So I want to start by, um, by first welcoming everyone to the second lecture in the terror lectures in American Art this year,
the lecture series is focussed on the topic, a contest of images, American art as culture war.
And my name is John Blake Jr. I'm the 2018 2019 Terror Visiting Professor of American Art here at Oxford.
And before I begin today's particular lecture, I want to give a bit of a disclaimer.
I'm going to show some imagery that may be disturbing, some violent imagery.
So if it is upsetting for any reason, please feel free to get up and leave the room.
Not a problem at all, but I just want to give warning to everyone in advance that the topic today does focus on images and issues of violence.
The most significant work of art at the twenty seventeen Whitney Biennial,
the exhibition of contemporary American art held every two years at the Whitney Museum in New York City, was not supposed to be part of the show.
It was a performative gesture, perhaps a work of activism more than art by Pirker Bright,
who walked through the Whitney's galleries with a grey t shirt bearing an inscription in Sharpie marker.
The back of his shirt was emblazoned with a highly charged phrase Black Death spectacle.
He stood in front of another work, an official work, one sanctioned and selected by the biennial curators,
and started recording on his iPhone while streaming on Facebook Live.
He captured conversations with museum visitors about the painting behind him.
He described that canvas as, quote, a scheme for the Whitney to create controversy and,
quote, to generate media attention through spectacle, through shock and awe.
Bright's action, effectively reframed and re signified that painting created by the artist Donna Schutz in 2016 and titled Open Casket.
The painting depicts the body of Emmett Till,
an African-American boy killed by two white men in 1955 when one of the most shocking lynching murders in American history.
Photographs of Till's open casket funeral appeared throughout the mass media,
and the painting shows his painting attempts to remediate these images, which linger in American national memory through pigment on canvas.
But the painting incited an intense backlash. Critics angrily condemned it as cultural appropriation.
It's a white woman had painted a subject, a black boy that was not hers to paint.
She had appropriated a historical example of violent imagery in order to create black death spectacle to shock and awe.
By blocking our view of Donna Schwarz's painting, by standing directly in front of it,
blocking our gaze and labelling the work with an aggressive textual description,
Bright's action, effectively reappropriate, fits his own appropriation of Till's body.
A photograph posted to social media captured his action. The image and images of the painting soon appeared everywhere.
Artnet, Artforum, The Guardian, The New York Times, hyper allergic.
The Washington Post right then appropriated this photograph.
Yet again, turning it into a drawing titled Confronting My Own Possible Death,
further appropriating his own action and the media spectacle it had created.
These interventions effectively reframe and re signify as painting, yet again forcing her work under his gaze,
forcing her use of an image into his representational terms, thus claiming ownership and possession.
Who can see and who is seen? What are the ethics of representation?
Bright's response was actually only one of many artists pastiche.
Lumumba, for example, hung a banner outside the Whitney Museum that read, quote,
The white woman whose lies got Emmett Till lynched is still alive in twenty.
Feel old yet, end quote. And he he's referring there to Carolyn Bryant, who is now age 85 and whose interaction with TILL had prompted Till's murder.
The controversy, however, did not explode until the artist Hannah Black posted a provocative letter online on Facebook.
It is worth reading her letter closely to the curators and staff of the Whitney Biennial.
I am writing to ask you to remove Donna Schwarz's painting open casket with the urgent
recommendation to the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum.
As you know, this painting depicts the dead body of 14 year old and the till in the open casket that his mother chose,
saying, let the people see what I've seen.
That even the disfigured corpse of a child was not sufficient to move the white gaze from its habitual cold calculation is evident daily.
And in a myriad of ways, not least the fact that this painting exists at all.
In brief, the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about black people
because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute black suffering into profit and fun.
Though the practise has been normalised for a long time. Although Schwartz's attention may be to present white shame,
this chain is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead black boy by white artist.
Those nonblack artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should,
first of all, stop treating black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Shultz's white.
Free speech in white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others and are not natural rights.
The painting must go. Ongoing debates on the appropriation of black culture by non black artists have highlighted the relation
of these appropriations to the systemic oppression of black communities in the US and worldwide.
And in a wider historical view to the capitalist appropriation of the lives and bodies of black people with which our present era began.
Meanwhile, a similarly high stakes conversation has been going on about the willingness of a largely
non black media to share images and footage of black people in torment and distress,
or even at the moment of death, evoking deeply shameful white American traditions such as the public lynching.
