Project

5 | Magazine Project : You will develop a new magazine base dona topic and audience that will be given to you randomly. After determining all of the content and oveall direction of the magazine you will produce a minimum of three different grid structures for the design. Once one is selected you will begin with rough designs. Once these are complete you will be producing one tight, color prototupe of a complete magazine. These piece will be mounted on black board.

Andy Warhol is an art-world colossus whose work accounts for one sixth of contemporary art sales. How did that happen, and is he really worth it? Bryan Appleyard canvasses the experts.

othing good was made in the 19th century, nothing really good was made in the 18th century and American art in the 20th century for the first three, four or five decades was very elitist, says Sara Friedlander, the head of First Open Sale at Chrities in New York. There was, in this view, no American Titian or Picasso, Raphael or Matisse. And then, suddenly, on July 9th 1962, there was. That was the date of the first solo show by Andy Warhol, the 33-year-old son of Slovakian immigrants. It was at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and it consisted of a series of 32 paintings of Campbells Soup Cans, one for each flavour beef, clam chowder, cheddar cheese, etc. The response was underwhelming. Five sold for $100 each, but the gallery owner bought them back to keep the series intact. Nevertheless, by the end of that year, Warhol had conquered New York, the capital of the art world, and America had the artist for which she had been waiting. He reached a public, says Friedlander, that no artist was able to do before him. Because he was able to accomplish what nobody else had done and in the way he was able to influence what came after him, I think that makes him, I would guess, the greatest artist of the 20th century. There is nothing unorthodox about this claim. Almost unanimously, todays young art fans adore Andy as earlier generations adored Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollock. To the under-45s, says Georgina Adam of the Art Newspaper, Warhol is what Picasso used to be to an older generationand, like Picasso, he has become a man for all seasons. This vast fan base has been reinforced by the shrewd licensing arrangements negotiated by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, established under the terms of the artists will. There have been Warhol skateboards, Warhol editions of Dom Prignon champagne and countless Warhol fashion lines, including Pepe jeans and Diane von Furstenberg dresses. But, in a wider sense, Warhols colours and stylesespecially his use of pop stylepervade the culture. Any city street shows evidence of the astonishing power and durability of his imagery.

The market backs the enthusiasm of the young. Those original soup cans are not for sale: bought by the Los Angeles dealer for $1,000, they were sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996 for $15m, a deal that promoted Warhol to arts first division. In 2008 a 12-foot-wide Warhol painting entitled Eight Elvises, made in 1963, broke the $100m barrier, putting him in the same lofty bracket as Picasso, Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Gustav Klimt. The highest auction price, meanwhile, is $71.7m for Green Car Crash (1963). To put these dizzying prices in perspective, Titian recently achieved his highest ever auction price$16.9m for A Sacra Conversazione from about 1560. This is an important picture by an artist many regard as the greatest painter that ever lived. But the market says that Warhol is more than five times better. Warhol is now the god of contemporary art. He is indeed, it is said, the American Picasso or, if you prefer, the art markets one-man Dow Jones. In 2010 his work sold for a total of $313m and accounted for 17% of all contemporary auction sales. This was a 229% increase on the previous yearnothing bounced out of recession quite like a Warhol. But perhaps the most significant figure is the rise in his average auction prices between 1985 and the end of 2010: 3,400%. The contemporary-art market as a whole rose by about half that, the Dow by about a fifth. Warhol is the backbone of any auction of post-war contemporary art, says Christopher Gaillard, president of the art consultants Gurr Johns. He is the great moneymaker. Some glee in the market is understandableand not just because of the money. Warhol believed in fame and wealth: they were intrinsic to his aesthetic. The auctioneers are cocreators, carrying on Warhols work post mortem, and the salerooms are extensions of the galleries. How he would love it all! says Sara Friedlander of the current frenzy. I can see him at an auction, seated at front and centre with his Polaroid camera and his fright wig I think of him in every sale we do.

