B

We Want

We want
to give you something beautiful
we want
to adorn you
crown you
allow, create bedding
downy, feather soft underfoot
for feet
of all considerations
we want
to invite you to sit
we want
to show you you
but the
part of you you
need to know
we want
this for you
but instead
we are copying and pasting.

Hello

I don't know why you read this blog, but you do. That is NOT to say you aren't welcome. You are welcome to. It's just a perfect example of the continually interconnected separation that is to be a living identity. You are there, but you are not there. You are witness, I have no idea who you are.

Carry on!

asemic writing, abstract calligraphy painting by Matox ( Nuno de Matos)

Paracas textile: Peruvian, over 2,000 years old

Respectfully lifted from the BBC's A History the World in 100 Objects podcast.

synecdoche

Synecdoche ( /sɪˈnɛkdəkiː/; from Greek synekdoche (συνεκδοχή), meaning "simultaneous understanding") is a figure of speech[1] in which a term is used in one of the following ways:

Part of something is used to refer to the whole thing (pars pro toto), or
A thing (a "whole") is used to refer to part of it (totum pro parte), or
A specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class, or
A general class of thing is used to refer to a smaller, more specific class, or
A material is used to refer to an object composed of that material, or
A container is used to refer to its contents.

Phoneme (taken from Wiki)

In a language or dialect, a phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound uttered") is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.[1]

Thus a phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example of a phoneme is the /k/ sound in the words kit and skill. (In transcription, phonemes are placed between slashes, as here.) Although most native English speakers don't notice this, in most English dialects, the /k/ sounds in these two words are actually pronounced differently: they are different speech sounds, or phones (which, in transcription, are placed in square brackets). In our example, the /k/ in kit is aspirated, [kʰ], while the /k/ in skill is unaspirated. The reason why these different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme in English is that if an English-speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized. By contrast, some other phonemes could be substituted (creating a minimal pair) which would cause a change in meaning: producing words like still (substituting /t/), spill (substituting /p/) and swill (substituting /w/). These other sounds (/t/, /p/ and /w/) are, in English, different phonemes.

In some languages, however, [kʰ] and [k] are different phonemes, and are perceived as such by the speakers of those languages. For example, in Icelandic, /kʰ/ is the first sound of kátur meaning 'cheerful', while /k/ is the first sound of gátur meaning 'riddles'. The fact that these two different words have different meanings which can be readily identified by speakers of Icelandic tells us that Icelandic speakers perceive the sounds as different phonemes.


Diagram of basic procedure to determine whether two sounds are phonemesPhones that belong to the same phoneme, such as [t] and [tʰ] for English /t/, are called allophones. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones of the same phoneme or separate phonemes relies on finding minimal pairs: words that differ by only the phone in question. For example, the words tip and dip illustrate that in English [t] and [d] are separate phonemes, /t/ and /d/, in English: the two words have different meanings that are readily recognizable, meaning that English speakers can readily distinguish between the two sounds. In other languages, though, including Korean; there are no such pairs available. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing /t/ and /d/ in Korean indicates that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/. (/tʰata/ is pronounced [tʰada], for example. That is, when they hear this one word, Korean speakers perceive the same sound in both the beginning and middle of the word, whereas an English speaker would perceive different sounds in these two locations.)

Some linguists (such as Roman Jakobson, Morris Halle, and Noam Chomsky) consider phonemes to be further decomposable into features, such features being the true minimal constituents of language. Features overlap each other in time, as do suprasegmental phonemes in oral language and many phonemes in sign languages. Features could be designated as acoustic (Jakobson) or articulatory (Halle & Chomsky) in nature

Decision Fatigue, NYTimes

August 17, 2011
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
By JOHN TIERNEY

Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one:

Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault.

Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud.

There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences. It was all about timing, as researchers discovered by analyzing more than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year. Judges, who would hear the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day. Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70 percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than 10 percent of the time.

The odds favored the prisoner who appeared at 8:50 a.m. — and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the other Arab Israeli prisoner was serving the same sentence for the same crime — fraud — the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 in the afternoon. He was denied parole, as was the Jewish Israeli prisoner at 3:10 p.m, whose sentence was shorter than that of the man who was released. They were just asking for parole at the wrong time of day.

There was nothing malicious or even unusual about the judges’ behavior, which was reported earlier this year by Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. The judges’ erratic judgment was due to the occupational hazard of being, as George W. Bush once put it, “the decider.” The mental work of ruling on case after case, whatever the individual merits, wore them down. This sort of decision fatigue can make quarterbacks prone to dubious choices late in the game and C.F.O.’s prone to disastrous dalliances late in the evening. It routinely warps the judgment of everyone, executive and nonexecutive, rich and poor — in fact, it can take a special toll on the poor. Yet few people are even aware of it, and researchers are only beginning to understand why it happens and how to counteract it.

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.

Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be conserved by avoiding temptation. To study the process of ego depletion, researchers concentrated initially on acts involving self-control ­— the kind of self-discipline popularly associated with willpower, like resisting a bowl of ice cream. They weren’t concerned with routine decision-making, like choosing between chocolate and vanilla, a mental process that they assumed was quite distinct and much less strenuous. Intuitively, the chocolate-vanilla choice didn’t appear to require willpower.

