More scribblings from recent trip to New York City, in part for book-related research. & in part to confirm that what happened on November 4 actually did happen. (Pics from Lisa K.)

November 10, 2008
Paying sporadic attention to the news one item stands out: Gun and ammo sales are booming surging (insert your own punning headline here). It would appear some folks are afraid that the new socialist president is intent on stripping the citizenry of their armaments, so they’re stock-piling. A store in Houston reported that sales on the Saturday preceding election day were seven times higher than for a typically healthy one.

We hit a few more galleries and the trip’s art highlight ends up being the exhibition DOWN by Kehinde Wiley at Deitch Projects. Seven monumentally-scaled paintings that riff on historical images of fallen religious and warrior icons by situating urban black men in heroic poses—sacrificial, ecstatic, sanctified while often tricked out in bling and hip hop gear. The colours vibrate and the scenes are startling for being both so modern graphic and yet classical; epochal mashups enhanced by the floating latticework of textile patterning (patterns based on the kind of designs once found on African-produced textiles for the European market). They’re subversive but seem to have a sense of humour about themselves. And their scale is overwhelming; the largest painting is 24 feet across.

We also check out shows by Andreas Gursky, Phillipe Parreno, Zak Smith and Bill Jacobson.

Which has me wondering: how goeth the art market? Not well I discover by perusing the previous day’s New York Times.

“Works by a wide range of artists failed to sell at a Christie’s auction in New York [on November 5], and items that did go fetched disappointing prices… The contagion has infected the art world. Collections from the estates of two New York philanthropists were expected to generate at least $104 million in sales; they brought in $47 million.”

Tuesday, November 11
President George Bush is in town for Veteran’s Day.

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It’s estimated that New York has already lost 45,000 finance-related jobs. Those terminated can console themselves at one of the now hot & happening Pink Slip Parties, which function as both networking events and drunken gripe-fests. Beer comes cheap at only $2 for a Bud. Former hedge-fund manager Mike Grimm said farewell to a $500,000 annual salary only a couple weeks ago. Mike tells the New York Post: “No one is an investor anymore. Everyone’s a speculator.”

Wednesday, November 12
Several interviews today, but the one most pertinent to current events is with William Easterly, an economist at New York University who specializes in development and foreign aid. In his book The White Man’s Burden he gamely takes on the many failings of not only traditional development models and big-letter aid agencies, but also the overly ambitious and technology-centred solutions proposed by Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Development Goals. He’s not saying the Goals are themselves are unworthy, only that the methods we keep employing to get there don’t work. Easterly pushes for a more modest, flexible, bottom-up, trial-and-error approach that considers what works in one political, cultural and economic context may not necessarily work in another.

But Easterly doesn’t restrict his criticism to well-meaning NGOs and international development agencies. He’s pointing out all the ways in which our interventions have gone awry in the developing world, which includes the sorts of policies forced upon countries by the IMF and World Bank, through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and the like. Which brings us to the current moment—the IMF had been struggling to overcome its bad reputation and make itself relevant again when the financial crisis landed its lap. Now it’s suddenly an active lender again, to Iceland, Pakistan, Hungary, Ukraine, and others. I asked Easterly what he thought about the return of the IMF.

“I’m afraid they’re going to go back to the old models—the course of conditionalities. The anti-globalization types who talk about neo-liberal economic policies as such a bad thing, I sympathize with them a lot but disagree at the same time. On one hand I believe that a lot of neo-liberal economics is common sense, time-tested stuff that works in the long-run to promote prosperity… But it’s not some kind of ideological dogma that you rigidly apply, and it’s certainly not something to be coercively imposed by outsiders. Because the moment something goes wrong, and things always go wrong along the way, you get a wave of xenophobic populists come to power who say it’s all the fault of evil foreigners and their ideas. You’ve just set back the cause of trying to find sensible ideas for economic management. Instead you get this pendulum of extremes.”

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Afterward, I make the move from hotel to home, relocating myself and travelling things to a friend’s place on the Upper West Side. But there is bad news: Her husband was laid off today from the company where he had worked for ten years. The economy in general, and slumping sales in particular, were cited as the reasons why. Over dinner he’s distracted and not very hungry; he keeps migrating to his laptop as he’s sent out some messages to friends and family, and, I suppose, is seeking some comfort or counsel in their replies. As he’s a foreign national, there is also the matter of his soon-to-be cancelled work visa. And they have a one-year-old baby.

Thursday, November 13
George Bush is still in New York. As if to say: you won’t be rid of me so easily! He’s making a speech to a forum hosted by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which I’m watching simulcast on a local television station. It takes a vigorous bout of arm pinching for me to again re-affirm the utter meltdown of the past couple months. And there’s Bush delivering his dispatch from bizarro world: on the one hand he’s justifying his administration’s de facto nationalization of many major U.S. banks while advising against any new substantive measures to regulate global financial markets.

He insists that the crisis “was not a failure of the free market system,” but, presumably, some greedy, loose nuts operating inside of it. Which sounds something like the argument that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” while neglecting to mention the regulatory conditions and business culture that enabled/encouraged the reckless behaviour.