How Many Robert Indianas Are Lost Per Year?

This is Robert Indiana's screenprint "Autumn", from the "Four Seasons of Hope (Gold)" portfolio. Executed in 2012, it was produced in an edition of 82. There were also some printer's proofs and hors commerce proofs set aside, so let's say that a total 100 of these prints were created.

Robert Indiana is a prominent artist and he has an active secondary market. A copy of this piece, for instance, is up for auction next week with an estimate of $3,000 - $5,000. That's far from jaw-dropping by art world standards, but it's definitely something worth keeping around if it's in your house.

So here's my question: of the circa 100 copies of this print that were created, how many do we think are "lost" per year? Or put differently, how many copies of this print still are, functionally speaking, "in existence" in the art world?

By lost, I mean to include things like:

• The work being damaged beyond reasonable repair.
• The work being thrown away or otherwise disposed of.
• The work being in a location where it is forgotten about, or its owner not knowing what it is, such that it is unlikely that it would ever reemerge into the art world.

The last category does not include circumstances where the work is in someone's private collection and have no interest in selling it (but they know what they have), but does include situations where someone just puts it in a box in their garage and forgets about it because they don't realize it is a prominent work by a prominent artist.

Presumably, all editioned art (or all art by a given artist, if we consider their entire career production as a whole) has an attrition rate. Once the edition is produced (or the artist dies), no more is created. Meanwhile, as life goes on and entropy takes its course, work progressively gets lost. Pieces in museum collections are, relatively speaking, safe from becoming "lost". But pieces in private hands are a different story -- it gets gifted to someone who doesn't realize the work is important, or someone dies and the print is tossed while the house is being cleaned up, or it is ruined a natural disaster. Stuff happens, in short, and so practically speaking that 100 figure is going to progressively tick down as time passes.

But I'm curious what people think the rate is. When one sees an editioned work by a prominent artist, how many of those works have disappeared?

Maybe 2012 is too recent for much of this particular edition to have been lost. Robert Indiana was very well-established by then; one would imagine most people who obtained his work would be people who knew what they were getting. The proportion of "lost" pieces for earlier works may be higher -- in part simply because of the passage of time, but in part because earlier in his career his work was more likely to end up in the hands of people who didn't really think of it as an artifact to be preserved.

My parents have a couple of great limited edition prints by some of the most famous artists from the mid-20th century, and last year I did a little project where I tried to "account for" as many copies of those pieces as possible -- looking at auction records, museum collections, gallery inventories, and so on. Even for the most prominent work with the smallest edition size (28 with 7 asides), I was only able to find info on less than half; for most of the works the number was far less. That doesn't mean those unaccounted for prints are "lost" as I defined it above -- I suspect many are in private hands with owners who know full well what they are* -- but it was still interesting to witness how much of even the most famous artwork in the world is, in practical terms, missing.

Anyway, no deep thought here, just a musing of the day.

* For example, my research would not have revealed anything about my parents' ownership of these prints, but for the fact that I obviously knew what they had.

Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Believe Them

 

The above conversation captures two different accounts of why people voted for Trump. In one corner, there are those who voted for him because "he'll do what he says" (unlike, presumably, other more feckless politicians who make big promises but never keep them). In the opposite corner, there are those who voted for him because he won't do what he says -- it's all bluster and trolling and hyperbole to trigger oversensitive woke libs, but in reality he's just playing a transactional game and will be reasonable.

Emma Briant flags these two accounts with the observation that it's interesting how Trump has been able to effectively activate both camps even though they have seemingly opposite priors. I'll suggest, though, that paradoxically these two opinions about Trump are not as far apart as they seem, and can -- albeit with a very healthy dose of self-delusion -- coexist in the same voter.

Start with the premise that Trump "tells it like it is." Obviously, this seems absurd to anyone who spends a half minute listening to Trump -- he's a grade-A bullshitter whose open lies can be spotted a mile away. But for a certain type of observer -- the self-styled cynic who prides himself on knowing that every politician is some type of liar or fraud -- Trump's very brazenness loops back around into a form of trustworthiness. At least he isn't trying to pull the wool over our eyes. The lies are so obvious that they don't even count anymore. But they're deemed to be in service of some greater agenda, an agenda which the listener is confident Trump very much believes in.