But then a postdoctoral fellow, Jean Twenge, started working at Baumeister’s laboratory right after planning her wedding. As Twenge studied the results of the lab’s ego-depletion experiments, she remembered how exhausted she felt the evening she and her fiancé went through the ritual of registering for gifts. Did they want plain white china or something with a pattern? Which brand of knives? How many towels? What kind of sheets? Precisely how many threads per square inch?

“By the end, you could have talked me into anything,” Twenge told her new colleagues. The symptoms sounded familiar to them too, and gave them an idea. A nearby department store was holding a going-out-of-business sale, so researchers from the lab went off to fill their car trunks with simple products — not exactly wedding-quality gifts, but sufficiently appealing to interest college students. When they came to the lab, the students were told they would get to keep one item at the end of the experiment, but first they had to make a series of choices. Would they prefer a pen or a candle? A vanilla-scented candle or an almond-scented one? A candle or a T-shirt? A black T-shirt or a red T-shirt? A control group, meanwhile — let’s call them the nondeciders — spent an equally long period contemplating all these same products without having to make any choices. They were asked just to give their opinion of each product and report how often they had used such a product in the last six months.

Afterward, all the participants were given one of the classic tests of self-control: holding your hand in ice water for as long as you can. The impulse is to pull your hand out, so self-discipline is needed to keep the hand underwater. The deciders gave up much faster; they lasted 28 seconds, less than half the 67-second average of the nondeciders. Making all those choices had apparently sapped their willpower, and it wasn’t an isolated effect. It was confirmed in other experiments testing students after they went through exercises like choosing courses from the college catalog.

For a real-world test of their theory, the lab’s researchers went into that great modern arena of decision making: the suburban mall. They interviewed shoppers about their experiences in the stores that day and then asked them to solve some simple arithmetic problems. The researchers politely asked them to do as many as possible but said they could quit at any time. Sure enough, the shoppers who had already made the most decisions in the stores gave up the quickest on the math problems. When you shop till you drop, your willpower drops, too.

Any decision, whether it’s what pants to buy or whether to start a war, can be broken down into what psychologists call the Rubicon model of action phases, in honor of the river that separated Italy from the Roman province of Gaul. When Caesar reached it in 49 B.C., on his way home after conquering the Gauls, he knew that a general returning to Rome was forbidden to take his legions across the river with him, lest it be considered an invasion of Rome. Waiting on the Gaul side of the river, he was in the “predecisional phase” as he contemplated the risks and benefits of starting a civil war. Then he stopped calculating and crossed the Rubicon, reaching the “postdecisional phase,” which Caesar defined much more felicitously: “The die is cast.”

The whole process could deplete anyone’s willpower, but which phase of the decision-making process was most fatiguing? To find out, Kathleen Vohs, a former colleague of Baumeister’s now at the University of Minnesota, performed an experiment using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose. A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones. The purpose of this was to duplicate everything that happens in the postdecisional phase, when the choice is implemented. The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them; they didn’t simply ponder options (like the first group) or implement others’ choices (like the second group). They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured, they were the one who were most depleted, by far.

The experiment showed that crossing the Rubicon is more tiring than anything that happens on either bank — more mentally fatiguing than sitting on the Gaul side contemplating your options or marching on Rome once you’ve crossed. As a result, someone without Caesar’s willpower is liable to stay put. To a fatigued judge, denying parole seems like the easier call not only because it preserves the status quo and eliminates the risk of a parolee going on a crime spree but also because it leaves more options open: the judge retains the option of paroling the prisoner at a future date without sacrificing the option of keeping him securely in prison right now. Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options. The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying). Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars.

The idea for these experiments also happened to come in the preparations for a wedding, a ritual that seems to be the decision-fatigue equivalent of Hell Week. At his fiancée’s suggestion, Levav visited a tailor to have a bespoke suit made and began going through the choices of fabric, type of lining and style of buttons, lapels, cuffs and so forth.

“By the time I got through the third pile of fabric swatches, I wanted to kill myself,” Levav recalls. “I couldn’t tell the choices apart anymore. After a while my only response to the tailor became ‘What do you recommend?’ I just couldn’t take it.”

Levav ended up not buying any kind of bespoke suit (the $2,000 price made that decision easy enough), but he put the experience to use in a pair of experiments conducted with Mark Heitmann, then at Christian-Albrechts University in Germany; Andreas Herrmann, at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland; and Sheena Iyengar, of Columbia. One involved asking M.B.A. students in Switzerland to choose a bespoke suit; the other was conducted at German car dealerships, where customers ordered options for their new sedans. The car buyers — and these were real customers spending their own money — had to choose, for instance, among 4 styles of gearshift knobs, 13 kinds of wheel rims, 25 configurations of the engine and gearbox and a palette of 56 colors for the interior.

As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time). Whether the customers paid a little extra for fancy wheel rims or a lot extra for a more powerful engine depended on when the choice was offered and how much willpower was left in the customer.

Similar results were found in the experiment with custom-made suits: once decision fatigue set in, people tended to settle for the recommended option. When they were confronted early on with the toughest decisions — the ones with the most options, like the 100 fabrics for the suit — they became fatigued more quickly and also reported enjoying the shopping experience less.

