Duke - Edward M. Gomez https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/author/edward-m-gomez en Books: March-April 2008 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/books-march-april-2008 <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>&nbsp;</p> <table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0" style="width:100%"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div style="margin-bottom: 5px; width: 48%; float: left;"> <p><strong>Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains: A Guidebook<br /> By Georgann Eubanks '76. University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 440 pages. $35.</strong></p> <p>Location pertains to feeling," Eudora Welty writes in her landmark essay, "Place in Fiction"; "feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place." Southern writers have long been accused of being obsessed with a sense of place. Kinfolk and sweethearts and workmates are all tied to a location in Southern storytellers' minds, and those locations to histories, personal and official, and those histories become story. Like all clichés, this truism about place and Southern storytelling has its roots in age-old traditions of that self-same identification with a landscape and an understanding of how a connection to that landscape shapes lives.</p> <p><em>Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains</em> gives a rich glimpse into how that connection has been fostered, and more, it excites a desire for reconnection and fresh connections to North Carolina vistas. The first book in a three-part series of guidebooks funded by the North Carolina Arts Council—the Piedmont and the Coastal Plains are to follow in 2009 and 2010—this handsome volume enchants with its stories of the raw material so many North Carolina writers have forged into their narratives.</p> <p>It has become a perennial question: Why has North Carolina in particular, of all the loquacious Southern states, produced such a great number of wordsmiths, from its colonial days to its modern banking present? So often agrarian-based, so often bound up in those diurnal Southern topics of fixation—Protestant religion, race, farming—North Carolina writers have taken their humble state and worked and reworked it, from Charles Chestnutt's defiant slaves of Fayetteville to Thomas Wolfe's Asheville boarding-house sojourners, to Reynolds Price's twentieth century Piedmont existentialism.</p> <p>The most delightful thing about Georgann Eubanks' absorbing book is how she slices and dices the great overabundance of the North Carolinian literary heritage, how she uncovers literary landmarks in at times unlikely places. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent time in Hendersonville; Thomas Dixon, who wrote <em>The Clansman</em>, made into the movie <em>Birth of a Nation,</em> was from Shelby; Valle Crucis was the inspiration for Romulus Linney's historical novel <em>Heathen Valley</em>, and the general store, built in 1883, still stands there. It would seem every small town and hamlet has had a scribe either born there or inspired by it.</p> <p>The book is divided into two geographical sections. "The Southern Mountains: Place" includes, among other places, Black Mountain and Swannanoa, home to the two legendary and unusual schools—Black Mountain College and Warren Wilson College—known for their progressive approaches to education, especially the arts. Black Mountain College, no longer in business, was famous for the many dancers and artists and writers who taught and studied there (Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage) from the early 1930s until it closed in 1956. We are told about Canton, the hometown of former North Carolina poet laureate Fred Chapell '61, A.M. '64, and given snatches of the world he returns to over and over again in his vast oeuvre. Of course we are treated to Asheville's rich and well-known history (Thomas Wolfe, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald), to Flat Rock, where poet Carl Sandburg made his final home, but also to places like Cullowhee, home to our current poet laureate, Kathryn Stripling Byer. But given equal footing with the well-known writers are lesser-known, though interesting and important, contributors to the tapestry, many who deserve rediscovering.&nbsp;</p> <p>"The Northern Mountains and Foothills: Voice," the second section of the book, gives us places like Celo, where novelist Anne Tyler '61 grew up, and Andrews Geyser, a man-made waterworks created when the railroads were built in the Blue Ridge, which John Ehle writes about in <em>The Road</em>. Tryon, where singer/songwriter Nina Simone grew up; Rutherfordton, which Tony Earley writes about with such wry joy; exotic Little Switzerland, which Doris Betts describes in her 1981 novel, <em>Heading West</em>—towns upon towns, each with a story, each that gives us a more and more layered sense of North Carolina's cultural legacy. The photography, largely by Donna Campbell, at times whimsical and times reportorial, almost always lyrical and evocative, whets the appetite for more, makes us want to get up and go see for ourselves.</p> <p>Well researched and pleasingly written, this volume will captivate the armchair tourist, the backpacker, or the day-tripper—its rewards are rich. Even if the reader is steeped in North Carolina lore and literacy, <em>Literary Trails of North Carolina</em> is bound to excite new discoveries and to lure one back to old haunts with new eyes.</p> <p>Welty writes: "It seems plain that the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood." Ultimately, the reason that North Carolina has produced so many important writers will probably remain a mystery. If, however, an answer exists, this book will go a long way toward explaining that wonderful literary cornucopia.</p> <p><em>— Kenan is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of several books, including </em><em>A Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.</em></p> <div style="clear: both;">&nbsp;</div> </div> <div style="margin-bottom: 5px; width: 48%; float: right;"><img alt="Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom" src="/issues/030408/images/030408-lg-miyaocover.jpg" style="float:left; height:136px; width:98px" /> <p><strong>Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom<br /> By Daisuke Miyao. Duke University Press, 2007. 379 pages. $23.95.</strong></p> <p>There was a time during the late 1910s and early 1920s—the golden age of silent films—when Sessue Hayakawa was something of a household name in the U.S., at least among movie-going Americans of Japanese descent who were proud to see that a son of Old Nippon had made it in Hollywood.</p> <p>Born in Japan in 1886, Kintaro Hayakawa (Sessue was a later, showbiz name change) was, as one version of his fuzzy life story puts it, being groomed for the navy when a childhood accident damaged one of his eardrums. Unable to meet the Japanese navy's physical requirements and feeling he had let down his father, Hayakawa attempted <em>seppuku</em>, or ritual suicide—demonstrating, perhaps, a youthful taste for drama.