Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…[laughs] There’s a time when I used to go — we had a program for college students every summer, and I used to love when they land to see the tap-tap. It’s so striking because it just feels like, “Oh, I’m in this world full of art.” They seem, to me, moving canvases. What I love, personally, most about tap-tap, even after you get used to the visual feast that they are, I love the sayings on them. You would see like, of course, basketball stars from here. At some point, not too long ago, Toni Morrison, after she died, was on a tap-tap. It’s just that people really soak up what’s happening around. But the sayings are also great. One of my favorite sayings on the tap-tap was “w ap pale, m ap travay,” like, “You’re talking and I’m working.” I felt it was so powerful in terms of how you respond to people who talk badly about you. “w ap pale, m ap travay. You’re talking, I’m working.” [laughs] Things like that. Also, the tap-taps with the art sometimes will have messages of gratitude. A tap-tap might have a message of gratitude to the driver’s mother or to whoever contributed. A lot of them are to Jesus, to God, to the Virgin and other religious figures, but also to people in the person’s life who contributed to the business. I always find them very beautiful to look at, but also really wonderful moving pieces of art. If I think of the Haitian arts today, I think of painting possibly as having peaked between the ’40s and the ’70s. The most interesting work today tends to be in Vodou sculpture. Why has that shift come about? Those are very large pieces. They’re like installations. They are hard to buy. They’re hard to transport. I think if you stayed there, you would be reducing your possible level of enjoyment because what’s most in that early period, the Centre d’Art period in the ’40s, like the early period, when the tourism that you were talking about, when people went to Haiti, what they bought the most was what they call naif, primitif art, which is super colorful, really beautiful figures, often market scenes. That’s traveled very well. But there was always, at that same time, artists who were a little bit more adventurous, artists who were somewhat abstract. At the same time, there were these artists who were like, “This is what the tourists want. That’s what I’m going to produce.” Throughout the Caribbean, even if you went to other islands, you would see these paintings, and they became almost a little bit mass-produced, but they’re gorgeous. I have some. The sculptures you’re talking about — those were started actually by . . . I used to work for Jonathan Demme, the filmmaker, who was a huge collector of Haitian art. In the office, whenever we acquired those sculptures . . . I traveled a lot to Haiti with him. He called them Liautauds because the original artist was Liautaud. When I was growing up, in cemeteries, often we had metal flowers, really, because you would do a wreath of metal. It would be metal from oil drums because that lasted longer, as opposed to if you have a wreath of just roses — that dies quickly, so people would make these beautiful wreaths. Liautaud was from St. Mark, which is really the home of these sculptures. Now, there’s a whole industry in those sculptures for sure. I have to say, they’re very hard, I agree. You can’t just put that in your suitcase, often, like you would the paintings. People used to roll them. But they’re gorgeous, and now they’re almost three dimensional. One Christmas, we bought one that was a nativity scene that was 3D. But there are a lot of wonderful young artists now. Some of them are moving away from the more primitive, naive Lionel St-Eloi. There’re so many whose names are escaping me, but there are just wonderful artists worth exploring. You mentioned Duval-Carrié, who is outside of Haiti, but there are quite a few other young artists, too, who are inside Haiti, who would use both that style of sculpture but also do painting, who do installations or doing really, really exciting things.…

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