Ace Ventura, 9/22

This week we went to the Cornell Art Museum which I thought provided an interesting perspective on post modernism. So many of the theorists that we have read talk about the interpretation of literature and art and all the different ways of looking at things and going to the museum really allowed us to create our own interpretations. I thought the Andre Kertesz On Reading exhibit was the most relevant to our class. In all of the photographs, people were reading in diffferent settings and reading different things, whether they be novels, magazines, newspapers, or street signs. Some of the photos reminded me of Barthes idea of jouissance or the pleasure that one gets from reading. Many of the readers in the photographs were in seclusion, alone with their novels or magazines and just enjoying the pleasure of reading and the pleasure of interpreting the text to way they feel necessary and in a way that is applicable to their lives. And as a viewer of the photographs, I was able to come up with my own interpretation of the meaning of the photo and what meaning the reader was coming up with and the emotion behind that. So it was really like a third person perspective on reading voyeurism.
Warhol's Personalitie exhibit applied to Lyotard's idea of realism and verisimilitude, or having art that mirrors real life as close as possible. Some of these polaroids were just of ordinary people. And even the polaroids that were of celebrities didn't appear to be any fancier than the ones of ordinary people. As the tour guide pointed out, the women in the photos were wearing make up and that came into question when Warhol first produced these photos, but his response was that women wear make-up and dress themselves up in every day life so why should they be any different in these photos? Being able to view these different exhibits and relate our new theories to them made some of them a bit more clear and easily applied to the world around me.