to Plato) or in perfected abstractions (according to Aristotle). Real art, by contrast, enacts natura naturans – that is, creation as such. If we can speak of imitation here at all, it is not in the sense of mechanical copying but of what the Christian mystics call imitatio Christi: the imitation that becomes instead of merely aping, a creative event transcending all the ways in which the intellect reduces things-in-the-making to things made.
Art alone puts us in touch with certain kinds of truth and beauty. And in that way, art restores us to reality. For it to succeed, however, it must be left to its own devices (or lack thereof). It must be free to eschew the logic of utility and to embody the freedom we stifle under the pressures of means-and-ends thinking.
‘All art,’ quipped Oscar Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), ‘is quite useless.’ For Wilde, art necessarily and essentially serves no purpose – and artists ought to know better than to wish it otherwise. At the same time, he elsewhere argued with equal conviction that if it weren’t for the efforts of the Impressionist painters, the London fog would not exist. It was they, he claimed in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), who brought forth this aspect of the world, which had gone unseen until then:
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? … The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last 10 years is entirely due to this particular school of Art … One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence … There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.
Claude Monet and his circle did not represent what was already present; they made present what had hitherto been absent. This power to make us see, for Wilde, is what makes art invaluable.
Is there a contradiction here? How can art be both invaluable and ‘quite useless’? It depends on how we define that last term. One might argue that if nobody paid attention to the fogs that crept through Victorian London until then, it was because there was no use in doing so. By attending to what no one cared to notice, the Impressionists drew from the invisible background of the human world a new entity that then became impossible to ignore. If art is useless for Wilde, it is only in the sense that it explores those regions of reality for which our present intellect has found no use – at least not yet. By making visible that which we could not see, to paraphrase Paul Klee, art expands our perception of the world. It thus fulfils a function precisely analogous to that of science; but whereas science is driven by an ideal of utility, art seeks what has not yet appeared on our radars. Artists alert us to what we do not yet know we do not know. Through their work, new realities, new ideas and new emotions become available.
Indeed, science begins – and can only begin – in the world that art has made. Ultimately, what we call art is the fruit of the human imagination’s capacity to go beyond immediate perception, to dream what lies around this corner, outside the human world. From this point of view, the hypothetical stage of the scientific method is nothing less than art: an exercise through which we step out of the mundanities of the actual to explore the possible as such, testing our dreams and extending our reach into the more-than-human.
This is why the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in 1968 described aesthetics as a ‘science of the sensible’. Art, for him, makes the world that science later measures, but the world it makes is ultimately beyond all measurement because it is the world that exists before we divide it into lengths, magnitudes and quantities. Bergson, a major influence on Deleuze, had called this a ‘qualitative multiplicity’, closer in nature to a continuous melody than to a series of discrete, static things that can be isolated from one another. It is what comes first, because it is the Real itself.
Paradoxically, art is useful only if it is allowed to remain entirely useless – that is, entirely free to go where it will. Wilde finds an ally here in Baudelaire, who followed his observation of the strangeness of the beautiful with a sharp rebuke to those who would subordinate artistic beauty to a utilitarian logic. Baudelaire asks:
How could this necessary, irreducible, and infinitely varied strangeness … ever be controlled, amended, and corrected by Utopian rules conceived in some little scientific temple or other on this planet, without mortal danger to art itself?
The privileging of utility over uselessness, of work over play, is the death of art – and the death of the given world in which our utilitarian spirit must be grounded if it is to have purpose and meaning.
Today, art is pressed upon by forces that would subordinate it to all-too-human ends. Some say that it should educate and elevate impressionable minds, training them to behave in accordance with a preexisting moral code. Others claim that it should play a therapeutic role, either as an instrument of medicine or as a means of escape by which workers might regain their strength before the next working day. Still others insist that art ought to serve the needs of the state or the market, upholding the preconceived ideas of a polity that mistakes its limited view of reality for the whole of reality. The rise of artificial intelligence has only intensified this levelling of art into non-art. By definition, artificial intelligence is capable only of artifice, since it inhabits a virtual universe of things made (data) rather than things-in-the-making. To fail to distinguish between the artifice it generates and the true art it imitates is to mistake representation for creation, and so to blind ourselves to the very source of what makes both art and humanity possible.