Before Warhol, the believers argue, there was sterility; after Warhol there is a ravishing, visual cornucopia. Without him, they say, there would be no Jeff Koons, no Richard Prince, no Banksy, no Takashi Murakami, no Damien Hirst. Many of the fashionable artists in the world emerged from beneath Andys fright wig. There would also be no fun without Andy. The starting point for any assessment of his legacy is his instant accessibility: nobody need ever be puzzled by a Warholhis lavish colours, his epic simplicity, above all his subject matter. Andy always painted famous things, says the artist Michael Craig-Martin, whether it was Liz Taylor or a Coke can. Even children love him, says Gul Coskun, a specialist Warhol dealer in London. They stop their parents outside my shop. His pictures are big, colourful, they are not taxing academically. But they are taxing financially now. All of which raises the question: is this a bubblecritical and financialthat will soon burst? In market terms, it seems likely if only because the rise in values has been so extreme. But the problem is that the market conceals more than it reveals. There are, it is said, 10,000 individual worksthe exact number will only become clear when the vast catalogue raisonn is completed by the Warhol Foundation. They have just started work on Volume Four of this mighty project, but there is no current indication of when it will be finished. About 200 Warhols come on the market each year. A large percentage are always bought by Jos Mugrabi, a New York-based dealer-collector who turns up at auctions in jeans, black T-shirt and baseball cap. Mugrabi made his money in textiles in Colombia. He moved to New York in 1982 and began collecting art. He likes to be seen to be buying and he is now believed to own 800 Warhols, some of them first-rank. Last year he is said to have bought more than 40% of the Warhols that came on the market. This scale of participation distorts the market and entails a risk of a swift collapse if Mugrabi were to withdraw. The question is, says Noah Horowitz, author of Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, what value would those works sustain if and when the market sees some sort of correction?

Christopher Gaillard does not think this is a problem. Warhol is a global commodity now. His work is certainly supported by some key players we read about in the papers, but its my belief that this is much more far-reaching than that. Warhol is the most powerful contemporary-art brand that exists. Picasso is another. Its about sheer, instant recognition and what comes along with it is a sense of wealth, glamour and power. The cans he exhibited in Los Angeles emerged both from his mothers menu and from a love of the colourful world of consumption. So they were not quite as impersonal as is often claimed. Warhols approach to pop culture, Scherman and Dalton argue, was far from purely aesthetic: from childhood on, he loved its products and worshipped its heroes and heroines. But his psychology played no part in their reception: they were seen as works devoid of introspection, shocking statements of the obvious. Whereas innocent viewers could stand in front of a Pollock and get no answer to the question What is it?, they would get an immediate answer standing in front of a Warhol. Its a soup can. It seems, wrote the artist Donald Judd of a 1963 Warhol exhibition, that the salient metaphysical question lately is Why does Andy Warhol paint Campbell Soup cans? The only available answer is Why not? Warhol now endorses a way of life. One simple technologysilk-screen printingdominated his career. But it was enough to show todays technology-laden, hyper-connected youth that they could do it too. The Andy Warhol Foundation and the market may want him to be Leonardo or Picasso, but the young want him to be the overthrower of all such pretensions. It is in this balance of aspirations that Warhol, the god of contemporary art, now exists. In time this phase will pass and the idea that Warhol is a greater artist than, say, Robert Rauschenberg or Jackson Pollock will be seen as the absurdity that it is. The bubble will burst, prices will fall and the drinker of all that Campbells soup will be restored to his rightful placeas a briefly brilliant and very poignant recorder of the dazzling surface of where we are now. Warhol was an artist, a generator of meanings. Valerie Solanas and his own social ambitions put an end to this. Now it is time for us, and the market, to adjust to the fact that it is over

19

economist.com

APRIL 2012

Andy Warhold is an art-world colossus whose work accounts for one sixth of contemporary art sales. How did that happen, and is he really worth it? Bryan Appleyard canvasses the experts.

