Last night I found some French blogs, via the Paris newspaper, Liberation. Here are three entries by Pierre Haski, Liberation’s Beijing correspondent, which I translated to share.March 11
We’re done for
In the 1960s, the Club of Rome, composed of great spirits, considered a ‘zero development’ report because the planet didn’t have enough energy resource to sustain that era’s development. Four decades later, we’re already there, and another Institute is warning of the same thing, this time regarding China.
The Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington, just went through the same classic intellectual exercise: if the Chinese maintain the same rate of development, and they’d equal that of the Americans in 2031, and if they began consuming at the same rate as the Americans, what would happen? The spectacular result: there would be 1.1 billion cars in China (versus the 795 million in the world today), the Chinese would consume more gasoline/oil that the whole world today produces, they’d eat 4/5ths of the world’s production of meat, 2/3rds of the grains, and you’d need to double the world’s production of paper (thus cutting down more forests).
You might say that’s an absurd scenario, except that we see today the few million Chinese who already effectively live the ‘American lifestyle’, that is, they have one or two cars, and are active participants in a consumerist society, as identical as that we know in “the West”. The American Dream as assuredly entered the minds of the Chinese.
The real problem of this study is the conclusion: it underlines that the Western model cannot be applied to China, simply because that planet doesn’t have enough resources (especially if India applies it as well!). And it concludes that we need to invent other things. But what? And especially, why not equally reconsider the American lifestyle, or that of industrial countries in general.
If the model is a failure for the whole world, how do you tell the Chinese: you can’t have cars, the ‘clim’ or low coast companies to develop the tourist industry (to refer to a recent posting), and are forbidden to pollute? Especially when the Americans refuse to sign the Kyoto Accord … but that’s another debate.
Therefore, is this 2005 report is as absurd as that of the Club of Rome was in its time? Or is China going to drive us into the wall? I await your response this weekend of a beautiful blue sky, but very cold in this Beijing end of winter.
March 12
Cars Again
Following-up on the commentaries by Jia and Bern on ‘We’re Done For’, car licence plates are sold by auction in Shanghai. The municipality has found a hyper-elitist was of limiting to a few million the numbers of new cars one can have in a city that has already reached it’s saturation point. They can reach exorbitant prices: last year averaging around 40,000 yuans (around 4000 euros), which is almost the price of a small car itself. This explains why there are no ‘small cars’ in Shanghai (the QQ Chinese brand, that you see a lot of in Beijing, sells for 50,000 yuans, less than 5000 euros). Paradoxically, this system was judged to be illegal by a Chinese administrative tribunal, but Shanghai hasn’t hear of this decision and continues to sell it’s licence plates by auction (which is nothing compared to Hong Kong, which has used this system for a long time, where record prices have been reached like 7.1 million HK dollars, a little less than 600,000 euros for the plate number 12, which sold last month. But it’s true that the earnings of those in Hong Kong is superior to those of France, and that the extravagance of the tycoons is without limit…)
Elsewhere, there are no limits, like in Beijing, where the number of cars went up last year at the rate of about 1000 a day (500,000 more in two years!) There’s already 2.3 million cars and the municipality estimates that there’ll be 3.5 million cars in Beijing in 2008, thus there’s already the feeling that the point of saturation has already been reached.
The government has invested too much into the auto industry to pull back, and according to it’s own predictions, (not those of the Americans this time), there’ll be 140 vehicles on Chinese roads in 2020, that is 7 times more than 2004. Even if China applies the same environmental standards as Europe for locally built cars, and if it encouraged research into electric card (Dassault is ready to pounce!) the development model followed is still that of ‘The American Dream’. All you have to see is how Beijing encouraged the sale of cars that are faster then public transit, the network of which is still quite limited (it’ll be better, they say, in 2008, the new frontier of the ‘harmonious society’ of the Chinese).
Photo: At this rate, as the bicycle is already marginalized in Shanghai, it has no better use than to be used for works of art, like this one of Ai Weiwei, shown at Factory 798 in Beijing. Chinese experts – translate the Maoist slogan on the wall….)
March 20
Ephemeral art
Art is in galleries, art is in the street. This afternoon, going to an opening at the Courtyard Gallery, one of the better ones in Beijing, situation two feet from the Forbidden City, I saw an old man who was painting … the ground. Armed with an enormous paintbrush and a bucket of water, he was doing caligraphy on a esplanade, which was evaporating as he was working. He was working for his own pleasure, and for those who were passing, who stopped to watch on this springtime Sunday afternoon. The experts would call this ephemeral art.
Here, it is a part of life, an art of living that fades.