Art must remain useless (or become it again), and it must do so in the name of truth as well as beauty. At the beginning of this essay, I distinguished two forms of each of these ideals: one that merely confirms what we think we know, and another that reminds us of the mystery that underlies all our partial knowledge and imperfect beliefs. Above all, art confronts us with that radical mystery, without which our problem-solving and utilitarianism would be pointless. This mystery is not a theory but a truth, the very ground of that truth whose splendour Plato called beauty, Herzog called ecstasy, and Keats, speaking to his urn, declared to be one with truth itself. It is ecstatic because it takes us outside ourselves, connecting us with the wonder that burns at the heart of the world, and which, out of every search for answers, calls forth new questions – and, with them, new reasons to live…
As we muse on the mystery of musing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that French highwire artist Philippe Petit committed the “artistic crime of the century,” traversing a 200-foot steel cable across the 138-foot gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. 1,312 feet above the ground, he performed for 45 minutes, making eight passes along the wire, during which he walked, danced, lay down on the wire, and saluted observers from a kneeling position. Office workers, construction crews, and policemen cheered him on. The unpermitted/illegal performance took Petit six years of planning.
Nearly $1 trillion of art is expected to change hands in the coming decade, as boomers’ art collections get passed down. There won’t be enough buyers or museums to absorb it all. Felix Salmon on what inter-generational transfer may mean for the art world…
… The baby boomers spent money at an astonishing rate. In the single year of 2005, US boomers spent $7 trillion in 2026 dollars, per McKinsey. Twenty years earlier, in 1985, their predecessors in the Silent Generation had spent just $3 trillion in today’s dollars. Spending on art accelerated as the rich got richer, moved into ever-larger houses and became eager to splash out on discretionary purchases.
That unprecedented demand for art created an unprecedented supply of it too. “The art world became professionalized during the lifetime of the boomers,” notes Michael Darling, a co-founder of Museum Exchange, a company that tries to find museums willing to accept donors’ art. The number of artists making a living from their work reached previously unthinkable levels, with a concomitant increase in the number of galleries. There were about 150 art galleries in New York in 1946, per a 2005 Rand report. That doubled by 1961 and then doubled again by the early 2000s. In Los Angeles, the number of galleries went from almost zero in 1957 to more than 400 in 2005.
When patrons were limited to a few royal courts and religious institutions, the number of people who could make a living by producing art was relatively low. The boomers, blessed with vastly greater numbers, turned their money into battalions of collectable artists. In 1988 the Artnet Price Database, which tracks artists sold at auction, included 8,300 artists, including substantially all the Old Masters. By 2012 there were 90,275.
When you inherit art that was expensive when acquired, it’s difficult to think of it as “stuff” that could be thrown away or given to a thrift store. At the same time, storing and figuring out what to do with it can be enormously challenging. One way of making sure someone appreciates the art is to sell it. But finding buyers can be extraordinarily difficult. Most artists get forgotten over time. Even living artists have a hard time selling their work. A dead artist… needs a dealer who’s committed to resuscitating interest in them — and those dealers are few and far between, since it’s nearly always easier to sell the work of a living artist than a dead one.