</p> <div class="media-header" style="width: 250px; ;margin: 10px;"><img alt="Glimpses of fame: Hayakawa, at lunch with Charlie and Oona O'Neil Chaplin, was never fully embraced by American audiences" src="/issues/030408/images/030408-lg-chaplin.jpg" style="height:200px; width:250px" /> <div class="media-h-caption">Glimpses of fame: Hayakawa, at lunch with Charlie and Oona O'Neil Chaplin, was never fully embraced by American audiences</div> <div class="media-h-credit">Bettmann / CORBIS</div> </div> <p>In any case, notes Daisuke Miyao, an assistant professor of Japanese literature and film at the University of Oregon, the future actor headed to the U.S. in 1907 and a year later was enrolled in the Home Study Department of the University of Chicago. All told, Miyao offers only a few paragraphs about his subject's past prior to his move, from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he appeared in stage plays in Little Tokyo.</p> <p>It was in one of those theatricals for Japanese immigrants that Thomas H. Ince saw Hayakawa perform; the well-known producer hired the young actor for several movies that would evoke "The Orient" and exploit the popularity, among some middle-class Americans, of what was then known as "Japanese Taste"—aesthetic appreciation of Japanese art, refined gestures, and the ineffable elegance of the "exotic" East. Thus, in early 1914, Hayakawa turned up in <em>O Mimi San</em> with the Japanese-born actress Tsuru Aoki, another player in Ince's stable who would later become the Japanese actor's wife. This "picturesque Japanese number," as one trade sheet described it, offered a convoluted plot complete with a shogun, political intrigue, samurai-armor-busting passions, and, of course, ritual suicide.</p> <p>Hayakawa acted in more than a dozen films in 1914 alone. A year later, in Cecil B. DeMille's <em>The Cheat,</em> he became an overnight sensation. Critics and movie-goers raved, Miyao recalls, about Hayakawa's charismatic presence, his East-meets-West blend of stylishness and poise, and the heightened emotion expressed by his kabuki-like acting, in which he seemed to use only his face. ("We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!" Gloria Swanson's faded, silent-movie queen, Norma Desmond, declares in <em>Sunset Boulevard</em>. Of Hayakawa's acting style, DeMille once remarked: "I don't understand it[,] ... but it is the greatest thing I ever saw.")</p> <p>In <em>The Cheat,</em> Hayakawa plays a debonair art dealer who uses money from a Red Cross Fund to pay a Caucasian American woman for sexual favors. Apparently, their passion goes unconsummated in this tale of sex and <em>sake</em>, for movie-makers at the time could not allow "the races" to mix. When the woman tries to return his money after her husband scores it big in the stock market, he assaults her and brands her shoulder—<em>The Cheat</em> becomes <em>Sex and the Psycho.</em></p> <p>Audiences were captivated by Hayakawa's gentleman-villain character. However, as Miyao explains, over time he faced an irresolvable artistic dilemma: Depending on Japan's relative popularity with the U.S. government—the country and its culture fell out of favor as Japanese imperialist aspirations rose after World War I—on American screens, the actor could play the likable but distinctly foreign Asian but often was forced to play the bad guy. He could not play romantic leads who ended up "getting the girl" when "the girl" was Caucasian. As a result, Hayakawa sometimes played honorable villains who sacrificed satisfying their own desires so that white heroines could find true love—or at least light-skinned, European-descended mates.</p> <p>Hayakawa founded his own production company, developing scripts, starring in his own movies, and taking part in directing and editing. In 1937, he headed to France to play a Japanese spy in Max Ophuls' <em>Yoshiwara</em>. He spent World War II in France, making movies with French directors and helping the French Resistance. Later, he resurfaced in Hollywood's <em>Tokyo Joe</em> (1949), alongside Humphrey Bogart. Hayakawa's late-career high point was his Academy Award-nominated role as a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp commander in David Lean's <em>The Bridge on the River Kwai</em> (1957). A low point: his turn a year later in the Jerry Lewis vehicle The Geisha Boy, in which Hayakawa again has a bridge constructed—across his swimming pool—but does not commit ritual suicide.</p> <p>Although Miyao's book often reads like a laundry list of plot summaries and can be annoyingly repetitious, and although it fails to provide a three-dimensional portrait of its subject, it does accomplish its goal of showing how producers and Hayakawa carefully managed "the tense balance between Americanization and Japaneseness" that shaped his "star image." They were keenly aware, Miyao notes, that a Japanese-born performer, even one as well-known as his contemporaries Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, would never be fully embraced by America's xenophobic masses. (Actors Anna May Wong and Paul Robeson faced similar bigotry.) Hayakawa's success story—he had fame, houses, his own company, a gold-plated car—lies in the great tradition of the American Dream Fulfilled. Still, as Miyao's study makes clear, Hayakawa really must have meant it when, in 1949, he said, "My one ambition is to play a hero."</p> <p><em>— Gomez '79 is a member of Duke Magazine's Editorial Advisory Board and co-author of Yes: Yoko Ono (Harry N. Abrams, 2000).</em></p> <div style="clear: both;">&nbsp;</div> </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td> </tr> <tr> <td>&nbsp;</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <!-- #EndEditable --></div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2008-04-01T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, April 1, 2008</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/writers/randall-kenan" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Randall Kenan</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/magazine/author/edward-m-gomez" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Edward M. Gomez</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2008" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2008</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue <h3 class="field-label"> Cover Story </h3> <h3 class="field-label"> Homepage </h3> Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18499806 at https://alumni.duke.edu https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/books-march-april-2008#comments J-pop Goes the Market https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/j-pop-goes-market <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Shibuya Station, Tokyo: Every day, dusk gives way to a riot of color lighting up whole façades of high-rise buildings filled with department stores, funky boutiques, hair salons, noodle shops, theme-dècor bars, and restaurants. School kids, young adults, and plain-suited "salary men" (office workers) spill out of trains and buses, meet up with friends and fan out into the urban playground of the Japanese capital. For sheer urban energy, there is nothing like Shibuya anywhere in the world.