品質眾生相( 83):
好壞藝術品的浸染效用有別: 好的越好. 不好的則適得其反
Behavioural economics
The utility of bad art
THE father of consumer choice theory, Alfred Marshall, believed
that the more of something you have the less of it you want: a
phenomenon economists call diminishing marginal utility. However this
was only taken to be the case for an individual at one point in time,
not over his entire life. Addiction could prompt us to learn to like
something if we consume more of it. Marshall picked out good music as an
example. The more we listen to good music, the more we want to buy.
Modern economists are more sceptical about our aesthetic judgement. The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon where the more someone is exposed to a stimulus the more they like it, irrespective of its characteristics. This result has been documented across subjects as wide as food, political opinions, nonsense words and music. In all these examples familiarity was sufficient to create positive feelings.
A study by James Cutting applied this observation to aesthetics. He paired lesser known works by impressionists to canonical pieces; over a lecture course undergraduate students were shown a lesser-known work for two seconds at the beginning of each class. Mr Cutting found that participants ended up preferring the lesser known pieces to the canon merely through exposure. That was in contrast to a control group of students from the same campus that tended to like the canonical works best.
But in a new paper researchers varied the quality of art that the participants were exposed to. Half the treatment group of undergraduate students were repeatedly exposed to the critically respected work of John Everett Millais over a seven week lecture course and half to Thomas Kinkade, who is a good deal less respected, although much more popular.
They compared the opinions of this treatment group to a control group who had no repeated exposure. You can see from the graph below that there was a significant decline in participants' opinions of the work of Thomas Kinkade the more they saw the pieces, while the opposite holds true for John Everett Millais. The exposure effect only held true for the "good" art.
This study suggests that Marshall’s optimism over our critical faculties may not be misplaced. The more we experience good art the more we learn to like it, whereas bad art has diminishing marginal utility. Of course, many may disagree about the respective quality of the two artists' work, but personally I find this result encouraging.
Modern economists are more sceptical about our aesthetic judgement. The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon where the more someone is exposed to a stimulus the more they like it, irrespective of its characteristics. This result has been documented across subjects as wide as food, political opinions, nonsense words and music. In all these examples familiarity was sufficient to create positive feelings.
A study by James Cutting applied this observation to aesthetics. He paired lesser known works by impressionists to canonical pieces; over a lecture course undergraduate students were shown a lesser-known work for two seconds at the beginning of each class. Mr Cutting found that participants ended up preferring the lesser known pieces to the canon merely through exposure. That was in contrast to a control group of students from the same campus that tended to like the canonical works best.
But in a new paper researchers varied the quality of art that the participants were exposed to. Half the treatment group of undergraduate students were repeatedly exposed to the critically respected work of John Everett Millais over a seven week lecture course and half to Thomas Kinkade, who is a good deal less respected, although much more popular.
They compared the opinions of this treatment group to a control group who had no repeated exposure. You can see from the graph below that there was a significant decline in participants' opinions of the work of Thomas Kinkade the more they saw the pieces, while the opposite holds true for John Everett Millais. The exposure effect only held true for the "good" art.
This study suggests that Marshall’s optimism over our critical faculties may not be misplaced. The more we experience good art the more we learn to like it, whereas bad art has diminishing marginal utility. Of course, many may disagree about the respective quality of the two artists' work, but personally I find this result encouraging.
品質眾生相(82- ):巴西高檔餐廳的食品安全突檢 ......
Rio De Janeiro Journal
Food-Safety Microscope on High-End Kitchens
Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times
Inspectors who this week
raided Antiquarius — where prices have shocked many people in Rio —
found more than 50 pounds of expired food.
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: August 8, 2013
RIO DE JANEIRO — Tucked on a leafy street in Leblon, the seaside bastion
of this city’s elite, Antiquarius ranks among Brazil’s most exclusive
restaurants. Well-heeled regulars frequent Antiquarius, which is
decorated in faux-farmhouse style with landscape paintings and porcelain
vases, and charges $68 for a stew of codfish in coconut-tomato sauce.
Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times
Protesters camped out near the home of Gov. Sérgio
Cabral, on the same street where a fancy restaurant was raided.
But while Antiquarius’s prices have long shocked many people here, the
restaurant is now gaining notoriety for another reason. Inspectors
raided it this week, finding more than 50 pounds of expired food like
ham, endive and beef tripe in its kitchen, including more than 10 pounds
of snails with an expiration date of July 2012.
