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How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where objective criteria seem absent?Talking Pricesis the first book to examine this question from a sociological perspective. On the basis of a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how contemporary art galleries juggle the contradictory logics of art and economics. In doing so, they rely on a highly ritualized business repertoire. For instance, a sharp distinction between a gallery's museumlike front space and its businesslike back space safeguards the separation of art from commerce. Velthuis shows that prices, far from being abstract numbers, convey rich meanings to trading partners that extend well beyond the works of art. A high price may indicate not only the quality of a work but also the identity of collectors who bought it before the artist's reputation was established. Such meanings are far from unequivocal. For some, a high price may be a symbol of status; for others, it is a symbol of fraud. Whereas sociological thought has long viewed prices as reducing qualities to quantities, this pathbreaking and engagingly written book reveals the rich world behind these numerical values. Art dealers distinguish different types of prices and attach moral significance to them. Thus the price mechanism constitutes a symbolic system akin to language.

Across various markets, consumers rely on brokers to help them select goods. How do brokers shape consumers’ valuation? We address this question by drawing from two independent but analogous ethnographies of brokerage and purchasing in the New York housing market and the New York art market. Building upon the relational turn in economic sociology, we identify the interlocking mechanisms by which brokers influence valuation in face-to-face interaction: Brokers (1) build trust by establishing rapport and displaying expertise, (2) prepare consumers to purchase by priming the consumption setting so that consumers compare a specified set of goods and experience urgency, and (3) posit matches between consumers and products, relying on demographic and cultural characteristics of consumers to complete transactions. Our novel theorization of brokerage has broader implications for understanding valuation and consumption.

This study was designed to determine the feasibility of using self-paced reading methods to study deaf readers and to assess how deaf readers respond to two syntactic manipulations. Three groups of participants read the test sentences: deaf readers, hearing monolingual English readers, and hearing bilingual readers whose second language was English. In Experiment 1 , the participants read sentences containing subject-relative or object-relative clauses. The test sentences contained semantic information that would influence online processing outcomes (Traxler, Morris, & Seely Journal of Memory and Language 47: 69–90, 2002 ; Traxler, Williams, Blozis, & Morris Journal of Memory and Language 53: 204–224, 2005 ). All of the participant groups had greater difficulty processing sentences containing object-relative clauses. This difficulty was reduced when helpful semantic cues were present. In Experiment 2 , participants read active-voice and passive-voice sentences. The sentences were processed similarly by all three groups. Comprehension accuracy was higher in hearing readers than in deaf readers. Within deaf readers, native signers read the sentences faster and comprehended them to a higher degree than did nonnative signers. These results indicate that self-paced reading is a useful method for studying sentence interpretation among deaf readers.

The notion of retrieving a bit of the past-by owning a material piece of it-has always appealed to humans. Often our most prized possessions are those that have had a long history before they came into our hands. Part of the pleasure we gain from the encounter with antiques stems from the palpable age and the assumed (sometimes imaginary) cultural resonances of the particular object. But precisely what is it about these objects that creates this attraction? What common characteristics do they share and why and how do these traits affect us as they do? InAntiques: The History of an Idea, Leon Rosenstein, a distinguished philosopher who has also been an antiques dealer for more than twenty years, offers a sweeping and lively account of the origin and development of the antique as both a cultural concept and an aesthetic category. He shows that the appeal of antiques is multifaceted: it concerns their value as commodities, their age and historical and cultural associations, their uniqueness, their sensuous and tactile values, their beauty. Exploring how the idea of antiques evolved over time, Rosenstein chronicles the history of antique collecting and connoisseurship. He describes changing conceptions of the past in different epochs as evidenced by preservations, restorations, and renascences; examines shifting attitudes toward foreign cultures as revealed in stylistic borrowings and the importation of artifacts; and investigates varying understandings of and meanings assigned to their traits and functions as historical objects. While relying on the past for his evidence, Rosenstein approaches antiques from an entirely original perspective, setting history within a philosophical framework. He begins by providing a working definition of antiques that distinguishes them from other artifacts in general and, more distinctly, both from works of fine art and from the collectible detritus of popular culture. He then establishes a novel set of criteria for determining when an artifact is an antique: ten traits that an object must possess in order to elicit the aesthetic response that is unique to antiques. Concluding with a provocative discussion of the relation between antiques and civilization, this engaging and thought-provoking book helps explain the enduring appeal of owning a piece of the past.

In the three years, eight months, and twenty days of the Khmer Rouge's deadly reign over Cambodia, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians perished as a result of forced labor, execution, starvation, and disease. Despite the passage of more than thirty years, two regime shifts, and a contested U.N. intervention, only one former Khmer Rouge official has been successfully tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity in an international court of law to date. It is against this background of war, genocide, and denied justice that Cathy J. Schlund-Vials explores the work of 1.5-generation Cambodian American artists and writers. Drawing on what James Young labels \"memory work\"-the collected articulation of large-scale human loss-War, Genocide, and Justiceinvestigates the remembrance work of Cambodian American cultural producers through film, memoir, and music. Schlund-Vials includes interviews with artists such as Anida Yoeu Ali, praCh Ly, Sambath Hy, and Socheata Poeuv. Alongside the enduring legacy of the Killing Fields and post-9/11 deportations of Cambodian American youth, artists potently reimagine alternative sites for memorialization, reclamation, and justice. Traversing borders, these artists generate forms of genocidal remembrance that combat amnesic politics and revise citizenship practices in the United States and Cambodia. Engaged in politicized acts of resistance, individually produced and communally consumed, Cambodian American memory work represents a significant and previously unexamined site of Asian American critique.

Outsiders hoping to gain insights into the world of leading high-end art dealers, auctioneers and star artists have always found it a difficult, if not impossible, task. In an extremely well-documented book underpinned by thorough research based not only on a wealth of secondary sources but also on first-hand access to key players at the top end of the contemporary art market, the author reveals himself as someone who is passionate about contemporary art, and is himself a collector. For some people - collector Charles Saatchi, art dealer Larry Gagosian and Damien Hirst, the star artist-cum-entrepreneur par excellence - art is mainly a business transaction designed to generate profit. For me, this book's underlying argument does not differ greatly from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the art market, in which the value of art is no more than the collective \"belief in the value of art\".

In Caxambu, daily life and alternating structures of security and insecurity, danger and safety, are experienced in a particular space, one that is both a site of marginalization and a place of pride, deeply connected to residents’ identities. When I asked residents of Caxambu what they thought about their neighborhood, they often responded in either of two ways. On the one hand, some residents—like Seu Oscar, quoted above—spoke about overlapping forms of marginalization. Significantly, Seu Oscar saw the morro as both “the place of blacks” and “where the poor live,” pointing to how patterns of racial discrimination and

[...]the adage, \"You can't judge a book by its cover,\" has a new 21st century spin, \"You can't judge a person by their online profile.\" Koenig cites a 2013 study by Kaplan Test Prep that found 29 percent of college admissions officers admitted to using Google to check an applicant, and 31 percent checked social media accounts.

`Taking Lives' gets job done, doesn't excel Role of criminal profiler has become a cliche in movies By Kevin McCusker Choices * the end credits started to roll on \"Taking Lives,\" the new psychological thriller starring Angelina Jolie and Ethan Hawke, a woman sitting next to me offered this critique: \"That was hella good.\" [...] Jolie's and Hawke's characters fall for each other. [...] the police decide the only way to catch the criminal is to use Hawke's character as bait, a well established crime-fighting technique for movie law enforcement.