In May, 2007, I traveled to Iceland for the opening of a specially commissioned project by artist Roni Horn. (I wrote about the experience for Artforum.com.) While there I was struck not only by the feral beauty of the country, but also by the high cost of consumer goods. The American dollar was weak, the Icelandic kronor was strong, and, for example, the cheap Thai takeout I ate one night, which would have cost seven or eight dollars in New York, cost the equivalent of twenty-two. At the time I chalked this up to the currency discrepancy and the fact that many, if not all, of the ingredients had to be imported from some distance away. Fifteen months later, the Icelandic economy crashed in spectacular fashion, and the autopsy reports now being published suggest that I may also have been experiencing one side effect of an enormous bubble: According to journalist Michael Lewis, “From 2003 to 2007, while the U.S. stock market was doubling, the Icelandic stock market multiplied by nine times.” Lewis’s article, published in the April 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, follows Rebecca Solnit’s October 2008 report from “Iceland’s polite dystopia,” published in Harper’s, and accompanies Ian Parker’s dispatch, published in this week’s New Yorker. (The latter is available in full online only to subscribers.) Lewis summarizes the first part of the problem this way: “When, in 2003, [Icelanders] sat down at the same table with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they had only the roughest idea of what an investment banker did and how he behaved—most of it gleaned from young Icelanders’ experiences at various American business schools. And so what they did with money probably says as much about the American soul, circa 2003, as it does about Icelanders.”
At one point, Lewis describes the harbor-front development I saw in Reykjavík: “The rocks beneath Reykjavík may be igneous, but the city feels sedimentary: on top of several thick strata of architecture that should be called Nordic Pragmatic lies a thin layer that will almost certainly one day be known as Asshole Capitalist. The hobbit-size buildings that house the Icelandic government are charming and scaled to the city. The half-built oceanfront glass towers meant to house newly rich financiers and, in the bargain, block everyone else’s view of the white bluffs across the harbor are not.” Here is a photo I took of this construction work on May 11, 2007:
Solnit was one of the first writers-in-residence at the apartment Horn constructed as part of her installation. (Horn’s photographs illustrate the article.) She mentions at the start of her essay that she bumped into the country’s president at an art opening–likely Horn’s exhibition at the Reykjavík Art Museum–and asked for a meeting. Solnit, too, notes an American strain in the contemporary Icelandic character: “ ‘I think the twenty-first century will be a fascinating period,’ [the President] said, a period in which we will ’see the relevance as well as the renaissance of small states.’ But the vision he described as we ate our catfish and salmon seemed decidedly mainstream, even American. He celebrates small states mostly for how they function economically and in the international society of states.” Whereas Lewis focuses solely on the world of finance, Solnit, as has been the case with her historically, discusses the environment and political protest (or lack thereof). Parker, arriving to report for the New Yorker in December of last year, encounters the first flickerings of just that protest. From the article abstract online: “To see Iceland this winter was to be reminded of that queasy split second during which a spectacular injury decides on its accompanying level of pain. But if Iceland’s economic misery was largely still to come, its cultural and political trauma had been immediate. Iceland was having a revolutionary moment, if of a sometimes hesitant and self-mocking sort.”
Tags: economic downfall, Ian Parker, Iceland, Michael Lewis, Rebecca Solnit, Roni Horn
