Dark Side of the Boom scrutinizes the contemporary art market's excesses, such as buying art as an investment, temptations to forgery and fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering. The book draws on interviews with artists, collectors, lawyers, bankers, and convicted forgers to explore the commodification of art and its role in global capital. It highlights issues like the use of tax havens for art transactions, making it timely in the wake of the Panama Papers revelations.
In Boom, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber examine the reasons behind the current era of technological stagnation. They argue that financial bubbles, often seen as destructive, have historically been the engine of significant breakthroughs. Through case studies of the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, fracking, and Bitcoin, the authors illustrate how small groups with unified visions, vast funding, and poor accountability can drive transformative progress. The book integrates insights from economics, philosophy, and history to provide a blueprint for accelerating innovation by decreasing collective risk aversion and organizing high-agency individuals around transcendent missions.
This book is a delightful exploration of cats and their prominent role in Japanese society. It features charming storytelling, numerous photographs, works of art, pop culture, and folklore. Archer highlights various aspects of Japanese cat culture, including cat cafes, designers creating cat costumes, and craftsmen building furniture for cats. The book also delves into the historical presence of cats in Japanese art, literature, and Buddhist folktales, explaining why cats are an integral part of Japanese society.
Orlando Whitfield started his career as a dealer in the feverish global art market but left it disillusioned and burnt-out a decade later. Today he works as a writer and his recent book is All That Glitters, a memoir that explores his experience as an associate of Inigo Philbrick, an ambitious art market player who in 2022 was sentenced to seven years in prison for defrauding investors in what has been described as allegedly the biggest art fraud in American history. Whitfield, by contrast, ended up in rehab and embarked on a period of painful self-reflection. All that Glitters reads like a script for a thrilling heist movie, which, indeed, it is likely to become since HBO has recently acquired the rights. Joining Whitfield in conversation for this episode is Kathryn Hughes, a literary critic at the Guardian and Professor at the University of East Anglia. Her latest book, Catland, concerns the Edwardian artist Louis Wain whose popular illustrations changed the way that the modern world thinks about cats.
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