Cultural Event Blog: Phobia

In order to write my cultural blog for this week I attended the lecture titled "American Phobia: Collecting in the History of Fear" by Sean Quimby, Syracuse University Library's director for Special Collection Research. I felt that the lecture tended to be a little uneventful because of the fact that there seemed to be no thesis or argument to the lecture. The lecture was much more devoted to presenting some of the famous historical documents associated with fear that can be found in Syracuse University's Special Collection Research Center. Some titles that were mentioned include "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" by Charles Darwin and "America's Retreat From Victory" by the infamous Senator Joe McCarthy. The lecture did not provide much information on different types of phobias or how they began as I had originally expected it would. However, it did provide a discussion on what Mr. Quimby noted as the two trends in the evolution of fear in America. He referred to these two trends as "the dogged invasion of fantasy" and the "gradual emergence of a therapeutic culture" in American history. The idea of a "dogged invasion of fantasy" was backed up by showing evidence of the fears that Americans had/have of things considered to be objects of fantasy. This can be seen in the public's reaction to the event when Orsen Welles read H.G. Wells' popular book "The War of the World's" on the radio. Quimby also showed how ideas of phobia and fantasy can be seen more and more throughout popular writings as the genre of Science Fiction novels seemed to reach its height in the United States. The "gradual emergence of a therapeutic culture" can be seen throughout the discussions of people dating back to colonial times where it became more and more socially acceptable to speak of the ideas of fear.

Binh Danh and Sontag

Binh Danh's chlorophyll prints provide an almost scary or spooky sense of reality of the Vietnam War. His photographs share a piece of history with the viewer because they are much more than just art, they allow you to almost feel the emotions of the soldiers or the Vietnamese locals, thus allowing a much more intimate connection to the photographs. In her article, "The Image-World", Susan Sontag refers to this same connection with the photographs by stating on page 350, "Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photgraph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask." This statement shows how a photograph can really be more than just a picture or a piece of art and goes along with the common saying of "a picture holds a thousand words". Sontag further refers to this statement in her article, "Regarding the Torture of Others", where she discusses the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. She shows how in today's society a photograph can be much more than just a keepsake item, but how it holds a piece of someone's identity and their feelings. We can relate this to the tragedies of the current war in Iraq because of how so many pictures find their way back to the public across the world and display the awful string of events taking place in Iraq. Everyday, through pictures, we are shown the terrible aspects of war, and creates a lack of confidence and approval for this war in Iraq.

What is Art?

In my opinion, creating a definition for the word "art" is inappropriate. Simply defining what can or can not be art would be an injustice to the entire world of past, present or future art. One of the many things that makes art so great is that there are no boundaries as to what art can or can not be. Whose to be the judge of whether or not something is art? Just because one person feels that something is not art, that doesn't mean that somebody else thinks it to be a masterpiece. My personal feelings for what the definition of art is agree with the statements that Thierry de Duve proposes in "Art Was a Proper Name". De Duve states that as human beings we still have not truly created a good understanding of the limts for the definition of art. He even argues that it is impossible to come to an accurate conclusion of what art is when he states on page 11 of "Art Was a Proper Name", "In other words, you will have to identity the properties that are common to all the things called painting, music, literature, and so on, then isolate the properties common to all the arts taken together, and finally eliminate those properties which are also present in things not called art at all. Arduous, interminable, it is a task that is also probably in vain. For even if you reached the conclusion, for example, that the presence of pigment on a support is the criterion identifying the members of the class of the painted things, this would not separate paintings as works of art, from all the painted things that have no claim to the name of art. Thus, you must discover the criterion that all subclasses composing the class of art-things have in common and that simultaneously discriminates art in general from non-art." This passage of de Duve's emphasizes that he believes there to be no true definition for the word "art". This statement of his also perfectly sets up his conclusion of what art is when he states on page 12, "art is everything that is called art...".


My most memorable experience with art took place in December of 2005. For the past year in my fine arts classes in high school I had learned about the properties of surrealism. During our unit on surrealism, we were asked to research an artist and then present to the class his styles, methods, works of art, and anything else interesting about the painter. I researched the famous surrealstic painter Salvador Dali. Through researching the artist's works of art I fell in love with many of his paintings, especially "The Hallucinogenic Toreador". I enjoyed how Dali was able to put together such random areas of painting and was still able to create a flawless composition of vibrant color that stayed true to his nature as a human. Later that school year, our art class took a field trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art because they had the largest exhibit on Dali anywhere in the world on display at the time. The show had pieces of his work from the begining, middle, and end of his career that had been gathered from different galleries all over the world. I loved the display of his artwork so much that I ended up going back to the exhibit a second and a third time. It was truly amazing, but each time I left the exhibit i still felt empty inside because my favorite painting, "The Hallucinogenic Toreador" had not been on display. Then finally in December of that year I was on vacation in Tampa, Florida with my family. While in Tampa, I made it a priority that we visit the Salvador Dali Art Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida because I knew that the painting would be on display there. Upon seeing the 13 foot by 10 foot masterpiece my face lit up. It was even better seeing it in person than I could have possibly imagine. I was in complete shock that I was finally able see my favorite painting in person that I stood in front of the painting staring at it for 10 minutes while narrating all the facts that I had learned about Dali to my less than thrilled parents.