Through October 23

David Zwirner

“From MCB to MBC”
Opening September 18 6-8 PM
Through October 23

Richard Telles

A Black Ant Traveling

Opening Reception September 16, 6-8 PM
Through October 30

Michael Benevento

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 12, 2010

Last week Japan’s minister of finance declared that he and his colleagues wanted a discussion with China about the latter’s purchases of Japanese bonds, to “examine its intention” — diplomat-speak for “Stop it right now.” The news made me want to bang my head against the wall in frustration.

You see, senior American policy figures have repeatedly balked at doing anything about Chinese currency manipulation, at least in part out of fear that the Chinese would stop buying our bonds. Yet in the current environment, Chinese purchases of our bonds don’t help us — they hurt us. The Japanese understand that. Why don’t we?

Some background: If discussion of Chinese currency policy seems confusing, it’s only because many people don’t want to face up to the stark, simple reality — namely, that China is deliberately keeping its currency artificially weak.

The consequences of this policy are also stark and simple: in effect, China is taxing imports while subsidizing exports, feeding a huge trade surplus. You may see claims that China’s trade surplus has nothing to do with its currency policy; if so, that would be a first in world economic history. An undervalued currency always promotes trade surpluses, and China is no different.

And in a depressed world economy, any country running an artificial trade surplus is depriving other nations of much-needed sales and jobs. Again, anyone who asserts otherwise is claiming that China is somehow exempt from the economic logic that has always applied to everyone else.

So what should we be doing? U.S. officials have tried to reason with their Chinese counterparts, arguing that a stronger currency would be in China’s own interest. They’re right about that: an undervalued currency promotes inflation, erodes the real wages of Chinese workers and squanders Chinese resources. But while currency manipulation is bad for China as a whole, it’s good for politically influential Chinese companies — many of them state-owned. And so the currency manipulation goes on.

Time and again, U.S. officials have announced progress on the currency issue; each time, it turns out that they’ve been had. Back in June, Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, praised China’s announcement that it would move to a more flexible exchange rate. Since then, the renminbi has risen a grand total of 1, that’s right, 1 percent against the dollar — with much of the rise taking place in just the past few days, ahead of planned Congressional hearings on the currency issue. And since the dollar has fallen against other major currencies, China’s artificial cost advantage has actually increased.

Clearly, nothing will happen until or unless the United States shows that it’s willing to do what it normally does when another country subsidizes its exports: impose a temporary tariff that offsets the subsidy. So why has such action never been on the table?

One answer, as I’ve already suggested, is fear of what would happen if the Chinese stopped buying American bonds. But this fear is completely misplaced: in a world awash with excess savings, we don’t need China’s money — especially because the Federal Reserve could and should buy up any bonds the Chinese sell.

It’s true that the dollar would fall if China decided to dump some American holdings. But this would actually help the U.S. economy, making our exports more competitive. Ask the Japanese, who want China to stop buying their bonds because those purchases are driving up the yen.

Aside from unjustified financial fears, there’s a more sinister cause of U.S. passivity: business fear of Chinese retaliation.

Consider a related issue: the clearly illegal subsidies China provides to its clean-energy industry. These subsidies should have led to a formal complaint from American businesses; in fact, the only organization willing to file a complaint was the steelworkers union. Why? As The Times reported, “multinational companies and trade associations in the clean energy business, as in many other industries, have been wary of filing trade cases, fearing Chinese officials’ reputation for retaliating against joint ventures in their country and potentially denying market access to any company that takes sides against China.”

Similar intimidation has surely helped discourage action on the currency front. So this is a good time to remember that what’s good for multinational companies is often bad for America, especially its workers.

So here’s the question: Will U.S. policy makers let themselves be spooked by financial phantoms and bullied by business intimidation? Will they continue to do nothing in the face of policies that benefit Chinese special interests at the expense of both Chinese and American workers? Or will they finally, finally act? Stay tuned.

“Geometric Persecution”

September 12th-October 23rd, 2010

Opening Tonight Sunday, September 12th, 6-8 pm

Overduin and Kite

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: September 11, 2010

I want to share a couple of articles I recently came across that, I believe, speak to the core of what ails America today but is too little discussed. The first was in Newsweek under the ironic headline “We’re No. 11!” The piece, by Michael Hirsh, went on to say: “Has the United States lost its oomph as a superpower? Even President Obama isn’t immune from the gloom. ‘Americans won’t settle for No. 2!’ Obama shouted at one political rally in early August. How about No. 11? That’s where the U.S.A. ranks in Newsweek’s list of the 100 best countries in the world, not even in the top 10.”

The second piece, which could have been called “Why We’re No. 11,” was by the Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson. Why, he asked, have we spent so much money on school reform in America and have so little to show for it in terms of scalable solutions that produce better student test scores? Maybe, he answered, it is not just because of bad teachers, weak principals or selfish unions.

“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson. “Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”

There is a lot to Samuelson’s point — and it is a microcosm of a larger problem we have not faced honestly as we have dug out of this recession: We had a values breakdown — a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism. Wall Street may have been dealing the dope, but our lawmakers encouraged it. And far too many of us were happy to buy the dot-com and subprime crack for quick prosperity highs.

Ask yourself: What made our Greatest Generation great? First, the problems they faced were huge, merciless and inescapable: the Depression, Nazism and Soviet Communism. Second, the Greatest Generation’s leaders were never afraid to ask Americans to sacrifice. Third, that generation was ready to sacrifice, and pull together, for the good of the country. And fourth, because they were ready to do hard things, they earned global leadership the only way you can, by saying: “Follow me.”

Contrast that with the Baby Boomer Generation. Our big problems are unfolding incrementally — the decline in U.S. education, competitiveness and infrastructure, as well as oil addiction and climate change. Our generation’s leaders never dare utter the word “sacrifice.” All solutions must be painless. Which drug would you like? A stimulus from Democrats or a tax cut from Republicans? A national energy policy? Too hard. For a decade we sent our best minds not to make computer chips in Silicon Valley but to make poker chips on Wall Street, while telling ourselves we could have the American dream — a home — without saving and investing, for nothing down and nothing to pay for two years. Our leadership message to the world (except for our brave soldiers): “After you.”

So much of today’s debate between the two parties, notes David Rothkopf, a Carnegie Endowment visiting scholar, “is about assigning blame rather than assuming responsibility. It’s a contest to see who can give away more at precisely the time they should be asking more of the American people.”

Rothkopf and I agreed that we would get excited about U.S. politics when our national debate is between Democrats and Republicans who start by acknowledging that we can’t cut deficits without both tax increases and spending cuts — and then debate which ones and when — who acknowledge that we can’t compete unless we demand more of our students — and then debate longer school days versus school years — who acknowledge that bad parents who don’t read to their kids and do indulge them with video games are as responsible for poor test scores as bad teachers — and debate what to do about that.

Who will tell the people? China and India have been catching up to America not only via cheap labor and currencies. They are catching us because they now have free markets like we do, education like we do, access to capital and technology like we do, but, most importantly, values like our Greatest Generation had. That is, a willingness to postpone gratification, invest for the future, work harder than the next guy and hold their kids to the highest expectations.

In a flat world where everyone has access to everything, values matter more than ever. Right now the Hindus and Confucians have more Protestant ethics than we do, and as long as that is the case we’ll be No. 11!

By FRANK RICH
NY Times Published: September 11, 2010

NO, he can’t. President Obama can’t reverse the unemployment numbers by Election Day. He can’t get even a modest new stimulus bill past the Party of No, and even if he could, there would be few jobs to show for it until (maybe) 2011. Nor can he rewrite the history of his administration. Its signal accomplishments to date are an initial stimulus package that was overrun by the calamity at hand and a marathon health care battle as yet better known for its unseemly orgy of backroom wrangling than its concrete results. While that brawl raged, the White House seemed indifferent to the mounting number of Americans being tossed onto the Great Recession scrapheap.

And so the odds that Obama’s party will survive the midterms seem less than Indiana Jones’s in the Temple of Doom — as we are reminded hourly by the Beltway herd flogging the latest polls. The Democrats are facing a “historic” rout, an earthquake, a tidal wave — well, you know the drill. End of story.