othing good was made in the 19th century, nothing really good was made in the 18th century and American art in the 20th century for the first three, four or five decades was very elitist, says Sara Friedlander, the head of First Open Sale at Chrities in New York. There was, in this view, no American Titian or Picasso, Raphael or Matisse. And then, suddenly, on July 9th 1962, there was. That was the date of the first solo show by Andy Warhol, the 33-year-old son of Slovakian immigrants. It was at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and it consisted of a series of 32 paintings of Campbells Soup Cans, one for each flavour beef, clam chowder, cheddar cheese, etc. The response was underwhelming. Five sold for $100 each, but the gallery owner bought them back to keep the series intact. Nevertheless, by the end of that year, Warhol had conquered New York, the capital of the art world, and America had the artist for which she had been waiting. He reached a public, says Friedlander, that no artist was able to do before him. Because he was able to accomplish what nobody else had done and in the way he was able to influence what came after him, I think that makes him, I would guess, the greatest artist of the 20th century. There is nothing unorthodox about this claim. Almost unanimously, todays young art fans adore Andy as earlier generations adored Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollock. To the under-45s, says Georgina Adam of the Art Newspaper, Warhol is what Picasso used to be to an older generationand, like Picasso, he has become a man for all seasons. This vast fan base has been reinforced by the shrewd licensing arrangements negotiated by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, established under the terms of the artists will. There have been Warhol skateboards, Warhol editions of Dom Prignon champagne and countless Warhol fashion lines, including Pepe jeans and Diane von Furstenberg dresses. But, in a wider sense, Warhols colours and stylesespecially his use of pop stylepervade the culture. Any city street shows evidence of the astonishing power and durability of his imagery.

The market backs the enthusiasm of the young. Those original soup cans are not for sale: bought by the Los Angeles dealer for $1,000, they were sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996 for $15m, a deal that promoted Warhol to arts first division. In 2008 a 12-foot-wide Warhol painting entitled Eight Elvises, made in 1963, broke the $100m barrier, putting him in the same lofty bracket as Picasso, Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Gustav Klimt. The highest auction price, meanwhile, is $71.7m for Green Car Crash (1963). To put these dizzying prices in perspective, Titian recently achieved his highest ever auction price$16.9m for A Sacra Conversazione from about 1560. This is an important picture by an artist many regard as the greatest painter that ever lived. But the market says that Warhol is more than five times better.

Before Warhol, the believers argue, there was sterility; after Warhol there is a ravishing, visual cornucopia. Without him, they say, there would be no Jeff Koons, no Richard Prince, no Banksy, no Takashi Murakami, no Damien Hirst. Many of the fashionable artists in the world emerged from beneath Andys fright wig. There would also be no fun without Andy. The starting point for any assessment of his legacy is his instant accessibility: nobody need ever be puzzled by a Warholhis lavish colours, his epic simplicity, above all his subject matter. Andy always painted famous things, says the artist Michael Craig-Martin, whether it was Liz Taylor or a Coke can. Even children love him, says Gul Coskun, a specialist Warhol dealer in London. They stop their parents outside my shop. His pictures are big, colourful, they are not taxing academically. But they are taxing financially now. All of which raises the question: is this a bubblecritical and financialthat will soon burst? In market terms, it seems likely if only because the rise in values has been so extreme. But the problem is that the market conceals more than it reveals. There are, it is said, 10,000 individual worksthe exact number will only become clear when the vast catalogue raisonn is completed by the Warhol Foundation. They have just started work on Volume Four of this mighty project, but there is no current indication of when it will be finished. About 200 Warhols come on the market each year. A large percentage are always bought by Jos Mugrabi, a New York-based dealer-collector who turns up at auctions in jeans, black T-shirt and baseball cap. Mugrabi made his money in textiles in Colombia. He moved to New York in 1982 and began collecting art. He likes to be seen to be buying and he is now believed to own 800 Warhols, some of them first-rank. Last year he is said to have bought more than 40% of the Warhols that came on the market. This scale of participation distorts the market and entails a risk of a swift collapse if Mugrabi were to withdraw. The question is, says Noah Horowitz, author of Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, what value would those works sustain if and when the market sees some sort of correction?

