The Appearance of Value

Do you know where one of the most annoying places to get a paper cut is? on the tip of your right index finger....ow...no typing right, no writing....bah....

Petty complaints aside, I have a bigger issue to tackle, and this is the idea that I crave my coffee in the morning. I will often get it from the coffee shop downstairs, where it will cost me about £1.30, although I have perfectly good coffee (which at this moment is actually a small fib, this unfortunate purchase has all the appearances of good coffee and none of the taste, but that's a side issue) in my office, which will cost me all of £0.30 or less to make (factoring in its cost, and milk and sugar, and my hourly wage ;)).
Yet, I get distinct pleasure from coffee served to me and have an irrational conviction that it is somehow better than what I could make. It is my little indulgence for getting up in the morning :)

With the plethora of coffee shops around my work, I understand that to attract more customers they need to 'differentiate' themselves from the rest. How? I can guess, by cooler music in their cafe, or fancy spoons, or red cardboard cups instead of gray ones, etc etc. How provide their customers with a 'feeling' that they are special without forking out the extra money for fancy coffee, or organic sugar, or whatever...

Successful marketing plays on this, i.e. selling hot air, 'a feeling at no cost, and all profit'. This is where the 'cost benefit' occurs - in the time lag between the actual/legal meaning of a word, and customer perception, or the 'street' meaning. For example, when you/I think organic, we think cows on green pastures, eating buttercups bathed in sunshine. It means 'good', 'warm', 'grassy', 'wholesome', that is it's street value. Yet, legally, to be allowed to stick an organic label a product, means obviously something different. Something like, the fertiliser which the food was grown with had to be 50% sourced from renewable sources (erm...let's not go to define renewable), for example. This is its 'real' meaning.

This disparity between meanings is where a lot of profit is to be made, and it's legal. Which is kind of crazy when you think about it. I would definitely not maintain a close friendship with a person, to whom I said: Please do not tell this to anyone....blah blah.
I later found out that they told everyone, and when I confront them they retort that they kept their word, they did not tell 'anyone'. Admittedly, this is a clumsy example, but I hope it carries the point. The people we value most are those who understand us most, not weirdos that don't 'get' our meaning.
Hmmm... this actually reminds me of a book about jokes that Freud wrote (yes! would you believe! and which I have read, that is also not a joke). In this book, Freud explores the mechanics of the most basic turns of phrase that make us laugh etc, and one of the most common is the brief misunderstanding of a word in a given context.
So I guess, I understand why this approach is so common in many branches of our society, not just between friends over a coffee.... ooohhhhh .... yes, coffee... in a brown coffee cup for £1.30 :D....special.

In the Eye of the Beholder

Hahaha....I never noticed before - but there's a 'transliterate' button in blogger now, very interesting.....

"I have just been to" <--> "И хаве юст бен to" ....хехехе....

Anyway, indeed, I have just been to the Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. I remember seeing his painting "Musicians in the Orchestra" which for an instant made me think I was looking through a window at real people. It is a beautiful exhibition, and makes you realise that not that long ago, we had no idea what people looked like in motion - the way our muscles flexed, or the lines our knees/arms/thighs traced as we walked or swam. Amazing to think that this knowledge was absent from the collective consciousness! (...made me consider how trivial my research is in the larger scheme of things... in a decade or so, everything that I have done will be worthless, not to say it's not important, but that it will be assimilated into public knowledge, and hence become unnoticeable, because it will become obvious.)

I left with one distinct impression though...as though the exhibition, it's arrangement... had an idea to express: the idea of our (i.e. humanities) visual maturity. What I mean by this is, as you begin your walk through the exhibition, you see the first early paintings/sketches by Degas of dancers/people. And you realise how awkward and sometimes out of proportion the limbs are, and how sometimes the faces, heads, necks of his subjects are almost brutal in their coarseness. The plaques in the exhibit make mention of the fact that at this time, people in motion were rarely drawn because it was so difficult to hold a pose, and sometimes ropes or other props would be used to fix a dancer's figure in a certain position.

Then, as you walk on, you get introduced into the idea of photography, the efforts to capture motion. And Degas' paintings improve - the dancers now posses a delicacy, fragility and grace that was absent in his early drawings. Now, I do not want to say that Degas drew these later paintings from photographs, but that rather, the existence of photographs, and his exposure to them, allowed him to fix in his memory (for longer than was otherwise possible) the still figure of a dancer 'in motion'. Consequently, when drawing from memory, he was able to recall this image with greater accuracy than he was previously able to do.

Now, is it possible, that before photographs to compare to, people seeing Degas' first paintings of dancers in motion, really considered that this is what they looked like? Not having the capacity to 'feel' that the proportions where wrong, because they of course had even less exposure to dancers than Degas? (i.e. this sense of proportion, and motion, had not entered the collective consciousness?)

Could this in any way be justifiably related by analogy to the infantile early (early! i.e. BC) paintings? or those of small children? Photography/movies has allowed the specific fluidity of human form to enter our minds. Before this, we looked upon these forms, and in our 'minds eye' saw the stick figures of our early childhood?