Unless it’s not. On Labor Day, the fighting Obama abruptly re-emerged, a far cry from the man whose Oval Office address on Iraq days earlier was about as persuasive as a hostage video. Speaking to workers in Milwaukee, the president finally started giving voice to the anger of America’s battered middle class. And he even let loose with a little anger of his own. The unspecified “powerful interests” aligned against him, he said, “talk about me like a dog.”

That inelegant line — “not in my prepared remarks,” Obama explained — landed because it was true and because he said it with a grin. Americans like their warriors happy, not petulant (cf, “You’re likable enough, Hillary”).

For a guy facing a tidal wave, the president was so ebullient, you had to wonder if he knew something we didn’t. Maybe he simply read the unabridged poll numbers rather than the CliffsNotes summaries of cable news. Those numbers are hardly as monochromatic as advertised. Obama’s approval rating, for months a consistent (not imploding) 45-ish percent, still makes him arguably America’s most popular national politician. The polls also continue to show that, while both political parties are despised, Democrats are slightly less despised than Republicans. In The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, for instance, 36 percent of those surveyed rate the Democrats positively, compared with the G.O.P.’s 30 percent. It’s only when the November horse-race matchup is limited to “likely voters” that the tidal wave rolls in, giving the Republicans a roughly 10-point lead.

That spread is the Democrats’ dread “enthusiasm gap.” And since that gap can’t be bridged in two months by new government programs or divine intervention for the nearly one in six Americans who are un- or underemployed, what could give the Democrats even a slender reed of hope? If there’s any plausible answer, it can be drawn from the single poll finding that is most devastating for Obama, the question (as worded by The Washington Post/ABC News) of whether “he understands the problems of people like you.” There his numbers really have imploded. When he arrived in office, 72 percent answered Yes and 24 percent No. As of last week, Yes had fallen to 50 and No had doubled to 48.

That a former community organizer and insurgent presidential candidate from a rocky middle-class background could be branded an out-of-touch elitist is not entirely the fault of his critics. Obama has perhaps never recovered from handing his administration’s plum economic jobs to Robert Rubin protégés with dirty hands from the bubble — Lawrence Summers, a deregulation advocate from the Clinton administration, and Timothy Geithner, an indulgent regulator at the New York Fed. Their presence has helped Obama’s more unscrupulous adversaries get away with the lie that his White House, not President Bush’s, created TARP. Indeed, such is the Obama administration’s identification with the tarnished Wall Street culture that even Michael Bloomberg mistakenly identified Geithner, a longtime public servant who never worked at an investment bank, as a Goldman Sachs alumnus at a public event in New York last month.

The White House’s not-on-C-Span deal-making with the health care industry behemoths only cemented the administration’s corporatist image, as did Obama’s meandering path to what still looks like a loophole-ridden compromise on financial regulatory reform. This is why even many Democrats have become lukewarm in their conviction that their president “understands the problems of people like you.”

For Obama to make Americans believe he does understand their problems and close the enthusiasm gap, he cannot merely make changes of campaign style. Sporadic photo ops in shirtsleeves or factory settings persuade no one; a few terrific speeches can’t always ride to the rescue. Nor would there be much point in firing Summers and Geithner — a political nonstarter anyway, now that it’s been opportunistically proposed by the G.O.P. leader John Boehner (his one good idea). Certainly Obama can add powerful new hands who might actually fight to protect ordinary Americans from the sharks; the star consumer advocate, Elizabeth Warren, should have been front and center, even in a Senate confirmation battle, long ago. But in the short term between now and Election Day, Obama may have the most to gain by sharpening his attack on those “powerful interests” who liken him to a dog. A top dog bites back (with a smile).

In a second forceful speech last week, delivered outside Cleveland, Obama titillated the political press by calling out Boehner by name eight times. But though Boehner is a nice soft target — he belittled the economic meltdown as an “ant” and has staked his political capital on extending tax cuts for America’s wealthiest 3 percent — he’s merely a front-man. Obama must also call out the powerful interests who are pulling the G.O.P.’s strings (and filling its coffers), whether on Wall Street or in Big Oil or any other sector where special interests are aligned against reform in the public interest.

If Obama can speak lucidly about a subject as thorny as race, he can surely do a far more specific job of telling the story of how we got to this economic impasse. He must join the many who are talking about why the top 1 percent of American earners now take home nearly a quarter of Americans’ total income — perhaps the single most revealing indicator of how three decades of greed and free-market absolutism have eviscerated America’s fundamental ideals of fairness. It can’t all be reduced to the shorthand of “George W. Bush.”

Obama might be so rude as to point out how these top earners are whining all the way to the bank even as the G.O.P. opposes extending more benefits to the unemployed and new tax cuts to small business. In June, the Business Roundtable chairman and Verizon chief executive Ivan Seidenberg gave a speech so rank with self-victimization — he claimed that government was “reaching into virtually every sector of economic life” — that the normally polite Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein reviled him as “a corporate hack” peddling “much-discredited country-club nonsense.”

Seidenberg was soon topped by a multibillionaire Republican contributor, Stephen Schwarzman, who likened Obama’s modest financial regulatory package to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” Among the clients of Schwarzman’s private equity company, Blackstone, is Goodyear, which signed on in 2004 to get advice on “optimal business configuration” and announced it was shipping more jobs to Asia the following year. That narrative, one of countless like it, might have come in handy last week when Obama was speaking in Ohio, just 30 miles from Goodyear’s headquarters.

As many have noted, the obvious political model for Obama this year is Franklin Roosevelt, who at his legendary 1936 Madison Square Garden rally declared that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies in the realms of “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” As the historian David Kennedy writes in his definitive book on the period, “Freedom from Fear,” Roosevelt “had little to lose by alienating the right,” including those in the corporate elite, with such invective; they already detested him as vehemently as the Business Roundtable crowd does Obama.

Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.

F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.

A Gerhard Richter watercolor from 1988, at the Drawing Center.

By HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: September 9, 2010

The superb five-decade survey of drawings by Gerhard Richter opening at the Drawing Center in SoHo on Saturday is, without even trying to be, an event. It’s the first career overview of Mr. Richter in the United States since the much-praised “40 Years of Painting” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002. It presents seldom-exhibited work, most of it abstract, in a medium that would seem a natural adjunct to his painting.

That both drawing and abstraction have enjoyed a recent vogue in New York makes the timing of this show, “Lines Which Do Not Exist,” feel right, though almost any time probably would be appropriate. Mr. Richter is an artist for many genres, styles and seasons.

Art-world types obsessed with painting’s supposed endangered status point to him as a keeper of the modernist art-for-art’s-sake flame, a true believer. Others take the distinctive coolness of his art as proof of his skepticism toward virtuosity, originality, expressivity, all the qualities that modernism holds dear.

One reality seems fairly clear. At present, the fashion for work that is ideologically overdetermined in meaning, political or otherwise, has passed. We are now in a phase of retreat from easily readable content. And Mr. Richter’s career offers a model for how to build art on ambiguity.

In paintings of the human figure over the years — of terrorists, of his family, of Sigmund Freud — he has rarely made his attitude toward his subjects evident. The Expressionist-style abstract work for which he has become famous is the very opposite of spontaneous and personal; it is, rather, a special effects concoction of layered and lifted pigment, nothing more.

Of course no art, abstract or otherwise, is devoid of content (which doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of hollow work around). All art has meaning, intended or not, and part of the meaning of Mr. Richter’s is precisely to keep meaning on the move, to hide it, change it, multiply it, undermine it, all the while couching these feints and thrusts in visually ingratiating forms.

Which brings us to the 50 drawings in the show, done in graphite, ink and watercolor on paper, dating from 1966 to 2005. A traditionally trained painter (an East German Socialist Realist in his youth) under the sway of Pop Art and Conceptualism, Mr. Richter, early in his career, viewed drawing — and its history as a vehicle for virtuosity — with suspicion, if not disdain. The only way he could approach it was indirectly, by taking its conventions apart, exposing its artifice.

