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Andrea Sisson's "¿Wearable Objects, Objects You Wear?" Photo courtesy of Ashley Kempher.
Despite an extensive common history, fashion's status as art often necessitates explanation. Even with well-documented connections amongst designers, artists, and art collectors over the past dozen decades—not to mention the many fashion exhibitions put on by such prestigious art institutions as the Metropolitan Museum and our very own Cincinnati Art Museum—the connection between the two often begs justification, particularly in lofty critical journals whose writers and readers might harbor partialities for fine (as opposed to applied) art. What follows is a brief history lesson.
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Peter Henry Emerson.
Cantley: Wherries Waiting for the Turn of the Tide, c. 1884. Platinum print, c. 1886, by Valentine and Sons. George Eastman House Collection. Gift of William C. Emerson.
"TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945" is a scaled-down version of an exhibition organized by George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, drawing almost exclusively on its collection. Even in this smaller incarnation at the Taft Museum of Art—it still has 130 works—it offers a rich view of this important photographic movement.
The title of the show sums it up nicely. "TruthBeauty" refers to John Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn," 1819, which ends:
- Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
- Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Almost from the very beginning of photography, which dates to 1839 with the invention of the daguerreotype, there have been roughly two ways of looking at photographs. One is that it is a record or document—truth (Let's leave aside how photos "lie.")—or a vehicle for artistic expression—beauty.
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Paul Coors.
Living Room (white) (2010). Candle Wax Monotype print, 18x24in. Photo Courtesy of Joe Lamb.
Paul Coors' new solo exhibition at Clay Street Press is something of two different worlds. Beneath the surface of a quintessential contemporary exhibition, Tell Me What Else You Need From Me reveals a multiplicity of approaches to conceiving of and executing visual art. Coors, a 2004 graduate of The Art Academy of Cincinnati and formerly of the now defunct and highly respected Publico, is one of Cincinnati's most gifted designer/printmakers. In this current show, the viewer is asked to locate her/himself within a space that never proposes stylistic or formal unity, a place where one is offered a series of objects bound together only by their common creator and then challenged to fashion the links between them. It is as if we have been invited to spend time examining variations on a theme without ever having the theme formally stated.
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Art & Fashion: Aesthetic Worlds with Seamless Boundaries
