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Mr Tommy Brue

Today Portrait XXI –
Mr Tommy Brue

(Picture: nzz.ch/André Carrilho)

(Picture: telegraph.co.uk/A Most Wanted Man, with Tommy Brue played most convincingly by Willem Dafoe)

Mr Tommy Brue, a character from John le Carré’s 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man, is the writer’s portrait of a more or less disillusioned, but rather decent private banker, manipulated by the Secret Service. But not only that: it is also, as John le Carré declared himself (http://www.togohlis.de/03lecarre-interview.htm), kind of a self-portrait of him, the writer. Mr Tommy Brue, c’est moi, in one word. And with this Today Portrait we go into the third series of Today Portrait(s) that I am going to dedicate to portraits of bankers, entrepreneurs, the financial architecture, in brief: to the economy, since I am finding that art historians should turn more to a critical inspection of the economic system, of how it is represented in art, even so – or just because – the economy is rather a blind spot of the art system, since the art system, of course, despite or because its frequent critique of capitalism, is being part of it.

A Most Wanted Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Most_Wanted_Man) does belong to the category of Post-9/11-novels, but a character like Tommy Brue is haunted also by the more distant past. The Pre-’89-past, or better: his father’s Pre-’89 and Shortly-after-’89 past as a money launderer for a Russian colonel. Tommy Brue, as a private banker, is left with a mess to clean up inside his bank. And since there is a mess to clean up (and he hasn’t yet done the cleaning up convincingly and to the full) the Secret Service sees his chance to manipulate Tommy Brue. As the Secret Service had once already manipulated the father of Tommy Brue (which is the reason, actually, why there is a mess to clean up, inside Brue Frčres).

The novel, of course, does develop its characters much more fully than it does the 2014 movie, based on the 2008 novel. And in developing more complex characters, the novel shows Tommy Brue, the Scottish but now Hamburg-based banker, for example seeking comfort. And he does so, although he is not an actual art lover, by turning to art, by heading, again, to the Hamburg Ernst-Barlach-Haus (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst-Barlach-Haus), where he does find sculptures of characters (or human types) seeking also comfort, as it appears to him, but not finding such. Which is, as the novel, speaking from Tommy Brue’s own perspective, does declare, a sort of comfort in itself.

Ernst Barlach, Fries des Lauschenden (picture: Rufus46)

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Financial Architecture

Today Portrait XXII –
Financial Architecture

(Picture: bis.org)

(Picture: DS)

Occasionally there is such thing as a free lunch, at least here’s one I found – with a view to the
Hilton, and at the margin of the BIS entry fountain (picture: DS)

The days of the Basel Hilton Hotel building are counted. But this is not about the Hilton, nor about the new tower that is going to house the headquarters of an insurance company (see: http://bazonline.ch/basel/stadt/BaloiseHochhaus-erhaelt-gruenes-Licht/story/15975296), but about financial architecture, or, if one likes so: about a new environment for the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank of many central banks, but also an institution that the common man (like me) rather perceives as a black box, unaware of what the BIZ (or BIS) with its Basel headquarters (and two actual buildings; see on left and on right above) precisely does. Check it out here: http://www.bis.org/about/index.htm and here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_f%C3%BCr_Internationalen_Zahlungsausgleich, and maybe you will see then architecture differently, because there is architecture, and there is the architecture of the international finance system, and the common man (like me) might ask now: what have this two levels of speaking of architecture actually in common? What is, in one word, financial architecture at all (or what should it be, if not to ask: what should it look like?).

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The Club of Grey Men

Today Portrait XXIII –
The Club of Grey Men

(Picture: clubmonaco.com)

(Picture: Der Club der grauen Männer)

»Der Club der grauen Männer« – a short feature on the type of financial expert, working in international financial institutions like the World Bank or the IMF, the type of expert that the public usually does not get to see, but that does participate in defining when and under what condition a country does economically fail (and someone, some cluster of experts, here called the ›Club of Grey Men‹) has to define criteria what exactly is ›failing‹, and under what condition an international institution does help, and to what aim (watch here: http://www.dctp.tv/filme/der-club-der-grauen-maenner-10vor11-13102014).

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The System/The Symptom

Today Portrait XXIV –
The System/The Symptom

(Picture: artfacts.net ; Hanne Darboven
(not from the exhibition))

(Picture: kunstmuseumbasel.ch/Henrik Olesen: I do not go to work today. / I don’t think I go tomorrow)

»One Million Years – System und Symptom« – an excellent exhibition in the Basel Museum für Gegenwartskunst (http://www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/de/ausstellungen/aktuell/one-million-years-system-und-symptom) with exquisitely chosen works of art and an intelligent intellectual approach. Only: If you really think seriously about what’s being presented, and about the relation between human neurosis and being forced into inhuman working conditions of today, what is one left to do? What is someone left to do, being confronted with as radical an artist as the late German conceptional artist Hanne Darboven (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanne_Darboven) who visualizes the life time of a working woman or man, the time he or she might have spent in a factory with nothing else to do but doing some mechanical movements? It’s frightening, and yes, it is a luxury to be allowed to think about it. If art says: ›you must change your life‹, does art say also ›how‹?

