“All the most beautiful things in the world are made by narcissists. The most interesting by schizoids. The kindest by the depressed. The impossible by psychopaths. Healthy people hardly contribute to history.” (psychologist Ekaterina Potapova)
An interesting thought
Translation in progress… Please provide the text you need translated.
When there’s a free minute, you can chat with Open AI about the folk tale “The Gingerbread Man.” An interesting conversationalist.
A new batch of my photos, aspiring to be artistic. If it’s your first time, I invite you to view the entire album, click on its title
Spring, summer, and autumn flew by so quickly this year
Decided to explore the topic — who and how creates oil paintings for sale in hypothetical Walmarts across the USA. In particular, I can hardly imagine how to put impasto painting on a conveyor belt, but evidently, it happens.
And here’s what I found out. There is a village in China, Dafen (Dafen), a suburb of Shenzhen. It has only 8000 residents, which by Chinese standards is practically a city block. According to estimates, 60% of all cheap oil paintings in the world are produced within four square kilometers (1.5 square miles) of Dafen. Last year, local art factories exported paintings worth 28 million euros (36 million dollars). Here are some numbers — just one company, Shenzhen Artlover, supplies 300,000 paintings a year. According to some sources, about five million oil paintings are produced annually in Dafen. The workshops are staffed by 8,000 to 10,000 artists. No one knows the exact figures because this is China.
The search for artists is conducted in the form of a competition — students come and compete annually during a match of making copies from a photograph, portrait, or landscape.
“A decent copy of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ sells for 40 euros (51 dollars). If you buy 100 paintings, the price drops to €26 ($33), the gallery workers note. 100 paintings, guaranteed to be created by graduates of an art academy, are delivered within three weeks. Buyers with less stringent requirements can get their 100 paintings within one week, paying €6 ($8) each.”
“A few simple brush strokes by Wu, and a forest appears on the canvas. The small photograph he holds in his hand serves as his model. He works on a copy of an idyllic French landscape — a lavender field in the south of France. In one day, Wu can make between 20 to 30 copies. When a large order comes in, he may have to paint the same motif 1,000 times. “We do not get a fixed salary,” he says. “We are paid per finished painting.”
Huang Jiang, who first started a business in Dafen, shares that his biggest order was from Walmart – 250,000 copies. He then hired 2,000 artists to fulfill the order. So, imagine the assembly line, right? Each artist had to make 125 copies, which at a productivity rate of 20 pieces a day — just a week. Well, probably not everyone has such productivity, but 125 copies isn’t super high either. And orchestrating 2,000 painters without internet and maintaining quality control of copies… now that’s interesting. Another art factory owner, Wong Kong, talks about an order from Walmart for 100,000 copies a month, and 300,000 a month overall from different customers. Wong talks about 3,000 contractors. Both lament that it’s time to create a real conveyor belt where each artist performs only part of the work. It’s unknown whether they managed to do that or not.
Returning to Wu. He earns the equivalent of 0.30 euros per copied painting. This means he earns between 128 to 385 euros a month — barely enough to cover living expenses and send some money home. But he doesn’t complain: “In a workshop like this, it’s much better without a schedule”. Once, artists worked in a factory owned by the company, where they had a fixed workday.”
I think Midjourney/OpenAI now costs more, if you add everything up, than manual Chinese labor….
At the Facebook office eight years ago
Reading Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond). Here are some new interesting details about Francisco Pizarro.
“…the first meeting between the Inca emperor Atahualpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in the highland town of Cajamarca in Peru on November 16, 1532. Atahualpa was the absolute monarch of the largest and most developed state in the New World, while Pizarro represented (falsely, by his own account) the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V (also known as King Charles I of Spain), the monarch of the most powerful state in Europe.