The inspection of Antiquarius, carried out on Tuesday in an operation
code-named Ratatouille — after both the Provençal stewed vegetable dish
and the 2007 animated film about a kitchen rat with dreams of becoming a
chef — was one of several raids this year by officials seeking to
improve the city’s restaurant standards as more visitors flock to Rio
ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, both of which will be
held here.
“Some restaurants think they will never be inspected, just because they
are so chic and expensive,” said Cidinha Campos, director of Rio’s
consumer protection agency, singling out an item on Antiquarius’s menu,
grilled slipper lobster in beurre d’escargots, which costs about $78.
The restaurant’s snail butter used in the recipe was also found to have
expired, she said.
“Well,” Ms. Campos said, “even Antiquarius is not above the law.” She
added that the restaurant, which serves dishes largely inspired by the
cuisine of Portugal, Brazil’s former colonial ruler, could face a fine
from about $200 all the way up to $3 million, depending on its
explanation of its kitchen practices and the size of its revenues.
Many people have welcomed the raids of Antiquarius and other restaurants
in Rio, a city where visitors are often wowed by the natural beauty of
beaches and forested peaks and entranced by the city’s cultural
offerings, like music and dance. But laments are common here about
soaring restaurant prices and service that is somewhere between
lackadaisical and dismissive.
In another surprise raid this year, inspectors found rotting fish and
expired beef in the kitchen of the Copacabana Palace, the Art Deco gem
on Copacabana Beach that is one of Rio’s top hotels. Ms. Campos, the
consumer protection official, said the hotel paid a fine of more than
$100,000 and quickly enacted new food safety measures.
An array of other high-end spots here have also recently been found to
have expired food in their kitchens, including Quadrifoglio, an Italian
restaurant in the Jardim Botânico district where inspectors found
expired tomatoes, pasta and ice cream. At Brigete’s, a bistro in Leblon,
the osso buco was deemed “unfit for consumption.”
The food inspectors have also focused on cheaper restaurants,
supermarkets and the kitchens found in Rio’s love hotels, its famed
short-stay establishments. Several of the hotels — including Gallant,
Panda, Bambina and Magnus — had expired food, according to the consumer
protection agency.
(In an exception to the trend, a few high-end restaurants raided by
inspectors were found to have no expired food at all, including Gero,
part of the Italian Fasano chain, and Zuka, which serves dishes like
namorado fish in a foie gras broth.)
Pedro Mello, a spokesman for Antiquarius, which was founded in 1977 and
is owned by the Portuguese restaurateur Carlos Perico, said in an
interview that the expired food found by inspectors was “unjustifiable,”
and that snails (though not snail butter, which, its name
notwithstanding, does not need to include snails at all, but involves
butter, parsley, garlic and shallots) had been removed from the menu
well before the raid.
“The Perico family itself eats lunch and dinner at Antiquarius, so you
can imagine our sense of surprise,” Mr. Mello said, adding that
personnel responsible for the expired food were facing disciplinary
action.
The raid is just one problem for Antiquarius, which is on the same block
in Leblon where Sérgio Cabral, Rio’s unpopular governor, lives.
Mr. Cabral has been besieged since June by protesters fuming about
police brutality and abuses of power by the authorities, including the
governor’s extensive use of a fleet of helicopters to escape Rio’s
traffic jams. Some demonstrators remain camped not far from his doorstep
and the entrance to Antiquarius, causing the restaurant’s customer
traffic to fall steeply at several points in recent weeks, said Mr.
Mello, the restaurant’s spokesman.
One Rio socialite, Narcisa Tamborindeguy, went so far as to tell a social columnist
that Antiquarius was being “ripped off” because of its location on the
governor’s street. “Cabral should refund the restaurant because it’s
empty since the protests,” said Ms. Tamborindeguy, who recently starred
in a reality show called “Rich Women.”
As for the protesters, they also expressed indignation about Mr. Cabral,
who is grappling with polling in which half of those surveyed say he is
doing a bad job, but they stopped far short of fretting about
Antiquarius’s fortunes.
“The city is full of these contrasts, these paradoxical things,” said
Ernesto Brito, 36, an ecologist camped among the protesters, some of
whom were bathing less regularly than their new neighbors in Leblon. “We
might be dirty in our skin, but they are dirty in their model,” he
said, gesturing at Antiquarius.
“We think there is a double standard; if someone came here and said, ‘I
got poisoned by them,’ we’d go to jail for years,” he continued,
referring to himself and other scruffy protesters near Mr. Cabral’s
home. “They don’t,” he said, pointing again toward Antiquarius.
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