Although derided by many white and white affiliated critics as trivial and naive,
discussions of appropriation and representation go to the heart of the question of how we might seek to live in a reparative mode with humility,
clarity, humour and hope. Given the barbaric realities of racial and gender violence on which our lives are founded,
I see no more important foundational consideration for art that this question,
which otherwise dissolves into empty formalism or irony into a pastime or a therapy.
The curators of the Whitney Biennial surely agree because they have staged a show in which black life and antiblack violence feature as themes.
And Ben and Ben approvingly reviewed it happen approvingly, reviewed in major publications for doing so,
although it is possible that this inclusion means no more than that.
Blackness is hot right now, driven into nonblack consciousness by prominent black uprisings and struggles across the U.S. and elsewhere.
I choose to assume as much capacity, capacity for insight and sincerity in the biennial curators as I do in myself.
Which is to say, we all make terrible mistakes sometimes, but through effort,
the more important thing could be how we move to make amends for them and what we learn in the process.
The painting must go. Thank you for reading. Needless to say, the painting was not destroyed.
It did not go. The museum did not remove it. The Whitney did revise its wall label.
More explanation that the museum, quote, as a Museum of American Art must engage this enduring history.
And quote, Schultz also added an explanation of her intentions.
She related the painting to the summer of twenty sixteen,
the summer before the election of Donald Trump, quote, a long, violent summer of mass shootings,
rallies filled with hate speech and an ever escalating number of black men being
shot execution style by police recorded with camera phones as witnesses and quote.
She claimed that photographs of Tyll quote felt analogous to the tragic events of the summer.
What had been hidden was now in plain view, end quote.
The debate over Donna Schwartz's painting of Amatil and the incendiary responses it generated raise profound questions.
Is history universal? Is the past available to all?
Is American history available to all Americans? To anyone?
Or alternatively, to a particular historical episodes only belong to certain people.
To those who claim ownership over the past based on identity and shared experience.
Who can speak and for whom? Who can see and what is seen.
How is the right to representation determined and who decides? And finally, how do current events, the violence that saturates our visual culture,
the images of police brutality that we all see in newspapers and online?
How do these events and images shape and reshape the debate over Schwarz's painting?
You might talk. Today, I explore these questions not so much to answer them, but to reveal the layers of complexity in this controversy.
The layers of complexity that extend back into history.
Before proceeding, I want to make clear that I can only offer my own perspective.
I make no claim over how others perceive these images, and I'm not interested in arguing for or against Shultz's painting.
And the responses are generated as I see it.
The controversy is in part about the need to validate the full range of responses charged images generate.
I mean, I am inspired by the hope in Black's letter that we all might live in a reparative mode.
We can only do that by taking part in these high stakes conversations.
This talk is the second in a series of four lectures that attempts to do precisely that.
That examines the resurgence of the culture wars in the United States.
Two recent controversies and high stakes conversations last week in a discussion of
ongoing protests at the Whitney against the museum board member Warren Kanter's,
whose company, Safari Land Manufacturers, teargassed.
I presented a few of my hypotheses about recent culture wars, ideas I want to carry across the floor talks and repeat here.
I suggested that, first of all, one, these controversies are both analogue and digital.
To the debates are framed by a set of diametrically opposed, dialectically inverted positions.
Three, the controversies are political but also aesthetic.
For they are about the present, but also the past.
And five, they seem new but are actually old.
These claims are consistent with the controversy over open casket, which perfectly illustrates these tensions.
It is about a painting in the present. It seems new, but it also engaged questions about the past.
It is about a physical thing, but the debate happens in the digital sphere.
The most revealing aspect of Parker Bright's protest is the way it indexes these contradictions.
It shows him in situ at the museum. But his action is captured as a digital image, one that also depicts a woman's iPhone reflecting the scene.
This meson, a beam of references, clarifies one of the main arguments of this lecture series.
These cultural wars reflect how contemporary digital technologies are disrupting older historical arguments.
Arguments about the past, animating them and also animating American art and visual culture in new ways.
We live in an age of image overload, of constant visual bombardment, of too many images,
a blur on thin glass screens on our computers and iPhones, all of history is disturbingly visible.
I want to argue that this contemporary condition is a key feature linking all of these culture wars.
