We pass the marker announcing the start of the sestercentennial, also known as the semiquincentennial. The first term contains sester, which means something on the way from 2 to 3. The second term essentially means half of 5 hundreds. Centennial in both words, of course, refers to hundreds of years.
It all started when about 20 genuine cowboys on dancing horses passed us at the intersection. Turns out there are thousands of them here. Tope Nacional parade, San Ramon, Costa Rica
Does she really have a 21:9 television at home to broadcast stretched 4:3 images?
Suddenly today, the word “gorodki” popped into my head. When I was a little boy, in Baku, Azerbaijan, we used to play two games in the courtyard – gorodki and knives.
I Google it. The internet tells me that in Russia there is a Russian Federation of Gorodki Sport. It has a president, a first vice-president, and a vice-president. All in blazers. There is a presidium, and it has a chairman of the commission on international relations. There is a whole apparatus for the president of gorodki sport with three advisers and a responsible secretary. They hold conferences, at least in 2018 and 2020. There is a march of gorodki players, music by A. Roshchin, lyrics by V. Avdeev, I. Vinogradsky.
The website has a section “Anti-Doping”. Can you imagine doping in gorodki sport? It has a subsection “methodological recommendations”.
In 2024, there was a World Championship of Gorodki Sport. And it had a Grand Closing. Besides Belarus, athletes from Germany and Kazakhstan participated in the world championship. From Germany, besides Sergey, Vitaly, and Konstantin, there was Schlein Eugen, or rather, Zhenya.
Masters of sport. To be admitted to international competitions, one must come with a certificate, oh, a certificate of having undergone anti-doping education from an institution, whatever that means.
In general, it’s all very serious.
But I did not find a federation for the game of knives.
In Soviet times, there was a great school of animation that led the world for many decades. If you search on YouTube for “Vovka in the Land of Far Far Away”, it almost exclusively shows restorations 🤮, and at the same time, it shows the same disgusting restorations of heaps of other cartoons, all made in the same style (vectorization, black outlines). If you go to Wikipedia, it will display a screenshot from the restoration, not from the original 1965 cartoon. The original can be found, for example, by searching “vovka in the land of far far away madina gazieva”, but searching “vovka in the land of far far away soyuzmultfilm 1965” shows nothing at all.
They really broke the internet.
P.S. By the way, “two of a kind, fulfilling wishes,” and “good enough” resonate very much with today’s ChatGPT 😉
How to watch the series “Seagulls” when you’ve run out of wine and are missing Interstellar
Remembering Splean! The first concert for which I bought tickets a year in advance;)
Miami — what to do there? We’re flying out tomorrow for 3 days — Nadya, Lisa, and me. Throw out some suggestions on what’s worth visiting. And if by chance we have mutual friends from Miami, tag them, please, they might recommend something interesting. To be honest, I only have one museum on my “definitely must-visit” list (Perez), and everything else is kind of iffy.
Let’s be honest about the art market (and why the prices there are insane).
Actually, there’s no mystery to it. It works somewhat like NFTs, only with a longer history and a better reputation.
The scheme is simple:
You take an item that hasn’t been on the market in this form yet (a painting, sculpture, installation — doesn’t matter). You call it an “important artifact”. It helps if you have connections — galleries, auction houses, billionaire collectors. If you don’t have connections, then find someone who does and sell the cow to them. Since uniqueness is required, there will be no paintings of bears in a pine forest, no matter how brilliantly they are done. There will be something distinct.
The very notion of “this is a painting/sculpture” — is just a convenient formality. The main thing is that the object can be incorporated into the already established art trading system.
Art is such — one of the most convenient ways to “optimize” taxes and move large sums of money. Paid 18 million euros for someone else’s work, and then someone “on your side” bought some of your work for the same 18 million. Virtually no money was really lost (just taxes), and now in catalogs and rankings, two works are each priced at 18 million. The price can be pushed up by selling them cascadingly. Win-win. Auctions are just in on the deal. Further, if you donate this work to a museum for charity, you can even cut more taxes. But it can also be sold. And here’s why.
Currently, there are simply too many free funds in the world. The number of billionaires and their wealth is growing faster than the availability of truly rare assets (real estate, companies, gold, etc. have all been divided already).
Art is one of the few markets where “scarcity” can still be created literally out of nowhere.
If you have access to a hundred such wealthy simpletons and you can tell stories (“this is an investment for 20-30 years, it will only increase”), then selling is purely a technical matter. Two or three interested parties = bidding already starts, and already you see +50-100% to the price.
Over time, real cases appear: someone bought in 2000 for 2 million, sold in 2024 for 80 million.
These cases are used to convince the next buyers. New buyers with their money confirm and amplify these cases. The cycle is closed.
Result: the rise in prices in the top segment of art is directly tied to the increase in the number of super-rich and their capital. As soon as a serious global crisis occurs and the extra trillions stop being printed/earned, and the pyramid collapses, the market will very quickly show where there was real cultural value, and where it was just a beautiful financial scheme.
P.S. This doesn’t mean at all that all contemporary art is a bubble. There are works that are really important historically and culturally. It’s just that at the very top of the price pie, cultural value has long ceased to be the main driver.
But at the summit of Olympus of the most expensive paintings of classic genius solitaries, there will never be, because galleries and dealers need artists who can produce 20-50 works a year to satisfy demand, organize exhibitions in five capitals simultaneously, and maintain turnover. Artists like Lopez Garcia, Odd Nerdrum, or Ron Mueck make unique pieces that will become especially valuable only after the artist dies.
This must be about my tenth staging of Le Nozze di Figaro. And I still can’t understand why no one ever bothers to make modern, well-constructed subtitles instead of something that resembles a product of prehistoric “Google translate”. Every single line is translated from Italian in such a barbaric way that it’s about to make one’s eyes bleed. And for what reason? The Italian is certainly not modern either, but if you undertake to translate, then do so in a way that the meaning can be grasped within those tens of milliseconds when your eyes dart to the screen. Now, you land on a text that takes a minute to chew over… Every woman makes me change colour… Instead of make me blush or make me pale… If you are fain to dance… And all that stuff.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 