Lightning-Fast Doubt Resolution

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.

No painter has remained more consistently in favour with both artists and the public than Van Dyck. His art marks the highest achievement of Flanders of the seventeenth century. In making this statement the claims of Rubens have not been overlooked, although the latter has been, and probably will always be, considered the head of the Flemish school.

It is perhaps not too much to say that Van Dyck possessed in a greater measure than Rubens those qualities which go to make a great artist. We can never overlook the seniority of the latter, and to him will always belong the credit of having evolved the style which revolutionised the art of a nation, and there is no doubt that the pupil owed to him much of the knowledge he so well utilised in after-life.

In comparing those two great men it would be well, at first, to rid ourselves of the confusion which often arises through the application of the terms "artist" and "painter." In relation to painting they are only too often considered synonymous, but a little consideration will show us that a man whose technical abilities are of a high order need not necessarily be a great artist. In fact, one of the most truthful charges urged against the best contemporary art is that it demonstrates an astonishing poverty of invention, a lack of message, if you will, coupled with an extraordinarily highly developed technique. To screen as much as possible the dilemma in which he finds himself, many a modern painter has recourse to creating those outbursts of meaningless eccentricity that are so familiar upon the walls of our exhibitions. It is true that some few of the men who are living to-day are equipped almost, if not quite, as well technically as the great majority of the old masters. In a word, they could meet them on nearly equal terms as painters, but they lack invention and conception in which to bring their powers into legitimate play, and consequently they cannot rank with them as artists.

It was in the possession of these very qualities that Van Dyck surpassed Rubens. I do not suggest that the latter was devoid of power of conception, for, if I did, would not the great "Coup-de-lance" at Antwerp, or the "Fall of the Damned" at Munich (the drawing for the latter in the National Gallery gives an even better idea than the finished picture) be there to refute me? Van Dyck, however, though being quite the match of Rubens in technique, even in his early days—though still working under him—surpassed him in his middle period. Anybody who has closely studied the noble religious pictures at Courtrai and Malines—the latter, unfortunately, irreparably injured by damp and neglect—can but be impressed with his stupendous power in this direction. Granted that he does not appeal in the same measure to our emotions from the spiritual side as do the early painters of Italy and Flanders, he yet brings the brutal aspect of the scene before us in an intensely human manner.

In most subject pictures Van Dyck painted before his visit to Italy it is apparent that Rubens had been his sole guide, and he was impelled only with a desire to emulate his master. But, after his return, the influence of the mighty painters he had studied south of the Alps had wrought a wondrous change in his method, and although he found himself back again amidst his old surroundings he never quite forsook the path he had been treading in the interval. Rubens, who had also spent some years in Italy, did not submit to the influence of the southern masters in the same measure, but remained a Fleming to the end. There is little alteration to be observed, either in his historical and sacred pictures or in his portraits, after he had studied the Italians. From this we may assume either that Rubens was less susceptible to extraneous influences, or that he considered his method quite the equal to any that he had seen. Van Dyck, on the other hand, absorbed, particularly from the Venetians, certain qualities which he employed ceaselessly throughout the remainder of his life. It was not, however, solely this cause which raised Van Dyck as an artist above his master. Rather was it to be attributed to the superiority of temperament. Thus, whilst we can still consider Rubens the head of the Flemish school of the seventeenth century, we should accord to Van Dyck the foremost rank as an artist.

Read the following passage carefully and answer the given questions.

“In the future, ___ will be done by the crowd.” This sentiment has become ubiquitous among those engaged in the study or promotion of technologies that exploit large, networked groups of people.  Though I’m an employment lawyer, not a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or tech pundit, I confess to having expressed my enduring faith in the crowd on a number of occasions. It’s quite seductive to imagine a future in which we solve all our problems through connecting with one another, aggregating our knowledge and our energy.  Naturally, a futurist crowd-driven utopia also appeals to those who would look to the crowd as a substitute for – or an extension of – existing methods of production. Crowds can process and generate enormous volumes of data in sophisticated ways, with alarming speed, and at quite low cost. As such, it has become common to view crowds as an exploitable labour pool.

Commentators describe the phenomenal capacity of crowds in various ways, including “wisdom” (Surowiecki, 2004), “wealth” (Benkler, 2006), and “surplus” (Shirky, 2010). It boils down to the simple and perhaps self-evident premise that, in the right circumstances, we can get something more or better by sending “the crowd” to do what we would otherwise trust to the state, private enterprise, or individual agents. Yet I find myself wondering whether we spend too much time focusing on the strength of crowds, their ability to cohere, innovate, collaborate, and self-police. Crowds can be incredibly effective in building encyclopaedias, developing products, processing data, constructing communities, entertaining themselves and others, and – in some cases – influencing powerful institutions. But we must be careful to avoid confusing the output of a crowd project with the individuals and groups that bring it into being. I would suggest that the very attributes that make crowd members so effective at producing also discourage them from engaging in collective action to protect and empower themselves.

A few years ago I began to explore the phenomenon of paid crowdsourcing, in which a group of workers accept and perform tasks on a web-based platform in exchange for compensation from whoever posted the task. I approached it as a legal and industrial curiosity, something that bore little resemblance to any existing labour model. By way of a brief legal detour, our labour laws were designed and enacted with the 19th and 20th century industrial employment relationship in mind. In crowd labour, there is no physical jobsite. Firms and workers connect on software platforms through various independent vendors who exert substantial control over the relationship. The technology of crowd production enables instantaneous contracting and compensation, personalized workspaces, and – most unusually – the integration of work into other online activity, such as gaming or social networking. Instead of the typical one-to-many relationship between employer and employees, crowd work platforms tend to encourage many-to-many relationships, each lasting only a short time.

I went about making the case that such activity should be classified as work, and that those who perform it should enjoy the protection of employment and labour law (Felstiner 2011). I was driven by my belief that employment laws should display internal consistency, and should, where possible, avoid falling hopelessly behind the emerging online work models that represent the future of our networked information economy. Those were my scholarly reasons, but I also had practical reasons to advocate for the employment rights of crowd workers. In a nutshell, I have more confidence in their ability to vindicate individual statutory rights than in their ability to exercise collective rights, or even to engage in collective action in any way that would accomplish a fundamental change in their working conditions.

Why should this be? If crowds are so collaborative, and generative, and influential, shouldn’t they be able to use that power to improve their own individual and collective position? I believe they can, but they face structural obstacles created and reified by the way crowds are valued, cultivated, and regulated.

Source: Alek Felstiner, Limn