Once one adopts that approach, one can absolutely simultaneously believe that Trump obviously won't do what he says he'll do and that he alone will do what he says he'll do. Simply put, if one doesn't like something he says or if some ramble taken "literally" is acknowledged to go too far, then it is one of those obvious lies that can be discounted -- the listener patting himself on the back for his sophistication in not taken the clearly absurd seriously. And everything one does like is slotted into that greater agenda that is presumed to represent a substrata of absolute, passionate commitment -- the core promises that the listener does want to believe in, desperately, and so is willing to project onto Trump with reckless abandon.

Others have categorized Trump as a classic scam artist, and we see that here too -- the trick is convincing his followers that they're in on the con, as opposed to the marks. Seeing the lies doesn't drive them away from Trump, it makes them feel like they're insiders. Believing they've spotted the ruse, they become more confident that the underlying play is whatever they're being sold.

I've said before and I'll say again: it's no accident that Arendt identified this sort of cynical outlook as a harbinger of totalitarianism, because it leads to worse than believing lies -- it leads to an indifference towards truth. There's no falsifying this outlook, since it can equally and happily accommodate belief and disbelief in equal measure.

Can One Man Really Stop the Senate?

As Donald Trump's disastrous march through America's legal institutions continues unabated, progressives are desperately looking for something -- anything -- that can stem the tide. One possibility folks have seized upon is Senate obstructionism. The line goes that even a single Senator can do a ton of things to throw sand in the gears -- objecting to unanimous consent, slowing down hearings, delaying votes -- that can extract real costs on the MAGA agenda and provide Democrats with some negotiating leverage. So far, no Senator has taken this approach, and that in turn is a source of considerable frustration to progressive partisans who feel that Democrats have been rolling over without a fight.

But for me, the fact that no Senator has done this raises a different question: If this strategy was so effective, wouldn't someone have done it by now?

There are 47 Democratic (or Democratic-aligned) Senators in Congress right now. And as a collective, I absolutely believe there are plenty of plausible explanations for why they're hesitant to adopt the defiant, resistant pose so many of us are thirsting for. If you told me that (too) many still harbor a gut desire for "bipartisanship" and "working across party lines", I'd believe you. If you told me that (too) many remain attached to Senate norms of civility and comity, I'd believe you. If you told me that Chuck Schumer has attempted to unify the caucus around a strategy that, for whatever reason, doesn't include maximal obstructionism, I'd believe you.

But if it's really true that just one Senator has in his or her power the ability to grind Congress' gears to a halt, is it really possible that not one of the forty-seven would try it? There wouldn't be a single defector?

Do you really think Bernie Sanders is afraid to rattle cages? Do you really believe that Adam Schiff has in the past few weeks become enamored by venerable Senate traditions? Do you really imagine that Tammy Baldwin is inclined to cower before any and all Chuck Schumer diktats (do you really believe Chuck Schumer is that good at keeping his entire caucus in absolute ramrod lockstep)?

It just doesn't seem plausible to me. Someone would have defected by now. In fact, even if this strategy was considerably less effective than it's cracked up to be, or even if you think Senate Democrats are all fat cat posers who don't actually care about resisting Trump at all, you'd still think someone would have tried it simply to be a clout-chaser. The fact that nobody has done it suggests that either it is a lot less effective than people think, or there are a lot more (and more serious) hidden costs to it than people recognize.

I won't claim to be an expert on Senate procedure, and reading about the various machinations around blue slips and unanimous consent and holds makes my head spin. So it's entirely possible I'm missing something here. But whatever I'm missing has to explain not why "Senate Democrats", collectively, aren't adopting an obstructionist strategy; it has to explain why every single individual Senate Democrat has so far refrained from using their power as a one-Senator army to bring things to a halt. And I just don't see what that explanation is, aside from this alleged silver bullet not actually being one.