</p><p>New York's Times Square is a mere Christmas-tree bulb compared with the cascades of neon and gigantic video screens that illuminate this and other dynamic sections of Tokyo. Among them: Shinjuku, with the endless enticements of its nighttime entertainment district, and Roppongi, with its chic shops and legions of trend-chasing fashionistas. Hot zones like these, as well as scores of stores, galleries, and gathering spots spread out around the city, define the cutting edge of an ultra-hip Japan whose outpouring of unique pop-culture products--manga (comic books), anime (animated cartoons), Mujirushi Ryohin design products, outrageous street fashions--are being scooped up by enthusiastic admirers around the world.</p><table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><div class="media-header" style="width: 301; float: left;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091006/images/lg_602050249.jpg" alt="Peripatetic aesthetic: edgy fashions and youth-centered trends contribute to Japan's expanding cultural cachet " width="300" height="450" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Peripatetic aesthetic: edgy fashions and youth-centered trends contribute to Japan's expanding cultural cachet</div><div class="media-h-credit">©2006 JapaneseStreets.com/Kjeld Duits</p></div></div></div></div></div><p class="articletitle">Back after more than a decade of recession that hit when its fabled bubble economy burst at the start of the 1990s, Japan Inc. has revamped some of the monolithic corporations that have long been the bulwarks of its capitalist system. Sony, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota, and instant-soup makers Nissin and Maruchan have ridden the wave of globalization with remarkable success in an era of multinational marketing. Even so, many Japanese brands had gone global with determination and skill long before globalization had a name.</p><p>Today, though, in a development the architects of Japan's post-World War II "economic miracle" probably never could have imagined, this export-dependent home of the world's second-largest economy has become known to a new generation of overseas consumers not so much for durable goods such as automobiles and electric appliances, but rather, like Hollywood, for its "soft" offerings: video games, Hello Kitty trinkets, Pokèmon figurines, Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards, and more. To their admirers, these products are irresistible, each an instant collector's item. For Japan's economy, they have become vitally important exports.</p><p>Sanrio Company Ltd., for example, sells nearly $1 billion worth of Hello Kitty and other cute-character fancy goods each year; 15 percent of its profits are generated outside Japan. Excitement about Japanese pop-culture products--or "J-pop," as they are collectively known--can become a mania. In July, more than 40,000 fans turned out for the fifteenth annual Anime Expo, in Anaheim, California, sponsored by the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation, a nonprofit organization based there. Many showed up dressed as their favorite manga or anime characters; among the trade fair's diverse offerings: a seminar about collectible, ball-jointed, <span class="pubtitle">anime</span>-inspired figurines and a beginners' workshop called "J-pop Culture 101."</p><p>Historically, for American consumers, the encounter with Japanese pop-culture products as we know them dates back to the post-World War II era. A major pop icon of those times whose fame crossed the Pacific was Gojira ("Godzilla" in the American market), the dinosaur-like monster with atomic powers who, as the story goes, was awakened from its prehistoric hibernation by U.S. nuclear testing in the South Pacific after the war. The giant creature made its debut in a 1954 Japanese feature film in which it laid waste to Tokyo. Gojira later appeared on American screens in adapted movie versions that dazzled--and terrified--theater-goers with innovative special effects. For Japanese viewers, though, the beast's rampaging image provided an eerie catharsis; in the immediate postwar era, they related the on-screen havoc to the devastation their country had recently suffered, culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.</p><p>Duke cultural-anthropology professor Anne Allison, who has examined the historical conditions in which certain J-pop merchandise has developed over the last half-century, has pointed out that the Gojira story and films were "conjured out of historical events that were deeply real and painfully remembered" in Japan after the war. In her new book,<span class="pubtitle"> Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination</span> (University of California Press), she revisits the World War II era to begin tracking the evolution of a variety of Japanese-made playthings and entertainment figures, their links to movies and mass media, and the marketing plans their creators formulated for them.</p><p>Citing the rich sense of fantasy and mythmaking that were essential elements of Gojira/Godzilla as a character, a story, and a movie franchise in Japan and the U.S., Allison looks back at that not-so-adorable monster and also at Japanese-created entertainments such as <span class="pubtitle">Go Rangers</span>, the 1970s children's television series that later became popular as <span class="pubtitle">Mighty Morphin Power Rangers</span> in foreign markets. The Power Rangers were a team of ordinary teenage boys and girls who became extraordinary cyberwarriors with notable spiritual qualities. For its time, Allison explains, the process of personal transformation the Power Rangers represented was something fresh in children's TV fare. For young viewers--who went on to consume a multitude of toys that were marketed in conjunction with the series--the Power Rangers' heroism was "not only more collective" (a decidedly Japanese social trait), "but also ... more democratic," Allison notes. With these newfangled characters, she adds, the empowerment of superheroes became "open to everyone, even women."</p><p>Uniquely Japanese-flavored fantasy could also be seen in <span class="pubtitle">Neon Genesis Evangelion</span>, a 1995-96 TV series that spawned several films. <span class="pubtitle">Evangelion</span> creator-producer Hideaki Anno's emotionally complex tales concerned the saving of a future Tokyo from deadly monsters by biomechanical superheroes. Thanks, in part, to the buzz J-pop fans generated on the Internet, <span class="pubtitle">Evangelion</span> found a foreign audience much more quickly than <span class="pubtitle">Mighty Morphin Power Rangers</span>. Now, with the success of such entertainment products outside their home market, Allison writes, the "production of kids' culture" is moving away from its long-standing, main-source market and culture, namely those of the United States. In effect, this production trend already has "decentered" and "recentered" the international market for such entertainment material.