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What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

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Teddy Roosevelt and The Man in the Arena

On April 23, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt presented a spectacular speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.

The title of his argument was — “Citizenship in a Republic” — and here is the famous “Man in The Arena” excerpt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

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The Collective Nothing: Postmodernism in the Modern Era

The Postmodernist Art movement honors the — Collective Nothing — because the genre doesn’t want to be tied to anything specific, verifiable, or humanly truthful.  The most famous Postmodernist art example in our lifetime is the disgusting “glass pyramid” addition to the Louvre Museum in Paris.

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Paris Hilton and the Million Dollar Bounty

Paris Hilton is finally due to be released from jail tomorrow after serving 23 days in the hoosegow.
There’s a million dollar bounty for Paris Hilton and last week I received email asking me to be a part of the hunt for Ms. Hilton before she is released from the Big House.

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A Lesson for Scooter in Paris

Are we sick of Paris Hilton yet?
Will we ever be rid of her now or is she now an American meme a powerful as Plymouth Rock?
Have we tired of her Weeping Semiotic?

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Celebrity Semiotic: The Bad Parenting of Paris Hilton

As a cogent and mindful people we are faced, once again, with the inappropriate disparity between rich and famous and the poor and unknown. I call this disconnect: The Celebrity Semiotic.

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