Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I got really interested in Jacob Lawrence when I was working on Joe Gould’s Teeth, and thinking about what was so exciting representationally about Harlem artists in the ’30s and ’40s. I’ve often thought about what it would mean for Lawrence to be your introduction in the kind of swan song piece of what American art is representationally. So, I don’t know. If I had an endless amount of time to think about it, I don’t know that I’d settle on Lawrence, but in my mind at the moment . . . If we think about the 18th-century American painting, it’s so portrait-intensive, as you’ve observed yourself. Today, income inequality is fairly high. Andy Warhol silkscreens aside, there’s Chuck Close. But for the most part, it’s not very portrait-intensive. And even Chuck Close, very often, is not painting the people who are paying him to do the painting. Given that celebrity has so intensified, why have we so much moved away from portraits? There’s this lovely series of lectures that Frederick Douglass gives in the 1860s. They have different titles, but one of them is called “Pictures in Progress.” Douglass, when he escaped from slavery, 1838, he was 20, the year before the daguerreotype comes to the United States. He sits for a daguerreotype in 1841, and he’s really transformed by what it is to see himself in a photograph. In the 1860s, he writes all these essays about photography in which he argues that photography is the most democratic art. And he means portrait photography. And that no white man will ever make a true likeness of a black man because he’s been represented in caricature — the kind of runaway slave ad with the guy, the little figure, silhouette of the black figure carrying a sack. And, as historians have recently demonstrated, he’s the most photographed man in the 19th century. Douglass just makes a big commitment to being photographed.…

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