Friday, February 28, 2020

Katrina Van Tassel

Among the musical disciples who assembled, one evening in each week, to receive his instructions in psalmody, was Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer. She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy cheeked as one of her father’s peaches, and universally famed, not merely for her beauty, but her vast expectations. She was withal a little of a coquette, as might be perceived even in her dress, which was a mixture of ancient and modern fashions, as most suited to set off her charms. She wore the ornaments of pure yellow gold, which her great-great-grandmother had brought over from Saardam; the tempting stomacher of the olden time; and withal a provokingly short petticoat, to display the prettiest foot and ankle in the country round.
 --Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy  Hollow"

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Managed Middlebrow Mimesis



Successful "art packaging" can exercise the dynamics of peer-defined normative mimetic reinforcements. The peer-normative symbols are focused though an archetype-model (an author in this case) and the cultural artifacts (books) created by that model, which are packaged, transmitted, and regulated through the media promotional apparatus. The symbol of the media promotional apparatus (Steve Allen in this case) patterns the archetypal behaviors of involvement, veneration and deference that consumers are encouraged to imitate.

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Sunday, February 2, 2020

Artist Making an Image (representations and contexts)



On display at the American Museum of Natural History.

Saturday, February 1, 2020