Art Scatter considers worst-case scenarios
Look, Art Scatter is not an economics advice site. We only know what we read, and frankly, that’s pretty dismal these days. Where should you put your money? What money!?!?!?! We do think that there’s a moral dimension to all of this, though, beyond the obvious, and maybe a suggestion that the way we at Art Scatter have thought about the world, even the way we have conducted ourselves, hasn’t been quite “right”, hasn’t acknowledged certain “realities” that may turn out to be the realities we should have been paying attention to. We are so easily distracted in the monkey tree.
Worst-case scenarios. How bad are your worst-case scenarios? This isn’t a competition. You don’t get extra points for having a bleaker worst-case scenario in your mind than your neighbor does in hers. Your worst-case scenario is a fantasy, after all. Or maybe a nightmare. It’s hard to manage a worst-case scenario once it’s planted in your head. Maybe you should just play with it — stretch it, take it in some strange directions, try to get to know it a little better so you can test it with what you can actually see and touch and taste. Right now, I’m picturing myself in a long line of refugees walking eastward on the other side of the Cascades. (I’m wishing right now that I had a better backpack.) Where are we walking? I have no idea. I have this image in my head from various newsreels/documentaries/movies I’ve seen over the years. I’ve never really imagined myself IN the line before.
I don’t think I can prepare for my worst-case scenario. Maybe no one does, if only because we aren’t actually living it. Maybe we just keep pushing our worst case back as actual conditions worsen and we realize there’s room for yet more deterioration. But that doesn’t mean I can’t act at all. And figuring out what to do, maybe that’s the ultimate reductive act: So very little really matters. And yet I do so very little of it.
Art. Art points us to places we can’t talk about, where the idea of “this matters” is somehow forged and spit out into the universe. Among other things. I like to think of art as a description of things as they are, even interior things, a description that is more or less useful to me. I imagine a photograph of an expensive condo tower, maybe like one in the paper today. Today, it’s ironic. A suggestion of “things I don’t need”. Two year ago, it might have described something else: the dense, successful city of the future. Although that description might have been intended ironically, too. Things we don’t need: “Cities of the future.” (Maybe we need a city that works today and works better tomorrow. And maybe it includes condo towers; in fact I rather suspect it does.)
Art won’t tell you what to do with your assets, the shreds of your remaining assets, or the big fat zero that describes your “net worth”. It might make you reconsider what net worth means, though. So does a financial crisis, apparently. How is art like a financial crisis? They both give you an appreciation for what’s real.
This is Friday. Art Scatter has no idea what Monday will bring. (You knew that, of course.) Art Scatter can only promise that it will try to have a little more insight into what its business really is.
October 11th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I read this piece before heading home from work on Friday, right after a call from home which began, “Have you been hearing about the scary angry people at McCain/Palin rallies? It’s getting out of control!” As I rode the bus home, OPB was recapping the dismal week on Wall Street. I looked at my fellow passengers crowded on the bus and saw fellow refugees rushing home to put up the storm windows and stock up on candles and tinned beef. Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket? I stopped for a fresh bottle of tonic and a lemon before going home. Thanks a lot, Barry.
Worst case scenario? Most of my life, I’ve had faith that everything will work out okay, no matter what. In the words of the Big Lebowski, “the Dude will abide.” As I’ve grown older, I become increasingly aware of how naïve that may be. Bad shit happens and sometimes there’s nobody to pick up the pieces. You may wake up one morning and not have any bootstraps by which to pick yourself up. I regret having sold my camping equipment at a garage sale a few years ago because I thought I could always pitch a tent in someone’s yard if necessary.
On the other hand, I’ve also thought that there could be an upside to financial crisis. Perhaps we’ll see a readjustment of values–both moral and economic. On one of the cheesy “entertainment news” channels tonight, they reported that Charlize Theron was being sued by the watchmaker Hermes. Seems they paid her $20 million to be a spokesperson/model, but she had the gall to be spotted wearing a Dior watch. So two thoughts: (1) How in the hell is it worth $20,000,000 to have Charlize Theron wear your frigging watch? How many watches do you need to sell to recoup that marketing expense? And, (2) If you’ve been paid $20 million dollars, wouldn’t you try a little bit harder to put the right watch on before you go out of the house in the morning? Tomorrow morning, I’ll open the Sunday New York Times and be gobsmacked by the advertisements for high-end leather satchels, diamond rings and Park Avenue penthouses. Call me Fidel and hand me a cigar, but I can’t help but think there’s something seriously wrong happenin’ here.
Perhaps an economic collapse will lead to an economic revolution – one in which we will recalibrate what it means to be happy and satisfied. Maybe we’ll learn to feel okay about aspiring to a comfortable, upper-middle class Swedish life at best. Would it be so bad if nobody was too rich or too poor and we all drove Volvos? The shiny city on the hill is not so great if it’s surrounded by stinking favelas at its base.
Also, by writing that last bit, I’ve just destroyed my last remaining chance to run for President of the United States when I’m in my seventies. So much for that retirement plan.
October 12th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
I like that idea of a revolution — you can have one where the only casualties are the bad ideas inside your head. And gin and tonics help! Tinned beef, not so much…
October 12th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Even before the deregulation/greed meltdown I’d been thinking of planting a few vegetables next season. Check back in spring and see whether THAT idea becomes a reality … gardening always seems such a better idea when it isn’t raining.