Shopping can be especially tiring for the poor, who have to struggle continually with trade-offs. Most of us in America won’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether we can afford to buy soap, but it can be a depleting choice in rural India. Dean Spears, an economist at Princeton, offered people in 20 villages in Rajasthan in northwestern India the chance to buy a couple of bars of brand-name soap for the equivalent of less than 20 cents. It was a steep discount off the regular price, yet even that sum was a strain for the people in the 10 poorest villages. Whether or not they bought the soap, the act of making the decision left them with less willpower, as measured afterward in a test of how long they could squeeze a hand grip. In the slightly more affluent villages, people’s willpower wasn’t affected significantly. Because they had more money, they didn’t have to spend as much effort weighing the merits of the soap versus, say, food or medicine.

Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class. It’s hard to know exactly how important this factor is, but there’s no doubt that willpower is a special problem for poor people. Study after study has shown that low self-control correlates with low income as well as with a host of other problems, including poor achievement in school, divorce, crime, alcoholism and poor health. Lapses in self-control have led to the notion of the “undeserving poor” — epitomized by the image of the welfare mom using food stamps to buy junk food — but Spears urges sympathy for someone who makes decisions all day on a tight budget. In one study, he found that when the poor and the rich go shopping, the poor are much more likely to eat during the shopping trip. This might seem like confirmation of their weak character — after all, they could presumably save money and improve their nutrition by eating meals at home instead of buying ready-to-eat snacks like Cinnabons, which contribute to the higher rate of obesity among the poor. But if a trip to the supermarket induces more decision fatigue in the poor than in the rich — because each purchase requires more mental trade-offs — by the time they reach the cash register, they’ll have less willpower left to resist the Mars bars and Skittles. Not for nothing are these items called impulse purchases.

And this isn’t the only reason that sweet snacks are featured prominently at the cash register, just when shoppers are depleted after all their decisions in the aisles. With their willpower reduced, they’re more likely to yield to any kind of temptation, but they’re especially vulnerable to candy and soda and anything else offering a quick hit of sugar. While supermarkets figured this out a long time ago, only recently did researchers discover why.

The discovery was an accident resulting from a failed experiment at Baumeister’s lab. The researchers set out to test something called the Mardi Gras theory — the notion that you could build up willpower by first indulging yourself in pleasure, the way Mardi Gras feasters do just before the rigors of Lent. In place of a Fat Tuesday breakfast, the chefs in the lab at Florida State whipped up lusciously thick milkshakes for a group of subjects who were resting in between two laboratory tasks requiring willpower. Sure enough, the delicious shakes seemed to strengthen willpower by helping people perform better than expected on the next task. So far, so good. But the experiment also included a control group of people who were fed a tasteless concoction of low-fat dairy glop. It provided them with no pleasure, yet it produced similar improvements in self-control. The Mardi Gras theory looked wrong. Besides tragically removing an excuse for romping down the streets of New Orleans, the result was embarrassing for the researchers. Matthew Gailliot, the graduate student who ran the study, stood looking down at his shoes as he told Baumeister about the fiasco.

Baumeister tried to be optimistic. Maybe the study wasn’t a failure. Something had happened, after all. Even the tasteless glop had done the job, but how? If it wasn’t the pleasure, could it be the calories? At first the idea seemed a bit daft. For decades, psychologists had been studying performance on mental tasks without worrying much about the results being affected by dairy-product consumption. They liked to envision the human mind as a computer, focusing on the way it processed information. In their eagerness to chart the human equivalent of the computer’s chips and circuits, most psychologists neglected one mundane but essential part of the machine: the power supply. The brain, like the rest of the body, derived energy from glucose, the simple sugar manufactured from all kinds of foods. To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister’s lab tried refueling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless variety tasted quite similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices, and when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff. The ego-depletion effect was even demonstrated with dogs in two studies by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky. After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.

Despite this series of findings, brain researchers still had some reservations about the glucose connection. Skeptics pointed out that the brain’s overall use of energy remains about the same regardless of what a person is doing, which doesn’t square easily with the notion of depleted energy affecting willpower. Among the skeptics was Todd Heatherton, who worked with Baumeister early in his career and eventually wound up at Dartmouth, where he became a pioneer of what is called social neuroscience: the study of links between brain processes and social behavior. He believed in ego depletion, but he didn’t see how this neural process could be caused simply by variations in glucose levels. To observe the process — and to see if it could be reversed by glucose — he and his colleagues recruited 45 female dieters and recorded images of their brains as they reacted to pictures of food. Next the dieters watched a comedy video while forcing themselves to suppress their laughter — a standard if cruel way to drain mental energy and induce ego depletion. Then they were again shown pictures of food, and the new round of brain scans revealed the effects of ego depletion: more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, and a corresponding decrease in the amygdala, which ordinarily helps control impulses. The food’s appeal registered more strongly while impulse control weakened — not a good combination for anyone on a diet. But suppose people in this ego-depleted state got a quick dose of glucose? What would a scan of their brains reveal?

The results of the experiment were announced in January, during Heatherton’s speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world’s largest group of social psychologists. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in San Antonio, Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion — a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him. Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.

The discoveries about glucose help explain why dieting is a uniquely difficult test of self-control — and why even people with phenomenally strong willpower in the rest of their lives can have such a hard time losing weight. They start out the day with virtuous intentions, resisting croissants at breakfast and dessert at lunch, but each act of resistance further lowers their willpower. As their willpower weakens late in the day, they need to replenish it. But to resupply that energy, they need to give the body glucose. They’re trapped in a nutritional catch-22:

1. In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower.

2. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat.