This is what he did in the large 1968 graphite drawing called “Mountains.” To create it, he first took a snapshot of a mountain landscape, that staple of German Romanticism. He then turned the photograph into a slide, projected the slide onto paper and drew the projected image. The result looks sort of like a mountain range but, clunkily traced, it resembles other things too: a hulking creature with staring eyes, a loaf of rye bread, a blob of inanimate matter, a space station.

If “Mountains” turned out to be an elaborate joke about drawing’s vaunted capacity for realistic depiction, in another piece two years earlier Mr. Richter addressed its treasured reputation as an intimately personal medium. Again, he used mechanical intervention to make his point. He attached his pencil to an electric handle drill, plugged in the drill and went to work on a sheet of paper. The resulting clusters of jittery lines look more like termite tracks than a signature style.

In other drawings from the ’60s, Mr. Richter played around with architectural forms. One prophetic sketch shows the layout of a gallery installation of large, faintly lined drawings or paintings. Structural images continued into the ’70s, gradually growing more abstract — space opened up, line disengaged itself from representation — until, in the ’80s, abstraction more or less took over, though with no fixed themes or styles.

Certain drawings seem to imitate, in graphite, the look and texture of paint strokes not so different from the big, artificially processed ones in Mr. Richter’s oil paintings of the time. And there are watercolor drawings that are really miniatures of those paintings, done in aquatic green and blue and rich vermilion.

These pieces look freely gestural, but they aren’t: they’re products of chance. Mr. Richter made them pouring paint onto the paper, then distributing it by tilting the sheet this way and that.

I don’t know how he executed several graphite works from 1986 that consist of little more than tangles of looping scribbles. These are barely drawings at all in the conventional sense of being deliberate designs. Yet from the same year we find what looks like a rough, adamant sketch of a skull, and from the year before an exquisitely modulated image of a nude female torso, a tour de force of academic realism that seems to have arrived from a different world.

Anyone familiar with Mr. Richter’s painting knows that he uses similarly contrasting images and styles in that medium, as if telling us that he planned to keep his options open. This has allowed him to sample from a range of art histories without swearing allegiance to any, to make a sweeping formal investigation of painting without declaring his absolute faith in it.

In 1999, Mr. Richter agreed to a proposal by the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Zurich to do an exhibition of his drawings, accompanied by a catalogue raisonné. For the occasion he made 45 new pieces. Several are at the Drawing Center, and they are extraordinary. In them, one senses that a long-maintained distance from the medium is gone; the artist is engaging drawing on its own material terms.

The 1999 pieces, over all, are elaborately tactile looking. Entire sheets are covered with a layer of lightly rubbed graphite that brings out the grain of the paper and gives it graphic life. Areas of smudging create an illusion of shadowy spatial depth, against and within which linear forms float. In addition, there is lots of patterning: clouds of black dots trailing cometlike tails form drifting nebulae, which recur from piece to piece, helping to give the group cohesion.

Several of these components are both simplified and amplified in a set of four exceptionally large drawings from 2005, the most recent works in the show. Vertically oriented, they are entirely abstract but with passages of volumetric shading that suggest a concealed third dimension. Like Mr. Richter’s “Four Panes of Glass” from 1967 — and the panels in the ’60s gallery drawing — they’re environmental in scale, the size of the doors or tall windows big enough to walk into. Yet they don’t invite entry. Something about them is closed off. As with most of this artist’s work, access, apparently encouraged, goes just so far.

These drawings, which are really a single piece, hang together on one wall. But otherwise the show, organized by Gavin Delahunty, a curator at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in England, mixes work from different eras, often in clusters of pieces set on shelves. This is a smart arrangement; it points up consistencies over a career’s span but also creates an impression of surprise and variety in the work as a whole.

This is particularly important in a show that invites careful, lingering scrutiny from start to finish. In the end Mr. Richter remains as enigmatic an artist as ever. Whatever questions you ask of his art still yield conflicting answers. But you won’t find a more intimate setting for asking those questions than this one.

“Gerhard Richter: ‘Lines Which Do Not Exist’ ” opens Saturday and continues through Nov. 18 at the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, SoHo; drawingcenter.org.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 9, 2010

TOKYO

“Japan’s problems now are the same as they were in the 1990s, when you were writing about them. It’s depressing.” So declared one economist I spoke to here. “But the Japanese don’t seem all that depressed,” objected another. Both were right — and the conversation crystallized some thoughts I’ve been having about Japan’s situation, and ours.

A decade ago, Japan was a byword for failed economic policies: years after its real estate bubble burst, it was still suffering from chronic deflation and slow growth. Then America had its own bubble, bust and crisis. And these days, Japan’s record doesn’t look that bad to an American eye.

Why not? For all its flaws, Japanese policy limited and contained the damage from a financial bust. And the question in America now is whether we’ll do the same — or whether we will take a hard right turn into economic disaster.

In the 1990s, Japan conducted a dress rehearsal for the crisis that struck much of the world in 2008. Runaway banks fueled a bubble in land prices; when the bubble burst, these banks were severely weakened, as were the balance sheets of everyone who had borrowed in the belief that land prices would stay high. The result was protracted economic weakness.

And the policy response was too little, too late. The Bank of Japan cut interest rates and took other steps to pump up spending, but it was always behind the curve and persistent deflation took hold. The government propped up employment with public works programs, but its efforts were never focused enough to start a self-sustaining recovery. Banks were kept afloat, but were slow to face up to bad debts and resume lending. The result of inadequate policy was an economy that remains depressed to this day.

Yet the picture is grayish rather than pitch black. Japan’s economy may be depressed, but it’s not in a depression. The employment picture has been troubled, with a growing number of “freeters” living from temporary job to temporary job. But thanks to those government job-creation plans, the country isn’t suffering mass unemployment. Debt has risen, but despite constant warnings of imminent crisis — and even downgrades from rating agencies back in 2002 — the government is still able to borrow, long term, at an interest rate of only 1.1 percent.

In short, Japan’s performance has been disappointing but not disastrous. And given the policy agenda of America’s right, that’s a performance we may wish we’d managed to match.

Like their Japanese counterparts, American policy makers initially responded to a burst bubble and a financial crisis with half-measures. I’ve lamented that fact, but at this point it’s water under the bridge. The question is: What happens now?

Republican obstruction means that the best we can hope for in the near future are palliative measures — modest additional spending like the infrastructure program President Obama proposed this week, aid to state and local governments to help them avoid severe further cutbacks, aid to the unemployed to reduce hardship and maintain spending power.

Even with such measures, we’ll be lucky to do as well as Japan did at limiting the human and economic cost of the economy’s financial woes. But it’s by no means certain that we’ll do even that much. If the Republicans go beyond obstruction to actually setting policy — which they might if they win big in November — we’ll be on our way to economic performance that makes Japan look like the promised land.

It’s hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be if put into practice. Basically, he proposes two things: large tax cuts for the wealthy that would increase the budget deficit while doing little to support the economy, and sharp spending cuts that would depress the economy while doing little to improve budget prospects. Fewer jobs and bigger deficits — the perfect combination.

More broadly, if Republicans regain power, they will surely do what they did during the Bush years: they won’t seriously try to address the economy’s troubles; they’ll just use those troubles as an excuse to push the usual agenda, including Social Security privatization. They’ll also surely try to repeal health reform, which would be another twofer, reducing economic security even as it increases long-term deficits.

So I find myself almost envying the Japanese. Yes, their performance has been disappointing. But things could have been worse. And the case Democrats now need to make — the case the president finally began to make in Cleveland this week — is that if Republicans regain power, things will indeed be worse. Americans, understandably, are disappointed over, frustrated with and angry about the state of the economy; but disappointment is better than disaster.

Kimono, 2010
Oil, wax and pencil on linen.
84 x 58 inches / 213.4 x 147.3 cm

Slide Paintings
Opening September 9
6-8 PM
Through October 16, 2010

Marc Foxx

Not every great metropolis is going to make a comeback. Planners consider some radical ways to embrace decline.
(Greg Klee/Globe Staff Illustration)

By Drake Bennett
The Boston Globe
September 5, 2010

Since cities first got big enough to require urban planning, its practitioners have focused on growth. From imperial Rome to 19th-century Paris and Chicago and up through modern-day Beijing, the duty of city planners and administrators has been to impose order as people flowed in, buildings rose up, and the city limits extended outward into the hinterlands.

