But did either of these women, or a handful of other formidable females whose exploits were recorded by history, ever actually rule the world? That topic took center-stage before an overflow audience at a Zócalo/Getty panel discussion that roamed from pharaonic Egypt to the court of Queen Elizabeth I to the White House.

Moderated by Bettany Hughes, a historian and documentary filmmaker, the conversation drew on the expertise of UCLA archaeologist Kara Cooney, author of The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt, and University of Manchester Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley, author of Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt.

After confessing to her “enormous girl crush” on Cooney and Tyldesley for their exemplary scholarship, Hughes drove right into what she ironically called the “completely uncomplicated and uncontroversial question” of whether women, in fact, ever have ruled the world.

For feminists, the answer wasn’t encouraging.

“I don’t know,” Tyldesley replied. “It was always, I think, unusual for a woman to take a position of power.”

Cooney concurred definitively, “the answer is no.”

But even if there is “no mythical matriarchy to which we can return,” as one panelist put it, history offers some instructive examples of women who were able to take and hold power through a combination of brilliance, bravery, guile, beauty, gender-bending self-reinvention, and—perhaps most importantly—the ability to control and manipulate their own image.

In ancient times, as now, women seeking to rule had to contend with the constraints imposed by existing cultural traditions, political structures, patriarchal hierarchies, and male-driven religions. While earth-mother goddesses and fertility deities abounded in the ancient world, aspiring women rulers had to push back against spiritual systems dominated by male gods and male priestly castes. That may have been even truer under the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam than it was in pagan cultures. “Monotheism usually doesn’t do anybody any favors, particularly women,” Cooney observed.

Tyldesley cautioned that historians of the ancient world, like herself, must be very careful about making assumptions that often have to be based on fragmentary evidence and scraps of records.

But one powerful woman who history definitely shows to have been in charge was Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. This remarkable ruler helped establish trade networks and was a prolific builder of temples and other public works. An inscription on her tomb described her as “Mistress of Two Lands,” the type of homage that Egypt’s mightiest male potentates typically showered on themselves.

“In a way, it speaks to how the Egyptian culture allowed a female to take all those claims as her own and feminize them,” Cooney said.

Indeed, Tyldesley chimed in, the concept of “king” in ancient Egypt wasn’t necessarily gender-linked; it was quite possible for a woman to take on that role, although usually the title was bestowed on males. Over the course of her career and reign (circa 1478–1458 B.C.), Hatshepsut controlled her image in strategic ways that underscored the changing nature of her power.

To wit, early on, she was represented in a nubile, eroticized, traditionally feminine style. But as her reign progressed, she adopted a more masculine public persona and custom of dress. In one of her best-known images, a statue in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, she registers as an almost androgynous being; in other representations, she’s buff and muscled like a man.

Hatshepsut’s fluid style of self-representation was matched by her flexible style of power-wielding, Tyldesley suggested. Instead of subjugating conquered peoples to try to make them part of the Egyptian empire, she preferred to engage them through trade.

“I think if you’re a woman in the ancient world, Egypt is the place to be,” Tyldesley concluded.

Cooney agreed that it may have been easier for a woman to take power in Egypt, “an authoritarian, tightly controlled society” ruled by dynasty, as opposed to democratic Greece or republican Rome. Cooney drew a parallel to Hillary Clinton, speculating about whether we associate the former Secretary of State and one-time First Lady with dynastic power, rather than judging her on the basis of her own merits.

Taking up the point, Tyldesley noted that there are examples of ancient queens who temporarily filled in as rulers for husbands who had died or were away in battle. These women often ruled on behalf of their infant sons until their offspring were old enough to assume the throne, at which point their mothers stepped back from power.

Do women rule differently from men? It’s a question that haunts Cooney, who said that, although she wavers on an answer, “the older I get, the more I read, the more I live in Trump’s America, [I believe] that women do rule differently.”

Both today and throughout the centuries, powerful women often have aroused a deep ambivalence. Hughes noted that while a goddess like Venus is generally depicted as a creature of pure, unadulterated beauty and sensuality—fairly harmless, apart from her role in starting the Trojan War—some of Venus’s counterparts, like Isis, are represented in more complex ways. They’re fighters as well as lovers, “bringers of death as well as bringers of life.”

What’s more, Cooney said, there’s “a great disconnect” between the way that some societies worshipped man-eating, ferocious goddesses while remaining deeply sexist and segregated. “That fierceness, that PMS-ing b!$©h” quality is something that certain societies had to harness and tame, and put to use in more socially acceptable ways, like protecting the king.

Perhaps few rulers embody the contradictory demands placed on women more than Nefertiti, who appears to have followed a singular trajectory from queen to co-ruler to solo ruler. In the world’s imagination, she’s the glamorous woman immortalized in a famous bust that sits in a Berlin museum. But according to Tyldesley, “We don’t even know if she was beautiful. We have this one bust and from that, this whole mythology has developed.”

Similarly, much of what we think we know about Cleopatra—from her putative powers of seduction to the manner of her suicide—comes from the writings of Roman authors, filtered through the plays of Shakespeare. Another powerful woman whose name gets short shrift and whose remarkable deeds have been obscured by time is the 6th-century empress Theodora, a humble exotic dancer who became a powerful and revered ruler-reformer—a sort of Byzantine Eva Perón.

Although the evening was devoted to examining female rulers of the pre-Christian world, one audience member during the question period raised the example of Queen Elizabeth I. The panelists agreed that she should be on the list of the world’s 10 most powerful female rulers of all time. Another audience member proposed Margaret Thatcher, the long-serving British prime minister known as the “Iron Lady” for her take-no-prisoners economic policies and steely response to Argentina’s attempted takeover of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands in 1982.