As the body uses up glucose, it looks for a quick way to replenish the fuel, leading to a craving for sugar. After performing a lab task requiring self-control, people tend to eat more candy but not other kinds of snacks, like salty, fatty potato chips. The mere expectation of having to exert self-control makes people hunger for sweets. A similar effect helps explain why many women yearn for chocolate and other sugary treats just before menstruation: their bodies are seeking a quick replacement as glucose levels fluctuate. A sugar-filled snack or drink will provide a quick improvement in self-control (that’s why it’s convenient to use in experiments), but it’s just a temporary solution. The problem is that what we identify as sugar doesn’t help as much over the course of the day as the steadier supply of glucose we would get from eating proteins and other more nutritious foods.

The benefits of glucose were unmistakable in the study of the Israeli parole board. In midmorning, usually a little before 10:30, the parole board would take a break, and the judges would be served a sandwich and a piece of fruit. The prisoners who appeared just before the break had only about a 20 percent chance of getting parole, but the ones appearing right after had around a 65 percent chance. The odds dropped again as the morning wore on, and prisoners really didn’t want to appear just before lunch: the chance of getting parole at that time was only 10 percent. After lunch it soared up to 60 percent, but only briefly. Remember that Jewish Israeli prisoner who appeared at 3:10 p.m. and was denied parole from his sentence for assault? He had the misfortune of being the sixth case heard after lunch. But another Jewish Israeli prisoner serving the same sentence for the same crime was lucky enough to appear at 1:27 p.m., the first case after lunch, and he was rewarded with parole. It must have seemed to him like a fine example of the justice system at work, but it probably had more to do with the judge’s glucose levels.

It’s simple enough to imagine reforms for the parole board in Israel — like, say, restricting each judge’s shift to half a day, preferably in the morning, interspersed with frequent breaks for food and rest. But it’s not so obvious what to do with the decision fatigue affecting the rest of society. Even if we could all afford to work half-days, we would still end up depleting our willpower all day long, as Baumeister and his colleagues found when they went into the field in Würzburg in central Germany. The psychologists gave preprogrammed BlackBerrys to more than 200 people going about their daily routines for a week. The phones went off at random intervals, prompting the people to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or had recently felt a desire. The painstaking study, led by Wilhelm Hofmann, then at the University of Würzburg, collected more than 10,000 momentary reports from morning until midnight.

Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception. Half the people were feeling some desire when their phones went off — to snack, to goof off, to express their true feelings to their bosses — and another quarter said they had felt a desire in the past half-hour. Many of these desires were ones that the men and women were trying to resist, and the more willpower people expended, the more likely they became to yield to the next temptation that came along. When faced with a new desire that produced some I-want-to-but-I-really-shouldn’t sort of inner conflict, they gave in more readily if they had already fended off earlier temptations, particularly if the new temptation came soon after a previously reported one.

The results suggested that people spend between three and four hours a day resisting desire. Put another way, if you tapped four or five people at any random moment of the day, one of them would be using willpower to resist a desire. The most commonly resisted desires in the phone study were the urges to eat and sleep, followed by the urge for leisure, like taking a break from work by doing a puzzle or playing a game instead of writing a memo. Sexual urges were next on the list of most-resisted desires, a little ahead of urges for other kinds of interactions, like checking Facebook. To ward off temptation, people reported using various strategies. The most popular was to look for a distraction or to undertake a new activity, although sometimes they tried suppressing it directly or simply toughing their way through it. Their success was decidedly mixed. They were pretty good at avoiding sleep, sex and the urge to spend money, but not so good at resisting the lure of television or the Web or the general temptation to relax instead of work.

We have no way of knowing how much our ancestors exercised self-control in the days before BlackBerrys and social psychologists, but it seems likely that many of them were under less ego-depleting strain. When there were fewer decisions, there was less decision fatigue. Today we feel overwhelmed because there are so many choices. Your body may have dutifully reported to work on time, but your mind can escape at any instant. A typical computer user looks at more than three dozen Web sites a day and gets fatigued by the continual decision making — whether to keep working on a project, check out TMZ, follow a link to YouTube or buy something on Amazon. You can do enough damage in a 10-minute online shopping spree to wreck your budget for the rest of the year.

The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend — these all deplete willpower, and there’s no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. It’s not like getting winded or hitting the wall during a marathon. Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain’s regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful (and alcohol causes self-control to decline further). Like those dogs in the experiment, ego-depleted humans become more likely to get into needless fights over turf. In making decisions, they take illogical shortcuts and tend to favor short-term gains and delayed costs. Like the depleted parole judges, they become inclined to take the safer, easier option even when that option hurts someone else.

“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.

“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. “The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”

John Tierney (tierneylab@nytimes.com) is a science columnist for The Times. His essay is adapted from a book he wrote with Roy F. Baumeister, “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,” which comes out next month.

Editor: Aaron Retica (a.retica-MagGroup@nytimes.com)

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It wouldn't be so hard to live one's life out in the state of Colorado.

if typing on the keyboard could be the equivalent of playing the piano, then we would be serenaded all day every day in these offices.

