by Jeanne Willette | Apr 12, 2013 | Contemporary Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy
SIGMUND FREUD (1856 – 1939) PART TWO DREAMS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND The “psyche” was a term borrowed from Plato who had used the term as designated the “soul,” but for Sigmund Freud, the psyche was composed of energies or basic instincts. These instincts are...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 5, 2013 | Modern Culture, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy
SIGMUND FREUD (1856 – 1939) PART ONE ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE SUBCONSCIOUS Freud died in exile in London from tongue and throat cancer, brought on from his longtime habit of smoking some twenty cigars a day. He had left his native Vienna reluctantly, as he also...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 29, 2013 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHERS AND THE GERMANS New Topographics refers to more than a visual tradition in photography. New Topographics examines a mindset that is distinctly Western: marking, mapping, conquest, enclosure, and control. Land and territory has always been...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 22, 2013 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
PHOTOGRAPHY AS CONCEPT Landscape and Idea The leading edges of Postmodernism were architecture and photography and film, all of which moved away from Modernism in the sixties. By the eighties, the shifts seen in these mediums would be characterized as...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 15, 2013 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Georgia O’Keeffe, Part Two Refusing to be trapped by demeaning art writing that discussed her flower paintings as inherently female, Georgia O’Keeffe defied gender expectations by taking up that most masculine of subjects—the new towering...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 15, 2013 | Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
PHOTOGRAPHY and MANIPULATION The decades of the 1960s and 1970s are notable for a return of manipulated photography, that is, photography that is not “straight” but changed or manipulated by the artist for expressive reasons. One of the debates surrounding...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 8, 2013 | Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER ROBERT FRANK The new generation of photographers, led by Robert Frank, did not come into their own until Edward Steichen resigned from the Museum of Modern Art, the only art museum at that time that seriously collected photography. A disciple of...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 1, 2013 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
WHAT ROBERT FRANK SAW Following in the footsteps of Walker Evans who, in the late 1930’s had produced The American Photographs, Robert Frank found the humble and forgotten America. But where Evans, the sophisticated and urbane New Englander, had located...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 22, 2013 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
ROBERT FRANK AND THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC VOCABULARY After Robert Frank, contemporary photography was never the same. In the middle of the twentieth century, photography was redefined by one book, The Americans, published in 1958 in France as Les Américains, and in...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 15, 2013 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Art Criticism, Modern Art Podcasts, Podcast
Georgia O’Keeffe, Part One The career of Georgia O’Keeffe was a paradox: on one hand, she was dependent upon the patronage of her husband, photographer and art dealer, Alfred Stieglitz; on the other hand, she always had an independent vision. The podcast,...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 15, 2013 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
Finding White Art There is an interesting painting by the (white male) artist, Mark Tansey, White on White (1986), featuring an unexpected encounter between a Bedouin tribe and a band of Eskimos. At the edges of a sandstorm and a snowstorm is a white out, a reference...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 7, 2013 | Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
WHITE, WHITER, AND ”WHITENESS” The study of “whiteness” is a newly emerged field of scholarship, only about ten to fifteen years old. One if its leading scholars, Richard Dyer, expressed concern about even embarking upon such an enterprise for, after all, isn’t the...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 1, 2013 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Criticism, Postmodern
Girls Night Out As was explained earlier, after the Witch Hunts of the seventeenth century, women who were single, independent, and sometimes lesbian were able to function with more freedom from legal persecution than their male counterparts. So great was the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 25, 2013 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Criticism, Postmodern
The Many Shades of Gay As the previous posts pointed out, many artists who were gay were caught up in attempts from various forces, both political and religious, to censor art. Confused and angered that art would be attacked in a land of free speech, the American art...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 18, 2013 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Criticism, Postmodern
The Reception of “Queer Art” Part Two A large blue painting, the color of a dark daylight sky, filled with falling birds, dropping from the heavens, wings paralyzed in death is one of the great images on the AIDS crisis. Using the discredited and...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 18, 2013 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Norman Rockwell, Part Three Contrary to what many Americans assumed, Norman Rockwell was a very modern and forward thinking artist. Far from being old-fashioned, the artist moved with the times and was able to follow the nation from the sleepy fifties to the turbulent...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 11, 2013 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
WHAT IS “HOMOSEXUAL ART?” Part One Once again, the question arises. Like the questions of what is “Black Art?” What is “Chicano Art” What is Women’s Art?’ the query demands a neat definition that is impossible to give. Is...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 4, 2013 | Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
LESBIANS IN CULTURE In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation. Simone de Beauvoir There is a historical coincidence...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 28, 2012 | Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
OUT OF THE CLOSET From the end of the nineteenth century on, homosexuals were put firmly “in the closet.” The “Closet” is a metaphor for “silence” about one’s forbidden sexual identity and one’s forbidden sexual longings. Fear of social disapproval and, perhaps even...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 21, 2012 | Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
WHAT IS “QUEER?” “Queer” was once an insulting term of scorn and distaste applied to homosexuals and the aggressive appropriation of this term by the homosexual community as a defiant positive identification signaled a change from the meaning of the term...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 14, 2012 | Contemporary Culture, Modern
CREATING HOMOSEXUALITY “Chick equals nigger equals queer. Think it over.” Unattributed quote Homosexuality In his 1980s series of books on human (mostly male) sexuality, the French...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 14, 2012 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Art Podcasts, Modern Culture, Podcast
Norman Rockwell, Part Two America was never more united in a single national effort than it was during the Second World War. During the dark days of these years, American on the home front took comfort from a steady stream of covers on the Saturday Evening...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 14, 2012 | Modern, Modern Culture
MODERNITY and SEXUALITY Modern Homosexuality The beginning of the modern homosexuality is linked to a new economic system: capitalism. Capitalism, compared to feudalism, is marked by a specific kind of society characterized by urban centers and bureaucracy. ...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 7, 2012 | Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
THE EIGHTIES AND BLACK ART All artists of color are faced with the question of whether or not to assert their ethnic identity in their art or to simply make art without ethnicity. The white world expects Chicanos to make only murals, for example, and expects Blacks...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 30, 2012 | Contemporary Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Culture, Postmodern
CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN ART Part One The story of contemporary African American art must begin with the post-war culture and the emerging Civil Rights movement of the late fifties. By that time, Blacks were divided into two cultures—the culture of the...
