The Opportunists | Hacker News Reader

The Opportunists

theatlantic.com

85 pointssamclemens21 comments

If the thesis of this book is, as the article summarizes:

> ... artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to self-promotion, but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger systems with other aims, principally oriented toward money, political advantage, or commercial churn. [emphasis mine]

then the question I have is - was it ever NOT this way? Perhaps these dynamics are more legible in post-war America, but I certainly don't think they're uniquely American.

Granting that I am no student of art history, the little I do know makes me think this argument is much more broadly applicable than the author suggests - to give one example, consider the relationship between Michelangelo and the Catholic Church.

Even if you're right, and you might be, academic anthropology has a history of making wildly universal claims that turn out to only apply to the WEIRD demographics that they have studied.

It's probably for the best that they're more conservative about their claims.

> ... academic anthropology has a history of making wildly universal claims that turn out to only apply to the WEIRD demographics that they have studied.

A very fair point indeed. It would certainly be unusual to have the opposite be true here.

Patronage from the wealthy (especially the church) was a primary funding model for European art for the past thousand years, but I wouldn't call this unanticipated adoption. The work was explicitly commissioned, purchased in advance.

> ... I wouldn't call this unanticipated adoption. The work was explicitly commissioned, purchased in advance.

Fair enough - certainly in his own time he was known to the Church thus his commissions were not "unanticipated," as you point out.

Perhaps in this case the term could apply more to the legend and myth that has grown up around Michelangelo as an exemplar of the "Renaissance man" - why do we know about him more than, say, Domenico Ghirlandaio?

Yes, and in fact, why restrict this to _artistic_ success. Surely it's true of any type of success? Everything ultimately involves tapping into something greater than yourself, to go beyond yourself.

> was it ever NOT this way ?

I dont think so.

The mechanism was always this way. There are a lot of subtle notions that did change. what success means, is it about the destination or the journey, what price are you willing to pay for it, and for what?

For Michaelangelo, did success mean selling his painting to the church? Was it just about making it big or was it about something more ?

The Medici family shaped the history of European fine art very significantly with their patronage. A perfect example of the phenomenon described in the article.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_and_the_Medici

Thank you for pointing this out. There's so much to that background with the Medici family.

I must agree; Michaelangelo - the Opportunist.

> then the question I have is - was it ever NOT this way?

Yes. The author thinking otherwise is cute; kind of like a child that gets a glimpse of how the adult world works.

This is in a way similar to the engineering to marketing ratio with technology companies. Many lean hard on clever engineering and end up failing. Early on marketing is essential to communicate successfully with potential customers in order to solve the problem of who is going to buy the damned thing. Without a path to sales what you end up with is like sports car with a fabulous engine and no wheels. No matter how clever or useful the idea, it will only spread and become successful with social propagation.

The review leaves me with no idea whether the book is any good or not. It is fair to say that the post-war US had a lot of money and a lot of power, and thought that it therefore must have a lot of great thinkers, major writers, and first-class artists. Not all have held up well; some were I think pretty good.

"The book is so masterful, and exhibits such brilliant writing and exhaustive research, that I wonder whether Menand could truly have intended where his history of the postwar era landed me. I learned so much, and ended up caring so much less."

Shoot, the subject of the book interests me but the review makes the whole thing sound rather deflating. Maybe deflating is good. After all, I think I admire this period in some ways because I associate it with my parents and all the ostensibly "serious" thinkers I read in college -- many of whom, I have to admit, are fairly overrated.

There's a lot of money to be made in tearing down statues in the modern era. It's a sign of the times.

It could be that cultures need mythology to thrive. On the other hand you can also make a case for better BS detection for any new statues being put up.

I highly recommend Boom if you're interested this history of art and what drives the market, arts political context.

Boom focuses more on the mega's and the gross borderline (outright) fraud, sales practices, & value pumping schemes.

The book in this review seems like it might delve deeper in the cultural and political drivers which would be cool to learn more about.

Important to ground the context of contemporary art in politics as a heuristic or opposition to 'soviet-style communist' culture and growing cuter-culture. Really interesting stories for instance the CIA & MOMA [1] [2]. There's also a history of large business being one of the first to build collections of contemporary art. And of course for profit galleries making kings. What is art now that a photo can perfectly reproduce a scene.

This review has this great quote "As if on cue, one did.” (This was Sartre in 1945, when the Nazi occupation ended and he delivered a philosophy of freedom that “turned France’s wartime experience into a metaphor.”)"

As a collector myself who can't afford more than works on paper (from established artists at least) I can't even get a reply to buy something theoretically in my budget for a lot of artists i love. PACE etc will only sell these 'lesser works' if you buy a ton of other art, prop up their less popular artists, have a top level connection. Even Nina Chanel Abney posted on her insta getting the classic 'who is in your collection' reply ;) she replied i have the largest collection of Nina Chanel!! We're not even worthy of knowing the price of pieces on that PDF.

[1] https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/ [2] https://hyperallergic.com/294142/a-visit-to-the-the-cias-sec...

I can also recommend this New Yorker profile of David Zwirner. We are all complicit ;)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/02/dealers-hand

I haven't read that tanks for sharing! We'll see if fairs pick back up, seems like for anyone but the biggest they are lucky to break even.

Calling Hannah Arendt an opportunist is too rich for my blood. She went to Israel to report on the Eichmann trial, coined the phrase, "banality of evil", and said she did not like how the trial was being run. As a Jew, she criticized the newly formed Jewish state's trial of a former Nazi war criminal. All of her friends begged her not to publish the feature, but she did anyways, and she received as much hate and opprobrium as you would expect.

I first thought that the book itself was titled The Opportunists, but that's just the title of the book review; the book is called The Free World. Although it sounds like the book is fairly critical of many of its subjects, I doubt either Louis Menand or Mark Greif specifically meant to sum up Hannah Arendt's work as opportunism.

The closest to this that the review comes is

> One sentiment repeated with variations throughout the book is “The timing was good” (for the appearance of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, when Stalin seemed to have taken the place of Hitler).

In context I think the idea is that some people like Arendt may have engaged in sincere journalism and philosophy, which the culture and/or the CIA may then have deployed as part of the Cold War, not that Arendt (at least) was thinking "what could I write that would make me famous and influential right now?".

To modernize this a bit, Ta-nehisi Coates and Jordan Peterson were both developing and expressing their ideas for a long time (decades, I think) in relative obscurity. Then they suddenly became best-sellers in the 2010s, I imagine to a great extent because of cultural and political developments outside of themselves and their work. Both are presumably profiting quite a bit from their success, but I doubt either primarily thought tactically or consciously opportunistically about that.

To a great extent, Coates's career was accelerated when he joined the Atlantic. They actively promoted his work and let him work for two years on "The Case For Reparations". This is not to say that he wouldn't have written popular books eventually anyway. I just think it had less to do with outside cultural developments. Ihe Atlantic may have helped drive those developments, in fact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com