At the Courtyard Gallery, another ambience. The one we find in Paris, New York, or Tokyo. Cao Fei, a young artist from Canton, presented large format photographs, with exagerated colours, of young Chinese dressed as mythological characters in the middle of the urban setting of contemporary China. Accompanied by a whacky video of the same scenes, with a subdued audio chanel. A work that was seductive and catchy. But here, we’re no longer in the world of ephemeral art, we’re in the world of the fashionable and expensive contemporary globalised art.
These two forms were happening at the same time 200 metres from each other. But these two universes are light years apart.
That’s Beijing in 2005.
Last night, The Daily Show did one of their pseudo-reports on Christo’s The Gates, a transcription of which is below:
Stewart: Wow, what an exciting 16 days here in New York, with more I’m joined by Daily Show Senior Conceptual Art Correspondent Stephen Colbert, live in Central Park. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.
Stephen: Yes Jon.
Stewart: It’s clearly dusk there in Central Park. Stephen, whatya think?
Stephen: Simply put, The Gates is a triumph Jon, an artistic milestone that may finally put New York on the cultural map. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here Jon, but I think this may do for the Big Apple what The West Wing has done for Washington DC, or what the band Asia did for that continent.
Stewart: Stephen, I have to say, and again, you know, I can’t help but wonder, what does all this mean?
Stephen: [begins stroking goatee silently]
Stewart: uh, Stephen…Stephen
Stephen: Hold on Jon, that’s a five stroker [continues stroking goatee silently, to the audience’s laughter]. Jon, The Gates is a triumph of contemporary installation art. Each Gate redefining its section of the park as not a public place for private reflection, but a private place for public reflection, juxtaposed with the barrenness of the mid-winter, The Gates posits a chromatic orgy, this riot of colour achieves a rare re-defamilrazation with the nature of place-time, the whatness of our whereness. N0 longer framed …. I’m sorry I’ve run out of crap. [audience applauds]
Stewart: As our conceptual art critic, is this great art?
Stephen: Yes Jon, because like all great art it challenges what we thought we knew about the world. For instance, I used to think 21 million dollars could be used to achieve something noble, like, I don’t know, build a hospital wing. But The Gates has forced me to recontextualize my notion of what 21 million dollars can be used for, in this case, redecorating a bike path.
Stewart: So, you believe that shrouding these walkways in these orange curtains will somehow change our lives in New York?
Stephen: Oh, it’s happening already Jon. Just today I saw an installation artist take a sandwich and … and wrap it in a paper like substance, almost waxy in texture, and he kept wrapping it, and I’m not doing it justice here, he kept wrapping until he visually achieved ‘not-sandwich’, then, this is the genius part Jon, at the last minute he cut it in two, in a final act of ‘re-sandwichment’.
Stewart: So … so you had lunch at a deli?
Stephen: Ok, fine, I was at “a deli”. Ordering “lunch”. That’s how you need to think of it. “Jon”.
——–
Update (7 March): a reader as submited this link to the clip on the Comedy Central website. Thank you anonymous.
Malcolm Gladwell’s presentation at PopTech! Oct 21-23 2004 in Camden Maine
Audio file available here via IT Conversations.
[transcription beginning at 21:12/30:17]
We don’t have access to our unconscious, we don’t know what these thing are coming, where they come from that bubbles up from the recesses of our brain. So what do we do? Well, we have a behavior that we just did, we just made a decision of a certain kind, we don’t really know where it came from, so we come up with an explanation, we make up a story. And we’re really really good at making up stories. I call this The Story Telling Problem. And this is something that happens over and over again.
I spent some time when I was writing my book [ Blink] with this tennis coach Vic Brayden, and he had spent a lot time talking with world class tennis players, and one the things he noticed is that if you ask a world class tennis player how he hits a top spin forehand they will always say this, ‘Right at the moment of impact, I roll my wrist’. Well, Vic Brayden took video tapes of world class tennis players hitting top spin forehands and digitized them and broke them down to, you know, milliseconds and noticed that no one ever rolled their wrist when they hit the ball, ever, the wrist was always fixed. In fact, if you roll your wrist when you hit the ball you can’t hit a good top spin forehand. Yet all these are guys going around the country giving seminars teaching young kids how to hit a top spin forehand and saying, ‘At the critical moment or impact, you gotta roll your wrist just like that’. They had no idea. These are people who hit a top spin forehand better than anyone else in human history and yet they are fundamentally incapable of accurately describing the way in which they perform that task. And when they’re asked to describe it, what do they do? They tell a story.
Now this is a real problem, cause what it says is … that a whole assumption of this project is that we can ask people to explain what they’re feeling but then when we look at the various situations we say … that when we listen to the various stories people tell about why they think the way the do, or what they want there are no connections to reality. They’re just plucking them out of the thin air.
