I’m genuinely interested: Who is the man on the left, and what does the $2.1m number refer to?
Ed Ruscha’s “Hurting the Word Radio #2” was bought directly from the artist in the early 70s by Joan & Jack Quinn, for much less than $2.1m; they sold it for $52m.
cc @MasterworksIO who might be able to shed some light on this
The only reference I can find to someone buying a Ruscha for $2.1m is when Marc Jacobs did it for a different work; that piece subsequently sold for... $1.7m google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.c…
Then if you scroll the ad to the right, you see this, which is even more puzzling. At least the Ruscha sold for what the ad says it sold for. In this case, neither the buying nor the selling price is correct.
George Bellows’ Polo Crowd was sold by MoMA, which received the painting via donation, and therefore paid $0 for it. And the selling price was $27.5m, not $21.1m.
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My free idea for Substack: Allow people to pay for emails they’ve read and enjoyed, rather than forcing them to only pay for emails that haven’t even been written yet.
A subscription is a big commitment. But when I read a great email like @CaseyNewton’s yesterday, I would love to pay him a buck or two to say “thank you for doing that reporting, this was great.”
An ex-post payment system has other advantages. For one thing, it encourages broader distribution, rather than paywalls. For another, it’s a great real-time indicator of what your audience loves and values and wants to read more of.
Here’s @andrewrsorkin on Friedman and stakeholder capitalism. His choice of words here — “making” stedda “growing” — is an important sleight of hand that often undergirds my debates with @Three_Guineas on this subject. nytimes.com/2020/09/11/bus…
Hotels are some of the longest-running businesses in the world. So let’s consider a hotel that has been run by the same family for 250 years. Its owners need to *make* money, sure. They’re rich capitalists. But they don’t need to *increase* their profits every year.
Since 1972, the idea of “shareholder capitalism” has morphed from “companies need to make enough money to be able to pay their dividend every quarter” into “companies need profit *growth* that will cause their share price to rise indefinitely.”
@nathanielpopper If you’re dividing revenue by average account size, then obviously mostly what you’re measuring is the number of accounts, not revenue per account or per dollar.
This doesn’t make sense either. What is it supposed to mean that Robinhood trades 25,840 options contracts “for every dollar in the average customer’s account”? It’s a nonsensical metric.
I really don't think I'm exaggerating when I said that today, more than any other day, marks the end of the world as we knew it. (thread)
I was in Piccadilly Circus at 11pm London time, when the UK officially left the EU. The big billboard was a huge sign saying "London is Open". But who were they trying to kid.
It was just hours after the Trump administration announced that the entire USA was closed to any foreigner who had travelled to China of late. (Citizens can come back, but only if they can find a flight, and they face 14 days' quarantine if they've been in certain areas.)