Whether something is art or can be defined as ‘art’ or has artistic value is questionable and supposedly relative. It seems to me that the question of ‘artistic value’ is an economic and historical one. We could call this the historoeconomic theory of art (or the capitalist’s valuation of art).
An artwork always has an economic […]

There are some interesting services that exploit the power of data mining in the field of news and recent events. We all know sites like Google News, which have for a while used network power to find subtle (and more often not-so-subtle) connections between news items and link them together. Google News (and sites like […]

Why did Shakespeare write Shakespeare
If vilia meritur vulgus* is true,
The groundlings who made up his theatre
Would find his language hard to chew.
If wealth were Shakespeare’s ‘lighted shaft’,
As modern historians deduce,
Then nonsense would more hit the mark
Than the brilliance he produced.
But, desiring immortality,
He wrote ‘So long lives this’,
This shows his partiality
Towards eternalness.
So I think both accounts […]

I’ve always found it odd how great culture is confined to the fringes of society, such as Art Nouveau cinema houses, specialist book stores, and obscure art galleries, whilst poor (for lack of a better term) culture dominates from the centre. In a perfect world it should be the other way around. ‘Mass’ culture should […]

Saatchi Online is Charles Saatchi’s latest innovation and extension of his online galleries, taking the Long Tail theory into the world of art. The Long Tail theory basically suggests that physical constraints such as shelf-space limit markets and that the Internet de-limits markets (or allows for unlimited ’shelf-space’), thus extending markets down the ‘Long Tail’ […]