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A 220-pound, fully functional, solid-gold toiletonce offered to President Donald Trump as a satirical giftjust sold at a Sothebys auction for $12.1 million. The commode is a work of art called America created by Maurizio Cattelan in 2016. Cattelan is most well-known for his surreal, conversation-starting, and often controversial art concepts, like the 1999 piece La Nona Ora, which depicts a life-size Pope John Paul II getting struck by a meteorite, or the infamous 2019 piece Comedian, which is, put simply, a banana taped to a wall (which sold at auction for $6.2 million). After America debuted at the Guggenheim Museum in September 2016, it became an instant subject of public fascination, inspiring dozens of think pieces and even a front cover of the New York Post. In the nine years since, the intrigue surrounding the work has only grown after it was the target of a high-profile heist. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of America, though, will be its emergence as a striking symbol for Trumps first terma connection made even more poignant by the timing of its sale during Trumps second term, itself most visually recognizable by its glut of gilded motifs. The original America, on display at the Guggenheim Museum in 2016 [Photo: William Edwards/AFP/Getty Images] The storied, sometimes unbelievable history of America When it debuted to the public, America was not sequestered on a pedestal or inside a gallery space. Instead, it was located in the Guggenheims bathroom, where visitors were allowed five minutes each to, as one New York Post article put it at the time, crap all over America. In all, more than 100,000 guests lined up to do just that. At the time, the Guggenheim said that the artwork represented the American dream, with its utility ultimately reminding us of the inescapable physical realities of our shared humanity. Cattelan put it more bluntly to The New Yorker: Whatever you eat, a two-hundred-dollar lunch or a two-dollar hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise, he said. In 2019, the loo was sent to Englands Blenheim Palace, where it was to be put on view to the public for a second time. Just as the exhibition was set to open, a group of thieves broke into the palace, used sledgehammers and crowbars to pry the toilet out of the floor, and escaped in under five minutes. Two of the people involved in the theft were sentenced to prison in June of this year, but the original America has never been recovered. The America that just sold at Sothebys is actually a second version of the work, which Cattelan had previously alluded to but did not reveal in public until the sale. According to Sothebys, its the only other version of America in existence. People wait in line to use the fully functional installation of America at the Guggenheim Museum, 2016. [Photo: Christina Horsten/Picture Alliance/Getty Images] An 18-karat-gold throne In a new YouTube video about the whirlwind history of America, several Sothebys experts note that Cattelans reticence to provide much context about America is one of the reasons it became iconic. But the toilets connections to Trump were never exactly subtle. When America arrived at the Guggenheim just two months before Trump was elected in 2016, the museums then-blogger, Caitlin Dover, wrote in a post, The aesthetics of this throne recall nothing so much as the gilded excess of Trumps real-estate ventures and private residences. When Dover asked Cattelan about the connection, he said that while Trump wasnt top of mind when he conceived the piece, it was probably in the air. The allusion got a lot more explicit in 2018. That year, the Trump administration contacted the Guggenheim to request that the Vincent van Gogh painting Landscape With Snow be borrowed for Trumps private living quarters. According to The Washington Post, then-curator Nancy Spector, who wrote a book about Cattelans work in 1999, declined to lend the painting, suggesting America instead. The White House, it seems, did not respond to the subtle act of protest. A gilded symbol Trumps penchant for gold decor dates back decades. In 2004, he told reporters that the reign of Louis XIV represented his favorite styleand the gilded, rococo-esque aesthetic has become a visual hallmark of both his presidencies. This year alone, Trump has decked out the Oval Office in golden objects, accepted a luxury jet from Qatar filled with gold furniture, and begun construction on a new White House ballroom that will be, predictably, very gold. In some ways, a golden toilet feels like the ultimate symbol of a second term in which Trump has repeatedly strengthened his ties with billionaire investors while the average American is in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. But when asked about the goal behind agreeing to offer America to the Trump family in 2018, Cattelan told The Post that his reasoning was a bit more lighthearted. “What’s the point of our life? he said at the time. Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.” The original America at Blenheim Palace, 2019 [Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images]
Category:
E-Commerce