This debate is also representative of many other recent controversies in the U.S. involving identity politics and claims of cultural appropriation.
Specifically, the appropriation of black culture by white cultural producers, artists, novelists, musicians and so forth.
Today, I examine that debate, but also situated historically relating it to the visual dynamics that remain unseen and unacknowledged,
but which nonetheless structure these historical images of violence.
Vision and the gaze are both reactionary and progressive weapons.
The painting is contested now, but its image was contested long ago.
Lynching is vigilante violence. It is murder committed by a mob.
Typically, though, not exclusively by whites against blacks as racialized and racist terrorism.
The majority of lynchings occurred in the United States between 1880 and 1930,
when there were four thousand six hundred and ninety six documented murders.
Many more were never recorded. The vast majority of these murders occurred in the Jim Crow South.
Their perpetrators were rarely brought to justice.
These crimes were intended to defy the legal system altogether and there and they were often even tacitly condoned by police and the legal system.
The lynching of Emmett Till was one of the most widely covered cases,
and the brutal images from that event effectively helped and lynching as a common extra juridical practise in the US.
This specific story of Amatil needs to be told.
Emmett Till grew up in Chicago, where his grandmother had moved as part of the Great Migration out of the Deep South,
to the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast in the early 20th century.
A migration prompted by the racism of the Jim Crow South, but also the promise of opportunities elsewhere.
In the summer of 1955, when Till was 14 years old, he asked his mother to allow him to visit his cousins in Mississippi for a few weeks.
And despite her reservations about a boy of 14 travelling on his own,
she sent him down by train to the small town of Money, Mississippi, where he would stay with his great uncle Moses Wright,
on a Wednesday evening, August 24th,
till with his cousins and some friends drove to Bryant's grocery and meat market at nearby general store for candy and sodas.
Carolyn Bryant, a white. 21 year old woman, was working the cash register till wanted bubble gum.
It is not clear what happened at Bryant's grocery,
but whatever occurred violated the rigid social codes to dictating behaviour between whites and blacks and between men and women,
boys and girls in the Jim Crow South. Bryant later told her attorney that Till's hand touched hers when he gave her money.
This alone would violate taboos against physical contact across racial lines.
Tilden put his candy money on the counter, as was common custom.
Actually, I cite alone just making eye contact. Just looking was enough to violate taboos.
Local news reports at the time also described what similarly seemed like innocuous transgressions till may have failed to say.
Yes, ma'am. He may have whistled at Bryant. In response, Till was kidnapped from his uncle Moses Wright's house by Carolyn Bryan's husband, Rob.
Excuse me, Roy Bryant and her brother in law, J.W. Milam.
The two men beat till shot him and dumped his body, weighed down by a giant metal fan from a cotton gin tied to his neck in the Tallahatchie River.
The body was discovered three days later. He was sent by train back to his mother, Mamie Till Bradley,
who famously insisted against the demands of authorities in Mississippi and her own funeral director in Chicago and holding an open casket funeral.
The coffin lid was propped open, only a thin sheet of glass covering her son's body.
She famously declared that it was this body, a visible body that would create social change in the United States that might change the body politic.
And the Till's body was visible to all who attended.
Tens of thousands of mourners who went up around the block. There were also many photographs.
Newspapers reproduced images of the funeral. These were seen by millions.
One in particular is striking. It's a PIC's Till's mother in shock at the side of the casket.
Her face is anguished. It is riveting and awful.
But I am drawn to the coffins silk lining, which serves as a backdrop for the display of still more photographs.
This is a photograph of photographs. An image of images. These pictures displayed on the coffin lining TTYL as a boy.
In one he poses with his mother.
This particular image of Mamie Till Bradley Index is the way photographic images have framed this event since it occurred.
I find it so striking simply because it anticipates the image overload that defined and continues to define Till's murder.
Many of the other photographs taken at the time were more gruesome focus less on
the funeral and the public task of mourning and instead on the image of brutality.
The most shocking brand in Jet magazine, the major news magazine targeting African-Americans.
Shot by the photographer David Jackson. This one particular photo showed physical trauma in close detail.
And it is also worth mentioning that many of these images were actually artists representations,
which raises a question of how aesthetic cessation of this image occurs in different contexts from different artists for different purposes.
How? Excuse me. How were these images looked at in the 1950s?
And how do we look? Look. Excuse me? And how do we look at them now?
