David Koren

See This Movie on Netflix: The Art of the Steal (2009)

This is the most important movie I've seen in quite some time, and it's not because it's about art. It's because it's about money and power and how they actually operate when there is something that people with money and power want badly. This is a great documentary about the Barnes Foundation, which was created in 1923 by Albert Barnes. Barnes assembled an incomparable collection of post-impressionist art (Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, etc.) and created a school around it that reflected the way that he wanted it to be viewed. This movie documents how outside forces (with money and power) systematically violated what Barnes wanted, and what he tried to preserve in his will. All things considered, he did a pretty good job protecting what he believed in. But it still only took 90 years to violate it completely. See this film. I'll put the trailer here... but really, you have to see the film. Don't just watch this trailer and think you get it (or that it isn't interesting because it's about "art"). It's not about art. It's about money and power. And the way that money and power really work when people with money and power want something is documented in this movie better than anywhere I can remember. So just see it, please.

Here's the netflix link.

What Would Jesus Buy?

Smash and I went to see What Would Jesus Buy? yesterday, mostly because we have some friends who are in Reverend Billy's choir, and who are in the movie. The film does a good job of presenting the problem (as does Reverend Billy in his performances)... that we are, as a nation, addicted to shopping, and many Americans have dug ourselves into significant debt because of it. The Christmas season has become an orgy of shopping... buying things for our families, our kids, our friends, and ourselves.

In the day since seeing the film, I've had two thoughts about commerce. First, it has occurred to me that all of the advertising that we see is for products that we don't actually need, or that we don't automatically buy. Plumbers don't usually have to advertise, aside from making sure they have the biggest ad in the yellow pages (or online?). It's very telling that Starbucks has never run a television ad campaign before, and now that their market seems to be stagnant and their share price is falling, they've announced that they're going to run ads on television. They never had to do it before, because they were able to sell plenty of $4 cups of coffee. Now, people are buying a little less overpriced coffee, and the number of Starbucks stores is reaching the saturation point, so Starbucks is going to try to increase sales through ads. It's only necessary because sales are dipping... that is, our need for coffee is dipping. So they need to try to increase our need.

The other thought I had was that we are actually endorsing a shopkeeper's principles when we buy a product. That is, everything we buy comes with all of the principles that brought it into being and got it to the store in tact, and we are accepting those principles when we buy. So, if you don't endorse sweatshop labor, you shouldn't buy clothes that were made in sweatshops, and so forth. There's an opportunity for retailers that decide to educate their customers about the principles by which their products were manufactured and marketed. For example, what does "fair trade" actually mean, and why isn't every product a "fair trade" product? What's the alternative to "fair trade"? I believe that people, at heart, do care about where the things they buy come from, but retailers haven't known how to bring the story of the product into the marketing. I think we'll see much more of this as time goes on.