Warhol is now the god of contemporary art. He is indeed, it is said, the American Picasso or, if you prefer, the art markets one-man Dow Jones. In 2010 his work sold for a total of $313m and accounted for 17% of all contemporary auction sales. This was a 229% increase on the previous yearnothing bounced out of recession quite like a Warhol. But perhaps the most significant figure is the rise in his average auction prices between 1985 and the end of 2010: 3,400%. The contemporary-art market as a whole rose by about half that, the Dow by about a fifth. Warhol is the backbone of any auction of post-war contemporary art, says Christopher Gaillard, president of the art consultants Gurr Johns. He is the great moneymaker. Some glee in the market is understandableand not just because of the money. Warhol believed in fame and wealth: they were intrinsic to his aesthetic. The auctioneers are cocreators, carrying on Warhols work post mortem, and the salerooms are extensions of the galleries. How he would love it all! says Sara Friedlander of the current frenzy. I can see him at an auction, seated at front and centre with his Polaroid camera and his fright wig I think of him in every sale we do.

19

economist.com

APRIL 2012

Christopher Gaillard does not think this is a problem. Warhol is a global commodity now. His work is certainly supported by some key players we read about in the papers, but its my belief that this is much more far-reaching than that. Warhol is the most powerful contemporary-art brand that exists. Picasso is another. Its about sheer, instant recognition and what comes along with it is a sense of wealth, glamour and power. The cans he exhibited in Los Angeles emerged both from his mothers menu and from a love of the colourful world of consumption. So they were not quite as impersonal as is often claimed. Warhols approach to pop culture, Scherman and Dalton argue, was far from purely aesthetic: from childhood on, he loved its products and worshipped its heroes and heroines. But his psychology played no part in their reception: they were seen as works devoid of introspection, shocking statements of the obvious. Whereas innocent viewers could stand in front of a Pollock and get no answer to the question What is it?, they would get an immediate answer standing in front of a Warhol. Its a soup can. It seems, wrote the artist Donald Judd of a 1963 Warhol exhibition, that the salient metaphysical question lately is Why does Andy Warhol paint Campbell Soup cans? The only available answer is Why not? Warhol now endorses a way of life. One simple technologysilk-screen printingdominated his career. But it was enough to show todays technology-laden, hyper-connected youth that they could do it too. The Andy Warhol Foundation and the market may want him to be Leonardo or Picasso, but the young want him to be the overthrower of all such pretensions. It is in this balance of aspirations that Warhol, the god of contemporary art, now exists. In time this phase will pass and the idea that Warhol is a greater artist than, say, Robert Rauschenberg or Jackson Pollock will be seen as the absurdity that it is. The bubble will burst, prices will fall and the drinker of all that Campbells soup will be restored to his rightful placeas a briefly brilliant and very poignant recorder of the dazzling surface of where we are now. Warhol was an artist, a generator of meanings. Valerie Solanas and his own social ambitions put an end to this. Now it is time for us, and the market, to adjust to the fact that it is over

Humans are natural-born storytellers, so lying is in our blood. IAN LESLIE considers how this comes out in our art ...

Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called Lying for a Living. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). If you can lie, you can act, Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. Are you good at lying? asked Kaftan. Jesus, said Brando, Im fabulous at it. Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a fine one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower orderas Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of beliefa skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological rootone that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.

case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. This patient spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there, she replied, Falklandese. What else? In the language of psychiatry, this woman was confabulating. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In the literature it is defined as the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omissionthere are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fillconfabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing. Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of why theyre in hospital, or talking to a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical scar, explained that during the second world war he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life. The same patient, when asked about his family, described how at various times they had died in his arms, or had been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators arent out to deceive. They engage in what Morris Moscovitch, a neuropsychologist, calls honest lying. Uncertain, and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they are seized by a compulsion to narrate: a deep-seated need to shape, order and explain what they do not understand.