How does Donna Shutz look at them? Are they gratuitous, fulfilling, a disturbing, voyeuristic desire to indulge in spectacular violence,
to witness Black Death spectacle, as Parker Bright so provocatively puts it in her memoir?
Mamie Till Bradley argued the opposite. She claimed that seeing the body of her son was urgent, that the body needed to be visible.
That vision could be a powerful agent of social change, rendering the violence enacted by whites visible to all quote.
I knew that I could talk for the rest of my life about what happened to my baby.
I could explain it in great detail. I could describe what I saw laid out there, one piece, one inch, one body part at a time.
I could do all that and people would still not get the full impact.
They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this.
I knew that if they walked by the casket, if people opened the pages of Jet magazine or The Chicago Defender, another African-American newspaper,
if other people could see it with their own eyes, then together we could find a way to express what we had seen.
The art historian Martin Berger knows that the most graphic images of Till's body only appeared in African-American publications.
The black press used them tactically, strategically as a means of generating outrage that could propel civil rights activism.
The white press avoided these images altogether. They censored them.
Photographs of violence were, of course, featured in mainstream white newspapers.
So the lack of images documenting Till's murder was not the result of an editorial ban on disturbing visual culture of fear of upsetting readers.
Graphic depictions of dead soldiers, for example, frequently filled the pages of Life magazine during the Second World War censoring
and the Till's body instead reflected a fear that the images power was too strong,
that they might destabilise liberal narratives around race.
Or, as Berger puts it, quote,
The singularly unified white resistance to publication offers evidence that dissemination of the till photographs would have produced
more unambiguously progressive results than the circulation of any other period photograph of white on black violence and quote.
Significant accounts from the likes of Black Panther, Eldridge Cleaver and boxer Muhammad Ali attest to this power,
a traumatic but compelling power that instil fear, anger, rage and sadness in those who viewed the images.
Many who saw them later became leaders of the civil rights movement.
The Emmett Till generation. They were called in this sense, the use of the images was helpful to African-American poet Langston Hughes,
for example, embraced the spread of such images via mass media, quote, showing just one lynched body on TV.
Seems to me long overdue, end quote. Or as Mamie Till Bradley announced on the station platform, according to press reports,
when her son's body arrived in Chicago by train from Money, Mississippi, quote, The death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.
End quote. In other words,
the failure of mainstream white publications to publish these images the way they remained invisible is actually a reactionary political gesture.
The graphic depiction of violence is here progressive,
revealing through vision a truth about American society which might force other Americans to change the way that society functioned.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, however, were soon acquitted by an all male, all white jury.
They would later confess in the pages of Look magazine, a publication whose title is so appropriate for our discussion of what is visible
and what is invisible to the acts that committed the murder they got away with.
On its own, without the title, without the wall text, without the critical reappropriation,
the reframing and re signifying provided by Pirker Bright and Hannah Black.
The painting does not seem to convey much of this history, at least to me.
My I. It's wrong to the lining of the casket with a silk fabric falls in painterly patterns purples,
pinks, blues, yellows, oranges, a rich texture, a seductive layer of carefully worked pigment.
The painter's marks are at once informal and spontaneous, but also controlled and articulated here.
The fabric. Excuse me here.
The fabric does not evoke anything about the episode at all.
It doesn't index the mediation of the event through images. It is all surface decoration.
We could probably perform the same type of analysis on the decorative,
painterly patterns that comprise and the tails face the stumbled and worked pigment.
Indeed, what is most disturbing about the painting is not the fact that it depicts the body of Emmett Till.
But the tension of that fact against the visual play of the painting surface.
The painting abstracts charged content into mere form.
It creates a transformation of history into something literally superficial.
Hannah Black called this transformation a transmutation of the reality embedded in the image.
Its reference to an actual person, the real Emmett Till, into, quote, profit and funds, unquote.
Last week, we discussed the phenomena of earth washing,
the idea that the investment of capital into the arts turns that capital into cultural capital,
into a mask, a positive value that can disguise negative ones.
At the Twenty Seventeen Biennial, a version of this dynamic was also at play.
The issue is not that Schultz's painting attains monetary value.
Schwartz has confirmed that it will never be sold,
but that it tienes cultural capital of value resulting from a sense of intellectual engagement with the politics of race.
Even though that engagement might might be no more than a spectacle of racial
reconciliation intended to entertain a largely white audience at the museum.