Hughes replied that although Thatcher still divides Britain as deeply as Marmite, “she definitely taught me that women can be in power.”

“Whether you like her policies or not,” Tyldesley said that Mrs. T ensured that, “girls don’t grow up in England thinking, ‘I can’t be the prime minister.’”

But, in the end, it may not be possible to assess how much women like Thatcher, Clinton, and Angela Merkel owe to their ancient female political forebears.

“I think we’re missing a whole host of powerful women,” Tyldesley said, “simply because there wasn’t someone to write down what they do.”

The post Women Rocked the Ancient World—But Ruling It Was Harder appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The color is associated with introversion and introspection, but it’s also associated with the expansiveness and openness of oceans and skies. It’s a sacred color in the world’s religions, but blue movies are obscene movies. And while the color can represent life in many ways, it’s also true that “when we die, we turn blue,” said art historian Carol Mavor. Blue, she added, “does seem to depend on a sense of paradox.”

The color and all its permutations were the subject of a Zócalo/Getty “Open Art” event before a large and appreciative audience Thursday night at the Getty Center. On an auditorium stage bathed in blue light, in front of blue backdrop in a blue state, a blues quartet of a panel—a chemist, an art historian, a photographer and researcher of West Africa, and a comedian-musician-playwright—offered very different reflections on blue in an awe-inspiring array of contexts.

The conversation started with a look at the blues of the Morpho butterfly and the Giotto frescos in the 14th-century Arena Chapel in Italy, and covered bluestockings, blue bloods, blues music, blue-collar workers, blue eyes, the civil-rights era film A Patch of Blue (about a blind white girl who befriends Sidney Poitier), the iris in Vincent Van Gogh’s work, and the magic of that little blue pill, Viagra.

Oregon State chemist Mas Subramanian talked about his accidental discovery of a new shade of blue, “YInMn blue,” during work to create compounds that might improve the memory of computers. He said that is typical—blue is an unpredictable color, even a deceptive one.

“Nature plays tricks on us—many things that we think are blue are not really blue,” he said. “Living organisms are not very good at making blue.” The sky, for example, is not really blue. But, he added, deep bodies of water are actually blue, in that they absorb reds (which have longer wavelengths), leaving blues, which have shorter wavelengths.

Another panelist, Catherine McKinley, author of Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World, spoke of the value, financial and spiritual, of blue cloth—specifically indigo products—in west Africa, where she traveled along traditional indigo trade routes in 11 countries. In the 1800s, lengths of blue cloth were exchanged as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In some contexts, a human being could be traded for two yards of cloth. During the American Civil War, the U.S. dollar became so devalued that trade was conducted in indigo cakes.

McKinley said that across different cultural contexts, there is often a connection of blue to life and death. “Blue as cool,” she explained, “representing a kind of spirituality, exemplified by a coolness.”

Panelist Garrett Morris, an original Saturday Night Live cast member who has worked as a musician, actor, and playwright, pointed out that blue is not just a color. “Blue is also something you can feel,” he said. He described how his grandfather, a Baptist preacher, introduced him to the blues when he was a young child in New Orleans, “even though he shouldn’t have” since the blues were considered evil and dirty.

Morris, who also has owned a comedy and blues club in Los Angeles, said he loved the “elusiveness” of the blues. “It’s not sad or happy. There’s a bittersweetness about the blues. It’s more sentimentality, melancholia, which can be good or bad … It doesn’t have to be definite.”

As the event went on, the panelists—and several audience members—exchanged a river’s full of facts and questions about the color blue.

Did you know that Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is colorblind, and blue is the only color he sees well? Did you know that the Hindu god Vishnu is blue, and associated with life and death and rejuvenation? Subramanian noted how Indians became excited about perceived connections between the blue characters in the James Cameron film Avatar and aspects of Hindu religion and culture.

Morris pondered, “When was the first time someone said, ‘I feel blue.’ Why didn’t they say, ‘I feel green.’” (Other panelists suggested that the body can turn blue when it is hurt or ill). And a retired swimming pool contractor in the audience described how much work goes into making sure that when water fills a pool, it looks blue.

In response to an audience member’s question about how blue tastes, the art historian Mavor, who is the author of Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour, discussed a blue mushroom, the indigo milk cap, that bleeds a delicious milk. But she noted that many blue tastes are artificial—like blue jello—and desired by children.

The post This Color Can Be Dirty, Deceptive—and Divine appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These were all challenges of the ancient world—times and places far removed from the 21st-century United States. But on a cool summer evening before a packed audience at the outdoor amphitheater of the Getty Villa, three scholars found some surprising parallels between that distant era and our own, as they pondered the question, “What Can the Ancient World Teach Us About Globalization?”

Leading off the Wednesday night Zócalo/Getty Villa “Open Art” event, moderator Margot Roosevelt, an economy reporter for the Orange County Register, cut straight to the chase, asking the panel of experts what is the single most significant thing we can learn from past civilizations about globalization.

Roger Bagnall, a classics scholar at New York University, replied that, because ancient governments were not democratic, “they had a whole lot less trouble with globalization than we do.”

Grant Parker, a classical philologist at Stanford University, cautioned that, because history tends to be written by the victors, we need to reconstruct more stories of people in ancient times who were unrepresented and oppressed, if we are to make full sense of remote eras.