But cities don’t always grow. Sometimes they shrink, and sometimes they shrink drastically. Over the last 50 years, the city of Detroit has lost more than half its population. So has Cleveland. They’re not alone: Eight of the 10 largest cities in the United States in 1950, including Boston, have since lost at least 20 percent of their population. But while Boston has recouped some of that loss in recent years and made itself into the anchor of a thriving white-collar economy, the far more drastic losses of cities like Detroit or Youngstown, Ohio, or Flint, Mich. — losses of people, jobs, money, and social ties — show no signs of turning around. The housing crisis has only accelerated the process.

Now a few planners and politicians are starting to try something new: embracing shrinking. Frankly admitting that these cities are not going to return to their former population size anytime soon, planners and activists and officials are starting to talk about what it might mean to shrink well. After decades of worrying about smart growth, they’re starting to think about smart shrinking, about how to create

cities that are healthier because they are smaller. Losing size, in this line of thought, isn’t just a byproduct of economic malaise, but a strategy.

The resulting cities may need to look and feel very different — different, perhaps, from the common understanding of what a modern American city is. Rather than trying to lure back residents or entice businesses to build on vacant lots, cities may be better off finding totally new uses for land: large-scale urban farms, or wind turbines or geothermal wells, or letting large patches revert to nature. Instead of merely tolerating the artist communities that often spring up in marginal neighborhoods, cities might actively encourage them to colonize and reshape whole swaths of the urban landscape. Or they might consider selling off portions to private companies to manage.

A few of these ideas are actually starting to be tried. In Detroit, a city that now has more than 40 square miles of vacant land, Mayor Dave Bing has committed himself to finding a way to move more of the city’s residents into its remaining vibrant neighborhoods and figuring out something else to do with what remains. A growing number of cities and counties are creating “land banks” to enable them to clear the administrative hurdles that previously prevented them from taking control of blighted blocks of abandoned homes.

The idea remains controversial. Mayor Bing’s proposal has been fiercely criticized in Detroit, and some planners — along with many of the residents of blighted neighborhoods — argue that planned shrinkage is simply an excuse to stop helping the people in the worst-hit neighborhoods, and will only compound the pain that industrial decline and the housing collapse have had on the lives of poor and working-class residents.

But to the proponents of the idea, it’s a recognition of reality, and, more than that, an opportunity to free struggling cities from a paralyzing preoccupation with past glories. At its most ambitious, smart shrinking offers an opportunity to rethink what makes a city a city: Some planners envision a landscape that isn’t recognizably urban, suburban, or rural, but some combination of the three, with multistory apartment buildings next to working farms, and public transit lines extending through neighborhoods where most households have ample space to park their cars.

“This is an area where five years ago basically nobody except a couple of academics and oddball planners were talking about it, and now it’s pretty widely accepted. You’ve got just a lot of land and a lot of buildings for which there is no quote redevelopment potential,” says Alan Mallach, an urban planning expert at the Brookings Institution. “Part of what you have to do is think about ways to use land that help improve the quality of life but don’t involve actual building.”

The golden age of growth for the American city stretched from the late 1800s into the early 1900s. As immigrants from rural America and abroad flooded in, cities expanded outward, annexing more and more of the surrounding land. By the 1920s, however, suburbs in many parts of the country began to incorporate and to assert home rule, hemming cities in. At the same time, the middle class began to migrate to the suburbs, leaving the cities to the poor. That meant less tax revenue and higher social services costs, and the process of outmigration fed on itself. As the manufacturing industries that had driven the original growth moved abroad or died out in the decades after World War II, cities from St. Louis to Chicago to Baltimore stopped growing in population and began to dwindle.

Some forms of shrinking are more destructive than others. In Boston, for example, much of the population loss came from a reduction in family size, with the number of households remaining roughly the same. In Detroit and Cleveland, however, the decline left large portions of the city barely populated at all. And the recent nationwide collapse in housing prices has only exacerbated the trend, taking a process that had been occurring gradually and sharply accelerating it.

“For the first time, places like Detroit and Youngstown are realizing that they are not going to regain the population that they lost,” says Daniel D’Oca, an urban planner and partner at the planning and architecture firm Interboro Partners who has studied Detroit’s abandoned lot problem.

Cities like Detroit have suffered from a collapse in tax revenue. They have to deal with block upon block of buildings that have been left to the elements and a frayed urban fabric where the last holdouts from once-bustling neighborhoods now are isolated among vacant homes and lots. As a result, simply providing basic services like garbage collection, electricity, policing, and firefighting becomes more expensive and more difficult. Today whole sections of Detroit and Cleveland and Youngstown look like ghost towns: boarded-up houses everywhere, boarded-up office buildings, schools, even hospitals and train stations alongside vacant lots, with wild animals creeping back in.

But though the trend is decades old, urban planners have only recently begun to think about shrinking not as a setback on the path to future growth but as a condition to be actively managed. It’s a radical shift.

“It’s so contrary to what most planners do, it’s contrary to what we spend our time teaching students, [which is] all about how do you manage growth and accommodate growth,” says Joseph Schilling, who teaches urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech University and helped launch the National Vacant Properties Campaign. “The challenge for planning is how do you adapt existing tools and planning strategies to deal with an economy and market that is either totally dysfunctional or will have maybe slow, modest growth at best.”

Part of the difficulty planners face in thinking about the problem is that there are no real case studies of managed urban shrinking in the United States. There is, however, some precedent abroad. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany, the former East Germany experienced a massive emptying, with waves of residents from cities like Leipzig, Dresden, and Jena leaving for the more prosperous west.

Leipzig’s government in particular realized its diminished size would be a permanent condition and responded accordingly. According to Tamar Shapiro, the director of the comparative domestic policy program at the German Marshall Fund, city officials set out to address the problems created by all of the empty homes abandoned by those who had left. Unmaintained, they were an eyesore, and as they fell apart, a danger. They dragged down the value of the surrounding properties and left hollowed-out neighborhoods that attracted squatters and crime.

But since eminent domain was all but unheard of in Germany and the city couldn’t afford to buy out the remaining landowners in the largely abandoned neighborhoods, officials came up with something else, a new kind of land-use contract in which private owners signed over control to the city for a period of several years in exchange for not having to pay property taxes. The government was free to do what it wanted with the space — which was usually tearing down the buildings to create parks and other green spaces — and if the city’s population were to begin to grow again, the owner would be able to develop the land again when the contract ended.

Planners and city and state officials are beginning to look at similar ideas here in the United States. Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and several other cities have multiple nonprofits dedicated to turning vacant lots and blocks into parks. Many of the plots are tended in some way, some are left to return to nature, perhaps with a trail or two through them. The aim is partly aesthetic, but also an attempt to increase the value of neighboring homes and neighborhoods by replacing vacant houses or other signs of blight with greenery.

Other organizations are looking to turn vacant lots to more straightforwardly productive uses. Urban farms, for example, are spreading in several cities. These are not just community gardens, but larger-scale operations meant to be viable commercial enterprises. One of the most successful is the Ohio City Farm, a 6-acre plot behind a large housing development across the Cuyahoga River from downtown Cleveland. The farm, still in its first growing season, produces over 100 varieties of heirloom fruits and vegetables, and is worked by a few young entrepreneur farmers, residents of the housing development, and, thanks to a local nonprofit, refugees who have resettled in the area.

The abundance of vacant land is also providing a better way to deal with storm water runoff, a serious problem for large cities. Because rainwater and sewage typically flow into the same pipes, large storms overload urban sewage systems, causing raw sewage to be dumped into surrounding waterways. Soil, of course, absorbs water much better than concrete. Cleveland and Philadelphia are now dotted with vacant lots that have been landscaped into so-called bioswales, patches of land with a slight gradient, loose soil, and vegetation, that collect storm water and filter out the pollutants it picks up as it flows over city streets — relieving some of the pressure on the sewage system.

Some areas are being targeted as sites for green energy production. Lackawanna, N.Y., a former steel town just south of Buffalo, has a wind farm built over the ruins of a decrepit Bethlehem Steel plant. Terry Schwarz, a planner who heads the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative and has worked extensively with the city to repurpose vacant lots, believes that some of the land could make good sites for land-intensive energy sources like solar cells, or for geothermal wells to power adjacent buildings.