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Giving up the dreams of one’s youth (love, hunting) for economic reasons? The Portrait of a Young Gentleman by Lorenzo Lotto, in his cave of melancholy
(and in the Accademia of Venice)

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Tulip Folly (picture: 19thcenturyrealism.com)

The Angel of Efficiency

Today Portrait XXV –
The Angel of Efficiency

(Picture: tinesofwolfram.blogspot.com)

(Picture: slideteam.com)

The title ›Angel of Efficiency‹ does refer to an upcoming book by German scholar Florian Hoof, and also to Frank Bunker Gilbreth (1868-1924; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bunker_Gilbreth,_Sr.), the actual ›angel‹, whose photographic studies of worker’s movements while working (see picture above on left) have already inspired, here and there, curators and artists, and who does, according to the advertisement, figure prominently in Hoof’s monograph on the media history of corporate consulting. A book that, unlike the more anecdotal discussion of Gilbreth’s movement studies, traces back the actual history of Visual Management (see large picture above as well as the small picture on right below) to Gilbreth and his contemporaries (see: http://www.k-up.de/katalog/titel/978-3-86253-063-2.html).

(Picture: shmula.com)

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Peter Thiel

Today Portrait XXVI –
Peter Thiel

(Picture: TechCrunch50-2008)

(Picture: abcnews.com)

Who is Peter Thiel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel)? A venture capitalist, maybe the embodiment of risk capital, of smart investment. Some do portrait him as a ›cold heart‹, as the libertarian capitalist, some as being rather shy in personal encounter, all, as far as I can see without exception, as being very intelligent.
He has now come up with a book, and is dispersing the message that ›competition is for losers‹ (http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536). And may economists discuss about the value of competition. What I find interesting about this message is that this may sound perfectly familiar to artists and artists-to-be: Do not compete, it’s about uniquely creative individuals who do not follow the main trends, the mainstream, but are, why not: inventurers. And their unique ideas do not need to compete, because unique ideas tend to create, at least in certain fields, monopolies. In other words: one does not chose to be an artist (or entrepreneur): those who do only compete are simply not (or at least not great ones); and either the unique, passion-driven individual’s idea does stand or not, and hopefully for the individual artist/entrepreneur/inventurer: in due time. Is Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist, by the way, also a patron to the arts (and are successful artists, today, nothing but entrepreneurs)?

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The Inventurer

Today Portrait XXVII –
The Inventurer

(Picture: Richardfabi)

(Picture: sailko)

Now a trick question to all venture capitalists: It might appear sometimes that all inventions of the modern age have already been anticipated by the one or other drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The airbag was invented by Leonardo, one does read, or even the modern computer. And we may now assume that some inventions to come might also already have been anticipated by Leonardo.
Now the question to the venture capitalist: Which yet unrealized idea by Leonardo, which design would you pick to be realized? And one suggestion, if I may: What, for example, about his plan to uplift the Florence Baptistery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Baptistery), to put in on a new socket (my favourite passage in Vasari’s life of Leonardo, with Vasari reporting that Leonardo sounded quite convincing to his fellow citizens, but when, after Leonardo had left, they came to think about his plan, they all realized that it was actually impossible).

A method to allow one to look into the sun (source: leonardodigitale.com)

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Sustainability/Growth

Today Portrait XXVIII –
Sustainability/Growth

(Picture: thwink.org)

(Picture: w4.stern.nyu.edu)

While the discussion over ›sustainable development‹, quantitative or qualitative growth, zero-growth and so forth strikes me as being rather repetitive ever since, let’s say 1992, I am fascinated by the idea of writing a history of visual management, with a double focal point on Sustainability and Growth. It’s like the religious congregations of earlier days in history had artists commissioned to express their respective theological beliefs in pictures.

(Picture: Paul Sableman)

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Top Dogs/Slumdogs

Today Portrait XXIX –
Top Dogs/Slumdogs

(Picture: handelsblatt.com)

(Picture: Celador Films and Channel 4 Television Corporation)

A Top Dog, a top shot manager (see or read the 1996 play by Urs Widmer: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Dogs), has fallen, if a court is going to sell his seized watch on the internet (this happened to Thomas Middelhoff, this is not taken from the play, it was a Piaget: http://www.manager-magazin.de/finanzen/artikel/middelhoffs-piaget-nach-pfaendung-fuer-10-000-euro-versteigert-a-997826.html). If a writer had invented this kind of humiliation (or: depending on the view: ›feel-good‹) practice, probably no-one would have believed him.

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The Exchange Rate

Today Portrait XXX –
The Exchange Rate

(Picture: handelszeitung.ch)