(Via.)

(Via.)

Kenyon Cox, COLUMBIA & CUBA - MAGAZINE COVER - NUDE STUDY (1898)

In Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, Reynolds J. Scott-Childress has this to say about the above image:

Besides connoting the stronger/weaker sister relationship, the drawing plays on an older/younger sister or mother/daughter relationship. It suggests a scenario in which the older sister/mother (Columbia) has just finished disciplining the younger siter/daughter (Cuba) and is standing proudly while Cuba clings contritely to Columbia who wields a big stick, paddle, or bat…. [I]mages like this one need no support from male representatives of American power because such militantly masculinized images incorporate them already. However, Columbia’s muscular, mannish are leading down to the hand which grips the phallic stick may also be interpreted as leading back to these male representatives. The club is a clear reminder of the long arm of Uncle Sam and the “big-stick policy” articulated by Theodore Roosevelt. Both the Columbia and Cuba of Cox’s study gaze out at the viewer. One might imagine that this veiwer coule be a “New Woman” herself, a suffragette for whom such an image of female power, however imperialistic, might still have had emancipatory appeal. Nonetheless, the point to which the figure’s look is directed might just as easily be Uncle Sam’s controlling gaze. Columbia’s posture is remindful of that of a soldier standing at attention before this gaze which in the cartoon is not embodied by a corresponding cartoon character, but rather transparently conscripts the viewer.

This passage, though not without insight, in some ways exemplifies everything that is wrong with a lot of art criticism nowadays. As Susan Sontag explains, “The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” In other words, I seriously doubt most people’s first reaction to the above image is, “Of course, it’s about American imperialism. How obvious!” To quote Sontag again: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

Winslow Homer, Incoming Tide, Scarboro Maine, 1883, watercolor on paper.

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea—“cruising,” it is called.

Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

“I’ve always wanted to sail to the South Seas, but I can’t afford it,” some men say. What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of “security.” And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine, and before we know it our lives are gone.

What does a man need—really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in, and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all in the material sense, and we know it.

But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by, the dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

—Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

Lovely, just lovely. More here and here.

Paul Cézanne, The Card Players

Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.

—Malcolm Gladwell