For those of us who earn a living publishing content on the open internet, Amazon’s lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity can seem darkly amusing. Perplexity is among the many AI companies that has spent years extracting value from the internet in exchange for little. Its crawlers have synthesized endless amounts of content from publishers, even working around publishers’ attempts to block this behavior, all so Perplexity can summarize content without having to send traffic to the websites themselves. Now Perplexity and its rivals are going a step further, with a new wave of AI browsers that can navigate pages automatically. Perplexity has Comet, OpenAI has ChatGPT Atlas, Opera has Neon, and others are on the way. The pitch is that AI “agents” will soon be able to trudge through the web on your behalf, booking your flights, buying your groceries, and shopping on sites like Amazon. Both Perplexity and OpenAI view these browsers as imperative in their goals to build AI “operating systems” that can manage your life. Amazon, which has a lot to lose if people stop accessing its website directly, is suing to stop that from happening. It’s been trying to block Perplexity, but so far to no avail. Therein lies the irony: These AI browsers promise a future where you’ll never have to visit a website again, yet that promise depends on having viable websites to crawl through in the first place. Amazon’s lawsuit is a sign that these two goals may be incompatible. Feeding the beast For companies like Perplexity and OpenAI, web browsers are suddenly important because they open the door to content and data that would otherwise be inaccessible. Consider Amazon. If you’re just using ChatGPT’s website, you might ask it to recommend a few Amazon items or summarize a product’s user reviews, but its answers wouldn’t include any personal data from Amazon’s site. By contrast, ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity Comet can access Amazon exactly as it appears in your own browser window. That means they can crawl through your order history or weigh in on Amazon’s personalized product recommendations. Perplexity says these “agentic” browsers make for a better shopping experience, which is why Amazon should embrace thembut Perplexity also stands to benefit in other ways. By understanding things like your order history, personalized recommendations, and all the questions you asked Perplexity’s AI to arrive at a particular product, the company can build a much richer user profile for things like targeted advertising. “You’ve gone from behavior tracking to psychological modeling,” says Eamonn Maguire, who leads the machine learning team at Proton. “Where you have traditional browsers tracking what you do, AI browsers infer why you do it.” This isn’t speculation. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on the TBPN podcast earlier this year that its browser will enable “hyper-personalized” ads by understanding more about users’ personal lives. “What are the things youre buying, which hotels are you going to, which restaurants are you going to, what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you,” Srinivas said. Amazon, meanwhile, has much to lose from AI shopping agents, even if they ultimately help make a purchase. The company has its own $56 billion advertising business, fueled in part by the ads it stuffs into its shopping pages. CEO Andy Jassy has acknowledged that AI agents could disrupt that business. You may have little sympathy for Amazon in that scenario, but consider also the many smaller entities that stand to lose from an agentic web. Your favorite newsletter, for instanceone that paywalls content for its most loyal readersmay now have that content exposed within the tabs of an AI browser. Eamonn also gives the example of research papers that sit behind paywalls, or personal documents that wouldn’t exist on the web at all. The contents of emails, shopping lists, and productivity apps could all become fodder for AI to learn more about you. And while Perplexity and OpenAI have said they won’t train AI models on what people view in their web browsers, Eamonn says they could easily change that policy in the future. “Cynically speaking, it’s a smart way not only of building particularly good profiles of users but also getting more data,” Eamonn says. Why the web? Srinivas has acknowledged that AI companies need the openness of the web to provide them with all this context, because other platforms are too locked down. “The only reason we’re doing a browser is there’s no other way to build an agent with enough control over many applications simultaneously,” Srinivas said at the Upfront Summit in February. “Especially on iOS, you cannot even access another app. You don’t want to be bottlenecked by how Apple is building its ecosystem. You want to work around it, and the browser is a very good work-around in the short term for us.” OpenAI has similarly described the web browser as key to its broader ambitions. “Now that we have feedback and signals from hundreds of millions of people around the world, its clear ChatGPT needs to become so much more than the simple chatbot it started as,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, wrote in a blog post announcing the Atlas browser. “Over time, we see ChatGPT evolving to become the operating system for your life: a fully connected hub that helps you manage your day and achieve your long-term goals.” While AI companies have clear ideas of what they can do on te open web, it’s less certain whether the open web will cooperate. Lots of websites already attempt to block AI crawlersReddit has even cut off search engines that don’t provide compensationbut AI browsers represent yet another way around those restrictions. Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity could be a sign of further fights to come when attempts to block AI fail. AI companies would have you believe that these efforts are just delaying the inevitable. But that raises a bigger question of what the open web even looks like if it becomes entirely intermediated by AI. A common complaint against AI tools like ChatGPT is that they’ll erode the incentives to create new content, and that AI itself will ultimately suffer from having nothing new to train on. “Nothing really gets better unless you have content, but the content is getting worse because people are just using AI to generate this content, and then these models are getting worse because the content is getting worse,” Proton’s Maguire says. With the rise of agentic AI browsers, a similar argument could be applied to the web as a whole: What motivation will exist to design beautiful, unique websites for humans when there’s no one left to browse them?
