(Above: Bruce Petty doing banking. Petty was doing PowerPoint connectivity cartoons before PowerPoint was born).
The Punch exercises a hypnotic, but deadly, charm.
The danger is it will take focus off getting to the bottom of precisely why finance houses were so exposed when the US housing market collapsed and triggered an unprecedented global economic shockwave. There are more important lessons to be learned than the one about the dangers of putting something in an email that you don’t want anyone to see.
Continuing to talk about himself in the third person, he wrote, “Standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstruosities!!! Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this. ...”
In an e-mail to his girlfriend, he called his “Frankenstein” creation “a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a “thing,” which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’ ”
In another e-mail to her, he blithely joked that he was selling toxic bonds “to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport.”
This PowerPoint presentation is not only emblematic of what may have gone wrong in Afghanistan, but, without wanting to sound too alarmist, what’s gone wrong with the way we all think.
I’m of the opinion that the piece itself is pretty cool, but can’t quite work out whether Deller is taking the piss or not. Either way we recognise the format and what it’s trying to explain, whether acid house and brass bands are at all related doesn’t matter: the graphic explains it all.
So I’ve been asked to talk about The History of the World which is the big wall drawing in front of you. There’s a quote by Lenin which is “everything is connected to everything else” and that could almost be the title of this work cos it’s how my brain works in a lot of ways how I try to connect things up, and it’s how I work as an artist in that respect.
I did a work called Acid Brass which was when I got a brass band to play Acid House music. And this diagram explains it in the way that I thought that brass bands and Acid House music actually have a lot in common even though on the face of it they have nothing in common whatsoever. They’re both these forms of folk and popular music, they’re both very strong, had a very strong following in the north of England, or still do. And also they have a connection in the middle with trade unions, with the media hysteria that surrounded Acid House music and drug culture, and also with the miners’ strike. So they meet in the middle really with civil unrest as you can see.
I have to say that it was one of the most pleasant experiences as an artist to work with a brass band, to hang out with those guys and to go to the concerts with them which were just great social occasions. And that’s something that I try to bring out in my work: a sense of enjoyment of what I do.”
The Punch exercises a hypnotic, but deadly, charm.
Why only a few days ago there was Paul Colgan explaining how A few stupid emails do not an industry conspiracy make.
It got me to thinking that a few incoherent blog postings do not Australia's best conversation make.
Colgan's acute insight? Journalists say horrendous things in private, and so do surgeons when peering into your open gut, not to mention barristers chatting about clients and politicians muttering about bigots. Amazingly, soldiers also say over the top things in the heat of war.
So it's not surprising bankers, especially Goldman Sachs, write silly emails, but you shouldn't read anything into this, or in to Melbourne Storm's ethical behaviour, just because they might stretch a few rules:
This has all started a hand-wringing debate from predictable quarters about the ethics of banking, as if we have always expected that bankers go about their business day to day living by some strict moral code.
Que? Moral code? Why you might as well talk about the strict moral code of News of the World arranging for illegal phone hacking. (after all, it's only collective amnesia). Or the strict moral code at work in that News Corp company Melbourne Storm.
What's worse, it distracts from crucial issues:
Not to equate Goldman’s activity with warfare but pulling a couple of quotes from any big messy situation and focusing on them as being representative of a wider problem is a bit like looking at the sun in the sky and saying it’s summer.
A messy situation! Well I guess that's one way of describing the handing out of seven billion pounds in salary and bonus packages after taking a six billion pound bail out (Goldman Sachs ready to hand out £7bn salary and bonus package... after its £6bn bail-out).
Why that's hardly a messy situation, just business as usual. But it seems that for Colgan such idle talk just muddies the waters:
The danger is it will take focus off getting to the bottom of precisely why finance houses were so exposed when the US housing market collapsed and triggered an unprecedented global economic shockwave. There are more important lessons to be learned than the one about the dangers of putting something in an email that you don’t want anyone to see.
Yep, thank the lord it had nothing to do with excessive risk-taking and excessive greed and really loopy derivative structures, as revealed in said loopy emails. Why that is just the shallow surface view, and we need to get much closer to the murky bottom, where no doubt we will find excessive risk-taking, excessive greed and loopy derivative structures.