</p><p>Is there, as Allison points out, a uniquely Japanese aesthetic, mixed with some kind of "mass mythmaking," that somehow manages to captivate audiences "with an emotional power that registers as 'true' while still remaining a fantasy"? If so, it certainly was evident during the Tamagotchi "virtual pets" fad of the late 1990s. Shaped like an egg, Tamagotchi was an electronic gizmo that quickly became popular with children and young working women. Designed to fit in a user's hand, the device had a little screen and buttons that allowed an owner to "feed" or "play" with it, as though it were a living organism. Tamagotchi's owners could watch their "pets" develop into different characters during their "lifetimes," as long as they gave them plenty of attention, like good parents.</p><p>Similarly, the use of many products--clothes, cars, fragrances, fast food--allows consumers to derive or project a sense of personal identity. However, Japan's most enticing pop-culture creations today not only allow consumers to imbue them with their own emotion, but also to feel themselves part of the "stories" these products may suggest or explicitly express.</p><div class="media-header"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091006/images/lg_pg30asculpturesbymr.jpg" alt="Big boys and girls: Japanese urban youth are the subject of sculptures by Mr., an artist in Murakami's entourage" width="580" height="313" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Big boys and girls: Japanese urban youth are the subject of sculptures by Mr., an artist in Murakami's entourage. Edward M. Gomez</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>Take, for example, Hello Kitty, the grand mistress and face of one of Japan's all-time, most successful brands. As they do with the characters or stories found in anime or <span class="pubtitle">Mighty Morphin Power Rangers</span>, consumers around the world can emotionally connect with the more than 20,000 items in the Hello Kitty product line: pencils, notebooks, hair clips, clocks, bed sheets, lamps, microwave ovens, and much more. (A quirky detail: Hello Kitty has no mouth, which makes her a kind of emotional tabula rasa, ready for consumers to inscribe with feelings of their own.)</p><p>In fact, notes <span class="pubtitle">New York Times</span> reporter Ken Belson, who, with Brian Bremner of <span class="pubtitle">Business Week</span>, wrote <span class="pubtitle">Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon</span> (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), "Sanrio founder Shintaro Tsuji sees Hello Kitty and other 'character goods' as a form of social communication and as entertainment. He sees himself as a purveyor of goodness through the image of these products that are rooted in Japan's gift-giving culture." (Most "fancy goods" or "character goods" are designed to be affordable enough for children to easily purchase for themselves or their friends.)</p><p>Such products embody another quality associated with some of the most popular J-pop: cuteness. Known as <span class="pubtitle">kawaiimono</span> ("cute things") in Japanese, with their brightly colored, round forms, Hello Kitty and her confrëres--the penguin Badtz Maru, the puppy Purin, the baseball-playing frog Keroppi, and the bunny U*SA*HA*NA--are intended to be irresistibly adorable. Sanrio itself and a host of licensees have applied or adapted images of these characters to a profusion of products marketed around the world. All appear on school supplies, and all are conceived as collectibles. But Hello Kitty's mug has graced some more unusual offerings, too, including rice cookers, a Visa credit card, sexy underwear, a vibrator (Sanrio calls it a "personal massager"), and condoms.</p><p>"In Japan, there's a really wide range of what's considered <span class="pubtitle">kawaii</span>," observes Christine Yano, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii who, like Allison, specializes in Japanese popular culture. "Anything can be <span class="pubtitle">kawaii</span> if it's embraceable; the relationship between the user and the object is one of taking care of something. Even something ugly can be <span class="pubtitle">kawaii</span>."</p><p>Allison notes in her book that, in Japan, even airlines have decorated aircraft with Pokèmon's bright-yellow Pikachu character. She cites research conducted by Dentsu, the Japanese advertising company, that has shown that using <span class="pubtitle">kawaii</span> characters in marketing and merchandising "glues society"--especially a group-oriented society like Japan's--"at its roots." For the Japanese, Dentsu reports, a likable cartoon character (sometimes also called a mascot) functions as a "device for self-realization." It "accompanies the development of a group and becomes part of, and a symbol for, that identity."</p><p><span class="pubtitle">Kawaiimono</span> are ubiquitous in Japan; every bank, railway line, or department store, as well as many cities and prefectures (provinces or states) have cute-character mascots that appear on posters, in TV commercials, or, in the form of plastic or plush toys, as promotional giveaways. (In turn, the collecting of character toys and figurines, whether they are associated with cartoon shows, films, or comic books--or not--has become a huge trend in Japan and abroad. In the U.S., magazines such as <span class="pubtitle">Giant Robot</span> and <span class="pubtitle">Juxtapoz</span> serve as clearinghouses for information about this field, whose showcases are the Kid Robot chain's retail stores in New York, San Francisco, and Santa Monica.)</p><div class="media-header"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091006/images/lg_pg33aallisonanne060.jpg" alt="Cute factor: anthropologist Allison examines how cartoons and cuddly mascots contribute to help define group identity in Japanese society " width="580" height="289" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Cute factor: anthropologist Allison examines how cartoons and cuddly mascots contribute to help define group identity in Japanese society</div><div class="media-h-credit">Jon Gardiner</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>For some close observers of Japanese society, though, the popular preoccupation with all things <span class="pubtitle">kawaii</span> is uncomfortably echoed in the fetishization of pubescent and teenage girls in school uniforms (a standard theme in Japanese porn). They also see an unsettling strain of institutionalized cuteness in the mannerisms young woman are taught to affect in, for example, department-store greeter jobs. Dressed in conservative skirt suits, white gloves, and hats, these female store guides and elevator operators spend their days welcoming shoppers or chirping "Going up! Going down!" in high-pitched, unnatural, little-girl voices. (A darker side to the national fascination with <span class="pubtitle">kawaii</span>: Some of the girls who pour out of Shibuya station after school routinely sell their sexual services to eager male customers. The considerable pocket money they earn presumably allows them to do their part for Japan's economy by buying designer handbags, <span class="pubtitle">manga</span>, CDs, restaurant meals, and all those Hello Kitty tchotchkes.)