We are still in the
first gallery of Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show at the University of
Pennsylvania Institute of Contemporary Art, and the next organizing statement
from his diary is written on the wall next to the large neon light
installation.
I would
much rather live now than in any other time in history.
Unlike most of the other
diary aphorisms, this one struck me as something I had not really thought about
before. Sagmeister observes that
unlike 100 years ago when individuals had little control over their life, we
today can be in charge of the important decisions about what we do for work and
where we live our lives. He
references Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, a book that
documents a decrease in crime and violence.
Pinker’s book impressed
me with how far we have come since the Middle Ages. He quotes Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century,
which describes two of the most popular sports of that time:
Players
with hands tied behind them competed to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering
it to death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes
scratched out by the frantic animal’s claws…Or a pig enclosed in a wide pen was
chased by men with clubs to the laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from
the blows until beaten lifeless.
Pinker also describes a
scholarly article “Losing Face, Saving Face: Noses and Honour in the Late Medieval Town” where historian
Valentin Groebner documents dozens of accounts in which one person cut off the
nose of another. These acts of private vengeance were so common that
The
authors of late-medieval surgical textbooks also devote particular attention to
nasal injuries, discussing whether a nose once cut off can grow back, a
controversial question that the French royal physician Henri de Mondeville
answered in his famous Chirugia with a categorical “No.”
In late medieval times
cutting off someone’s nose was the prototypical act of spite and the source of
our modern saying, “to cut off your nose to spite your face.”
Living in Philadelphia
with its nation leading murder rate year after year (http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/11/us/philadelphia-violence/index.html), it can be hard to recognize that Sagmeister is
right in concluding that living today is preferable to living in the past.
Another organizing
Sagmeister statement is presented as words in a spider web that changes shape
as I pass by it in the first room of the exhibition. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U--PIzSuOv8) “Being not truthful works against me.” Sagmeister expands on this thought by
writing on the wall of the gallery:
This
is true for myself. My memory is too faulty to allow me to be a successful
liar. And if I don’t want people to know about something I do, maybe I should
not be doing it at all. People who do not cheat are happier than people who do.
Surprisingly the cheaters also do worse money wise in the long run.
Maybe it is just because
I am in the middle of re-reading volume 2 of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon
Baines Johnson, but this admirable observation by Sagmeister does not ring
universally true. Caro describes
in meticulous detail how Johnson lies about his acquisition of the Austin radio
station that was the foundation of his personal wealth and how he steals the
1948 Texas senate race against former governor Coke Stevenson. Johnson was a liar who became president
and died a wealthy man.
Today’s Sunday Business
section of The New York Times added to my skepticism with an article titled “Is
Insider Trading Part of the Fabric?”
Ted Parmigiani discusses evidence he provided to the Securities and
Exchange Commission showing frequent insider trading involving analyst research
at Lehman Brothers, and Mr. Parmigiani concludes that insider trading has
become institutionalized on Wall Street.
Despite the successful prosecution of Raj Rajaratnam for insider trading,
Mr. Pramigiani says the SEC’s “widespread net has a very big hole in it.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/business/is-insider-trading-part-of-the-fabric-on-wall-street.html?adxnnl=1&ref=business&adxnnlx=1337533392-ibwENqkW5EdqagALgqHF7w)
“Make the first step” (http://potentialitea.tumblr.com/post/20505438360/make-the-first-step-my-mum-worked-in-a-store-all) and “Keeping a diary supports personal
development” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8PkFSLuYOk) are two more Sagmeister statements that are
illustrated in the first room of The Happy Show in Philadelphia. In discussing his attempts at
meditation in Bali, Sagmeister observes that his fellow participants in the
full week of silent meditation seem “sobered out and dour; the current company
will not make me happy.” He also
notes that his back hurts like hell and the only pleasure is when the pain goes
away during breaks in silently sitting.
I also appreciated his observation that despite all the Westerners
telling him that meditation made them happy, he does not believe them for a
second.
Monitors in the room
showed Sagmeister TED talks that I enjoyed very much. His discussion of his trip and career in Hong Kong cracked
me up. (http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_shares_happy_design.html) I especially liked his discussion of authentic
looking fake New York City subway posters. When I got home I googled the subject and found many more
examples that made me happy (http://subwayartblog.com/tag/fake-signs/) and (http://www.cnbc.com/id/36692894/What_Not_To_Do_on_the_Subway) His TED talk on Things I Have Learned in Life So
Far (http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_on_what_he_has_learned.html) discusses the same themes as The Happy
Show. There is also a book by
Sagmeister with the same title, but I have not yet read it. I found another TED talk where Sagmeister
discusses the power of taking time off and how he tries to take a sabbatical
every seven years to recharge his creativity (http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off.html)
We have now finished
thinking about the first gallery of Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show. In Part IV, we will finish this blog
post by reacting to the exhibits in the second gallery of this exhibition.
No comments:
Post a Comment