That's why you need to forsake The Punch, and go elsewhere for a little fun. Like Maureen Dowd, who in Olive Oil and Snake Oil, takes the time to quote from the emails, most notably Fabrice Tourre's efforts:
“More and more leverage in the system, l’edifice entier risqué de s’effondrer a tout moment. ... Seul survivant potentiel,” gushed the highflying Frenchman charged with creating subprime mortgage investment deals intended to fail. That translates loosely to: the cheese stands alone.
Continuing to talk about himself in the third person, he wrote, “Standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstruosities!!! Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this. ...”
In an e-mail to his girlfriend, he called his “Frankenstein” creation “a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a “thing,” which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?’ ”
In another e-mail to her, he blithely joked that he was selling toxic bonds “to widows and orphans that I ran into at the airport.”
Memo to Colgan. You can sound smart and funny by quoting others; trying to sound solemn and insightful while attempting to excuse bankers and their emails can actually make you sound profoundly stupid.
But nothing stops The Punch. That's why today we're blessed by Leo Shanahan's special insight How PowerPoint slides ruined the world.
This PowerPoint presentation is not only emblematic of what may have gone wrong in Afghanistan, but, without wanting to sound too alarmist, what’s gone wrong with the way we all think.
It made me understand that what's gone wrong with the way we all think is that the insidious influence of The Punch has now spread around the world.
Poor old PowerPoint. Originally invented for the Mac as "Presenter", it was named as PowerPoint in 1987 and ever since then has had to endure jibes from hacks and wastrels masquerading as journalists, who use it to berate Bill Gates, Microsoft, and bureaucrats, when not explaining how it's responsible for the decline and fall of thinking in western civilisation.
Shanahan is just doing a follow up to General McChrystal having a joke about PowerPoint and Afghanistan, and rounds it out with Colin Powell's impeccable justification for heading off to war, but between cup and snide lip there can be many a slip.
Perhaps it's the dire influence of PowerPoint that explains why Shanahan puts up a picture of Jeremy Deller's PowerPoint style linking of Acid House and Brass Bands, The History of the World, and describes it as one of his 2004 Turner Prize winning entries.
Huh? The graphic explains it all? I thought PowerPoint didn't explain anything?
Never mind, the real point, Leo, is that Deller got shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2004 for his mixed-media installation work Memory Bucket, which documented his travels through the state of Texas, including tours of duty through the strange worlds of good old George W. and Waco.
The History of the World was an earlier work, and if you don't know whether he was taking the piss, here's what he had to say about it:
I did a work called Acid Brass which was when I got a brass band to play Acid House music. And this diagram explains it in the way that I thought that brass bands and Acid House music actually have a lot in common even though on the face of it they have nothing in common whatsoever. They’re both these forms of folk and popular music, they’re both very strong, had a very strong following in the north of England, or still do. And also they have a connection in the middle with trade unions, with the media hysteria that surrounded Acid House music and drug culture, and also with the miners’ strike. So they meet in the middle really with civil unrest as you can see.
I have to say that it was one of the most pleasant experiences as an artist to work with a brass band, to hang out with those guys and to go to the concerts with them which were just great social occasions. And that’s something that I try to bring out in my work: a sense of enjoyment of what I do.”
You can read it all here, at the Tate, where you can also find some other samples of his work, audio video and transcripts (here). Thank the lord the full to overflowing intertubes contains some real information. As usual Wiki has a handy guide to winners here, while The Guardian has a neat guide to the first twenty years of the Turner prize here.
Conclusion? Set the prisoner PowerPoint free; imprison the felon Shanahan and The Punch for lowering the IQ of all readers.
(Below: the history of the world, with artist acting as PowerPoint presenter).
Funny how a few months back a number of writers at The Punch ran with the notion that a few emails by scientists DID in fact indicate some an industry consipracy ...
ReplyDeleteYou may be interested to know that Punch staffer Shanahan, after a reader's robust rebuttal, silently edited his piece.
ReplyDeleteSo this fatuous opener
"This PowerPoint presentation is not only emblematic of what may have gone wrong in Afghanistan, but, without wanting to sound too alarmist, what’s gone wrong with the way we all think."
got toned down from offensive assumption to merely weaselly
"This PowerPoint presentation is not only emblematic of what may have gone wrong in Afghanistan, but, without wanting to sound too alarmist, what’s gone wrong with the way we’re being taught to think."
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/how-powerpoint-slides-ruined-the-world/
While the change was made silently, the brisk rebuttal was allowed to stand, making it appear the poster was misrepresenting the piece - and quickly pouncved on by later readers.
So there you go. The professional standards of News Ltd journalism on show.