</p><p>Perhaps inevitably, a backlash against what its detractors have called an unhealthy obsession with cuteness has emerged in Japan. One of its most prominent critics has been the artist Takashi Murakami, who, for sheer prolificness, is Japan's answer to Andy Warhol. With a legion of assistants at his studios in Tokyo and New York working on an ever-expanding array of fine-art and mass-market projects--paintings, sculptures, plastic-model kits, decorative designs for Louis Vuitton handbags--Murakami is Japan's most famous living artist and something of an international brand in his own right.</p><p>Murakami is known as one of the major artist-theorists of what the American art historian Alexandra Munroe has called the "post-Hirohito generation." (The term refers to the emperor who ruled during World War II.) Munroe, an expert on Japanese modern art, is the curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In her pioneering research in the field, she has observed that, after Hirohito's death in 1989, young Japanese artists began to openly criticize the hitherto off-limits, groupthink assumptions about national identity and history that had long prevailed in Japan.</p><p>Last year, Murakami curated an exhibition in which he put forth some of his own critical ideas about the popular attitudes that have characterized postwar Japan. Sponsored by Japan Society and the Public Art Fund in New York, "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture" included site-specific works made by artists in Murakami's entourage and historical material from the decades after World War II. It traced the development of several aesthetic-emotional currents in Japanese popular culture since the war's end. Among them: a fascination among comic-book and animation creators with atomic destruction and the subservient position Japan has occupied in relation to the U.S. since it lost the war.</p><p>The exhibition's title, "Little Boy," referred to what Murakami has called "Japan's enduring, infantile status in its relationship with the country that won the war--its former occupier--the United States." He notes that Japan's postwar defense treaty with the U.S., which allows its foreign "master" to keep military bases on its soil, perpetuates its inferior status. The exhibition's title was symbolically significant, too: "Little Boy" was the name of the atomic bomb American forces dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.</p><p>Speaking about the exhibition a few months before it opened, Murakami said that "contemporary Japan represents a version of George Orwell's <span class="pubtitle">1984</span>: It's a culture that is infantilized and impotent, perhaps even stunted." Politically, modern Japan has not completely matured, he said. That is because, he explained, for all its economic and technological success, it is stuck in an "occupied" mode. (He also had in mind the country's postwar, U.S.-imposed constitution, which revoked the emperor's divine status and forbade Japan from maintaining an army or waging war.) Murakami observed: "Hello Kitty represents this infantilized country."</p><p>Murakami's art has taken direct aim at Japanese-style cuteness. Some versions of his own Mr. Dob character, a round-faced figure with Mickey Mouse-style ears, display a menacing, shark-toothed grin, a sinister antidote to Hello Kitty's saccharine sweetness. Meant to be equally charming and subversive at the same time are his sculptures of the <span class="pubtitle">manga</span>-style figures <span class="pubtitle">Hiropon</span> (1997), a buxom lass with exaggeratedly large breasts from which she squeezes out a jet-spray of milk, like water from a garden hose, and <span class="pubtitle">My Lonesome Cowboy</span> (1998), a strapping youth who wields a lasso of his own ejaculate.</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 580; float: none;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091006/images/lg_pg34.jpg" alt="Girls, interrupted: the shadow side to Japan's fascination with childlike imagery, the fetishization of pubescent and teenage girls" width="580" height="305" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Girls, interrupted: the shadow side to Japan's fascination with childlike imagery, the fetishization of pubescent and teenage girls. PNC</p></div></div></div></div></div><p>Those Murakami works have been described as homages to the obsessions of Japan's hermetic <span class="pubtitle">otaku</span>. Mostly young males who have few friends and feel deeply uncomfortable in society, <span class="pubtitle">otaku</span> (loosely translated as "geeks" or "nerds") live in self-imposed isolation, rarely, if ever, leaving their bedrooms or tiny apartments. Glued to their computers and game consoles, they live in a "safe" fantasy world of video games, <span class="pubtitle">manga</span>, and <span class="pubtitle">anime</span>. They tend not to have sexual relationships but are commonly described as being obsessed with sex. Nevertheless, as "Little Boy" argued, together the subculture and sensibility of the <span class="pubtitle">otaku</span> have become a discernible force in Japanese pop culture today. Who would have expected, the exhibition suggested, that some of the same escapist, darker-themed pop diversions the self-isolated <span class="pubtitle">otaku</span> had long enjoyed would one day become mainstream pop hits?</p><p>At first glance, much of Murakami's art is unmistakably cute, like the J-pop fare that inspires it. Viewed more closely, its anti-<span class="pubtitle">kawaii</span>, <span class="pubtitle">otaku</span>-inspired nature becomes evident. Similarly, subverting cuteness has become a major theme in some of the contemporary art from Japan that in recent years has attracted serious critical attention at home and abroad. Like Murakami, artist Yoshitomo Nara has gained international renown. His signature works include childlike pictures of not-so-innocent-looking little girls, usually seen from odd angles and set against plain backgrounds. If looks could kill, theirs would wipe out whole neighborhoods. At galleries in Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, and London, Nara's works, like Murakami's, sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other Japanese artists whose work either critiques varieties of cuteness or blends them with elements of retro-psychedelia or sex-charged urban angst include Chino Aoshima, Aya Takano, and Mahomi Kunikata. These three art-makers are all young women.</p><p>The fact that children--and adults--outside Japan can find pleasure and meaning in products from a culture that is sometimes dramatically different than their own is evidence, Allison, the Duke cultural anthropologist, says, of the "decentering" effect of globalization. Worldwide marketing of the same products in many different countries means that, for entertainment, fashion, toy or pop-music producers, no one place can control a particular industry's output or market anymore. Hollywood learned this, decades ago, with the rise of movies produced independently of its big-studio system.