Schwarz’s larger vision is of a city with a reduced ecological footprint.

“We’re trying to take advantage of this moment to put a more sustainable pattern of urban development in place,” she says. “We want to delineate parts of the city where development probably shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.” One idea she and others are pushing is opening up the many creeks paved over during the construction of Cleveland. Doing so would leave the city braided with waterways, making it more pleasant and restoring a more natural water flow into the Cuyahoga River.

Schwarz and other planners involved in these efforts argue that some of the lessons they’re learning about how to use open land as a form of green infrastructure could apply in cities that aren’t facing the same population decline.

“How you unearth a creek in the city, how you separate storm water and sanitation water, it’s part of thinking more productively about landscapes, about a more ecological urban form,” says Dan Pitera, an architect at the University of Detroit Mercy.

All of these proposals, of course, merely shrink a city’s supply of inhabited land. Edward Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard, argues that cities like Detroit might think of shrinking in a more fundamental way, selling off parts of the city to private entities. Those companies would then manage their parts of the city the way the holders of private charters governed colonies in the early days of North American settlement. Glaeser concedes that the idea is politically improbable. Still, he points out that recent decades have seen the rise of privately owned and managed housing developments throughout the suburbs — he’s just proposing trying it in the city.

“You could think about the city shrinking not just in terms of the number of occupied homes, but that the city’s own political footprint would shrink, in the same sense that it expanded like crazy in the 19th century,” he says.

Shrinking, as a strategy, certainly has its critics, who see it as a continuation of decades of coercive urban renewal strategies. Rather than trying to revitalize dying neighborhoods, shrinking simply gives up on them. “I’ve yet to be shown a city or a community that has been revived through shrinkage,” says Roberta Brandes Gratz, an urban critic and the author of the recently published “Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs.”

Proponents of shrinking readily agree that forcing people to move should, whenever possible, be avoided. But the larger issue, they argue, is that talking about shrinking or not shrinking is somewhat beside the point; these cities have already shrunk, and they need to reconcile their new population with a built environment meant for many more people.

It’s a problem even the fastest-growing cities may someday face. “One hundred years ago, Cleveland wouldn’t have expected to be in the situation it is today,” Schwarz says, “but all cities grow and all cities decline and I think there are lessons that we can about how to manage decline that apply to all cities.”

via

Untitled (3310S) – 2010

lacquer on stainless steel, two parts
each:
147 x 98 x 147 x 128 cm
57 3/4 x 38 3/4 x 57 3/4 x 50 1/2 in

Johann Koenig

Marvin Gaye (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

By Jerry Crowe
The Los Angeles Times
August 29, 2010|6:05 p.m.

The way Marvin Gaye figured it, if Lem Barney and Mel Farr of the Detroit Lions could sing with him on a landmark recording, the Motown superstar could play in the NFL.

Forty years ago this summer, he set out to make it happen.

“There’s no question that if he had started out at an early age like most of us, he could have been a fine ballplayer,” Barney says. “Marvin had a lot of heart, a lot of will and stick-to-itiveness.

“He just didn’t have the skills.”

Not in football, anyway.

But that didn’t stop the 6-foot-4 Gaye from pursuing his dream — with the help of his football-playing friends.

Barney and Farr, the NFL’s defensive and offensive rookies of the year in 1967, had befriended Gaye in 1968 after Barney knocked on the singer’s door to introduce himself.

It was a difficult time for Gaye. Tammi Terrell, his duet partner on a string of 1960s hits including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” had collapsed into his arms during a 1967 concert. Later diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, she died in March 1970.

“Marvin really went into a stupor, and both Mel and I would go over and try to keep him encouraged,” Barney, 64, says from his home in Commerce, Mich. “And then one day he says, ‘Come on, let’s go by the studio.’

“We thought like always that we’d just sit and watch him perform. But he said, ‘Lem, you take this part,’ and, ‘Mel, you take this part.’ And as a result, it got us a gold record.”

The song they laid down, “What’s Going On,” was perhaps the most important recording of Gaye’s career, establishing the singer as a significant artist and not merely a hitmaker.

“‘What’s Going On,’” notes the All Music Guide, “was a new kind of protest song, a sugar-coated pill which surveyed the troubled landscape of an America torn apart by war, poverty and prejudice, but reported its findings not with anger and recriminations but with compassion and tenderness.”

It opens amid a party atmosphere, with Barney, Farr and others speaking scripted one-line greetings such as, “Hey, what’s happenin’?” and, “Brother, what’s up?”

The opening “set the record in a specifically black context,” author Steve Turner wrote in his 1998 Gaye biography, “Trouble Man.” “This was no longer just the ‘sound of young America,’ this was the sound of black America, and for the first time Marvin sounded as though he was speaking in his own voice.”

Motown executives, however, were said to be unmoved, company founder Berry Gordy reportedly dismissing “What’s Going On” as overly political and a tough sell.

The single remained unreleased for six months while Gaye, indignant, refused to record anything else.

It was during the impasse that Gaye, 31 at the time, set out to join the Lions as a wide receiver.

“He transformed a master bedroom into a universal gym and bulked up from about 180 pounds to about 210,” says Barney, a longtime pastor and executive at a Detroit hospital. “He ran every day and worked out. He was ready.”

Though he had never participated in organized sports, the singer believed he was a gifted athlete.

“I was always a sports fan,” he told David Ritz, author of the 1985 Gaye biography “Divided Soul,” “but I was determined to play for real. I knew I could. . . .

“You see, I had this fantasy: I was in the Super Bowl, with millions of people watching me on TV all over the world, as I made a spectacular leaping catch and sprinted for the winning touchdown.”

Through Barney and Farr, a former UCLA star, Gaye knew most of the Lions and had met their coach, Joe Schmidt.

“So Marvin went in to talk to coach Schmidt about it,” Barney says. “Schmidt asked if he had any film of when he played in high school or college and Marvin hung his head and said, ‘I didn’t play in high school. I didn’t play in college.’ So Schmidt said, ‘What makes you think you can play professional ball?’

“He said, ‘Coach, I just believe the first time I touch the ball I would score a touchdown.’ And Joe said, ‘I like your enthusiasm, so let me think about it.’”

Schmidt says he told the singer, “If I could sing like you, I certainly wouldn’t want to play football,” believing that Gaye and Barney were joking when they first met with him. Only after Gaye returned to meet with the coach a second time, this time unescorted, did Schmidt realize he was serious.

Still, Schmidt was unwilling to put the singer in harm’s way and quickly rejected the idea as unworkable.

In January 1971, Motown finally released “What’s Going On,” which soared to the top of Billboard’s R&B sales chart. An album of the same name, released later that year, also topped the charts and was hailed by critics as a pop music masterpiece.

On April 1, 1984, a day before he would have turned 45, Gaye was fatally shot by his father in Los Angeles.

Eight years later, Barney broke into song when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Gaye, of course, never made it that far, but his stirring version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1983 NBA All-Star game linked him indelibly to sports nonetheless. Twenty-five years later, Coach Mike Krzyzewski played it for the 2008 U.S. Olympic basketball team as inspiration.

“He was just a tremendously great musician,” Barney says of his late friend, “and one of the greatest guys you can imagine.”

“Geometric Persecution”

reception: Sunday, September 12th, 6-8 pm

Overduin and Kite

Rodrigo Corral and Steve Attardo

By JOHN GRISHAM
NY Times Published: September 5, 2010

I WASN’T always a lawyer or a novelist, and I’ve had my share of hard, dead-end jobs. I earned my first steady paycheck watering rose bushes at a nursery for a dollar an hour. I was in my early teens, but the man who owned the nursery saw potential, and he promoted me to his fence crew. For $1.50 an hour, I labored like a grown man as we laid mile after mile of chain-link fence. There was no future in this, and I shall never mention it again in writing.

Then, during the summer of my 16th year, I found a job with a plumbing contractor. I crawled under houses, into the cramped darkness, with a shovel, to somehow find the buried pipes, to dig until I found the problem, then crawl back out and report what I had found. I vowed to get a desk job. I’ve never drawn inspiration from that miserable work, and I shall never mention it again in writing, either.