The hour-long event touched on several issues that were as complex and thorny in the globalized ancient world as they are today: identity and assimilation; the role of language in shaping consciousness and asserting power; and the tug-of-war between emerging global powers, eager to put their mark on the map, and decadent older powers seeking to find (often darker-skinned) scapegoats for their troubles.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a scholar of globalization, development, and cultural anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara, emphasized the importance throughout history of cycles of trade expansion. In the ancient world, empires at the height of their power saw expanding commerce as beneficial, while empires in retreat tended to pull back from trade, he said. That phenomenon can still be seen today: “As America retreats, China advances,” he said.

Back when all roads led to Rome, Carthage, or Constantinople, trade helped speed not only the flow of grain, olive oil, and wine to new markets, but the flow of thought as well.

“Often, ideas went on the same boat as commodities,” Parker said, citing the example of the cult worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis.

But, Roosevelt asked, did circulating ideas across borders sometimes produce a backlash? Bagnall replied that the Romans initially pushed back against some of the new ideologies and new gods. But, in other cases, they gradually ingested and assimilated these upstart deities and newfound ways of doing things, he said.

Mastering the lingua franca of the day was another way to profit from globalization in the ancient world. Parker said that having command of Latin could give a subject of the Romans entry into the empire. Bagnall countered that, while a large part of the Roman Empire actually spoke Greek, the Romans tended to take a dim view of Syrians partly because “they were funny and they talked differently and they ate different things.” Juvenal, the Roman satirical poet, was perhaps the most famous complainer about Syrian migrants.

For Pieterse, one of the essences of globalization is connectivity, which requires both hardware (tradeable goods, transportation) as well as the “software” of ideas. Once upon a time, he observed, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Confucius walked the earth as near contemporaries, spreading philosophies that helped humans to establish “wider identities beyond the tribal and local.”

(You can read more about it in Pieterse’s most recent book, titled Multipolar Globalization: Emerging Economies and Development, which at one point he plucked from his satchel and displayed, to the amusement of the audience and his fellow panelists. “This is a commercial break,” Bagnall deadpanned.)

Long before there was any talk of Brexit, trade deficits, lost domestic jobs, or currency manipulation, some ancients believed that globalization mostly benefited elites.

Yet, Bagnall said, although it’s true that Roman elites benefited considerably from globalization, so did many poor people who migrated to places where they found better work.

“But we don’t hear about them because they didn’t write books,” Bagnall said.

Roosevelt asked whether climate change affected antiquity by prompting mass migrations, as it has begun to do in our time. Is there evidence that climate change might even have sparked wars? Bagnall says it’s difficult to pinpoint whether climate change could have caused a clash between, say, the Greeks and the Persians. But the records do indicate that droughts, which at times prevented the Nile from having its rejuvenating seasonal floods, caused harm to the Roman Empire.

During the question-and-answer period, several audience members probed the panel about additional parallels between ancient times and ours. One man asked what pagans would have to say about the way they were treated by the early Christians.

“Nothing very favorable,” Bagnall answered, “but the Christians could reply that they learned their lessons from the Roman government.”

Even now, Pieterse said, the ancient world still speaks to us through its monuments and its works of art.

“The ancient world is teaching us all the time because the ancient world is part of us,” he said.

The post Your Complaints About Globalization Are Old News appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The ancient caravan city of Palmyra, also known as Tadmor in Arabic, is one such place. Stretching three kilometers through the Syrian Desert, its ruins tell enumerable stories, thousands of years in the making. The city was never fully abandoned, and so Palmyra is an archive beyond its buildings: one of people, culture, and conflict across time.

Palmyra prospered in antiquity as Romans and Parthians vied for dominance of the region. In the Byzantine and early Islamic era, Palmyra’s ancient temples were remade into churches and mosques, and, during the early-modern and colonial periods, foreign expeditions documented and secured Palmyrene artifacts for distant museum collections. Syrian and international teams of archaeologists reconstituted the ancient city through excavation and reconstruction in the 20th century.

Detail of two-part panorama featuring the Colonnade Street and the Temple of Bel in Palmyra. Albumen print by Louis Vignes, 1864/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Each of these phases in history reframed Palmyra, physically changing and conceptually altering the once-thriving metropolis.

And today, militants have caused irrevocable destruction to Palmyra’s monuments and people. Our own, heart-wrenching moment in Palmyra’s history has been met with a variety of responses, including digital reconstruction projects, museum exhibitions, academic conferences, and significant media coverage. Although sometimes uneven and the subject of criticism, these projects signify an impulse to resist the damage done during the current Syrian conflict by reimagining the site as it was before the destruction, or as it may be remade in a more hopeful post-war future.

I have been fortunate enough to have co-curated together with Frances Terpak the online exhibition The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra. This project is the first of its kind taken on by the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles. The focus of the exhibition is the remarkable material held by the GRI, including the earliest known photographs of Palmyra, taken by the French naval officer Louis Vignes in 1864, and a rare set of etchings made after on-site drawings by the French artist and architect Louis François Cassas in 1785.

Together these two collections offer a window into a seemingly distant time in Palmyra’s history, but one that was no less complex than our own. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the ruins of Palmyra and the village of Tadmor contained within its ancient walls were part of the Ottoman Empire. Palmyra was connected to the world through caravans consisting of hundreds of camels, as it had been for thousands of years. Expeditions to the site, like those of Cassas and Vignes, foreshadowed a deeper penetration of Western influence in the region as well as the beginnings of archaeological investigations.

Valley of the Tombs in Palmyra. Etching after Louis-François Cassas, ca. 1799/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Cassas’ prints were part of a larger survey that documented monuments from Istanbul to Cairo and part of a career that recorded and published views of classical ruins in Rome, Sicily, Greece, and Croatia. Although not known well today, Cassas was recognized by intellectual elites of his day, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, precisely because he had gone to Palmyra to see and draw these famed ruins.