</p><p>In an essay in <span class="pubtitle">Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokèmon</span> (Duke University Press, 2004), Koichi Iwabuchi, a professor of media and cultural studies at International Christian University in Tokyo, points out that J-pop entertainments such as Pokèmon, <span class="pubtitle">manga</span>, and <span class="pubtitle">anime</span>, although created by artists in Japan, do not display "perceptible" signs of "Japaneseness." On the one hand, Iwabuchi notes, this bleaching out of specific, recognizably ethnic, racial, or cultural references allows for easier "transnational cultural consumption" of such products. On the other hand, he adds, if the Japaneseness, such as it is, of today's J-pop merchandise "is derived, consciously or unconsciously, from its erasure of physical signs" of its place of origin, then is the image of Japan that it offers merely "a de-ethnicized and cultureless, virtual version" of that country and its culture?</p><p>For J-pop aficionados and general audiences alike, an air of the familiar amid the strange wafted through <span class="pubtitle">Lost in Translation</span>, Sofia Coppola's 2003 film about an American actor who finds himself in Tokyo, jetlagged and culturally adrift. From a Westerner's point of view, the sense of bemusing dislocation that was, in large part, the subject of the film, may be a hallmark of a globalized-media, globalized-fast-food, globalized-everything age.</p><p>Dunkin' Donuts, Kentucky Fried Chicken, or Starbucks in Mexico City, or MTV in Mumbai or London are the same enterprises offering the same fare they offer in their home markets--except, of course, that they are not. Not exactly. (Those are teriyaki burgers on the McDonald's menu in Tokyo.) That's because, as any good postmodernist knows, context is everything. The notion that the different contexts--cultural, historical, linguistic, political, economic, social--in which something is experienced will yield varying meanings of artworks, foods, fashions, language, or events is the very bedrock of postmodernist critical analysis.</p><div class="media-header" style="width: 300px; float: left; margin: 5px;"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/091006/images/lg_pg35.jpg" alt="Fiberglass sculptures inspired by Japanese animation and manga, part of an exhibit by Murakami in New York's Grand Central Station, 200" width="300" height="399" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Fiberglass sculptures inspired by Japanese animation and manga, part of an exhibit by Murakami in New York's Grand Central Station, 200. © Reuters/CORBIS/Jon Herskovitz</p></div></div></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2006-10-01T00:00:00-04:00">Sunday, October 1, 2006</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/lg_pg30asculpturesbymr.jpg" width="620" height="335" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/edward-m-gomez" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Edward M. Gomez</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/sep-oct-2006" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sep - Oct 2006</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">In a globalized economy, comic books, toys, and other popular-culture products from Japan are no longer exotic--they&#039;re worldwide hits.</div></div></section> Sun, 01 Oct 2006 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501076 at https://alumni.duke.edu Books: July-August 2001 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/books-july-august-2001 <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p> </p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4"><tbody><tr><td class="text" colspan="2" height="15"><strong>M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism<br /> Edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor. Duke University Press. 467 pages. $22.95 (paper).<br /><br /> Economic Engagements with Art<br /> Edited by Neil De Marchi and Crauford D.W. Goodwin Ph.D. ’58. Duke University Press. 506 pages. $22.95 (paper).00. </strong></td></tr><tr><td class="text" colspan="2"><table width="100" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="0" align="left"><tbody><tr><td><img class="brwntextheader" src="/issues/070801/images/bk_meaning.jpg" alt="" width="90" height="133" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="4" /></td><td><img class="brwntextheader" src="/issues/070801/images/bk_economic.jpg" alt="" width="90" height="133" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="4" /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Is postmodernism spent? When does a “critical method” of analysis that claims that meaning is derived from the varied contexts in which something is perceived—or in which a message is conveyed<br /> —grow tired, weighed down by familiarity, or, in pomo’s case, by the relativism with which it often seems to regard just about any subject it addresses?</p><p>In art, postmodernist questioning has challenged the notion of authorship—who really creates a work, an individual artist, or the cultural and other conditions from which it emerges? It has taken on standards of quality, too, for in a perceptually, culturally relativistic world, who is to say what is technically proficient or thematically relevant? Postmodernists have also looked at how the art market and cultural institutions choose, present, classify, and document artworks in various forms, and how such handling determines their meaning and value to the public at large.</p><p>Postmodernists regard the world with a knowingly ironic wink that says: “Of course, we all know we’re all being manipulated by the mass media, hoodwinked by media-savvy politicians, and rendered passive by a confluence of forces that seems to reduce all human experience to some sort of spectacle.” But this is old news. After three or four decades, depending on how one measures it, postmodernism might be showing its age, at least on the more superficial level of style (in fashion, visual art, design, and architecture). Meanwhile, perhaps one of postmodernism’s most notable effects, at least among many art and design students today, is that it has helped nurture a strong desire for authenticity—that is, for a sense of some absolute aesthetic values or technical standards on which to hang their professional-artists’ hats.</p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Against this backdrop, books, reviews, and essays are now being published that are beginning to examine postmodernism with a retrospective air. Some observers have suggested that we are living in “post-postmodernist” times.” In any case, many art-makers sense that we are passing through some sort of transitional phase that might eventually give rise to another Big Idea or Movement or Style that will give everybody something new to chew on. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In the meantime, the American critic Eleanor Heartney’s fine, brief survey, Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press), provides a concise summary of how we arrived at this point, at least in the visual arts. From Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) sculpture, to Cindy Sherman’s untitled Film Stills (1970s) and Sherrie Levine’s appropriations (1981) of classic black-and-white images by the photographer Walker Evans, and on to the body-related art of the Nineties, Heartney traces the development of postmodernist ideas in the works of artists that gave them visible form. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Heartney does a fine job of explaining how so many of the era’s paintings, sculptures, and multi-media installation works served to argue pomo’s sometimes obvious, but no less contentious, critical themes. Among them: the idea that the forward-moving, narrative flow of history, including art history, ended decades ago, ushering in an age of the perpetual present, in which historical styles or motifs are merely fodder for art-making “strategies” that celebrate pastiche; or the idea that, in our consumer-culture, insatiable desire for gratification through representations of what we idealize (like youthful fashion images) or through acquiring commodity objects (to shop till you drop, including for works of art) both motivates and helps explain our behavior.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Over the years, Duke University Press has published an estimable share of books in the fields of postmodernist art history, art criticism, and “culture studies.” M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor, is one of its latest. It gathers a selection of essays and articles from M/E/A/N/I/N/G, an art journal that Bee and Schor founded in New York in 1986 and published for ten years. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">By the late 1970s, pioneering feminist artists had introduced many of their central themes into fine art’s international discourse. In the early 1980s, splashy neo-expressionism emerged in Germany and Italy, and </span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">in New York. It rejected minimalism and </span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">conceptualism’s austerity, and it seized the art world’s attention. A short while later, M/E/A/N/I/N/G first appeared, providing an independent venue for artists who, writing for themselves, explored postmodernist critical issues from a feminist viewpoint at a time when the art scene was charged with high energy and fueled by unprecedented commercial hype. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Essays in the journal, which Bee and Schor published twice a year, and roundtable discussions involving female and male artists, poets, and critics, addressed such topics as how contemporary art represented gender or how conventional art history had largely excluded women artists from its canon. M/E/A/N/I/N/G touched upon subjects that glossy art magazines generally ignored during the boom years of the 1980s art market, such as everyday working conditions for artists who were not rock-star famous, or how artists who were mothers managed child-rearing and professional careers. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Articles in M/E/A/N/I/N/G dared to examine from a feminist perspective the idea of “visual pleasure”—whose pleasure, and on what terms? They also looked at the persona of the “bad girl,” who, contrary to American society’s moralizing stereotype, just might have been a self-aware, self-assured, capable woman who knew what she wanted—security, self-esteem, a satisfying job, power, and sex—</span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">and did not hesitate to go about getting it. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Some of the language in this anthology is dated; such inelegant phrases as “patriarchy’s strategies of ideological and institutional repression” or “the erotically disenfranchised postmenopausal woman” might make more poetically inclined readers wince. But they might also make them angry, for so many of the unfair, condescending attitudes toward women in general and toward female artists in particular that prevailed in society and in the cultural world decades ago persist today. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Consider, for example, the typically small quantities of works by women artists that routinely turn up in major museum exhibitions like the Whitney Biennial in New York. Or the fact that revisionist art historians still find themselves having to play catch-up with outdated textbooks that diminish or ignore the accomplishments of such figures as the black American painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979) or the painter Joan Mitchell (1926-1992). Both were significant New York School abstractionists who deserve to be known to more than an informed, art-world elite. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology is a valuable document whose arguments and messages still reverberate in urgent ways. Overall, the book makes the point that postmodernism never completely subsumed feminist critical theory. Indeed, over time, as structuralism begat poststructuralism and the intellectual gymnastics of deconstruction, postmodernism’s critical reach expanded to embrace not only literature, cinema, and the visual and design arts, but also the methods and subject matter of history and science. Academicians in these latter fields are still wrestling with pomo’s impact today, as it challenges the factuality of their research findings and their disciplines’ authority.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Just how far postmodernist critical thinking has stretched in the visual arts was demonstrated in the exhibition “Painting at the Edge of the World” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis earlier this year. As the show’s organizer, Douglas Fogle, observes in the catalogue that he edited, which accompanied that presentation of thirty artists’ works, today the practice of painting “is no longer solely bound by such traditional categories as figuration, abstraction, portraiture, and landscape, or even by the conventional definition of the medium as paint on canvas.” </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">In the book Painting at the Edge of the World, numerous artists and critics, in a similarly broad manner, consider what painting—the concept, the process, the finished object—in our times can be. Their conclusion: A painting, which is normally an image supported by a surface (say, in oil paint on canvas), can certainly take such a form, but that it can take many other novel forms as well.