Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a wide-ranging cultural critic who has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Nation, London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is the author of many books, including, most recently, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art.

Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and a wide-ranging cultural critic who has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Nation, London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is the author of many books, most recently Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art.

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The Real Real Thing

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

List of Illustrations...........................................................xAcknowledgments.................................................................xiiiIntroduction: Philosophy in the Life Class......................................11 What Is a Model?..............................................................112 Yesterday's Models: Stories of the Creation of Women..........................303 I'm Not Being There: Artist, Model, Celebrity.................................464 What Happens to Art When Virtually Everything Is Virtual?.....................665 "Ecstatic Cahoots": New Hierarchies in Contemporary Art.......................876 Mother, Father, Mirror: Art That Changes the World............................1077 The Latest Models: Collaborative Creation Stories.............................1308 On Garde: Avant- or Derrire..................................................1519 The Aesthetic Gift: Hawthorne, Bioethics, Hairspray...........................180Notes...........................................................................193Index...........................................................................209

Chapter One

The goal of this chapter is to understand what a model is, and what characteristics of models make them useful symbols in contemporary culture. This might at first appear to be a doomed enterprise. Anything-material or abstract-can be a model for something else, insofar as it can be replicated, imitated, adapted. Human beings may be models for artworks; inanimate prototypes are models for products; mathematical equations are models of physical phenomena. Models may predict the future or, like Mitochondrial Eve, generate it. They run the ethical gamut: utopia is a model made real; so is anorexia.

The synonyms of model only add to the complexity. A model may be a paradigm, prototype, original, precedent, master: that is, an idea or entity "lying behind" or generating replicas and copies. But surprisingly, it may be just the opposite: an exemplum, replica, or copy, that is, an instance representative of the idea behind it. When Shakespeare's Henry V exhorts his troops, "Be copy now to men of grosser blood, / And teach them how to war," he is using copy to mean "role model." When a dealer points to a car and says, "This is a 2004 model," he is using model to mean "copy" or "instance." Some synonyms relate to the abstractness of models (norm, pattern, formula, schema); some to their excellence (ideal, icon); and some to their generative power, physical or psychological (script, score, sketch, matrix, inspiration, muse). Simulation points to the like / not-like relation (the "quasi-ness") between model and reality. Mannequin, miniature, and toy specify the nature of the difference-within-similarity.

Human models come in many varieties-fashion models, portrait sitters, life models, artist's models, role models-and many social guises-parent, teacher, leader. Deities, saints, and heroes are valued as models for human emulation, as the title Imitatio Christi implies. According to the book of Genesis, in fact, God was the first model, creating man "in his own image." The ambiguities loosed by this divine modeling have triggered millennia of theological debate. Similarly, the philosophy of Plato is a metaphysics of modeling that has permeated the history of Western thought.

Obviously, no single book could ever cover such a vast conceptual field, and it might well be meaningless to use the phrase "the idea of the model." But still, certain claims might be ventured. To begin: modeling is a process in which an original is replicated in a copy or copies. Whether we identify the model as the original or-less commonly-as the copy, some difference separates the two, and this discrepancy raises issues of matching, accuracy, or in the artworks that most concern us, realism. Models may be said to combine distinct orders of existence: their nature as beings (or objects or ideas) in their own right, and their virtual existence in the copies or replicas they generate. Thus, models straddle an ontological divide. And it is for this reason that they are ubiquitous in the arts today, for their doubleness allows them to symbolize the growing permeation of the virtual into everyday reality.

Second, "model" is a relational concept through and through. To say that something is a model implies that it is in play with other factors, human and inanimate. A model gives rise to something else-a product, a work of art, a "creature." In the case of an artist's model, she and her pose are directed toward someone-initially toward a creator, and ultimately toward a larger audience. The audience, in countless subtle ways, is attuned to the artist's treatment of the model, wondering, for example, about the "faithfulness" of a given rendering or the artist's emotional investment in the representation and its source. As a human being in the studio and a virtual presence in the painting, the model is connected to both artist and audience. Architectural models help artists conceive their buildings; they also help clients visualize and understand them. Jean-Paul Viguier puts the elements of his "tiny jewel- like models" together in front of his clients in order to convey "the imagination of what the building is going to be.... If [the client] loves it, he will never forget about it."

The myth of Apelles is an allegory of the model's system of relationships. Alexander the Great hires Apelles to paint his mistress Campaspe, and is so delighted with the result that he gives Campaspe to the painter, who fell in love with her in the course of her posing. According to Victor I. Stoichita, the Renaissance artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari saw this myth as symbolizing the idea that art "is the result of a fundamental pact between the artist (Apelles) and the sponsor (Alexander), concluded on the basis of a representation which has brought about the passage from reality (the lovely Campaspe) to fiction (a picture representing her). This is clearly a classic scenario," Stoichita concludes, "presupposing the fragile equilibrium of four elements constantly under tension: the Artist, the Patron [or Audience], the Model, and the Work."

If we were to add to Stoichita's four elements another two-the Code of art conventions and the physical conditions that permit the Contact required for experiencing the artwork-we would have all six of the factors, mutatis mutandis, in the linguist Roman Jakobson's famous communication schema. The Model is an integral factor in the communicative experience we call art, reminding us of its interactive nature. Since we shall be returning to these factors over and over throughout the chapters that follow, I offer Jakobson's speech schema adapted to visual communication as a handy reference.

I have put an asterisk beside "Model" in the diagram, because though in certain works, for example portraits, she is the referent, this is certainly not always the case. A work based on a model may not be "of" her: what it is about, what it means, what it designates or denotes, what its point is (or any of the other ways of construing "Referent"). And yet, she bears some connection (even if a contrastive one) to all of these. The ambiguities in the model's relation to the referent are precisely what make her such a...