The work itself, which can be considered the most comprehensive study of Palmyra before the 20th century, consists of close to 100 large-format etchings. These etchings are a collection of technical renderings, architectural plans, landscape views, and reconstructions of the magnificent buildings that have been intentionally demolished in recent years.

The painstaking detail in Cassas’ original drawings and the final prints display his desire to create a body of work that had superb aesthetic value. And by design, his imaginative depictions of the site also became blueprints for European artists to use in works of architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts.

View of the interior courtyard of the Temple of Bel showing the mudbrick homes in the foreground. Albumen print by Louis Vignes, 1864/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Neoclassical Europe had already had a taste of Palmyrene art from the earlier and more famous British expedition of Robert Wood and James Dawkins, whose monumental book The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise, Tedmor in the Desert (1753) was often cited as a source for architectural inspiration in 18th-century England. For example, the now-destroyed coffered ceiling of the Temple of Bel, which was depicted in the Wood and Dawkins publication, was replicated in the interiors of at least four prominent buildings designed by Robert Adam and others.

Cassas’s goal was to give this audience more material by providing lavish depictions of a style that became to be known as “Roman Baroque.” Although the term is generally not favored by art historians today, “Roman Baroque” suggests what Cassas and his audience found so powerful in Palmyra’s art and architecture. The colossal scale and opulent decorations of the Roman-era buildings in the great cities of the Eastern Mediterranean rivaled some of the best examples of classical architecture found in the West, even in Rome.

Palmyra’s architecture exemplified this concept, and, combined with its location “lost” in the desert, magnified its appeal. Embroiled in the struggles of the French Revolution, thinkers in Cassas’ time readily connected the perceived abandonment and decline of Palmyra as a cautionary tale to the possible destruction of their own civilization.

Imaginary view of Tetrapylon. Etching after Louis-François Cassas, ca. 1799/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Nearly 80 years after Cassas’ travels to Syria, Louis Vignes brought his camera to Palmyra and moved its ancient monuments into the modern era. To our eyes, Vignes’ images may appear nostalgic, and in light of current events, ghostly, as visages of a past no longer present. But to a 19th-century viewer, they would have been seen as concrete evidence, either validating or refuting the embellishments of earlier accounts. In contrast to the timeless and almost dream-like qualities of Cassas’ images, Vignes grounded Palmyra in a photographic immediacy that places the viewer in the monument.

This 1864 expedition to Palmyra was an offshoot of a larger geological and cultural survey of the Dead Sea region that was sponsored and led by Honoré Théodore Paul Joseph d’Abert, duc de Luynes, a French nobleman with a passion for archaeology, science, biblical history, and technology. Vignes, a ship’s captain hired for the mission because of his knowledge of the regions’ ports, had only briefly trained in photography before embarking on this journey.

The regional survey was meant to be scientific and comprehensive. Along with photographing classical, biblical, and crusader sites, the expedition team documented and mapped the sources of rivers described in the Bible, and collected core samples from the Dead Sea and specimens of its marine life. The expedition brought two small collapsible metal boats across the desert to be reassembled and used for research as needed.

The images produced by Cassas and Vignes are squarely set inside a colonial or orientalist vision of Palmyra, mostly concerned with its classical past. They were made in an interventionist period which deserves unsympathetic criticism for the lasting economic and political effects it caused in the region.

View of Palmyra from Qalaat Shirkuh before the destruction of its major monuments by ISIS. Photo by Judith McKenzie/Manar al-Athar, 2010.

Alongside and inseparable from this fraught history are the beginnings of modern scholarship on Palmyra and around the world. Many scholars from many countries have dedicated their professional careers to researching Palmyra. Through their efforts we know that Palmyra, throughout much of its history, was home to changing multi-ethnic and religiously diverse societies. Modern archaeology has reframed the city in our own time by excavation and decipherment of inscriptions. These images of daily life through the ages, culled together from decades of work by scholars, replace the earlier Western concept of Palmyra as a landscape of romanticized ruins belonging to a lost civilization.

Appallingly, Syrian archaeologists, workers, and others with knowledge of this and other sites in the war-torn country have been targeted and killed in recent years. In some reports, these atrocities have occurred when attempts were made to protect the sites from ISIS looters, who have been systematically seizing and selling antiquities to fund their activities.

Pursuing knowledge about Palmyra cannot undo the damage done. But it can offer new narratives that promote the value and importance of cultural heritage. From a nexus of trade in antiquity to a modern tourist destination, people from diverse backgrounds flocked to Palmyra. Continued engagement with the place, digitally if not physically, will help future generations reframe Palmyra once again.

The post Reflecting Splendor and Conflict in Enduring Visions of an Ancient City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Wednesday night, Simon and Shabazz came together before a packed auditorium at a Zócalo/Getty “Open Art” event to consider the question, “Does Art Capture Reality Better Than the News?” It’s a subject that Simon, a former newspaper reporter turned television writer, and Shabazz, a former U.S. Army soldier who later worked for a spell as a corrections officer while building his photography career, have had frequent occasion to explore, both personally and as artists.

But Wednesday’s conversation, moderated by Peter Tokofsky, an education specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum, encompassed many other themes, chief among them the role that art can play in witnessing and even healing society’s wounds (and the limits of that role); and how writers, photographers, musicians, and other artists can craft beauty and truth out of mundane, sometimes ugly and discouraging, daily existence.

For many viewers, Simon’s television dramas, including The Wire and Treme, conjure visions of modern America that are more textured and credible than most anything they witness on the evening news. Similarly, Shabazz’s four decades’ worth of photographs of street scenes provide an insightful running commentary on the trials and exhilarations of African American life that’s not regularly found in daily newspapers.