But a desk wasn’t in my immediate future. My father worked with heavy construction equipment, and through a friend of a friend of his, I got a job the next summer on a highway asphalt crew. This was July, when Mississippi is like a sauna. Add another 100 degrees for the fresh asphalt. I got a break when the operator of a Caterpillar bulldozer was fired; shown the finer points of handling this rather large machine, I contemplated a future in the cab, tons of growling machinery at my command, with the power to plow over anything. Then the operator was back, sober, repentant. I returned to the asphalt crew.

I was 17 years old that summer, and I learned a lot, most of which cannot be repeated in polite company. One Friday night I accompanied my new friends on the asphalt crew to a honky-tonk to celebrate the end of a hard week. When a fight broke out and I heard gunfire, I ran to the restroom, locked the door and crawled out a window. I stayed in the woods for an hour while the police hauled away rednecks. As I hitchhiked home, I realized I was not cut out for construction and got serious about college.

My career sputtered along until retail caught my attention; it was indoors, clean and air-conditioned. I applied for a job at a Sears store in a mall. The only opening was in men’s underwear. It was humiliating. I tried to quit, but I was given a raise. Evidently, the position was difficult to fill. I asked to be transferred to toys, then to appliances. My bosses said no and gave me another raise.

I became abrupt with customers. Sears has the nicest customers in the world, but I didn’t care. I was rude and surly and I was occasionally watched by spies hired by the company to pose as shoppers. One asked to try on a pair of boxers. I said no, that it was obvious they were much too small for his rather ample rear end. I handed him an extra-large pair. I got written up. I asked for lawn care. They said no, but this time they didn’t offer me a raise. I finally quit.

Halfway through college, and still drifting, I decided to become a high-powered tax lawyer. The plan was sailing along until I took my first course in tax law. I was stunned by its complexity and lunacy, and I barely passed the course.

Around the same time, I was involved in mock-trial classes. I enjoyed the courtroom. A new plan was hatched. I would return to my hometown, hang out my shingle and become a hotshot trial lawyer. Tax law was discarded overnight.

This was 1981; at the time there was no public-defender system in my county. I volunteered for all the indigent work I could get. It was the fastest way to trial, and I learned quickly.

When my law office started to struggle for lack of well-paying work — indigent cases are far from lucrative — I decided to go into yet another low-paying career: in 1983, I was elected to a House seat in the Mississippi State Legislature. The salary was $8,000, which was more than I made during my first year as a lawyer. Each year from January through March I was at the State Capitol in Jackson, wasting serious time, but also listening to great storytellers. I took a lot of notes, not knowing why but feeling that, someday, those tales would come in handy.

Like most small-town lawyers, I dreamed of the big case, and in 1984 it finally arrived. But this time, the case wasn’t mine. As usual, I was loitering around the courtroom, pretending to be busy. But what I was really doing was watching a trial involving a young girl who had been beaten and raped. Her testimony was gut-wrenching, graphic, heartbreaking and riveting. Every juror was crying. I remember staring at the defendant and wishing I had a gun. And like that, a story was born.

Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn’t sure how to start. Over the following weeks I refined my plot outline and fleshed out my characters. One night I wrote “Chapter One” at the top of the first page of a legal pad; the novel, “A Time to Kill,” was finished three years later.

The book didn’t sell, and I stuck with my day job, defending criminals, preparing wills and deeds and contracts. Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

I had never worked so hard in my life, nor imagined that writing could be such an effort. It was more difficult than laying asphalt, and at times more frustrating than selling underwear. But it paid off. Eventually, I was able to leave the law and quit politics. Writing’s still the most difficult job I’ve ever had — but it’s worth it.

John Grisham is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Confession” and a contributor to the forthcoming collection “Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit.”

By DAVID STREITFELD
NY Times Published: September 5, 2010

The unexpectedly deep plunge in home sales this summer is likely to force the Obama administration to choose between future homeowners and current ones, a predicament officials had been eager to avoid.

Over the last 18 months, the administration has rolled out just about every program it could think of to prop up the ailing housing market, using tax credits, mortgage modification programs, low interest rates, government-backed loans and other assistance intended to keep values up and delinquent borrowers out of foreclosure. The goal was to stabilize the market until a resurgent economy created new households that demanded places to live.

As the economy again sputters and potential buyers flee — July housing sales sank 26 percent from July 2009 — there is a growing sense of exhaustion with government intervention. Some economists and analysts are now urging a dose of shock therapy that would greatly shift the benefits to future homeowners: Let the housing market crash.

When prices are lower, these experts argue, buyers will pour in, creating the elusive stability the government has spent billions upon billions trying to achieve.

“Housing needs to go back to reasonable levels,” said Anthony B. Sanders, a professor of real estate finance at George Mason University. “If we keep trying to stimulate the market, that’s the definition of insanity.”

The further the market descends, however, the more miserable one group — important both politically and economically — will be: the tens of millions of homeowners who have already seen their home values drop an average of 30 percent.

The poorer these owners feel, the less likely they will indulge in the sort of consumer spending the economy needs to recover. If they see an identical house down the street going for half what they owe, the temptation to default might be irresistible. That could make the market’s current malaise seem minor.

Caught in the middle is an administration that gambled on a recovery that is not happening.

“The administration made a bet that a rising economy would solve the housing problem and now they are out of chips,” said Howard Glaser, a former Clinton administration housing official with close ties to policy makers in the administration. “They are deeply worried and don’t really know what to do.”

That was clear last week, when the secretary of housing and urban development, Shaun Donovan, appeared to side with current homeowners, telling CNN the administration would “go everywhere we can” to make sure the slumping market recovers.

Mr. Donovan even opened the door to another housing tax credit like the one that expired last spring, which paid first-time buyers as much as $8,000 and buyers who were moving up $6,500. The cost to taxpayers was in the neighborhood of $30 billion, much of which went to people who would have bought anyway.

Administration press officers quickly backpedaled from Mr. Donovan’s comment, saying a revived credit was either highly unlikely or flat-out impossible. Mr. Donovan declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement, a White House spokeswoman responded to questions about possible new stimulus measures by pointing to those already in the works.

“In the weeks ahead, we will focus on successfully getting off the ground programs we have recently announced,” the spokeswoman, Amy Brundage, said.

Among those initiatives are $3 billion to keep the unemployed from losing their homes and a refinancing program that will try to cut the mortgage balances of owners who owe more than their property is worth. A previous program with similar goals had limited success.

If last year’s tax credit was supposed to be a bridge over a rough patch, it ended with a glimpse of the abyss. The average home now takes more than a year to sell. Add in the homes that are foreclosed but not yet for sale and the total is greater still.

Builders are in even worse shape. Sales of new homes are lower than in the depths of the recession of the early 1980s, when mortgage rates were double what they are now, unemployment was pervasive and the gloom was at least as thick.

The deteriorating circumstances have given a new voice to the “do nothing” chorus, whose members think the era of trying to buy stability while hoping the market will catch fire — called “extend and pretend” or “delay and pray” — has run its course.

“We have had enough artificial support and need to let the free market do its thing,” said the housing analyst Ivy Zelman.

Michael L. Moskowitz, president of Equity Now, a direct mortgage lender that operates in New York and seven other states, also advocates letting the market fall. “Prices are still artificially high,” he said. “The government is discriminating against the renters who are able to buy at $200,000 but can’t at $250,000.”

A small decline in home prices might not make too much of a difference to a slack economy. But an unchecked drop of 10 percent or more might prove entirely discouraging to the millions of owners just hanging on, especially those who bought in the last few years under the impression that a turnaround had already begun.

The government is on the hook for many of these mortgages, another reason policy makers have been aggressively seeking stability. What helped support the market last year could now cause it to crumble.

Since 2006, the Federal Housing Administration has insured millions of low down payment loans. During the first two years, officials concede, the credit quality of the borrowers was too low.

With little at stake and a queasy economy, buyers bailed: nearly 12 percent were delinquent after a year. Last fall, F.H.A. cash reserves fell below the Congressionally mandated minimum, and the agency had to shore up its finances.