In viewing this painting, we, of course, become complicit with the aesthetic experience it creates with the contradictions between form and content.
We cannot escape the seduction of pigment on canvas.
This is part of what makes the painting uncomfortable to view.
Lynching is vigilante violence, but it is also visual violence specifically connected to the image,
to photography and the politics of seeing the crime of looking often incited murder to begin with looking across boundaries of race and sex.
Carolyn Bryant, in her own memoir, recalls how the social codes in Indianola, Mississippi, where she grew up, were conditioned by vision.
The prevailing rule was that blacks, quote, better not look any white person in the eye and quote.
Lynching was also visual in the sense of public spectacle. The murders were often viewed by the lynch mob in a common space.
Though this is not the case with the lynching Minitel, but making images of lynchings was also central to the ritual.
And these photographs frequently circulated as souvenirs or keepsakes mounted on cardstock or sent as postcards.
They not only increased the circle of participants who took part by proxy through the consumption of the image,
they also served as a warning, a threat to black Americans enacting a type of panoptic power in which the image looks back.
It instils fear in those who see it. And yet these images were highly complex representations and could also be reappropriated, reframed,
re signified and inverted for a time alternative uses an image weaponized in white visual culture used as
an instrument to police consensus amongst whites and intimidate blacks could also serve inverse purposes,
especially in the hands of anti lynching activists. In the 1920s, these activists purposely used such images in their campaigns,
and I want to offer a brief warning that the next image is particularly disturbing.
But I think it's worth and valuable to discuss one famous example, a 1935 leaflet circulated by the NAACP.
The most significant civil rights organisation shows the body of Rubins Stacy.
The leaflet uses text to modify the way we consume the image.
Quote, Do not look at the Negro. His earthly problems are ended.
Instead, look at the seven white children who gaze at this gruesome spectacle and quote.
The leaflet takes the gaze directed at the lynched man.
An object of visual focus as indicated by the sight lines provided by the mob of white
spectators surrounding the body and redirects it toward the white girl at right.
In other words, vision itself, as coded through the logic of the gaze,
is directed in a way that diverts attention from the act of murder and focuses it on the act of looking at murder.
The gaze is a form of violence, one that turns its centre of attention into an object,
one that objectifies its subject, that dehumanises controls and polices.
Here, however, we are asked to shift that weapon from a victim of violence to a perpetrator of violence,
or if not a perpetrator of actual violence, then a perpetrator of visual violence.
The leaflet demonstrates how an intervention in spectatorship can transform the way these images function.
This is precisely what Mamie Till Bradley did with the photographs of her son's funeral and of his body.
She also reappropriated, reframed, re signified she turned what could have been exploitative into a form of activism, constructing new meanings.
I do not discuss these images eagerly looking at lynching photographs is awful, but now looking at lynching photographs is also awful.
Avoiding them, averting the gaze entirely, pretending they do not exist is an act of repression,
a suppression of history of the past, but also of the present.
I am showing them because understanding how these images worked is actually crucial for understanding how they work.
Now how the controversy in twenty seventeen repeats the history of lynching photography and
the way that vision became implicated with power structures first in the Jim Crow South,
but also again in the mass media environment of the 1950s, an age of newspapers, of inky photographs printed in black and white on grey newsprint.
And, of course, the way that vision. Again, becomes implicated with power structures.
Today, in the new media environment of digital culture, we have a responsibility to look at these awful images,
not to normalise them, not to legitimate them or glorify them, but to understand how they operated and continue to operate.
In viewing these images, we, of course, also become participants in the violent spectacle.
It does not matter whether we are viewing Schulz's painting, Bright's intervention or the image as weapon that Mamie Till Mobley.
Excuse me, Mamie Till Bradley embraced. We are forced into a relationship with what we see.
We cannot escape entrapment. And this is part of the paradox.
This dynamic plays out constantly. It's worth mentioning that the front of Parker Bright's t shirt declared no lynching mob.
It announces our complicity. We are that mob.
And yes, this dynamic recurs right now in this lecture where a discussion of one of the most significant controversies in the arts in recent years.
A topic I believe is important to publicly discuss, a topic that already has been publicly discussed in every major news outlets.
Inevitably, unavoidably also restaged is the visual dynamics that caused the uproar in the first place.