Shabazz believes part of his duty as an artist is to serve his community and “sound the alarm” about the threats facing it—the crack cocaine epidemic of the early 1980s, the scourge of AIDS, and the damage inflicted by political policies that reinforce old racist stereotypes.

“I have chosen the camera as the weapon to combat what I’m seeing,” said Shabazz, adding that he works from a sense of obligation to keep documenting the impact of social forces on the lives of African Americans—sometimes friends, other times total strangers whose trust he first must earn.

“I never run out of stories to tell,” he said.

At the same time, he never wants to sensationalize the problems afflicting some of his subjects. “My community was already under siege and I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire,” he said.

Simon’s artistic apprenticeship took form differently. He spent many years covering cops as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, and even today, as an Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, Simon retains the sensibility of an old-school newspaperman. In answer to Tokofsky’s question as to whether Simon the reporter still lurks inside Simon the television writer, he replied: “To be honest with you, if newspapers had not taken the turn they did I’d probably still be working in newspapers,” said Simon, whose life took a decidedly different turn. “Now I’m stuck. I’ve gotten used to it,” he said of his second career.

Simon sharply contrasted journalism as it was when he practiced it 30 years ago with today’s social media-driven maelstrom of factoids, fake news, and “citizen journalists,” a phenomenon that Simon slapped with an expletive.

“Daily journalism, if it’s honest, it’s the known facts,” he said. “In this modern era, it’s whatever you can throw up on the internet.”

The two artists, both born in 1960, hadn’t met each other before Wednesday evening, but quickly discovered much common ground, particularly in their mutual penchant for patient observation and taking intimate, humanizing perspectives on their subjects.

“What you want … in every story I ever wrote, you want to leave people with absolute dignity,” Simon said.

Likewise, Shabazz’s photographs of subway riders, boys at play, and others (some of which were projected onto the walls of the Getty auditorium during the talk) capture the effusive street-style fashions and diversions of African American youth. He records the hopes as well as the anxieties of the Nixon-Carter-Reagan years: the welcoming atmosphere of a neighborhood African American barbershop, as well as the tension of a young man awaiting his Vietnam draft notice.

Simon said that Shabazz’s photos reminded him of a truism: that the most honest things often happen between two people in a kitchen or some other quietly ordinary domestic setting.

Shabazz, who calls himself “a child of the 1960s,” said he learned much from musical urban chroniclers like Marvin Gaye. From books like Leonard Freed’s Black In White America he absorbed a slew of new words and terminology—“racism,” “lynching,” “Jim Crow.”

He also credited Life magazine covers and Playboy interviews with introducing him to people like Fidel Castro and Malcolm X. “Then I would look at the pictures [in Playboy] and learn about light and composition,” he joked, drawing laughter from the Getty crowd.

Simon, who was greatly influenced by New Journalism innovators like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, wrote journalism so packed with the stuff of drama that Hollywood eventually came calling. Like Shabazz, he too said he fell under pop culture’s powerful sway, citing a scene in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) in which one character pummels another with a pool cue. That taught Simon that such unexpected, seemingly incidental details can be used by an artist to establish verisimilitude.

“It’s so incongruous that it made it more real,” Simon said of the memorable screen moment.

The discussion prompted an audience question from Howard Rosenberg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times former TV critic, who asked whether there’s a greater burden on mainstream journalism today to take a more active role in shaping the message, away from the spin zone.

Simon replied that in our contemporary society, it takes truth longer to catch up with the stampede of rumor and falsehood streaming across our cellphones.

Earlier, Simon also acknowledged the limitations of what art can achieve, particularly when it has to make a profit. There are three things that sell on commercial television, he said: violence, sex, and comedy.

“The moment you step away from that and are trying to capture anything else in the human condition, you’re saying goodbye to a mass audience,” Simon said. Art, by itself, can’t bring real enlightenment to a male TV viewer who’s only glued to his set because he’s hoping to see some blood or get a quick glimpse of skin.

“You can’t fix that guy with art,” Simon said. Nor can art, by itself, revive the rundown areas of Baltimore, or end violence.

“Picasso put up Guernica,” Simon said, “and they just kept bombing cities.”

The post Art Can Help Us Understand Reality, Even While Transforming It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How could a color be so valuable? In culture after culture, red commands the eye. We are drawn to its power, and to its passion, its sacrifice, its rage, its vitality. It’s not an accident that the color is red: It turns out that we humans are unusually susceptible to scarlet hues. Studies show that the color quickens our pulse and breath, perhaps because we link it with birth, blood, fire, sex, and death.

But for much of human existence, broad mastery of the color crimson was elusive. Only a few natural substances produce red dye. Henna, madder roots, brazilwood, archil lichens, and fermented stews of rancid olive oil, cow dung, and blood numbered among the sources over the centuries, but most of them fell short—faltering as dyes for textiles and setting into corals, russets, and persimmons instead of true scarlets. The worst of them faded fast into dull pinkish browns. True reds proved rare, and the evocative pigment became even more prized.

Thousands of years ago, however, Mesoamericans discovered that pinching an insect found on prickly pear cacti yielded a blood-red stain on fingers and fabric. The tiny creature—a parasitic scale insect known as cochineal—was transformed into a precious commodity. Breeders in Mexico’s southern highlands began cultivating cochineal, selecting for both quality and color over many generations.

The results were spectacular. The carminic acid in female cochineals could be used to create a dazzling spectrum of reds, from soft rose to gleaming scarlet to deepest burgundy. Though it took as many as 70,000 dried insects to make a pound of dye, they surpassed all other alternatives in potency and versatility.