Problem # 3. And I think this is the most serious problems of all and that is that asking people to think about what they want causes this to change their opinion of what they want, in fact it screws up their ability to understand and recognize what they want. This problem in psychology is called the Perils of Introspection Problem, and a lot of research has been done by a guy named Tim Wilson at U.V.A and he once did this very simple experiment called the Poster Test.
And the Poster Test is you got a bunch of posters in a room, you bring in some college students in, and you say ‘pick any poster you want, take it home’. And they do that. Second group is brought in and you say, ‘pick any poster you want, tell me why you want it, and then go home’. Couple of months passes, and he calls up all the students, and he asks, “That poster you got a couple of months back, do you like it?’ and the kids, who in the first group didn’t have to explain their choice, all liked their poster. And the kids in the second group who did have to explain, now they hate their poster. And not only that, the kids who had to explain their poster picked a very different kind of poster then the kids who didn’t have to explain their poster. So making people explain what they want changes their preference and changes their preference in a negative way, it causes them to gravitate toward something they actually weren’t interested in in the first place.
Now, there’s a wonderful little detail in this – that there were two kinds of posters in the room, there where Impressionist prints and then there were these photos of, you know, kitten hanging by bars that said, ‘Hang in there baby’. And the students who were asked to explain their preference overwhelmingly chose the kitten. And the ones who weren’t asked to explain overwhelmingly chose the Impressionist poster. And they were happy with their choice obviously, who could be happy with a kitten on their wall after 3 months? Now, why is that?
Why when you ask someone to explain their preference do they gravitate toward the least sophisticated of the offerings? Cause it’s a language problem. You’re someone, you know in your heart that you prefer the Impressionists but now you have to come up with a reason for your choice, and you really don’t have the language to say why you like the Impressionist photo. What you do have the language for is to say, ‘Well, I like the kitten cause I had a kitten when I was growing up,’ and you know … so forcing you to explain something when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you toward the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice. Now you see this time and time again in for example, market research.
That the act of getting someone in a room and asking them to explain their preference causes them to move away from the more sophisticated, more daring, more radical ideas. The classic example is All in the Family. When the first pilot was made back in the 70s, it was taken to ABC and ABC had a big room full of people, as many people as this, and they showed them the test and they asked them to rate the pilot, asked them to rate it on a scale of 1 to 100. You need 70 to get on the air basically. This All in the Family pilot got 40. An unbelievably low score. And the comments were, ‘well, the real problem is Archie Bunker, he needs to be a little softer, more nurturing, more of a caring father.’ That was people’s response. So what did ABC do? They passed on it. Guys went to CBS, CBS tested it, did really poorly, but some guy at the top of CBS really liked it, and said, well why not, let’s just play it, they put it on the air and it was one of the most lucrative sitcom franchises in the history of television. So what does this mean?
Does this mean we can’t trust people at all? Maybe. What is really means though is that there is a class of products that are difficult for people to interpret. Some things really are ugly and when we say that they’re ugly they really are ugly and we’re always gonna think their ugly. They’re never going to be beautiful. But there’s another class of products which we see and we don’t really know what we think, they challenge us, we don’t know how to describe them, and we end up, if we’re forced to explain ourselves, in calling them ugly because we can’t think of a better was to describe our feelings. And the real problem with asking people what they think about something is that we don’t have a good way to distinguish between these two states. We don’t have a good way of distinguishing between the thing that really is ugly and the thing that is radical and challenging and simply new and unusual.
And so often when we use the evidence of what people say, to determine what we ought to do, what we ought to go forward [with], we end up throwing out not just the things that ought to be thrown out, but the very things that are most meaningful, and have the potential to be most revolutionary.
There are, I think, two important lessons in that; the first is the one I dwell on in my book, which is simply that because of this fact people who come up with new ideas and new products or radical new things need to be very careful in how they interpret the evidence of consumers, the people that they ask about, random people whose opinions they seek. That we need to be very skeptical of ‘no’ and very skeptical of ‘ugly’ and very skeptical of ‘I don’t like that’. Particularly when we’re dealing with something that is radical and in some way challenging and difficult for someone to completely explain their feelings about. That’s one implication.
But the second implication, which is really one that’s more relevant to this discussion here, is that we’ve gotten really really good in recent years at describing all kinds of things about the way that human beings work and the way the mind operates. We understand genetics, we understand physiology, we have a whole vast array of knowledge now about why we do the things we do. But there is one area, perhaps the most important area of all, where we remain really really bad, and that is interpreting the contents of our own hearts, and as we go forward and learn more and more about human beings, I think we need to remember this fact, and to be humbled, because I’m not sure this is a mystery that we’re gonna solve.
