by Jeanne Willette | Dec 6, 2014 | Reviews
SEEING AS WILLFUL BLINDNESS A film by James Higginson Unlike all other art forms invented out of modern technology, film has remained stubbornly entrenched in its pre-industrial heritage. Even though the technology of “moving images” allowed for a wide range of...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 5, 2014 | Modern
JOSEPH NICÉPHORE NIÉPCE (1765-1833) The First Photograph and Its Rediscovery Part Two The Niépce Brothers, Joseph and Claude, were remarkable inventors. Or to put it another way, in the Napoléonic Era, there was little interest in industrial invention or development....
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 28, 2014 | Modern
JOSEPH NICÉPHORE NIÉPCE (1765-1833) The First Photograph Part One Although there was considerable early activity in England at the turn of the eighteenth century in the direction of the science of photography, the experiments conducted by Thomas Wedgwood and his...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 21, 2014 | Modern
THE REMARKABLE WEDGWOOD FAMILY Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805) The Invention of Photography One of the oldest–from contemporary perspective–or one of the first accounts of Thomas Wedgwood was A Group of Englishmen (1795 to 1815) being records of the younger...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 14, 2014 | Modern
THE REMARKABLE WEDGWOODS Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) and Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805) Photography and Pottery Josiah Wedgwood was potter with a problem. Success. He had invented a new formula for making a durable and beautiful earthenware to take the place of expensive...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 8, 2014 | Reviews
The Persistence of the Color Line by Randall Kennedy THE COLOR OF THE PRESIDENCY The full title of Randall Kennedy’s new book, The Persistence of the Color Line. Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, is, or was, published (2011) a bit too soon and needs a...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 7, 2014 | Modern
“READINESS” FOR PHOTOGRAPHY Part One: Technological Advances It was a photographer who best summed up the circumstances surrounding the invention of photography. Gisèle Freund (1908-2000) wrote in Photography and Society (1980) that although all the...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 31, 2014 | Modern
JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME: History Painter Part Three The Artist and History Gérôme studied under the official juste milieu artist, Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), who knew how to please a crowd. He had a gift that Gérôme did not: Delaroche could move an audience with his spell...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 25, 2014 | Reviews
The Betrayal of the American Dream by Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele THE CLOSING of the COMMONS The New Enclosure Movement Essentially “the American Dream” has always been a middle class dream. Thanks to carefully targeted government policy, the...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 24, 2014 | Modern
JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME: History Painter Part Two The Artist and Gender In painting after painting, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) clearly demonstrated his discomfort with women. Before his very profitable marriage to the daughter of Europe’s biggest art dealer, Gérôme lived...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 19, 2014 | Reviews
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (2012) Introduction The heart of the question of what Rachael Maddow calls Drift is how do we wage war in the twenty-first century? What is the purpose of war in the contemporary era? And who fights these wars? Or to...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 17, 2014 | Modern
JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME: History Painter Part One Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 – 1904) was on the wrong side of history. Many people have been on the wrong side of history, and, like the segregationist Senator, Strom Thurmond, they deserve to stay there. However, art history is...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 11, 2014 | Reviews
THE DARK HISTORY OF “WHITE” Introduction The History of White People by Nell Painter We were told that the election of Barack Obama meant that we—America—had transcended into a beatific state called “post-racial.” We were proud of...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 10, 2014 | Modern
IMPRESSIONISM, FASHION, AND MODERNITY Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago September 2012-September 2013 Part Four: Fashion as Costume Often though of as an unsatisfactory attempt at a large scale painting by a...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 3, 2014 | Modern
IMPRESSIONISM, FASHION, AND MODERNITY Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago September 2012-September 2013 Part Three: Fashion and Psychology Fashion is the masquerade that tells the truth–for the first time...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 27, 2014 | Reviews
ART AS WRITING In the dark days of the late 1970s, New York City was at its lowest ebb. Although Jimmy Carter never uttered the word “malaise” in his infamous “Malaise Speech” (1979), the Big Apple was a psycho poster city for malaise. Infuriated by the benign...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 26, 2014 | Modern
IMPRESSIONISM, FASHION, AND MODERNITY Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago September 2012-September 2013 Part Two: The Codes of Fashion Fashion and Gender Like the century itself, Parisian fashion was hybrid and...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 19, 2014 | Modern
IMPRESSIONISM, FASHION, AND MODERNITY Musée d’Orsay, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago September 2012-September 2013 Part One: Fashion as the Trope of Modernité Imagine if Impressionism existed today, not as a style but as...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 13, 2014 | Reviews
THE PARADOX OF TAR HEEL POLITICS. THE PERSONALITIES, ELECTIONS, AND EVENTS THAT SHAPED MODERN NORTH CAROLINA (2012) By Rob Christensen North Carolina is a small state of little consequence, so why is a political history of “modern North Carolina” of any interest to...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 12, 2014 | Theory
JEAN BAUDRILLARD (1929-2007) Simulacra and Simulations (1988) “The Precession of the Simulacra” (1981) As the Bible once stated, The simulacrum is never that/Which conceals the truth—it is/The truth which conceals that/There is none./The...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 10, 2014 | Other
If you woke up tomorrow, and your internet looked like this, what would you do? Imagine all your favorite websites taking forever to load, while you get annoying notifications from your ISP suggesting you switch to one of their approved “Fast Lane” sites. Think about...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 5, 2014 | Theory
JEAN BAUDRILLARD (1929-2007) The System of Objects (1968) “GARAP” Jean Baudrillard, the versatile French philosopher was a prolific writer whose chief claims to fame are his postmodern refutation of traditional Marxism and his influential articulation of...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 30, 2014 | Reviews
DISINTEGRATION THE SPLINTERING OF BLACK AMERICA (2010) by Eugene Robinson Affirmative Action has been an unqualified success. A legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, Affirmative Action forced employers to give “preferential” treatment to those who had been...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 29, 2014 | Postmodern
FREDERIC JAMESON (1934-) Postmodernism and Consumer Society (1983) Part Three As a literary scholar, Frederic Jameson was trained in the generation of “close reading” and has used literary analysis combined with a neo-Marxism of Karl Marx and the idea of...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 22, 2014 | Theory
FREDERIC JAMESON (1934-) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984) Part Two In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984) Frederic Jameson (1934-) examined film and architecture as forms of postmodernist culture that displayed...