As with the woman who told of her holiday in the Falklands, the stories spun by chronic confabulators are conjured up instantaneouslyan interlocutor only has to ask a question, or say a particular word, and theyre off, like a jazz saxophonist using a phrase thrown out by his pianist as the start of his solo. A patient might explain to her visiting friend that shes in hospital because she now works as a psychiatrist, that the man standing next to her (the real doctor) is her assistant, and they are about to visit a patient. Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been suicided by her family. In a sense, these patients are like novelists, as described by Henry James: people on whom nothing is wasted. Unlike writers, however, they have little or no control over their own material. Chronic confabulation is usually associated with damage to the brains frontal lobes, particularly the region responsible for selfregulation and self-censoring. Of course we all are sensitive to associationshear the word scar and you too might think about war wounds, old movies or tales of near-death experiences. But rarely do we let these random thoughts reach consciousness, and fewer still would ever articulate them. We self-censor for the sake of truth, sense and social appropriateness. Chronic confabulators cant do this. They randomly combine real memories with stray thoughts, wishes and hopes, and summon up a story from the confusion. The wider significance of this condition is what it tells us about ourselves. Evidently there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born storytellers, spinning narrative out of our experience and imagination, straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us our ability to conceive of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble, particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that confabulating can be dangerously fun.

36

economist.com

APRIL 2012

During a now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet minister, recounted a tale to illustrate the horrors he endured after a national newspaper tainted his name. He told of how, on leaving his home in Westminster one morning with his teenage daughter, he found himself stampeded by a documentary crew. Upset and scared by the crews aggressive behaviour, his daughter burst into tears, he said, and Aitken bundled her into his ministerial car. But as they drove away he realised that they were being followed by the journalists in their van. A hair-raising chase across central London ensued. The journalists were only shaken off when Aitken executed a cunning deception: he stopped at the Spanish embassy and swapped vehicles. The case, which stretched on for more than two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian about Aitkens relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held with them on a trip to Paris while he was a government minister. What amazed many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken told during his testimony. Some were necessary to maintain his original lie, but others were told, it appeared, for the sheer thrill of invention. As Aitken stood at the witness stand and piled lie upon lieapparently carried away by the improvisatory act of creativityits possible that he felt similar to Brando during one of his performances. Aitkens case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally found indisputable evidence about his Paris trip. Until then, Aitkens charm, fluency and flair for theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory. The first big dent in his faade came just days before, when a documentary crew submitted the unedited rushes of their stampede encounter with Aitken outside his home. They revealed that not only was Aitkens daughter not with him that day (when he was indeed doorstepped), but also that the minister had simply got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit. Of course, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to deceive us, because the rules are laid out in advance: come to the theatre, or open this book, and well lie to you. Perhaps this is why we felt it necessary to invent art in the first place: as a safe space into which our lies can be corralled, and channelled into something socially useful. The key way in which artistic lies differ from normal lies, and from the honest lying of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lies on behalf of himself; the artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writers have a compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the human condition. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is not. Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth

Humans are natural-born storytellers, so lying is in our blood. IAN LESLIE considers how this comes out in our art ...

Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called Lying for a Living. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). If you can lie, you can act, Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. Are you good at lying? asked Kaftan. Jesus, said Brando, Im fabulous at it. Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a fine one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower orderas Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of beliefa skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological rootone that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.

case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. This patient spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there, she replied, Falklandese. What else? In the language of psychiatry, this woman was confabulating. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In the literature it is defined as the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omissionthere are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fillconfabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing. Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of why theyre in hospital, or talking to a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical scar, explained that during the second world war he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life. The same patient, when asked about his family, described how at various times they had died in his arms, or had been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators arent out to deceive. They engage in what Morris Moscovitch, a neuropsychologist, calls honest lying. Uncertain, and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they are seized by a compulsion to narrate: a deep-seated need to shape, order and explain what they do not understand.