Again, I don't believe in avoiding these discussions or images, but I am very aware that any discussion about violent imagery cannot help but
perpetuate a history of violence and the racial politics that produced the images.
In this way, the politics circa 2017 are also the politics circa 1955.
And this is for me, the point of historic sizing, this controversy.
A point that is largely missing from the discussion,
which tends to be completely a historical operating on the instantaneous timescale of Twitter and Instagram and Internet outrage.
The supposed transgression of Till's murder was an interaction with Carolyn Bryant.
Perhaps nothing more than a glance, a gaze then looking.
Mamie Till Bradley, Donna Schultz and Parker Bright all intervene in this looking and relooking.
Images of violence can be dehumanising and damaging, but can also assert through a negative statement.
The value of human life, they can be constructive.
Susan Sontag famously claimed that, quote, photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses.
And quote, This simple statement encapsulates the paradox of viewing the body of Emmett Till.
Hannah Black's letter, her attack against ownership's is painting generated an equally intense counter attack.
Another backlash. This is, after all, one of the key features of a culture war, a polarised, dialectically inverted response.
Most figures in the arts completely disagreed with her argumentation, Coco Fusco,
for example, denounced the call for the destruction of Schwarz's painting on The View.
The day to. Daytime talk show. Whoopi Goldberg compared blacks call for destruction to actual fascism,
to the way Nazis burned books and targeted modern art with the epithet degenerate.
This controversy has departed from the positions on censorship characteristic of an early generation of culture wars.
In those controversies in the 1990s, right wing critics deemed works of art morally offensive and demanded their removal.
Here we have calls for image destruction from a progressive left, not the right.
The controversy does not fit familiar positions on debates over freedom of expression versus censorship.
These demands not only contradict familiar positions from other controversies, they also relate in complex ways to the historical events of the 1950s.
As I already mentioned, and as art historian Myron Berger compellingly argues,
the weight the white mainstream media censored images of Till's body from its pages because they feared the power of these images as weapons,
destabilising the status quo. But the actual sites where these historical actions occurred in the 1950s have also been targeted, have been censored.
Bryant's grocery and meat store, where TTYL bought bubble gum is now a ruin.
Long abandoned, overgrown, dilapidated, falling into the past.
In the summer of twenty seventeen. At the same time, the news media ran editorials denouncing Hannah Black.
The historical markers at sites like Bryant's grocery were vandalised, defaced, their images destroyed.
These acts of iconoclasm,
this destruction of images was presumably intended as a protest against the progressive politics to which the Till's story is now associated.
The way it propelled the civil rights movement,
school students visiting on a class trip attempted to repair the signs to make new images telling the story of TTYL.
Other historical markers in Money, Mississippi, on the Mississippi Freedom Trail were routinely attacked,
are routinely attacked, riddled with bullet holes, used for target practise sites for actual gun violence.
These signs have all been replaced multiple times.
These acts of image destruction are the inverse of Hannah Black's call for image destruction with the historical markers, vandalism and defacement.
Censorship is used to silence history,
whereas Black hopes to silence shots in what she sees as as opportunistic and self-serving association with his history.
The politics of censorship around this episode in 2017 compared to 1955 are highly conflicted.
The positions are not consistent. They do not align. We experience the culture war as a set of dialectically inverted positions.
But this polarisation ignores the complexity of positions around these images in different contexts and moments in time.
Ultimately. Ultimately, I appreciate the radicality of black statement and Bright's gesture.
I spoke last week about radical thinking, about how activists have embraced a set of positions that are radical because they are perhaps untenable
and that these positions therefore allow us to think about what a more humane art world might be.
Hannah Black makes a radical argument, and it worked as media strategy.
Donna Schultz, on the other hand, seems to have encountered this controversy unintentionally without realising what she was doing.
She was, I think it is fair to say, naive, unprepared for backlash and for.
American visual culture is a contest of images, and we are all entangled in it.
I can't resolve this contest.
Can't answer all the questions, but perhaps thinking this contest historically reveals it as in part, a clash between the present and the past.
A contemporary culture of rapid image circulation and digital networks creates constant confrontations with history.
History is framed and really framed. It signifies and we signifies.
I want to repeat something I said at the conclusion of my talk last week.
Given the pervasiveness of these digital networks, the constant bombardment of images, it is certain there will be many more culture wars to come.
We will look at another one. One related to the story of them until next week.