Jill Lepore: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Oh, and we had skipped over the question, for your imaginary Chinese friend: What painter or visual artist would you recommend they take a look at for their visit here? 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?…

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