As with the woman who told of her holiday in the Falklands, the stories spun by chronic confabulators are conjured up instantaneouslyan interlocutor only has to ask a question, or say a particular word, and theyre off, like a jazz saxophonist using a phrase thrown out by his pianist as the start of his solo. A patient might explain to her visiting friend that shes in hospital because she now works as a psychiatrist, that the man standing next to her (the real doctor) is her assistant, and they are about to visit a patient. Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been suicided by her family. In a sense, these patients are like novelists, as described by Henry James: people on whom nothing is wasted. Unlike writers, however, they have little or no control over their own material.

During a now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet minister, recounted a tale to illustrate the horrors he endured after a national newspaper tainted his name. He told of how, on leaving his home in Westminster one morning with his teenage daughter, he found himself stampeded by a documentary crew. Upset and scared by the crews aggressive behaviour, his daughter burst into tears, he said, and Aitken bundled her into his ministerial car. But as they drove away he realised that they were being followed by the journalists in their van. A hair-raising chase across central London ensued. The journalists were only shaken off when Aitken executed a cunning deception: he stopped at the Spanish embassy and swapped vehicles. The case, which stretched on for more than two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian about Aitkens relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held with them on a trip to Paris while he was a government minister. What amazed many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken told during his testimony. Some were necessary to maintain his original lie, but others were told, it appeared, for the sheer thrill of invention. As Aitken stood at the witness stand and piled lie upon lieapparently carried away by the improvisatory act of creativityits possible that he felt similar to Brando during one of his performances. Aitkens case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally found indisputable evidence about his Paris trip. Until then, Aitkens charm, fluency and flair for theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory. The first big dent in his faade came just days before, when a documentary crew submitted the unedited rushes of their stampede encounter with Aitken outside his home. They revealed that not only was Aitkens daughter not with him that day (when he was indeed doorstepped), but also that the minister had simply got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit. Of course, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to deceive us, because the rules are laid out in advance: come to the theatre, or open this book, and well lie to you. Perhaps this is why we felt it necessary to invent art in the first place: as a safe space into which our lies can be corralled, and channelled into something socially useful. The key way in which artistic lies differ from normal lies, and from the honest lying of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lies on behalf of himself; the artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writers have a compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the human condition. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is not. Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth

Chronic confabulation is usually associated with damage to the brains frontal lobes, particularly the region responsible for selfregulation and self-censoring. Of course we all are sensitive to associationshear the word scar and you too might think about war wounds, old movies or tales of near-death experiences. But rarely do we let these random thoughts reach consciousness, and fewer still would ever articulate them. We self-censor for the sake of truth, sense and social appropriateness. Chronic confabulators cant do this. They randomly combine real memories with stray thoughts, wishes and hopes, and summon up a story from the confusion. The wider significance of this condition is what it tells us about ourselves. Evidently there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born storytellers, spinning narrative out of our experience and imagination, straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us our ability to conceive of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble, particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the

36

economist.com

APRIL 2012

Editorial Editor-in-Chief | Adam Moss Executive Editor | John Homans Editorial Director | Jared Hohlt Managing Editor | Ann Clarke Deputy Editor | Jon Gluck Design Director | Thomas Alberty Photography Director | Jody Quon Culture Editor | Lane Brown Strategist Editor | Ashlea Halpern News Editor | James Burnett Features Editor | David Haskell Senior Editors | Rachel Baker, Christopher Bonanos, Raha Naddaf, Carl Rosen Food Editors | Robert Patronite, Robin Raisfeld Fashion Director | Amy Larocca Associate Editors | Patti Greco, Ben Mathis-Lilley Editor-at-Large | Carl Swanson Advertising Call 212-508-0876 Publisher | Lawrence C. Burstein Executive Director, Print and Integrated Sales | Leslie Farrand Advertising Business Manager | Nathan Whitney Advertising Coordinator | Melissa Nappi Marketplace, Director, Printed and Integrated Sales, New York | Michael Tresser Marketplace, Production Manager | Manny Gomes Marketplace, Assistant Production Manager | Linden Hass Culture and Entertainment Director | Ellen Wilk-Harris Luxury Goods & Retail Director | Kira Krieger Real Estate & Automotive Director | Jim Marron International Travel Manager | Elaine Shui Spirits, Food and Beverage Manager | Zach Mader Account Managers | Katie Gowdy, Ian Hopping, Melissa M. Montgomery, Kathryn Pfau, Holly Boucher, Gary McNealis, Bonnie Meyers Cohen, Adrienne Waun Midwest Office | Michelle Morris, 312-377-2207 Southwest Office | Jane Saffell, 310-315-0914 Northwest Office | Kim Abramson, 415-705-6772 Southeast Office | Robert H. Stites, 770-491-1419 Canada | Chris Brown Media Services International, 905-238-9228 Italy | Francesco Ravanello, Carla Villa Studio Villa, 011-39-0231-1662 Integrated Sales Planners | Megan Shannon, Melissa Sobel, Ellen Benveniste, Melissa Lawson, Gina Minerbi, Sarah Rehfield, Theresa Bunce, Sara Idacavage Marketing Executive Director, Creative and Marketing Services | Sona Hacherian Hofstede Executive Director of Business Development | Serena Torrey Operations & Circulation Chief Operating Officer | Kit Taylor Director of Circulation | Kenneth T. Sheldon Chief Financial Officer | Adelina Pepenilla

