Don’t buy anything with fish in it

According to studies, you swallow one of your teeth in your sleep once every six years, and if that sounds insane, that’s because it is, and you’re caught in a vortex of timeless, violet haze. Go towards the ocarina.

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I rewatched a documentary called The Price of Everything the other day, which is by Nathaniel Kahn and which I enjoyed, even more, the second time around. I had read a few unfavourable reviews beforehand, but as it turns out, you can like a thing despite others professionally disliking it.

This might bring up the question about the point of critics in general, which I’ve never really gotten, but then again, I don’t actually know anyone who cares about critics’ opinions, so it feels like I’d be discussing a dead horse. Everybody’s got to make a living, even critics, so for God’s sake, cut them some slack, Christmas is coming up.

The actually interesting thing, I found, was this quote by a great man who came up in the documentary (and is well known in the art world but probably doesn’t ring many bells beyond that):

Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing,

Stefan Edlis

The quote itself isn’t interesting, but the sentiment very much is, because it is essentially a variation of people these days or back in my day, you know, those pseudo-truisms perpetuated by people dwelling in nostalgia for a past heavily distorted by the inconsistency of their own memory.

I was interested in coming across this quote because first, it does have a nice ring to it, and second, this ring also sounds a bell in the very far back of my head. A bit of Googling turned out that this quote happens to be in one of the approximately eleven books that I’ve read in my life; Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I’ll spare the details, the point is the book is from 1890, so it turns out 130 years ago people already knew the price of everything and the value of nothing, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, just the same, people have known the price of everything and the value of nothing 200, 400, 800, and a thousand years ago (I’m not sure how old the English language is, but someone must be keeping track!).

The Romans have enjoyed saunas two thousand years ago, and all native tribes do is hunt for food, then eat it and then get high on some bush or juice, which is a simplified version of all we do. Apart from engineers building ever more technologically advanced stuff, nothing’s any different, and humans are and will be humans. Stop being reminiscent of back when tuberculosis had a good shot at killing you, then head out and enjoy the sun while that’s not yet trying to. If you think less about yesterday, you might just find today is quite the sweet spot.

Also, go ahead and try to interpret this quote by the very fun, very charismatic Amy Cappellazzo:

Once you’re in the lobby, you’re never getting out of it,

Amy Cappellazzo

But try not too hard, this one is literally just about the price of visual art.

For more advice on investing in fine art, see this entry’s title.

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