Before the Mona Lisa became one of the most famous and beloved paintings in the world, it sat in obscurity for hundreds of years away from the public eye. During that time, no one would have considered it the timeless, classic masterpiece that it is today. How did that change? Who decides what is worthy of the title “classic” and is it possible to have classics in our modern age?

Rochelle Gurstein is an intellectual historian, critic, and fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her latest book, Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art explores what it means for something to be labeled “classic” and how the notion of the classics has evolved over centuries.

Rochelle and Greg discuss the historical fluidity of aestheticism and taste, the shifting perception of iconic artworks, and unearth the forgotten contributions of critics and artists who shaped our understanding of what it means for art to transcend time.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Is the world being threatened by new art?

42:07:   One of the things that I try to trace in the book is this idea that one's world is being threatened by new art, and the sense that it's not the importance—by the 19th century and the 20th century—of what is at stake. It's not just that there is another work of art in the world, or a style that has entered the world. Instead, it is that a whole sensibility, taste, worldview is under attack.

What is the strongest foundation for a classic?

52:39: The strongest foundation for a classic is when artists keep a work alive in their own practice. So that, as long as people could still see the Venus de’ Medici in the works of all the artists who took it as the exemplar, they would continue to love it because they were all part of a continuum—an aesthetic continuum, a moral continuum—that, in the 20th century and 21st century, became harder and harder to maintain, because contemporary art shifted so dramatically every 10, 20 years—every other year these days. The way that we could keep art alive from the past is: the more we know about what other people have said about it—the people who have loved it, or the people who have not loved it.

What really keeps art alive

57:00: The practice of art itself—what artists are doing, not what collectors or museums and all the rest are doing, which is, of course, important. But I do not think that that is the most important thing. I think the artist’s practice and what they are keeping alive. And then knowing enough, caring enough about the art of the past, to try to understand what their aims were, and knowing it changed over time, and that these works were loved or not loved at different moments of time—and why?

Recommended Resources:

• Raphael
• Venus de' Medici
• Joshua Reynolds
• William Hazlitt
• John Ruskin
• Studies in the History of the Renaissance by Walter Pater
• Giovanni Morelli
• Roger Fry

Guest Profile:

• Fellow Profile at New York Institute for the Humanities
• Professional Website

Guest Work:

• Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art
• The Repeal of Reticence: America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art

It may be not much to look at, but the unassuming shipping container has had a massive impact on the global economy since its invention in the 1950s. The story of its rise as the dominant form of shipping is filled with dramatic turns and insights into the explosion of globalization.

Marc Levinson is a journalist, economist, and a former senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. His books like, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger and Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas explore the complex economic history and unexpected impact of how goods make their way around the world.

Marc and Greg discuss the labor-intensive nature of shipping before containerization, the union battles, regulatory hurdles, and the economic implications of adopting a standardized container. They also examine the unforeseen consequences of global supply chains and the evolving power dynamics between shippers and transporters.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The hidden globalization behind modern trade

47:48: The value of international trade of exports and imports is really based on transactions. Okay? One party is selling something to another party, and there is a price for that transaction. But what happens when you're looking at something on the internet? You're not paying any money to do that. You're just sitting at your computer. You do not know that the server that's offering you that page on the internet is actually based in a different country. That's an international exchange. It's not—there's not a transaction. This is not recorded as international trade, but it is. It's quite common now within large companies to have research operations in several countries. The researchers talk to one another all the time. They send each other emails all the time. And those ideas have economic benefit, but they do not have value that can be captured by national statistics. So we're having a much harder time keeping track of what is going on.

The unsung heroes behind global trade

28:27: The real heroes in the container story, I think, are the engineers from the ship lines and the container manufacturers and other companies who spent 10 years literally sitting in smoke-filled rooms, negotiating over things like: How many supports should there be inside the container? How thick should the end walls be? What should the door hinges look like? All of this seems really trivial, but economically, it made a big difference to the different companies...It made a difference to the cost of the container.

How companies are rethinking trade risk

41:08: I think companies have really devoted a lot more effort in the past couple of years to understanding how their supply chains work and looking for vulnerabilities. There are a couple of basic choices that they have got. One is that they can just keep more inventory, keep more stuff in the warehouse here in the States. Well, that is costly. First, you have to pay for it, and then you have to pay to store it. And it may go out of date depending upon what business you are in. But that is one way of reducing this risk

Recommended Resources:

• Malcom McLean
• John R. Meyer

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn

Guest Work:

• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
• Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas
• Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

Being easily distracted by the latest technologies has been a consistent feature of the human race since the time of Plato. But is the technology to blame? Or is the key to being more productive and present in life have to do with forming healthy habits around the technology?

Nir Eyal, writer, consultant, and former lecturer in marketing at Stanford, is the author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life and Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. In his work, Nir explores the psychology behind habit-forming technology.

Nir and Greg discuss the positive applications of habit-forming technologies, the timeless nature of distraction, the importance of forethought in combating impulsiveness, and practical strategies for becoming “Indistractable.”

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought

15:32: Studies have found that 90% of your distractions are not external triggers. They do not come from the outside world. Ninety percent of the time you check your phone, you check your phone not because of a ping, ding, or ring, but because of an internal trigger. Because 90% of distractions begin from within. They start because of these internal triggers. What are internal triggers? Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states—boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. This is the source of 90% of our distractions. So what that means is, when you let those impulses take over, right? The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. When you allow yourself to check social media or watch something on the news or whatever it is that is not what you want to do, because of an immediate sensation, that tends to be, 90% of the time, the source of the problem. That is when it becomes something of, “Oh my gosh, what was I doing? I wasted the whole day worrying about somebody else's problems online,” as opposed to what I really need to do. Whereas if you plan that time in advance, it is fine. There is nothing wrong with it.

How do you become indistractable?

50:42: The first step to becoming indistractable is mastering internal triggers, or they will master you. So you can have the best tools, the best life hacks, the best—all that stuff. But if fundamentally you do not know how to deal with that sensation, you do not know how to process boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety—if you do not know what to do with that sensation—you are always going to find a way to escape.

Humans adapt and adopt with every new technology

07:29: The solution is not to abandon the technology. The solution is to make it better, to do what we as Homo sapiens have always done. We have always done two things in the face of dramatic technological innovation. What we have done is to adapt and to adopt, right? We adapt our behaviors. We adapt to new social norms. We adapt to the downsides of these behaviors by changing our manners, and then we adopt new technologies to fix the last generation of technologies.

Recommended Resources:

• Akrasia
• Paul Virilio
• Peter Gray
• Amy Edmondson | unSILOed
• Robert D. Putnam

Guest Profile:

• Official Website
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn

Guest Work:

• Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
• Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products