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">For a long time, photography has influenced what image-makers do; more recently, so has the expressive power of visual, digital media. But Fogle’s exhibition suggested, and his book echoes the idea, that, as he writes, “[P]ainting’s traditional function as a window on the world has been circumvented, or rather someone has left the window open and a number of things have crawled in.” </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Among the evidence of this change in the show and the book: works ranging from the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s three-dimensional paintings-as-sculpture to the Scottish artist Jim Lambie’s site-specific installations. Oiticica, who died in 1980, took paintings off the wall and broke them up into multiple planes in space; often he hung their component parts from the ceiling and placed mirrors on the floor beneath them. Lambie has “action-painted” against a gallery’s wall, using a shaggy bunch of carrots as a brush, and created geometric patterns with colored-vinyl tape on the floor of another.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Other elements that have crept into the conceptual and physical space that paintings once literally framed include the artist Takashi Murakami’s amusing blend of influences from pop art and from Japanese manga and anime (comic books and animated cartoons), and the sumptuous psychedelia of the British-born artist Chris Ofili’s mixed-media tableaux. Ofili uses paint, glitter, magazine cutouts, and elephant dung. His images refer to African art, hip-hop culture, fashion, and 1970s “blaxploitation” films. From such works, some viewers might surmise that we really are passing through a period of late postmodernism or post-postmodernism, in which artists are both theoretically and literally deconstructing the familiar forms that artistic expression conventionally takes. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">If so, then as Painting at the Edge of the World argues, painting (or “painting”) can refer as much to the making of tangible objects that represent the world—the real or the imaginary—as it does to an outlook that is philosophical and, well, “painterly.” Such is the sensibility of a person who “paints” what he experiences even as he experiences it (that is, someone who considers what he perceives as he perceives it in terms of how it could be artistically represented). Think of a painter or film-maker’s gesture as she crops a view with her fingers, imitating a picture frame or a camera’s viewfinder. Or recall the voyeuristic suburban teenager in the movie American Beauty who videotaped hours and hours of his daily peregrinations. All the world’s a stage, postmodernist image-makers tell us, and it is our job or our recreation to capture the spectacle, to make the real irreal with whatever media become available and in whichever forms we can fashion from them.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Another Duke Press anthology, Economic Engagements with Art, scrutinizes the market in which art it is bought and sold. Edited by Neil De Marchi and Crauford D.W. Goodwin, its essays examine the history of a field whose more recent roller-coaster rhythms have reflected the money-obsessed spirit of our age. In one essay, Zarinés Negrón, a 1999 Duke graduate in economics, looks back at the European art market’s early history. She recalls the life and work of the seventeenth-century Spanish painter and art theorist Francisco Pacheco, who served as an overseer of religious painting during the Inquisition. His writings described the practice of painting and advised both suppliers and buyers of art—of artworks as products—about what to look for. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Goodwin, James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke and developer of a course for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program that examines some of these same issues as seen through the Bloomsbury group, has researched the relationship between the history of art and that of economic thought. His essay, “The Economics of Art Through Art Critics’ Eyes,” looks at how the pioneering, twentieth-century critics Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and Kenneth Clark understood and explained the conditions in which art is made and consumed. Their concerns were primarily aesthetic. Still, their considerations of the nature and functions of art inevitably took into account the commerce that surrounded it. Goodwin writes: “These critics behaved and approached their subject in some ways remarkably like... economists.” </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Among their aesthetic beliefs, they held that the artist was someone who answered an inner—or higher—calling, not the dictates of market forces; that beauty could be regarded as more important than comfort; and that art was something that served to enhance or improve civilization. In short, art was something good—provided it was good art. </span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Economic Engagements with Art also looks at the nineteenth-century British artist and critic John Ruskin’s musings on similar themes, at the international scope of the art market, and at luxury spending and how “pictures” were priced in eighteenth-century England. The book serves as a reminder that postmodernism’s sometimes self-important-sounding critique of art as a commodity has long roots. Artists, critics, buyers, and sellers have long recognized that artworks are products whose values and meanings shift in relation to laws of supply and demand, to the changing contexts in which they are experienced, or simply to fashion’s perennial, passing fancy.</span></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">These books and others like them put some of the ideas and subjects that historically helped shape postmodernism or that its proponents have routinely investigated into a perspective that could be helpful to university students. For anyone else who might want to become familiar with a way of critical analysis that has been pervasive and influential for a long time, they offer plenty of insight, too. However postmodernism in the visual arts further evolves is anyone’s guess. What is certain, though, is that its outlook and sensibility—ironic, challenging to established powers, sensitive to language, and endlessly intrigued by the forms and meanings to be found in the human-made, visible environment—have indelibly marked our understanding of the world and societies in which we live.</span></p><hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="80%" /><em><span class="text">Gomez ’79 is the author of Roberto Cortázar, a biography of the contemporary Mexican painter, which will be published this summer by Landucci.</span></em></td></tr><tr><td class="text" colspan="2"> </td></tr></tbody></table><!-- #EndEditable --> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2001-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, August 1, 2001</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/edward-m-gomez" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Edward M. Gomez</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2001" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2001</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Wed, 01 Aug 2001 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18501731 at https://alumni.duke.edu