The Gutai Manifesto

With our present awareness, the arts we have known up to now appear to us in general to be fakes fitted out with a tremendous affectation. Let us take leave of these piles of counterfeit objects on the altars, in the palaces, in the salons and the antique shops.
These objects are in disguise and their materials such as paint, pieces of cloth, metals, clay or marble are loaded with false significance by human hand and by way of fraud, so that, instead of just presenting their own material, they take on the appearance of something else. Under the cloak of an intellectual aim, the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us.

Lock these corpses into their tombs. Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material. In Gutai art the human spirit and the the material reach out their hands to each other, even though they are otherwise opposed to each other. The material is not absorbed by the spirit. The spirit does not force the material into submission. If one leaves the material as it is, presenting it just as material, then it starts to tell us something and speaks with a mighty voice. Keeping the life of the material alive also means bringing the spirit alive, and lifting up the spirit means leading the material up to the height of the spirit.

Art is the home of the creative spirit, but never until now has the spirit created the material. The spirit has only ever created the spiritual. Certainly the spirit has always filled art with life, but this life will finally die as the times change. For all the magnificent life which existed in the art of the Renaissance, little more than its archaeological existence can be seen today.

What still keeps that vitality, even if passive, may be primitive art or the art created after Impressionism. These are things in which either, due to skillful application of the paint, the deception of the material had not quite succeeded, or else, like Pointillist or Fauvist, those pictures in which the materials, although used to reproduce nature, could not be murdered after all. Today, however, they are no longer able to call up deep emotion in us. They already belong to a world of the past.

Yet what is interesting in this respect is the novel beauty to be found in works of art and architecture of the past which have changed their appearance due to the damage of time or destruction by disasters in the course of the centuries. This is described as the beauty of decay, but is it not perhaps that beauty which material assumes when it is freed from artificial make-up and reveals its original characteristics? The fact that the ruins receive us warmly and kindly after all, and that they attract us with their cracks and flaking surfaces, could this not really be a sign of the material taking revenge, having recaptured its original life? In this sense I pay respect to Pollock’s and Mathieu’s works in contemporary art. These works emit the loud outcry of the material, of the very oil or enamel paints themselves. These two artists grapple with the material in a way which is completely appropriate to it and which they have discovered due to their talent. This even gives the impression that they serve the material. Differentiation and integration create mysterious effects.
Recently, Tominaga Soichi and Domoto Hisao presented the activities of Mathieu and Tapi? in Informel art, which I found most interesting. I do not know all the details, but in the content presented, there were many points I could agree with. To my surprise, I also discovered that they demanded the immediate revelation of anything arising spontaneously and that they are not bound by the previously predominant forms. Despite the differences in expression compared to our own, we still find a peculiar agreement with our claim to produce something living. I am not sure, though, about the relationship between the conceptually defined pictorial elements like colours, lines, shapes, in abstract art and the true properties of the material in Informel art. As far as the denial of abstraction is concerned, the essence of their declaration was not clear to me. In any case, it is obvious to us that purely formalistic abstract art has lost its charm, so that the Gutai Art Society founded three years ago was accompanied by the slogan that they would go beyond the borders of abstract art and that the name Gutaiism (concretism) was chosen. Above all, we had to search for a centrifugal approach, instead of the centripetal one seen in abstract art.

In those days we thought, and indeed still do think today, that the most important merits of abstract art lie in the fact that it has opened up the possibility to create a new, subjective shape of space, one which really deserves the name creation.
We have decided to pursue the possibilities of pure and creative activity with great energy. We tried to combine human creative ability with the characteristics of the material in order to concretize the abstract space.

When the abilities of the individual were united with the chosen material in the melting-pot of psychic automatism, we were overwhelmed by the shape of space still unknown to us, never before seen or experienced. Automatism naturally made the image which did not occur to us. Instead of relying on our own image, we have struggled to find an original method of creating that space.

The works of our members will serve as examples. Toshiko Kinoshita is actually a teacher of chemistry at a girls’ school. She created a peculiar space by allowing chemicals to react on filter paper. Although it is possible to imagine the results beforehand to a certain extent, the final results of handling the chemicals can not be established until the following day. The particular results and the shape of the material are in any case her own work. After Pollock many Pollock-imitators appeared, but Pollock’s splendour will never be extinguished. The talent of invention deserves respect.
Kazuo Shiraga placed a lump of paint on a huge piece of paper, and started to spread it around violently with his feet. For about the last two years art journalists have called this unprecedented method "the Art of committing the whole self with the body." Kazuo Shiraga had no intention at all of making this strange method known to the public. He had merely found the method which enabled him to confront and unite the material he had chosen with his own spiritual dynamics. In doing so he achieved an extremely convincing result.

In contrast to Shiraga, who works with an organic method, Shozo Shimamoto has been working with mechanical manipulations for the past few years. The spray pictures created by smashing a bottle full of paint, or the large surface made in a single moment by firing a small, hand-made cannon filled with paint by means of an acetylene gas explosion, etc., display a breathtaking freshness.

Other works which deserve mention are those of Yasuo Sumi produced with a vibrator or Toshio Yoshida, who uses only one single lump of paint. All their actions are full of a new intellectual energy which demands our respect and recognition.

