"Facebook’s debut is not just a market event. For the millions of Americans who have no intention of ever buying or selling a share of Facebook (although the mutual funds in their 401(k) may have other thoughts), the trading on Friday is the the [sic] equivalent of a must-see Super Bowl Sunday showdown for people who don’t ordinarily watch a football game," opines the New York Times. It's "a pop culture spectacle"! I sure wish they'd said "spectacular." So basically, the Facebook IPO is "The Hills" but with more money. It's so important that we watch the manipulation of a market and a company's share price! Meanwhile, everyone's [...]

Time's recent declaration of the obscure and notoriously media-shy writer Jonathan Franzen as our "Great American Novelist" was met, at first anyway, with shocking equanimity, it seems to me. Sure, he has a new book, Freedom, coming out. Sure, Sam Tanenhaus declared said novel a "masterpiece of American fiction" in the New York Times, though he did so nearly a month before regular readers would be able to challenge that view. Sure, such is the confidence of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux in this book that it is pre-selling as an ebook at the unusually-high price of $14.99. Me, I read The Corrections, enjoyed it, and promptly [...]

Who wants in on my new firm? Here's how we're going to do it. We're going to open a simple trading market, right, which'll easily get approved by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, led as it is by Goldman Sachs alums. This will have a forward-facing straight-up predictive betting market on investment-backed lawsuits. (Later we'll open up that market to straight-up gambling on all law cases, because, who wouldn't want to go big on counterintuitive Supreme Court outcomes what with the new Justices?) Then we'll package and roll-up the investments in class action and high-end litigation. We'll let the lawyers openly re-sell their actual debts and [...]

I've been on record with my dislike for most of Annie Leibovitz's work, but even I figured it was a good value in the photography market. Her auction record is something like $57,000; today, you can actually buy prints for like $8 grand. But what are you getting? When she got into deep financial trouble, her arrangement with Philips resulted in a "Master Set" of 150 photographs, in an edition of 7; three of the set are broken up for solo sale. So, right: oh, look, a brand new edition! There's World Cup soccer photos in monster editions of 50; photographs, in an edition of 40, and sized [...]

Damien Hirst is in some hot formaldehyde these days. The secondary market for his works has collapsed by at least 93% in the last two years, and he's been accused of plagiarism by Charles Thomson, artist and co-founder of the Stuckists, a British arts group that promotes figurative painting. The jocular pontifications of these Stuckists fall somewhere in tone between Viz magazine and Prince Charles yammering on about "traditional" architecture. Thomson weakens his case enormously by claiming, for instance, that Hirst's "Pharmacy" was lifted from Joseph Cornell's work in the forties. Which, of course, it was. The "quotations" of fine artists-concepts, techniques, poses, etc., lifted [...]