Culture: January 2008 Archives

To extrapolate from the epigraph (below) chosen for Life Studies, this collection of short stories intends to explore the questions, "What is art?" and "To whom does it belong?" Four stories in, I have yet to find the answers here.
The lives that Susan Vreeland portrays are those that circle the periphery of Western art's great masters--Renoir, Manet, Monet, among others. And despite the characters' often dire circumstances, at least the first few of the collection are perhaps too awash in imagined awe and rarefied nostalgia to allow the reader to answer those questions in truth. Yet moments of beauty do glimmer on the page and, like a moment captured in paint and canvas, live on in the memory. Favorite quotes to come all week.

"The real question is: To whom does the meaning of the art of the past properly belong? To those who can apply it to their own lives, or to a cultural hierarchy of relic specialists?" --John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1977.

Last night, under the influence of champagne and chocolate, it occurred to those of us at abrooklynlife's New Year's party that 2008 rhymes with ... great ... yeah, so some would consider that a rough night. Others, perhaps, would consider that an indicator of New Year's Eve success. Regardless, in the spirit of eminent future greatness, Subway Reads emerges from the glitter and spangle to greet the cold light of the new year with spectacles and keyboard in hand.
Less ambitiously this year, instead of chronicling the ins and outs of the F train, I'll be exploring the much more modest confines of my bookshelf, though hopefully a few observations from underground will make its way onto the screen as well.

Today, we begin with the one book I received for Christmas:

Women in the Material World

by Faith D'Allusio and Peter Menzel

Arranged alphabetically, Women in the Material World explores the lives of women in countries from Albania, Brazil, and Cuba to Russia, Thailand, the United States, and fourteen other countries all over the globe. This book follows on the heels of the authors' previous project, which documented thirty statistically average families around the world. You can check out their portraits here.

But D'Allusio and Menzel discovered that the stories they had told were predominately male stories, and so revisited many of the profiled families to take a look from the female point of view. This new book is full of life--through conversations, observation, statistics, and of course, photography.

I'll include excerpts from these women's stories here each day of the week.

As Naomi Wolf writes in the foreword, "the beauty on the page is a tribute to the inherent beauty of the subject: the female love, passion, and toil that invisibly undergird human societies everywhere."