An illustration of cochineal collection by Mexican priest and scientist José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, 1777. Newberry Library, Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection.

Dried cochineal insects from the author’s study. Courtesy of Amy Butler Greenfield.

Cochineal spread through ancient Mexico and Central America, where it was used for the quotidian and the sacred. Textiles, furs, feathers, baskets, pots, medicines, skin, teeth, and even houses bore the brilliant red dye. Scribes colored the history of their people with its crimson ink.

Detail from a page of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, a pictographic history and genealogical record from Mixtec region of Mexico between 1200-1521 A.C. The British Museum.

When the Spanish conquistadors landed in Mexico, they were struck by the stunning scarlets of the New World. The exotic source of the dye became a sensation back in Europe, where it was deemed the “perfect red.” The Spanish would go on to ship tons of the dried insects back to the Old World and beyond. Their monopoly on the color’s source made it one of their most valuable exports from Mexico, second only to silver.

Europeans largely used cochineal on textiles, where it produced red fabrics of an unmatchable sheen and intensity. (It could also be used to make shades of peach, pink, purple, and black—but the reds were what made cochineal famous.) To see this magnificent red was to see power. Court gowns and royal robes were made with cochineal, as were the uniforms of British officers. The scarlet dye even found its way back across the ocean, into the “broad stripes” of the embattled banner over Fort McHenry that inspired the U.S. national anthem.

Cochineal also found a spot in the artist’s paint box. If you were a European artist on a tight budget, you could procure your cochineal from shreds of dyed cloth, but fresh-ground insects yielded much better results. Artists usually combined their cochineal with a binder, creating a pigment known as a lake.

It’s impossible to tell with the naked eye which painters used cochineal to make their reds. But recent advances in chemical analysis have confirmed its presence in numerous masterpieces. Among those works is Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride.

Between the muted browns and golds, the bride’s red gown draws the eye. A combination of vermilion base and cochineal glaze allowed Rembrandt to give the dress its great depth and luster. Other painters of the period also loved to use cochineal lakes to paint glowing red fabrics, such as the shimmering scarlet silks in Anthony van Dyck’s Charity and possibly in the Portrait of Agostino Pallavicini as well.

Anthony van Dyck’s Charity. National Gallery, London.

Portrait of Agostina Pallavicini. Getty Museum.

Eye-catching though these cochineal lakes were, they had one great drawback. Unlike cochineal dye on cloth, which usually holds fast to its color, cochineal pigments in paint tended to fade with exposure to light. This was especially true of watercolors. J. M W. Turner’s cochineal-reddened sunsets, for example, literally pale in comparison to what he originally set down. Cochineal could be fugitive in oils too. A lake made with minimal cochineal, or cochineal of poor quality, faded in a matter of years. Even quality cochineal has dimmed over the centuries. The dowdy jacket in Thomas Gainsborough’s Dr. Ralph Schomberg and the blotchy pastel backdrop of Renoir’s Madame Léon Clapisson both are pale versions of the original.

Thomas Gainsborough’s Dr. Ralph Schomberg, 1770. National Gallery, London.

Yet while Dr. Schomberg is consigned to his discolored suit for the foreseeable future, Madame Clapisson recently was given new life. A team at Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago analyzed the cochineal that remained in the portrait and digitally recreated the painting in all its glory. Regard the original and the restoration, and you can see both the force of cochineal and its weakness.

Renoir’s 1883 portrait of Madame Léon Clapisson and the digital recolorization. Art Institute of Chicago via the BBC.

When new artificial reds like alizarins made from coal tar became available in the late 19th century—ones more lasting and less expensive than those created by the naturally occurring insect—artists eagerly picked them up. By the late 20th century, artists had abandoned cochineal. Dyers, too, turned to cheaper alternatives. Even in its homeland, the insect nearly disappeared.

Today, in a surprising turn of history, the cochineal market is booming again—thanks to contemporary demand for safe food and cosmetic coloring. See names like carmine, carminic acid, crimson lake, Natural Red 4, or E120 on a label, and you may be looking at a modern manifestation of the color once fit for kings.

A few artists and dyers, too, have been tempted back by its revival—drawn to its intensity and sheen, its historical and cultural resonances. One is Elena Osterwalder, whose stunning installations employ both cochineal and the amatl bark-paper used by Mesoamericans before the Conquest.

“Red Room” installation by Elena Osterwalder. Courtesy of Elena Osterwalder.

In Oaxaca, once the epicenter of the cochineal trade, you can still find traditional weavers breathing new life into the ancient color.

Traditional tapate—belonging to the author—that was woven by Fidel Cruz Lazo of Teotitlán del Valle, who colors his yarns with only cochineal and other local natural dyes. Courtesy of Amy Butler Greenfield.

Though the high era of cochineal may have ended, the power conveyed by its potent hue remains. Over centuries and continents, we humans have always been drawn in by red. After all, it’s in our blood.

The post The Bug That Had the World Seeing Red appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The scariest place I have ever been—that was not intended to be scary—is this crypt beside the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome. At the foot of Via Veneto, the church contains a Caravaggio, but you could be forgiven for overlooking it, in favor of the adjacent vaults. For there lie the bones of some 3,700 former Capuchin and Franciscan monks, a haul that began with 300 cartloads of deceased brethren who accompanied the friars that founded this church in 1631 and added to it until 1870. What to do with this avalanche of human remains? The dead would be buried in the earthen floor for around 30 years, without a coffin, and then exhumed and transformed into decoration, to make room for the freshly deceased. Friar Michael of Bergamo led the initial arrangement of the crypts and their occupants, “burying” their brethren in a way that at once suited the available space—the walls, ceiling and floor of six vacant crypts alongside their church—venerated the remains, and created what many retrospectively label as one of the most beautiful, moving, and haunting art installations ever made.