Pizarro, leading a motley crew of 168 Spanish soldiers, was in unfamiliar territory, not knowing the local people, without any contact with the nearest Spanish forces (1000 miles north in Panama), and far beyond the reach of timely reinforcements. Atahualpa was at the center of his own empire with millions of subjects and was immediately surrounded by his army of 80,000 soldiers, who had recently won a war against other indigenous people. Nevertheless, Pizarro captured Atahualpa within minutes of the two leaders seeing each other for the first time.
Pizarro held him captive for eight months, extracting the largest ransom in history in exchange for a promise to release him. Once the ransom—enough gold to fill a room 7 by 6 meters and more than 3 meters high—was delivered, Pizarro broke his promise and executed Atahualpa.
The capture of Atahualpa was crucial for the European conquest of the Inca empire. Although the superior weapons of the Spanish would have guaranteed their ultimate victory anyway, the capture made the conquest much quicker and infinitely easier. Atahualpa was revered by the Incas as a sun god and had absolute power over his subjects, who obeyed even those commands which he issued while in captivity. The months that passed before his death gave Pizarro time to send out reconnaissance parties to other parts of the Inca empire and to send for reinforcements from Panama. When fighting finally broke out between the Spanish and the Incas after Atahualpa’s execution, the Spanish forces were already sufficient in number and knew what to expect.”
Around me is an almost completely full parking lot with 400 spaces at Masha’s school, which has 1500 students.
Observing all this mess in the opposition camp, and over the reaction of people from different countries and cultures to what’s happening around them, here’s a thought.
It seems that some cultures, Russia appearing to be one of them, have a stronger predisposition to distance themselves from even like-minded individuals and neighbors, on the “us versus them” scale. In many cultures, adversity unites, but in some, it seems to build fences. This individualism has likely been cultivated over generations, ironically, by the method of the reverse. The state forced people to unite, and people might have perceived this compulsion with resistance. Forming strong, authoritative groups has always been dangerous unless these groups were under state control. Even the church does not create such an “interest-based community”.
I am currently reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, and it precisely discusses this topic. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the daily life of most people took place within three ancient frameworks: the nuclear family, the extended family, and the local community. More precisely, bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.
Back then, a person was never alone. More precisely, they wouldn’t have survived long. A person who had lost their family and community around 1750 was as good as dead. Boys and girls who ran away from home could at best hope to become servants in some new family. At worst, they ended up in the army or a brothel. And then this circle, whether nuclear (immediate family), extended (relatives), or even more extended (friends, neighbors) behaved like one big organism, where each person did not have enough will to change the direction in which the whole “organism” was moving.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) in China, the population was organized into the baojia system. A unit of ten families was called a jia (degemena), and ten jia (or one hundred families) made up a bao. Each jia had a plaque, which circulated among the families. The family holding it at a given time was the jiazhang, or elder of the degemena. Similarly, the captain of the bao was the baozhang.
So, when a member of the bao committed a crime, other members of the bao could be punished, particularly the elders of the bao. Taxes were also collected from the bao, and it was the elders’ responsibility (not state officials) to assess each family’s situation and determine the amount of tax they should pay. Imagine how to cheat under such conditions?
As far as I know, a similar system informally exists even today, in societies where individualism hasn’t penetrated yet. Many Muslim territories. Plus, places that “civilization” hasn’t reached yet (from our point of view).
In many such societies, the concept of home is much wider than for people living in the apartment-car-office-vacation format.
Even in developed Europe and the USA, this identification of a person as part of society is still strong. People go to church on weekends not always because they are very religious. But because they are raised to be part of a larger group of people, not just themselves. Of course, this too is breaking down with each passing year. Where individuality has triumphed for various reasons, fences begin, disarray and wavering in achieving common goals. The notion of “why do I personally need this” begins to prevail over “why do the 100 people close to me need this”.
I think this is the main reason why some groups of people can unite for a common goal, while for others it is unnatural. They can too, and it even works out somehow, but it takes more energy and strength. And the brain has to readjust on the fly, and that’s oh so uncomfortable.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 