Government-backed loans in 2009 went to buyers with higher credit scores. Yet the percentage of first-year defaults was still 5 percent, according to data from the research firm CoreLogic.

“These are at-risk buyers,” said Sam Khater, a CoreLogic economist. “They have very little equity, and that’s the largest predictor of default.”

This is the risk policy makers face. “If home prices begin to fall again with any serious velocity, borrowers may stay away in such numbers that the market never recovers,” said Mr. Glaser, a consultant whose clients include the National Association of Realtors.

Those sorts of worries have a few people from the world of finance suggesting that the administration should do much more, not less.

William H. Gross, managing director at Pimco, a giant manager of bond funds, has proposed the government refinance at lower rates millions of mortgages it owns or insures. Such a bold action, Mr. Gross said in a recent speech, would “provide a crucial stimulus of $50 to $60 billion in consumption,” as well as increase housing prices.

The idea has gained little traction. Instead, there is a sense that, even with much more modest notions, government intervention is not the answer. The National Association of Realtors, the driving force behind the credit last year, is not calling for a new round of stimulus.

Some members of the National Association of Home Builders say a new credit of $25,000 would raise demand but their chances of getting this through Congress are nonexistent.

“Our members are saying that if we can’t get a very large tax credit — one that really brings people off the bench — why use our political capital at all?” said David Crowe, the chief economist for the home builders.

That might give the Obama administration permission to take the risk of doing nothing.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: September 5, 2010

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.

And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration’s initial economic plan has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the failure of the initial program to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs.

In short, welcome to 1938.

The story of 1937, of F.D.R.’s disastrous decision to heed those who said that it was time to slash the deficit, is well known. What’s less well known is the extent to which the public drew the wrong conclusions from the recession that followed: far from calling for a resumption of New Deal programs, voters lost faith in fiscal expansion.

Consider Gallup polling from March 1938. Asked whether government spending should be increased to fight the slump, 63 percent of those polled said no. Asked whether it would be better to increase spending or to cut business taxes, only 15 percent favored spending; 63 percent favored tax cuts. And the 1938 election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost 70 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.

Then came the war.

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.

But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.

The economic moral is clear: when the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don’t apply. Austerity is self-defeating: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And conversely, it is possible — indeed, necessary — for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: a temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses.

But the story of 1938 also shows how hard it is to apply these insights. Even under F.D.R., there was never the political will to do what was needed to end the Great Depression; its eventual resolution came essentially by accident.

I had hoped that we would do better this time. But it turns out that politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes. And it’s slightly sickening to realize that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out.

But always remember: this slump can be cured. All it will take is a little bit of intellectual clarity, and a lot of political will. Here’s hoping we find those virtues in the not too distant future.

Choe Sang-Hun/The New York Times

Cha Sa-soon, with her new car.

By CHOE SANG-HUN
NY Times Published: September 3, 2010

SINCHON, South Korea

A PERSON could know South Korea for a long time without knowing Wanju, an obscure county 112 miles south of Seoul. And, at least until recently, a person could know a lot about Wanju without ever hearing of Cha Sa-soon, a 69-year-old woman who lives alone in the mountain-ringed village of Sinchon.

Now, however, Ms. Cha is an unlikely national celebrity.

This diminutive woman, now known nationwide as “Grandma Cha Sa-soon,” has achieved a record that causes people here to first shake their heads with astonishment and then smile: She failed her driver’s test hundreds of times but never gave up. Finally, she got her license — on her 960th try.

For three years starting in April 2005, she took the test once a day five days a week. After that, her pace slowed, to about twice a week. But she never quit.

Hers is a fame based not only on sheer doggedness, a quality held in high esteem by Koreans, but also on the universal human sympathy for a monumental — and in her case, cheerful — loser.

“When she finally got her license, we all went out in cheers and hugged her, giving her flowers,” said Park Su-yeon, an instructor at Jeonbuk Driving School, which Ms. Cha once attended. “It felt like a huge burden falling off our back. We didn’t have the guts to tell her to quit because she kept showing up.”

Of course, Ms. Park and another driving teacher noted, perhaps Ms. Cha should content herself with simply getting the license and not endangering others on the road by actually driving. But they were not too worried about the risk, they said, because it was the written test, not the driving skill and road tests, that she failed so many times.

WHEN word began spreading last year of the woman who was still taking the test after failing it more than 700 times, reporters traced her to Sinchon, where the bus, the only means of public transportation, comes by once every two hours on a street so narrow it has to pull over to let other vehicles pass.

They followed her to the test site in the city of Jeonju, an hour away. There, they also videotaped her in the market, where she sells her home-grown vegetables at an open-air stall.

Once she finally got her license, in May, Hyundai-Kia Automotive Group, South Korea’s leading carmaker, started an online campaign asking people to post messages of congratulations. Thousands poured in. In early August, Hyundai presented Ms. Cha with a $16,800 car.

Ms. Cha, whose name, coincidentally enough, is Korean for “vehicle,” now also appears on a prime-time television commercial for Hyundai.

It is a big change from her non-celebrity life, spent simply in a one-room hut with a slate roof, where the only sounds on a recent summer day were from a rain-swollen brook, occasional military jets flying overhead and cicadas rioting in the nearby persimmon trees. A lone old man dozed, occasionally swatting at flies, in a small shop next to the bus stop.

Born to a peasant family with seven children but no land, Ms. Cha spent her childhood working in the fields and studying at an informal night school. It was not until she turned 15 that she joined a formal school as a fourth grader. But her schooling ended there a few years later.

“Father had no land, and middle school was just a dream for me,” she said.

Ms. Cha said she had always envied people who could drive, but it was not until she was in her 60s that she got around to trying for a license.

“Here, if you miss the bus, you have to wait another two hours. Talk about frustration!” said Ms. Cha, who had to transfer to a second bus to get to her driving test site and to yet another to reach her market stall.

“But I was too busy raising my four children,” she continued. “Eventually they all grew up and went away and my husband died several years ago, and I had more time for myself. I wanted to get a driver’s license so I could take my grandchildren to the zoo.”

Ms. Cha tackled the first obstacle, which for years proved insurmountable: the 50-minute written test consisting of 40 multiple-choice questions on road regulations and car maintenance.

Early in the morning (she wakes up 4 a.m.) and before going to bed, she put on her reading glasses and pored over her well-worn test-preparation books. She first tried, unsuccessfully, an audio test for illiterate people where questions were read to test-takers. Later, she switched to the normal test.

“She could read and write words phonetically but she could not understand most of the terminology, such as ‘regulations’ and ‘emergency light,’ ” said Ms. Park, the teacher.

Choi Young-chul, an official at the regional driving license agency, said: “What she was essentially doing while studying alone was memorizing as many questions — with their answers — as possible without always knowing what they were all about. It’s not easy to pass the test that way.”

PRACTICE made perfect, but slowly. She failed the written test 949 times, but her scores steadily crept up. When she came to them early last year, teachers at Jeonbuk Driving School pitched in, giving her extra lessons, painstakingly explaining the terminology.

“It drove you crazy to teach her, but we could not get mad at her,” said Lee Chang-su, another teacher. “She was always cheerful. She still had the little girl in her.”

It was only last November, on her 950th try, that she achieved a passing grade of 60 out of 100. She then passed two driving skill and road tests, but only after failing each four times. For each of her 960 tests, she had to pay $5 in application fees.

“I didn’t mind,” said Ms. Cha. “To me, commuting every day to take the test was like going to school. I always missed school.”

Her son, Park Seong-ju, 36, who lives in Jeonju and makes signboards and placards, said: “Mother has lived a hard life, selling vegetables door to door and working other people’s farms. Maybe that made her stubborn. If she puts her mind to something, no one can argue her out of it.”

About a decade ago, before embarking on her quest for a driver’s license, Ms. Cha spent three years studying for a hairdresser’s license. For six months, she caught a 6 a.m. bus every weekday, switched to a train and then to another bus to attend a government-financed training program for hairdressers. But no beauty salon would hire her. She was considered too old.

No matter, she said. “It was like getting a school diploma.”