If the message of this reburial-as-artwork was not clear, it is written into the floor of the final crypt, beneath the child’s skeleton: “What You Are, We Once Were, What We Are You Will Be.” Memento mori. Remembrance of death. Be a good Christian, before it’s too late.

As horror-filmic as the Capuchin ossuary chapels in Rome may sound, the creepiness of moving through them is cut by a cocktail of beauty (in the careful, aesthetic arrangement of this walk-through sculpture, for which bones happen to be the medium instead of wood or marble), tenderness (the hands of the friars who placed and fastened each component), and the sublime (the sweeping knowledge that death conquers all). For those who can’t walk these bone-covered crypts, memento mori can be appreciated on a much smaller scale—a single skull in some of the West’s greatest artworks.

Of course, the skull is a universal symbol. They are warnings of the possibility of death, flapping white on black on the Skull and Crossbones pirate flag, decorating the lapels of the SS, and on labels of poisonous materials. Prehistoric cultures displayed severed heads, and then the remaining skulls, of their vanquished opponents. Some Vikings made goblets out of the skulls of their defeated, which is perhaps the ultimate symbol of having conquered the body—not only did you kill and dismember it, but you repurposed the seat of the mind, the most human part of its corpus, and made it into something as mundane as a beverage holder. But these are displays of skulls as symbols, warnings—not artworks in the traditional sense.

Then there are vanitas paintings, still-lives that usually include a skull, among other inanimate objects that symbolize passing time—an hourglass, a burning candle, ripening then rotting fruit—as well as objects that are associated with vain youth, which will wrinkle, rot, and crumble in time—makeup, mirrors, dice. Philippe de Champaigne’s Vanitas (1671) is as good an example as any. From the artist’s perspective, these are exercise pieces, paintings of still-lives that allow you to show off your abilities at naturalistic reproduction, but to charge it with more meaning than a basket of fruit or vase of flowers alone might carry.

When the skull is taken out of a still-life and added to a religious work, it shifts from vanitas to memento mori. It’s hard to find a depiction of Saint Jerome without a skull. Jerome is usually shown naked in the desert, knelt before a cross and repeatedly whacking himself in the head with a rock, penitent and chastising his body in prayer. In these scenes, the skull serves as a reminder of a) Christ’s sacrifice, crucified at a place called Golgotha, which is Aramaic for “place of the skull” and which is supposed to have been the site where Adam’s skull lay, and b) the need for Jerome to hurry and engage fully in his prayers, before he becomes a skeleton, himself. The other version of Saint Jerome shows him as a scholar, in his study as he writes the Vulgate, his famous translation of the New Testament from Greek into Latin. In these images, as in Marinus van Reymerswaele’s Saint Jerome (1541), a skull gazes up from his desk, a ticking clock reminding Jerome and the viewer to be a good person (in pre-modern Europe that meant a good Christian) and to live life to the fullest.

A more complex version of the same Christian message may be found in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), famous for a mathematical/artistic trick, anamorphosis. This is a mathematical formula by which an image can be contorted or stretched in such a way that, when viewed normally from the front of a painting, it appears blurry or unintelligible, but when viewed from an acute angle or specific viewpoint, it optically “fixes” itself and we can see the image for what it really is. In The Ambassadors, what is ostensibly a double-portrait of two friends, the French secular and ecclesiastical ambassadors to the English court of Henry VIII, hides much more meaning. On the two-tiered table laid out between the two fully-painted figures are instruments to read the skies and constellations (telescope, astrolabe, celestial globe) and instruments of, or to measure, the earth (a ruler, books, a lute, a terrestrial globe).

But if we look closely enough, all is not well. On the celestial plane, the upper register of the table, it is as we would expect; but on the earthly level, the lower register, something is amiss, a-harmonic: a single string on the lute is broken, a reference to Henry VIII’s breaking with the Catholic Church and causing terrestrial disharmony. This message is further strengthened by the crucifix that peaks out from behind the green curtain at the back of the painting. This detail was only recently revealed after a restoration—it had been painted out at some earlier point, likely because it made too clear the underlying political message of this double portrait. But what people remember about the painting (my students, certainly) is the muddy shiver of white and black paint that appears to perhaps be a rug or tiles on the floor before the two-tiered table. It is only if you move to the far right-hand side of the painting (when facing it), and look at the painted floor from a tight angle, that the mess of white and black shifts into place before your eyes, and forms the shape of a giant skull.

Even in contemporary, secular art skulls remain (after all, we all have them), death remains, and all the symbolism that skulls carried in the past reverberates even today. Take the two most recent, famous skulls in art, two very different approaches: Gabriel Orozco’s Black Kites (1997) and Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God (2007).

One might assume that Orozco, who is Mexican, was referencing the Day of the Dead in this work—a real human skull which he spent months holding and drawing upon in pencil, in the shapes of squares, so the skull appears covered in a graphite and bone-white chess board (though the theoretically-even and consistent checkerboard pattern is contorted, as the squares bend around the contours of the skull). But Orozco disagrees, this is “an experiment with graphite on bone … The thing is a contradiction, really: a 2D grid superimposed on a 3D object. One element is precise and geometric, the other is uneven and organic. The two are not resolved.” It is certainly beautiful, and echoes the Capuchin ossuary chapels, in the communion of the artist, holding the skull of someone who once was, and drawing upon it—a thoroughly intimate act.

