Wendy Steiner

On her book The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art

Cover Interview of August 02, 2011

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“The body politic has become hard to distinguish from art.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“If the abstraction, surrealism, and formalism of the 20th-century avant-garde insisted on art’s contrast to the real, 21st-century artists often see art as a way to reconnect audiences to reality, to provide access to the world outside the work of art.”

On the second:

“Models are real people who deliberately simulate the state of an image by posing.”

philosophy / art / media studies / art theory / art criticism / bram christopher / sontag susan / green jeffrey edward /

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011