With no windfall to my account, I was crushed, of course. So comforting my wounded spirit, my dad played on, taking a few dives so I could experience the thrill of victory that my nickel and celebrate with jaw breakers, M&Ms, and jelly beans of my own. Now, you might be tempted to think that this was only fair. What else was a father to do? After all, he would have just had to give me the money anyway. Besides, Wayne was just lucky because it's not like there was any skill involved in his winning https://oncasinogames.com/casino-games/.
But the lesson I learned from that memory was that you need to be better up front so there's no need for kindness and accommodation if you come up short. Of course, we all know expertise at tunk, poker, craps, and other games of chance is largely an illusion, but not totally. So just as the fabled subjective nature of art is mostly myth, the value of things within a culture is determined by their position within established frameworks and structures. If the rules are agreed upon ahead of time, knowledge, skill, and attention to the odds, probability theory, can get you a little bit closer to something like certainly than ignorance of the rules would. So example, the composer John Cage has described the difference between his use of chance and the making of his work and that of Marcel Duchamp. And he describes it this way. He says, I am not interested in any kind of chance Duchamp is interested in, where almost anything can happen. Instead what I try to do is set up a set of conditions wherein the thing that I am looking for is more likely to happen than not. Now back in my gambling youth, as I've said, betting is a big part of my life, my unwillingness to admit to the vicissitudes of dumb luck was hardened when I first learned the rules of Vegas style blackjack. So even short of counting cards, it was clear to me that here was a game in which the decisions you made clearly had an impact on how well you performed. And so this was the game for me. And except for a go at the slot machines for some reckless fun, it is the only game I play when I go to a casino. So I had learned that there was a strategy you could use when you went to the blackjack table and that it had to do with how many people were playing along with you in the game. So I discovered that when you play the game with just yourself and the dealer, which requires an incredible amount of courage, because the losing could be fast, just as the winning could be fast. So that if you are playing a game and it was just you and the dealer, that the odds in the game seemed to shift in favor of the player as opposed to the house. But the more people who came and sat down at the table, the more the odds shifted away from you and they shifted towards the advantages that the house had, because the way the cards were counted the odds were always in the house's favor. So I learned to play at a table where it was just me and the dealer. And you go head to head. And you had more than a 50% chance of coming out on top in an exchange like that. And once two or three people sat down at the table, it was time to get up. If you stay there longer, attrition would eventually wear you down, and you will end up losing almost everything you had. So that approach to gambling and my approach to art have a lot in common. And the odds that I'm trying to negotiate when I making my artwork come from what I understand to be the principles under which these histories of art that we have to read to learn what art is worth are built around. And so the questions end up being, in the same way that John Cage's questions end up being, can I set up conditions in which the thing that I am looking for is more likely to happen than not? And if that is the case, then how do I do that?
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March 2019
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