John Menick Blog | Archive for ‘Markets’

Henry Jenkins — MIT director, professor and blogger — has a wild blog entry about his trip to Poland that documents, among other things, Polish Reggae, stadium markets, and a Fotoplastikon. Bruce Sterling points to the entry this week, and focuses on the Fotoplastikon, but what caught my eye was the amazing cultural collision that is Polish Reggae:

Keep in mind: There are almost no Jamaicans living in Poland. This is not a case of emigrant populations porting music to another part of the world. Poland is an incredibly homogeneous country with very limited immigrant populations and clearly, there are no cultural reasons for Jamaicans to want to relocate to this part of the world. Reggae emerged here because it served Polish interests and reflected Polish tastes and thus it has taken some distinctly Polish shapes… A group called Izrael was the first to introduce the sound into Poland in 193. [sic] Some members of Izrael heard a few songs and were so fascinated that they started to produce music in this style (at least as they understood it). I gather there’s a good deal of reinvention going on here given how limited their initial exposure to the music was. The name created confusion in Poland with some people assuming this was a Christian Rock group. Indeed, my hosts shared with me stories of older people storming out of the concert, confused and angry, having hoped for a more conventional religious experience.

For more on the Fotoplastikon (aka the Kaiserpanorama), see Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception, which also features praxinoscopes, stereoscopes, and tachistoscopes. The Kaiserpanorama is actually on its cover.

From Creative Time:

Michael Rakowitz will re-open Davisons & Co., based on the importexport business his family operated in Baghdad. Located in a storefront on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, the project will provide free shipping for the Iraqi diaspora community, as well as other families who have military personnel stationed in Iraq, thereby creating a space where human concerns on both sides of the conflict can meet.

Davisons & Co. was originally opened in New York by Rakowitz’s grandfather when the family was exiled from Iraq in 1946, leaving behind a legacy that spanned centuries. In this incarnation of the business, Rakowitz will also attempt the importation of Iraqi dates and other products, offering them at prices that are clearly the result of prohibitive import charges and restrictions that remain years after the Gulf War embargo was lifted in 2003. This situation has kept Iraqi products from legally entering the United States, with severe repercussions for the previously thriving, world-renowned date industry in Iraq that produced over 600 different varieties.

Michael is also blogging the project.

In this month’s Artforum, Tom Vanderbilt has an article on Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s documentary, Our Daily Bread, a fairly graphic study of “globalized factory food.” I haven’t seen the film yet, but I’m already thinking of it as a post-industrial update to Franju’s harrowing Blood of the Beasts.

The first ones to leave [a slowing art] market is not the established collectors but the speculators, and the current market seems to be driven by the latter.

- Anders Petterson on Reuters