2012 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the proir permission of The Economist Newspaper Limited.

economist.com

APRIL 2012

Editorial Editor-in-Chief Executive Editor Editorial Director Managing Editor Deputy Editor Design Director Photography Director Culture Editor Strategist Editor News Editor Features Editor Senior Editors Food Editors Fashion Director Associate Editors | Editor-at-Large Advertising Call 212-508-0876 Publisher Executive Director, Print and Integrated Sales Advertising Business Manager Advertising Coordinator Marketplace, Director, Printed and Integrated Sales, New York Marketplace, Production Manager Marketplace, Assistant Production Manager Culture and Entertainment Director Luxury Goods & Retail Director Real Estate & Automotive Director International Travel Manager Spirits, Food and Beverage Manager Account Managers Midwest Office Southwest Office Northwest Office Southeast Office Canada Italy Integrated Sales Planners Marketing Executive Director, Creative and Marketing Services Executive Director of Business Development Operations & Circulation Chief Operating Officer Director of Circulation Chief Financial Officer Kit Taylor Kenneth T. Sheldon Adelina Pepenilla Sona Hacherian Hofstede Serena Torrey Lawrence C. Burstein Leslie Farrand Nathan Whitney Melissa Nappi Michael Tresser Manny Gomes Linden Hass Ellen Wilk-Harris Kira Krieger Jim Marron Elaine Shui Zach Mader Katie Gowdy, Ian Hopping, Melissa M. Montgomery, Kathry Pfau, Holly Boucher, Gary McNealis, Bonnie Meyers Cohen, Adrienne Waun Michelle Morris, 312-377-2207 Jane Saffell, 310-315-0914 Kim Abramson, 415-705-6772 Robert H. Stites, 770-491-1419 Chris Brown Media Services International, 905-238-9228 Francesco Ravanello, Carla Villa Studio Villa, 011-39-0231-1662 Megan Shannon, Melissa Sobel, Ellen Benveniste, Melissa Lawson, Gina Minerbi, Sarah Rehfield, Theresa Bunce, Sara Idacavage Adam Moss John Homans Jared Hohlt Ann Clarke Jon Gluck Thomas Alberty Jody Quon Lane Brown Ashlea Halpern James Burnett David Haskell Rachel Baker, Christopher Bonanos, Raha Naddaf, Carl Rosen Robert Patronite, Robin Raisfeld Amy Larocca Patti Greco, Ben Mathis-Lilley Carl Swanson

2012 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the proir permission of The Economist Newspaper Limited.

economist.com

APRIL 2012

For me, the hardest part of this project was coming up with cohesive text design and creating more meaning through the visuals that I put in the magazine itself. It really helped me to create word/thought bubbles surrounding the topics of the articles I chose and then create my magazine spreads from there. I wanted to make a magazine that centers around policy and economics look more like a magazine that centers around art, and this was certainly a difficult task.