Category:
E-Commerce
Tis the season for givingand that means tis the season for shopping. Maybe youll splurge on a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal, thinking, Ill just return it if they dont like it. But before you click purchase, its worth knowing that many retailers have quietly tightened their return policies in recent years. As a marketing professor, I study how retailers manage the flood of returns that follow big shopping events like these, and what it reveals about the hidden costs of convenience. Returns might seem like a routine part of doing business, but theyre anything but trivial. According to the National Retail Federation, returns cost U.S. retailers almost $890 billion each year. Part of that staggering figure comes from returns fraud, which includes everything from consumers buying and wearing items once before returning thema practice known as wardrobingto more deceptive acts such as falsely claiming an item never arrived. Returns also drain resources because they require reverse logistics: shipping, inspecting, restocking, and often repackaging items. Many returned products cant be resold at full price or must be liquidated, leading to lost revenue. Processing returns also adds labor and operational expenses that erode profit margins. How e-commerce transformed returns While retailers have offered return options for decades, their use has expanded dramatically in recent years, reflecting how much shopping habits have changed. Before the rise of e-commerce, shopping was a sensory experience: Consumers would touch fabrics, try on clothing, and see colors in natural light before buying. If something didnt work out, customers brought it back to the store, where an associate could quickly inspect and restock it. Online shopping changed all that. While e-commerce offers convenience and variety, it removes key sensory cues. You cant feel the material, test the fit, or see the true color. The result is uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes higher rates of returns. One analysis by Capital One suggests that the rate for returns is almost three times higher for online purchases than for in-store purchases. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the move toward online shopping went into overdrive. Even hesitant online shoppers had to adapt. To encourage purchases, many retailers introduced or expanded generous return policies. The strategy worked to boost sales, but it also created a culture of returning. In 2020, returns accounted for 10.6% of total U.S. retail sales, nearly double the prior year, according to the National Retail Federation data. By 2021, that had climbed to 16.6%. Unable to try things on in stores, consumers began ordering multiple sizes or styles, keeping one and sending the rest back. The behavior was rational from a shoppers perspective but devastatingly expensive for retailers. The high cost of convenience Most supply chains are designed to move in one direction: from production to consumption. Returns reverse that flow. When merchandise moves backward, it adds layers of cost and complexity. In-store returns used to be simple: A customer would take an item back to the store, the retailer would inspect the product, and, if it was in good condition, it would go right back on the shelf. Online returns, however, are far more cumbersome. Products can spend weeks in transit and often cant be resoldby the time they arrive, they may be out of season, obsolete, or no longer in their original packaging. Logistics costs compound the problem. During the pandemic, consumers grew accustomed to free shipping. That means retailers now often pay twice: once to deliver the item and again to retrieve it. Now, in a post-pandemic world, retailers are trying to strike a balancemaintaining customer goodwill without sacrificing profitability. One solution is to raise prices, but especially today, with inflation in the headlines, shoppers are sensitive to price hikes. The other, more common approach is to tighten return policies. In practice, thats taken several forms. Some retailers have begun charging small flat fees for returns, even when a customer mails an item back at their own expense. For example, the direct-to-consumer retailer Curvy Sense offers customers unlimited returns and exchanges of an item for an initial $2.98 fee. Others have shortened their return windows. Over the summer, for example, beauty retailers Sephora and Ulta reduced their return window from 60 days to 30. Many brands now attach large, conspicuous do not remove tags to prevent consumers from wearing items and then sending them back. And increasingly, retailers are offering store credit rather than cash or credit card refunds, ensuring that returned sales at least stay within their company. Few retailers advertise these changes prominently. Instead, they appear quietly in the fine print of return policiespolicies that are now longer, more specific, and far less forgiving than they once were. As we head into the busiest shopping season of the year, its worth pausing before you click purchase. Ask yourself: Is this something I truly wantor am I planning to return it later? Whenever possible, shop in person and return in person. And if youre buying online, make sure you familiarize yourself with the return policy. Lauren Beitelspacher is a professor of marketing at Babson College. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
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