Her tenacity has struck a chord with South Koreans, who are often exhorted to recall the hardship years after the 1950-53 Korean War and celebrate perseverance as a national trait.

The country’s most popular boxing champion was Hong Su-hwan, who was floored four times before knocking out Hector Carrasquilla to win the World Boxing Association’s super bantamweight championship in 1977. His feat gave rise to a popular phrase about resolve: “Sajeonogi,” or “Knocked down four times, rising up five.”

Ms. Cha seems to have given new meaning to this favorite Korean saying.

On her wall where she hung black-and-white photographs of her and her late husband as a young couple and a watch that had stopped ticking, she also had posted a handwritten — and misspelled — sign that read, “Never give up!”

Valentin Bontjes van Beek

The Hungarian pavilion.

RODERICK CONWAY MORRIS
NY Times Published: September 3, 2010

VENICE — Kazuyo Sejima won the Golden Lion at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale for her design for the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, and she is back this year to curate the 2010 Biennale, the first Japanese and first female curator of the event, now in its 12th edition.

Her choice of nearly 50 architects, engineers and artists, whose presentations fill the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Biennale Gardens and the Corderie, or Rope Walk, at the Arsenale, is above all marked by its diversity, unified under the usefully unspecific overarching title of “People meet in architecture.” This core show is accompanied by exhibitions at 53 national pavilions on the two principal sites and at scores of other locations around the city.

Some of the architects and engineers Ms. Sejima has invited to participate have created installations that would not look out of place at a visual arts biennial. At the Corderie, for example, the Spanish Antón García-Abril & Ensamble studio have made an imposing full-scale mock-up of the primary structural elements of their inside-out “Hemeroscopium House” in Madrid, which consists of gigantic gray concrete beams in the shape of outsized steel girders; from Germany, Transsolar KlimaEngineering and Tetsuo Kondo Architects have collaborated in “Cloudscapes” to build a looped walkway rising through a dense blanket of artificially generated mist; and the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson in his pitch-dark “Your split second house” has produced another perception-bending experience of cracking spirals of light.

Ms. Sejima’s ideas of what is relevant to architecture today are probably more eclectic than those of any previous curator of the event. A tiny space in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni accommodates a floor-to-ceiling selection of drawings from the notebooks of the visionary and influential English architect Cedric Price (1934-2003), creator of the famous kinetic aviary for the London Zoo, with a delightful video of him talking about them. In a large hall in the Artilerie at the Arsenale, meanwhile, an installation by the Canadian Janet Cardiff consists of forty speakers playing the individual sung parts of the 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis’s “Spem in alium,” or “40-part motet,” one of the most elaborately “architectural” pieces of music ever written.

The enduring importance of drawing as the launching pad of the creative architectural process is vigorously advocated by the Hungarian pavilion, its internal spaces festooned with curtains of pencils, combined with videos exploring this form of human expression that stretches back to our distant ancestors.

Ms. Sejima has taken the opportunity to showcase some of her own recent projects. At the Palazzo delle Esposizioni is a joint project, currently under construction, with her partner Ryue Nishizawa to create a new form of museum integrated with the landscape and village houses on the small Japanese island of Inujima on the Seto Inland Sea. This will consist of a series of scattered exhibition spaces with a larger, semi-subterranean exhibition hall at the island’s summit, blending with the local topography but affording views of the surrounding sea and countryside.

The landscaped qualities of her style, with its contours and undulating interiors reflecting the natural environment, are captured on a 12-minute film by Wim Wenders that shows her recently completed Rolex Learning Center at the École polytechnique fédérale in its hilltop position in Lausanne, Switzerland, which is screened in the Corderie.

Mr. Wenders’s film is shot in 3-D, a form ideally suited to conveying architectural volumes that is also effectively employed in several other presentations, including those of the Danish and Australian pavilions. The former looks at Copenhagen, a city where hundreds of microarchitectural projects have been realized in recent decades but which has not had a grand plan since the late 1940s. This kind of macroplanning for the future is now under way and the various displays illustrate the sometimes radical transformations the city and its surroundings can expect to undergo.

A film at the Australian pavilion, watchable with the aid of 3-D glasses suspended from the ceiling, alternates between panoramic night views of the country’s coastal cities (where 93 per cent of the populations lives) and the vertiginous open-cast mines in the near-uninhabited interior, from which billions of tons of raw materials are being excavated to build cities elsewhere, and which cover areas as large and as deep as inverted high-rise city centers.

National pavilion responses to the curator’s theme of “People meet in architecture” are extremely varied. The Kingdom of Bahrain is at the Venice Architecture Biennale for the first time this year, and was awarded the Golden Lion for best participating country (the awards ceremony was on Aug. 28). Their “Reclaim” show at the Arsenale features three “kabayen” (or cabins, derived from the English word), ad hoc recreational huts built on stilts of drift wood and other odds and ends, and furnished with carpets and cushions.

Once an island of fishers and pearl divers, Bahrain is now highly urbanized and land reclaimed for building has pushed the coastlines further out to sea. But determined to maintain their littoral lifestyle, a number of fishermen and others have taken to building these structures along the shore, and they have become important places to meet, chat and socialize. As the newly reclaimed land is eventually developed, the cabin dwellers have to move on. One of the cabins on show had already been shifted to a new seaside location five times.

The Nordic Countries pavilion offers a broad survey of social gathering places, from squares and saunas to observation platforms and a moveable church. The Finnish pavilion presents some striking recent designs for schools, the places where many of us first encounter a wider world.

The design of domestic living spaces is the theme of many shows across the whole Biennale.

Estonia, with a population of under 1,400,000, offers a very positive environment to its many young architects, with 90 per cent of homes built to unique designs. In Japan, the rate of replacing houses is phenomenally high — every 26 years, compared with 150 years in Britain — offering ample opportunities for local architects to experiment and tailor their forms, typically within restricted plots, to the lifestyles of particular clients.

The Tokyo-based Atelier Bow-Wow’s display, part of Ms. Sejima’s exhibition, includes designs catering to an aspiring Tea Master, a journalist couple, a banker, an architect, and a woman who wishes to retire with plenty of space for her pet pony.

The architect Martin Rajnis’s “Natural Architecture” fills and even erupts out of the Czech pavilion into the Biennale Gardens. To create his wood structures he seeks “inspiration in the deeper laws of nature, which is an unbelievable treasure-house of ingenious structures, forms, colors, systems and chance.”

“The Ark. Old Seeds for New Cultures” at the Greek pavilion also proposes a “back to nature” solution in the form of a symbolic but habitable wooden ark, stuffed with native seeds, plants and dried fruits, emitting a complex melange of contrasting aromas, with a functioning galley kitchen and sleeping area, a kind of refuge/meeting place/incubator for rethinking the relationship between city and country and the future of architecture in general.

12th Venice Architecture Biennale. Biennale Gardens, Arsenale and other venues. Through Nov. 21.

Dish attributed to Solomon Loy, Alamance County, North Carolina, 1825-1840.

A WORLD OF CERAMICS

By EVE M. KAHN
NY Times Published: September 2, 2010

In North Carolina, 18th-century immigrant potters developed signature styles. Quakers from England preferred sunburst motifs on red backgrounds, while German Lutherans and Calvinists specialized in polka dots and stripes on black vessels. Moravians from Bohemia molded green flasks in turtle and owl forms and painted pomegranates and lilies to symbolize Jesus’ wounds and rebirth.

The products were all made near Greensboro. When they are shown together, “it’s going to be such a flood of pattern and color,” said Robert Hunter, a curator of “Art in Clay: Masterworks of North Carolina Earthenware,” now at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition ranks as “the largest and certainly the most revisionist” display of the material ever organized, Mr. Hunter said. Luke Beckerdite, a curator of the show, explained, “For so long, everyone thought all of this was Moravian.”

About half of the 120 pieces are loans from Old Salem Museums and Gardens in Winston-Salem, N.C., near the sites of Moravian workshops. Archaeological digs there and at other settlers’ kilns have not yet been completed, Mr. Beckerdite said. Shards keep turning up that suggest how communities experimented with forms. The excavations, he said, “will be key to establishing the final word.”

Milwaukee Art Museum

Thanks to Kelly Breslin