The search for an original, undiscovered world also resulted in numerous works in the so-called object form. In my opinion, conditions at the annual open-air exhibitions in the city of Ashiya have contributed to this. That these works, created by artists who are confronted with many different materials, differ from the objects of Surrealism can be seen simply from the fact that the artists tend not to give them titles or to provide interpretations. The objects in Gutai art were, for example, a painted, bent iron plate (Atsuko Tanaka) or a work in hard red vinyl in the form of a mosquito net (Tsuruko Yamazaki), etc. With their characteristics, colours and forms, they were constant messages about the materials.

Our group does not impose restrictions on the art of its members, letting them make full use of their creativity. For instance, many different experiments were carried out with extraordinary activity such as art felt with the entire body, art which could only be touched, Gutai music (in which Shozo Shimamoto has been doing interesting experiments for several years) and so on. Another work by Shozo Shimamoto is like a bridge which shakes everytime you walk over it. Then a work by Saburo Murakami which is like a telescope you can enter to look up at the heavens, and an installation made of plastic bags with organic elasticity, etc. Atsuko Tanaka started with a work of flashing light bulbs which she called "Clothing." Sadamasa Motonaga worked with water, smoke, etc. Gutai art put the greatest importance on all daring steps which lead to an undiscovered world. Sometimes, at first glance, we are compared with and mistaken for Dadaism, and we ourselves fully recognize the achievements of Dadaism. But we think differently, in contrast to Dadaism, our work is the result of investigating the possibilities of calling the material to life.

We shall hope that there is always a fresh spirit in our Gutai exhibitions and that the discovery of new life will call forth a tremendous scream in the material itself.

(Proclaimed in October 1956, published in December 1956 in the art journal "Geijutsu Shincho")

Jiro YOSHIHARA

The Poet...Sarah Blackman

Sarah Blackman, Instructor
Email: Sarah Blackman

Sarah Blackman is a poet, fiction and creative non-fiction author originally from Washington D.C. She graduated from Washington College, summa cum laude, with a BA in English, minor Creative Writing, and earned her MFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 with a primary concentration in fiction and a secondary concentration in poetry. For the past five years she has been teaching composition, creative writing and literature at the University of Alabama where she also served as the fiction editor for the Black Warrior Review. Sarah’s poetry and prose has been published in a number of journals and magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, Third Coast, The National Poetry Review, American Poetry Journal, Oxford American Magazine and The Greensboro Review among others. She has been anthologized in the Poets Against the War Anthology and Best New American Voices, 2006, and was the recipient of the 2006 American Poet’s Prize and the 2007 Laureate Prize for Poetry. Currently, she is the Assistant Prose Editor for DIAGRAM magazine and is at work on a novel set on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

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didacticism

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A moment in Turkish Art

The New York Times

May 18, 2011
Turkish Magnate Puts His Passion on Display
By SUSANNE FOWLER

ISTANBUL — Art collecting is often a very private passion, but the textile magnate Oner Kocabeyoglu has taken his passion very public with the exhibition “20 Turkish Artists of the XXth Century” at Santralistanbul, an art, music and education space at the tip of the Golden Horn.

The show, through June 19, features more than 430 works by 18 painters and two sculptors, accumulated by Mr. Kocabeyoglu and selected and arranged over three floors in collaboration with the writer and art critic Ferit Edgu.

At first, visitors may think they are seeing earlier works by Picasso or Klimt, but many of the paintings are by Turks who lived in France after 1940 as part of the École de Paris wave, working, studying and carousing with the Westerners creating masterpieces.

The exhibition covers a particularly interesting period for Turkish painting, Mr. Edgu said by telephone, in that it shows how Turkish artists, from a Western point of view, “caught up” to what was being painted by the Europeans. And they did this, in many cases, by packing up and moving to Paris.

But the collection itself began in 2001 when Mr. Kocabeyoglu, just 30 years old, made his first acquisition: a small gouache by Selim Turan.

“From then on, I got more and more involved,” Mr. Kocabeyoglu, whose company, Papko, manufactures clothing for retailers like Zara, said by e-mail. “I started reading about them, went around galleries. Then it became a way of life for me. I would travel to see a painting, attend a fair, or bid at an auction.” He said he would buy only “what really touched me,” until over the course of a decade he had formed a collection that is akin to an immersion course in modern Turkish painting.

He knew very little about Mr. Turan when he bought that first painting and “knew absolutely nothing” about the Turkish artists of the École de Paris, or Paris School, whose works “drew me to them with extraordinary force,” he wrote in the preface to the exhibition’s three-volume catalog. “One painting brought another, one painter another.”

“If I can express it this way,” he wrote, “they were my teachers of painting: They educated my eyes and continue to do so. Without exaggeration, I can say that the love of painting which finally became a passion gave meaning to my life, and filled a great void.”

Mr. Edgu, in his own catalog commentary, says collecting “is a passion, and like every passion, does not listen to reason. That virus that lies dormant within the individual can sometimes be awakened by a very insignificant little object, by a painting, by a line, a sculpture, a curio, a coin. And the result is as unstoppable as the run in a stocking.”

“From what I have seen, this is what happened to Oner Kocabeyoglu.”

In curating the show, Mr. Edgu divided the works into three sections: figurative paintings by artists including Fikret Mualla and Abidin Dino; pieces from the Paris School of abstract painters like Mubin Orhon, Fahrelnissa Zeid (the lone woman in the exhibition) and her son, Nejad Melih Devrim; and works by artists including Ferruh Basaga and Burhan Dogancay, under the heading of “Geometry, Light, Music and Walls.”