On the other hand, we have Damien Hirst mocking the commodification of art, by making what was the most expensive-to-produce artwork known (or so he liked to claim, though it’s a fair guess that works like the Colossus of Rhodes or the Athena Parthenos probably cost far more, in relative ancient world terms, than his 15 million GBP platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds). Hirst’s work is really the opposite of Orozco’s. Hirst’s skull is not real—it is a platinum sculpture onto which a ridiculous number of diamonds have been affixed. Hirst also did not make it himself, but commissioned a jeweler to do so. There is nothing actively human about For the Love of God, and perhaps that is part of Hirst’s point. In a 2008 interview about For the Love of God, Hirst said of death, “You don’t like it, so you disguise it or you decorate it to make it look like something bearable—to such an extent that it becomes something else.”

It is when the skull becomes not only something to fear, but also a friendly warning of life’s fleeting nature, that a universal symbol of death becomes a symbol of life. It is then that a skull is no longer just a lobe of bone, vacant sockets and remnant teeth, but a message loaded with additional, non-intrinsic meaning, then represented by human hand. Use the fear of death to inspire yourself to live life to the fullest. We have only so many grains of sand in our hourglass. In art, we can appropriate horror and make it our bone-winged ally, rallying us to seize the day.

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The evening’s moderator, documentarian Jody Hassett Sanchez, raised the question of whether artists illustrating religious scenes for the elites’ manuscripts or for more widespread consumption within churches were true believers or merely manipulators, hired to inspire certain emotions and reinforce the authority of church doctrine.

Filmmaker Michael Tolkin asserted that the intent of the artist is secondary to the intent of the imagery’s audience. For example, he cited the four different reactions to his 1991 movie The Rapture: “People either said it was religious propaganda and that’s why they loved it; it was religious propaganda and that’s why they hated it; it was an attack on religion and that’s why they loved it; or it was an attack on religion and that’s why they hated it.”

University of Southern California medieval historian Lisa Bitel is the author of Our Lady of the Rock, which examines the apparition of the Virgin Mary to the same woman on the 13th day of every month in the Mojave Desert. She is struck by the contemporary thirst not only to experience such miracles, but to witness the religious experiences of others. And so she was fascinated by the crowds that would come together every month to watch this woman see the Virgin in real time.

“And so there I was, watching these people watch someone else seeing the Virgin,” she said.

Leonard Norman Primiano, a religious studies scholar at Cabrini University in Philadelphia, stressed the great interplay between High Church depictions of the divine and those that appear in the vernacular, and how they each inform the other. “Your kitsch can be your sacred,” he said, pointing to two different people in the audience. That first person might walk down Broadway in downtown L.A. and pick up what he thinks is some tremendous religious “kitsch” that was never intended to be ironic.

At the same time, there is a great deal of fluidity not only between high art and the vernacular, but between classic Christian traditions and today’s spiritual imagery. Primiano compared a 1430 manuscript illustration of St. Francis receiving the stigmata to the endless stigmata representations you can find today on YouTube. The same motifs are handed down through the generations, even if today’s YouTubers are (according to Primiano) “visually illiterate,” having decoupled the images from their original content. But, Primiano also noted, the appropriation of spiritual images and traditions across secular and religious realms has always existed. “The Christians got the angels from the Etruscans,” he said.

Hassett Sanchez posited that the boundaries between the material world and the otherworldly were far more porous in the Middle Ages than today. So much more about life and their world was utterly mysterious, so people were more credulous about the supernatural.

But that doesn’t mean that people in our more scientific age have moved on from craving the supernatural. As Zócalo’s publisher suggested during the audience question-and-answer period, perhaps we now crave intimacy with apparitions and the supernatural for the opposite reasons medieval Christians might have—because so much in our lives is otherwise routine, predictable, known.

Bitel agreed that the craving is there, even as “the institutional bonds of our spirituality have loosened.” A Pew poll shows that 42 percent of Americans say they’ve changed religion.

To another question from the audience, on whether testimonials as an art form grew in popularity as a result of rising skepticism in society, Primiano reminded the audience that doubters are not a modern creation. “Remember,” he said, “Thomas the Doubter had to touch Jesus’ wounds to believe.”

So where does this yearning come from? Primiano recounted a recent trip to Mexico to find folk artists depicting miracles in their daily lives. A painting by one artist showed a standoff between the Virgin de Guadalupe and Donald Trump, with an American flag and scenes of Philadelphia (in Primiano’s honor) in between them.

Tolkin agreed with his fellow panelists that the yearning for spiritual experiences, coming from our “terror about our fate,” is not diminishing, though he encouraged the audience to embrace a broader definition and understanding of the religious. For Tolkin himself, seeing The Godfather in the 1970s in a crowded theater in Vermont, after waiting in line for hours, was a “religious communal experience.” And so, too, is attending the Burning Man Festival in the desert, which he has done for a number of years.

Such experiences don’t have to come at the expense of more traditional religious experiences. For Tolkin, one of the most compelling reasons to go to Burning Man is for the Sabbath services there. He explained feeling “the amplification of intensity” experienced with hundreds of other people—who are anonymous to you—on a Friday night in the desert, in the Jewish month of introspection, with the most beautiful of music. “There are naked women running around, too, everyone is weeping, and it breaks down the heart,” he said. It’s “a religious experience and a vision of paradise.”

But it’s perhaps even more elemental than that. When another audience member asked about how secularization alters our relationship to spiritual imagery, Bitel seemed to sum up the consensus on stage: “Religion is like lint in your pocket, it doesn’t go away.”

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