"Couldn’t we instead be happy with nature’s own natural stories? Why should we listen to Smithson rather than the undisturbed shoreline?"
Isn't Smithson, the artist, a product of nature (as is Clayton, the artist writing this excellent little story). making this art just as "natural" as the shoreline?
What he did was a "disturbance" by definition. But isn't the history of that shoreline, even more than most places, a history of disturbances as the lake has receded and filled again over time? And isn't this just one more, as was the construction of the pier you saw or the railroad causeway that altered the lake long ago?
Philosopher John Dewey says that human experience (and he definitely does not confine this to those who see themselves or are seen by others as artists) ends (or at least should end) in art. Untangling what that means isn't easy, but what I have been wondering about lately is time. How long did it take Smithson to build the jetty?
Economics (as normally practiced) asks how many commercially marketable widgets could he have manufactured in the same time, and that puts us all on a certain rather sad path. But the jetty and the elaborate quillwork I recently saw on a parfleche at the Eitlejorg Museum suggest another path. Unlike the jetty, the parfleche is inarguably utilitarian. But it would have held whatever it held in its working days just as well without any decoration. Why spend what has to have been many hours adding the quillwork? Is it possible that that is what's "natural?" I know that I like a vision of life in which the jetty and the quillwork are what counts.
Brilliantly said! (You should have your own Substack.) I hope the story showed me moving away from this skepticism, and closer to your position, the longer I lingered there. I see the skepticism as bred of the alleged preservation-versus-conservation divide: art is something humans create, and nature is something better. But if humans are part of nature, so is our art. (Although the outsized scale of our capability for disturbance does still trouble me.)
As a one-time econ major, I have to put in a defense for what I saw as a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) pseudo-science. Economics does not dictate the efficient production of widgets any more than evolution dictates the development of opposable thumbs. It merely observes that this is what humans do. The jetty, the quillwork, this Substack, and your paid subscription all suggest that there are other things that humans do. But these prove difficult to study and summarize, as recently shown by the kerfuffle in behavioral studies (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie). Thanks for commenting!
Thanks for that article. I recommend that Quick Fix, a book by Jesse Singal that covers the same ground, including some of the same people.
Scale is critical, but also hard to talk about. When does an apparently quantitative change become qualitative? I think I have a partial answer, but that is a topic for another time.
If Economics is a story (and it is) and stories influence behavior (and they do), then I don't think Economics is purely (or, honestly, at all) descriptive. Nor, for that matter is natural selection. They both produce useful descriptions, but they do far more than that.
"Couldn’t we instead be happy with nature’s own natural stories? Why should we listen to Smithson rather than the undisturbed shoreline?"
Isn't Smithson, the artist, a product of nature (as is Clayton, the artist writing this excellent little story). making this art just as "natural" as the shoreline?
What he did was a "disturbance" by definition. But isn't the history of that shoreline, even more than most places, a history of disturbances as the lake has receded and filled again over time? And isn't this just one more, as was the construction of the pier you saw or the railroad causeway that altered the lake long ago?
Philosopher John Dewey says that human experience (and he definitely does not confine this to those who see themselves or are seen by others as artists) ends (or at least should end) in art. Untangling what that means isn't easy, but what I have been wondering about lately is time. How long did it take Smithson to build the jetty?
Economics (as normally practiced) asks how many commercially marketable widgets could he have manufactured in the same time, and that puts us all on a certain rather sad path. But the jetty and the elaborate quillwork I recently saw on a parfleche at the Eitlejorg Museum suggest another path. Unlike the jetty, the parfleche is inarguably utilitarian. But it would have held whatever it held in its working days just as well without any decoration. Why spend what has to have been many hours adding the quillwork? Is it possible that that is what's "natural?" I know that I like a vision of life in which the jetty and the quillwork are what counts.
Brilliantly said! (You should have your own Substack.) I hope the story showed me moving away from this skepticism, and closer to your position, the longer I lingered there. I see the skepticism as bred of the alleged preservation-versus-conservation divide: art is something humans create, and nature is something better. But if humans are part of nature, so is our art. (Although the outsized scale of our capability for disturbance does still trouble me.)
As a one-time econ major, I have to put in a defense for what I saw as a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) pseudo-science. Economics does not dictate the efficient production of widgets any more than evolution dictates the development of opposable thumbs. It merely observes that this is what humans do. The jetty, the quillwork, this Substack, and your paid subscription all suggest that there are other things that humans do. But these prove difficult to study and summarize, as recently shown by the kerfuffle in behavioral studies (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie). Thanks for commenting!
Thanks for that article. I recommend that Quick Fix, a book by Jesse Singal that covers the same ground, including some of the same people.
Scale is critical, but also hard to talk about. When does an apparently quantitative change become qualitative? I think I have a partial answer, but that is a topic for another time.
If Economics is a story (and it is) and stories influence behavior (and they do), then I don't think Economics is purely (or, honestly, at all) descriptive. Nor, for that matter is natural selection. They both produce useful descriptions, but they do far more than that.
Great story. Interesting read!