Just looking at items that can be sold for cash on the secondary market, which is a tiny minority of all the art out there, roughly $1 trillion of art is expected to change hands just in the next 10 years, per Deloitte. No one is ready. The great wealth transfer includes a vast quantity of paintings and sculptures. A small proportion of it will have some sentimental value and be kept for that reason, but most of it is going to get moved out one way or another — sold, donated or even trashed…
[Salmon explores the options: continued stewardship by the heirs, sale (through auction houses or galleries), or donation (to museums)– all of which are, as he explains, fraught. But perhaps the biggest problem is the evolution of taste…]
… An even bigger barrier for inheritors looking to pass on a collection is the way tastes change over time. Boomers grew up looking at artists like Carl Andre or Balthus, congratulating themselves on how daringly receptive they were to the shattering of historical norms; as those norms get rebuilt, younger art lovers are much more likely to find reasons to avoid showing them entirely. Instead, their collections feature more women artists and tend to be more diverse in many other ways too.
The art world doesn’t fixate on the ultra-new in the way Hollywood or pop music does, where most consumption is of products produced and released in the past year or less. All the same, galleries overwhelmingly show new work by living artists, so that’s what most art collectors end up buying. That means heirs often end up inheriting work that used to be new and exciting but today is often little more than a faint memory.
The rise and fall of artists and artistic reputations is the subject of the emerging discipline of cultural evolution. Just as Darwinian evolution selects for species that do the best at surviving, artistic evolution selects for works that continue to attract our attention. Oleg Sobchuk, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, explains that art disappears from our collective memory first quickly and then slowly, in a process known as bi-exponential decay. “Sometimes we think about art as speaking to something that makes us human, that it’s general and timeless,” he says. “But in most cases, art is about something that is happening at that period of time.” The further we get away from the moment an artwork is made, the less of our attention it can generally command.
In paleontology there’s the concept of the “turnover pulse,” where the rate of extinction rises sharply; it’s not dissimilar to the theory of the paradigm shift in the history of science. In art, it’s been more than a century since the modernist revolution that started with impressionism and continued through Picasso and Duchamp. Now, for the first time, the dominant collectors and curators — not to mention artists — will be people who grew up in the age of the internet.
“Every new media, when it appears, creates some kind of rupture,” Sobchuk says. “Usually it functions as a revolution. The culture was in the hands of a small number of powerful individuals, and then from time to time, you have a technological revolution.” That doesn’t mean digital art will displace painting and sculpture. But it probably means there’s less appetite and reverence for modernism. Which doesn’t bode well for those inheriting a lot of it…
[Salmon explains why, though this transfer is essentially inevitable, it will unfold more slowly than we might think (TLDR: “Because there will still be many boomer buyers for every collector planning ahead and unwinding a collection, there won’t be nearly as much of a supply-and-demand mismatch over the next decade as the broader generational shift might imply…”) He concludes…]
… The great art transfer is a much bigger deal than “what are we going to do with all this stuff.” The art we keep will stay in the canon; the art we discard will be lost to history. All the same, the stuff question is becoming urgent, and its answer is sad, if simple: A tiny proportion of the art we inherit will be treasured and valued, and a little bit more will find a good home elsewhere, perhaps slowly accumulating historical value even if it continues to lose cultural cachet. But most of it will probably acquire signs of physical deterioration and neglect — bumps and scratches and sunbleaching… All artists are mortal, after all, and only a minuscule fraction of them achieves immortality through their work. The rest are bound to fade away, sooner or later.
Also worth following: the series in e-flux on the relationship between contemporary art, real estate, housing, gentrification, and the material conditions of artists’ lives. Revisiting earlier pieces, it begins with “Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part I,” from Martha Rossler.
As we contemplate the canon, we might send birthday greetings to two artists whose places in the firmament seem, at least so far, secure:
Diego Velázquez was baptized on this date in 1599. A Baroque master of the Spanish Golden Age and leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, he is generally considered one of the greatest artists in the history of Western art.
Andrew Warhola was born on this date in 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA. Better known as Andy Warhol, he was a leading figure in the Pop art movement; his work (painting, filmmaking, photography, publishing, and performance art) challenged traditional boundaries between high and low culture and provoked us to think more clearly about the relationship of reference and referent. Widely considered the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century, he was a role model for a generation of post-modernist artists.
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