The editing process was a challenge. “First I went to see the whole collection, approximately 900 pieces by 40 to 50 artists,” Mr. Edgu said. After he whittled down his choices, “the collector went out and bought some more paintings, so about 40 new pieces were then added to the show.”

Mr. Kocabeyoglu said that when he began collecting art, “I was not interested in their specific value and did not buy to invest,” adding that he “was lucky in a way as these artists were not in vogue when I started collecting them, but within this period they became quite valuable” as Western interest rose in Middle Eastern and Turkish art and houses like Sotheby’s, Bonham’s and Christie’s held auctions of Turkish modern and contemporary art.

Elif Bayoglu, head of sales for contemporary Turkish art for Sotheby’s in London, said by telephone that paintings by Turkish artists of the past century have been finding new audiences and selling for record prices.

“In our sales, the most successful result came last year from Zeid,” Ms. Bayoglu said, calling her one of the most important artists of the period not only in Turkey but on the French scene. “It has extremely good provenance in that it came from the family. One of her major works, it had been estimated at £300,000 to £500,000, and sold for £657,250 to an international collector,” the equivalent of about $1,060,000.

Sotheby’s first auction of Turkish art took place in 2009, Ms. Bayoglu said, and a fourth is planned for spring 2012.

“If I didn’t tell you the works were Turkish, you probably would assume they were French, or international,” she said. “The quality was very high and they did exhibit in Paris and around Europe with the rest of the international modern artists of the period. Most of these artists have died and the supply of good quality works is very limited, which is also why they are very valuable and very rare to come by.”

Some pieces are acquired through the artist’s relatives, she said, “but for the most part, they come from collectors who bought back in 1940, ’50, or ’60 and held on to them. But now with the values rising, are coming into the market.”

“Collectors held on to some of these for 50 years,” she said, “and it’s amazing to see works you didn’t know and learn where they’ve been hiding. It’s very exciting: You just don’t know where, or what else, has been hiding.”

But the first thing exhibit visitors will see upon entering the main gallery space is portraits of the artists themselves, taken over the years by the renowned Turkish-Armenian photographer Ara Guler.

“I was in Paris between 1950 and 1960,” Mr. Edgu said, “and all of the painters in this exposition were my friends, so I have a deep affinity for them and their work. Ara Guler was also a friend of mine from those days. And he has always been passionate about taking pictures of artists, Turkish or foreign, even Picasso and Dalí. Knowing this, I figured he had portraits of all these people in his archives. I was right. Of the 20, only one was missing, and luckily he was still alive, so Ara was able to shoot him, too.”

Mr. Kocabeyoglu advises collectors of Turkish art “to go about it carefully. There should definitely be passion but also selective choice and a lot of self-education.” The sole purpose of the exhibition at Santralistanbul, he wrote, was “nothing more than to share it with lovers of art” and to “repay in a small way my debt to these painters who have opened the doors to a new world for me and brought me much pleasure.”

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job searching is a somewhat soul-less activity. it feels soul-less bc there about a zillion things i would love to do and most of the doors refuse to open.

Sonia Delaunay--NYTimes, Roberta Smith

March 17, 2011
Swatches Illuminate a Painter’s Other Art
By ROBERTA SMITH

It is the rare museum exhibition that bets most of the house on fabric swatches — or, more politely, textile samples — and succeeds. This is the impressive achievement of “Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay,” a sumptuous and enlightening show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum that may change forever the way you look at dry goods.

Orchestrated by Matilda McQuaid, the museum’s deputy curatorial director, and Susan Brown, its assistant curator, “Color Moves” examines the more practical side of the multi-faceted achievement of Delaunay, the pioneering modernist painter (1885-1979). In the process, the show raises interesting questions about painting’s relationship to other two-dimensional, implicitly pictorial arts, including textiles, carpets and rugs, and even suggests that, for all the historical significance of Delaunay’s abstract paintings, she may have been in her best artistic form when designing fabric.

With her husband, the painter Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Sonia Delaunay originated the especially radiant French brand of Cubo-Futurism that their friend Guillaume Apollinaire named Orphism in 1910 . But there is much more to her achievement than painting.

“I have lived my art,” she declared on more than one occasion, and indeed she had. Adamantly ignoring the stifling distinctions among the categories of fine, decorative and utilitarian art, she painted, sewed, drew, embroidered, stenciled and above all designed her way through a long, eventful life, guided by an inborn faith in color’s visionary force and a survivor’s instinct for adaptation. An important artistic turning point that confirmed her interest in the clash of forms and color that she and Robert called “simultaneity” was simply a patchwork coverlet she made for their son in 1911; in 1962 she proudly wrote a friend that it was “nowadays shown in art galleries as one of the first abstract paintings.”

Her life seems to have been a combination of luck and incredible drive. Born Sarah Stern in Gradizhsk, a town near Odessa in Ukraine, into a Jewish laborer’s family, she was adopted at the age of 5 by her maternal uncle, Henri Terk, a wealthy lawyer in St. Petersburg. She grew up as Sonia Terk in a multilingual, Russian-bourgeois, Jewish-intellectual milieu. Life included regular trips to Europe and a summer house in Finland.

Delaunay’s precocious artistic talent prompted her adoptive parents to send her to Germany to study art in 1903. Within a few years she was ensconced in Paris, just in time to have her affinity for color corroborated by the paintings of van Gogh, Gauguin and Rousseau, as well as Matisse and the Fauves, whose lessons she quickly absorbed. Her parents urged a return to St. Petersburg to make a proper marriage. Instead she made a marriage of convenience with Wilhelm Uhde, a homosexual German art dealer who gave her an exhibition in 1908 and introduced her to the Parisian avant-garde. The union turned inconvenient once she began a love affair with Robert Delaunay, whom she married in December 1910, three months after her divorce from Uhde and two months before the birth of her son.

In 1917, while the Delaunays were sitting out World War I in Portugal, the Russian Revolution wiped out Sonia’s allowance, and she put down her paintbrushes and turned to work as a designer in order to support her family. In essence, she began to funnel her abstract vocabulary into an array of endeavors that ranged widely in terms of economic efficacy.

For the fashion houses bearing her name — first in Madrid and then in Paris — she designed striking dresses, scarves, hats and coats (including one made for Gloria Swanson). She designed costumes for Diaghilev’s dancers in Madrid and, later, in the 1920s, for Dadaist evenings in Paris, collaborating with Tristan Tzara on garments festooned with his poetry. She tried her hand at tapestry, rugs and bookbinding. By the late ’20s it was clear that her most successful endeavor would be fabric design, especially for Metz & Company, a Dutch department store headquartered in Amsterdam.

Delaunay’s impressive prolificacy is still being sorted out. The last museum survey of her work in this country, in 1980, concentrated on her paintings, in an attempt to free her art from her husband’s shadow, and largely ignored the fabric designs that she continued to make even after she returned to painting in the late ’30s.

The Cooper-Hewitt exhibition, like a series of recent shows in Europe, takes the opposite tack. Its brimming installation is sprinkled with a handful of artworks — a bright painting from 1946, several gouaches — and a small but vivid selection of garments and accessories, including a radiant passel of boldly geometric scarves. Swanson’s coat is here; its stepped designs in shades of black and sandstone conjure up Navajo art and its desert environment. So is a section from another coat that might almost be a wall hanging by some embroidery-obsessed contemporary artist.

There are photographs of pleasantly robust fashion models (by today’s standards) in Delaunay designs, posing beside a Delaunay-decorated Citroen B12. Also on hand is a copy of the 1913 “Prose of the Transsiberian and of Little Jehanne of France,” a six-foot-long fold-out poem by Blaise Cendrars to which she added stencils of prismatic color squares that influenced Paul Klee.

But the show’s primary energy source is a group of some 90 small, lively gouache studies and their equally vibrant commercial results: hand-printed silks, velvets and cottons, represented by more than 120 textile samples laid out in large vitrines. It is especially fascinating to see the same patterns repeated in different color schemes.

With consummate vitality the assorted motifs of the gouaches and the fabrics variously revisit, amplify and presage much of the history of modern painting. Delaunay’s designs of the 1920s tend to be geometric and boldly scaled with considerable use of diagonals, diamond patterns and zigzags. You can see her picking up ideas from the art around her: in one instance the zigzags suggest Brancusi’s “Endless Column.” There are moments of loosely rendered stripes — horizontal, vertical, undulant — that might almost be paintings by Mary Heilmann; a black and green arrangement of concentric patterns suggests the work of James Siena.

These designs were often produced by her workshop, Atelier Simultané, and sold under her Paris fashion label, Maison Delaunay. She closed both businesses after the stock-market crash and began to concentrate almost exclusively on textile design, working most closely with Joseph de Leeuw, the farsighted head of Metz & Company. De Leeuw also commissioned designs for furniture from Gerrit Rietveld and for textiles and rugs from Bart van der Leck, examples of which are included in this exhibition.

Delaunay’s fabric designs from the ’30s and beyond, which dominate the show’s second half, are in many ways more conventional and intimate in scale, more appropriate perhaps to ladies’ garments. But they also have an irresistible sprightliness. Their dashed-off lines and shapes retain a remarkable sense of the artist’s hand. They give you the feeling that, confronted with a blank sheet of paper, Delaunay was rarely at a loss. She wrote of devising 10 or 20 designs at a sitting.

In her designs for Metz & Company, Delaunay alternated fruitfully between the organic and the geometric. In many of her floral and leaf designs she is in some ways effectively cultivating ground broken by Matisse. In others she adopts to simple grids and color bars, sometimes absorbing some of van der Leck’s austerity and sometimes using repeating dots and dashes in ways that look forward to Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. But many designs negotiate brilliant resolutions of the abstract and the natural, as when she intimates fields of blossoms with clusters of buoyant spirals or when she resorts exclusively to blurry, horizontal strokes.

In her fabric designs and scarves especially Delaunay practiced painting, and drawing, by another name. For all their radiant colors, her actual paintings can seem a tad bombastic, belabored and fuzzy compared with the refinement and elegant efficiency of her textile designs.

Marshalling its numerous fabric swatches, and concentrating on the usable, livable side of her art, the Cooper-Hewitt’s show invites us to rethink the standard hierarchy of art mediums while revealing Delaunay’s talent at its most protean. It is quite a sight.

“Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay” is on view through June 5 at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan; (212) 849-8400, cooperhewitt.org.

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