An American Family was a groundbreaking documentary and is considered the first "reality" series on American television. Lance Loud, the eldest son of the family, emerged as the star of the show and was the first openly gay
person to appear on television. You can watch episode excerpts here; https://www.thirteen.org/american-family/
Years later, when Lance Loud was diagnosed with AIDS and Hepatitis C, he asked An American Family filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond to make a follow-up film that would take him through sickness and death. Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family becomes the final episode. Here is the
absolutely heart-wrenching last scene;
"SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW" sung by Rufus Wainright.
Rufus is accompanied by his mother, Kate McGarrigle.
From the documentary "Lance Loud! A Death In An American Family."
Fordism is a term widely used to describe
the system of standardized mass production that was pioneered in the early 20th
century by the Ford Motor Company, and a term
used to describe the basis of modern economic and social systems in
industrialized mass production and mass consumption.
This video tells how Henry Ford made affordable automobiles possible. Others look at the darker side of his vision.
Jeff Koons' artwork is the the most expensive in the marketplace for a living artist. Although critics are divided on the merits of his work, its presence in commerce is substantial.
There wasn't space in Modernism for nostalgia...as culture sprang forward any form of sentimentality needed to be cast aside. Post-modernists and post-structuralists had to deal with nostalgia anew, without much consensus on where it fit into the picture.
(nostalgia) by Hollis Frampton (1936-1984)
DVD program notes:
“What does it mean? I am uncertain but perfectly willing to offer a plausible explanation,” intones the narrator in (nostalgia) by Hollis Frampton (1936-1984). Film images, while capturing moments in time, also create illusions that outlast what they record. Frampton explores the disjuncture of image and memory in (nostalgia), deadpan retelling of his transformation from New York art photographer to filmmaker.
A voracious reader, the Ohio-born Frampton won a scholarship to the Phillips
Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he studied extensively, but he did not
bother to graduate. He followed the same path at Western Reserve University
before moving to Washington, D.C., to visit poet Ezra Pound, then institutionalized
at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Poetry, Frampton decided, was not his vocation,
and he went to New York and took up photography. Rooming briefly with his
Andover classmates, artists Carl Andre and Frank Stella, he produced the wry
photographic series The Secret World of Frank Stella (1958-1962) and
photographed the art world, supporting himself by doing odd jobs. Experiments
with filmmaking led to “Zorns Lemma” (1970), the first avant-garde feature
screened at the New York Film Festival.
Made the next year, (nostalgia) lays old memories to rest with a new twist.
The film is structured around a sequence of 13 photographs from Frampton’s days
documenting the art scene. Each photo is presented and burned to ash as the
narrator describes a different image. As the film unfolds, we realize that the narration
anticipates what will appear in the next photo. The distance between word and
image is jarring, as is the camera’s painstaking, almost loving, documentation
of the immolation of the photographer’s work. One by one, still images of
Stella, Larry Poons, James Rosenquist, and Frampton himself meet the moving
flame.
The narrative game keeps viewers on their toes and divides attention between
sight and sound, past and present. The voice often expresses regret or longing.
“I despised this photograph for several years. But I could never bring myself
to destroy a negative so incriminating,” confesses Frampton’s narrator, Canadian
filmmaker and multimedia artist Michael Snow. Snow’s flat delivery fuels the
understated wit but also intensifies the distancing and adds another layer of
complication, especially when he describes a portrait of his studio taken by
Frampton.
Nostalgia, derived from the Greek, was defined by Frampton as “the wounds of
returning.” As the narrator talks about each image, his stories bring to light
the inadequacies of the filmmaker’s former self and the electric burner
consumes the evidence of the previously described photograph. But like a
phoenix, a new beginning emerges from the ashes. As Frampton said to Scott
MacDonald about the images: “You see, that are not destroyed; they can be
resurrected by rewinding the film.”
More information: Rachel Moore’s book-length essay (nostalgia) (Afterall Books, 2006) features an illustrated transcription of the narration. Frampton is interviewed in A Critical Cinema, by Scott MacDonald (University of California Press, 1988), and his writings are compiled in Circles of Confusion (Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983). Prints of Frampton’s films are available from the Museum of Modern Art.
The idea of the replica can be seen in our earliest cultural artifacts.
But when did the simulation become our only reality, when did the real
cease to exist? When did we begin to live entirely in simulation? Some
see the fictions of Borges an important cultural moment.
This short piece was written in 1946, but the theme emerged in Borges
writings in the 1930s. Then in 1955 we have Disneyland, an actual place
based on fiction. (hyperreality)
Baudrillard references quite a bit of then-recent phenomena, including
Disneyland, the Louds, and Watergate, but Disneyland may be the most profound example in
the book. I've never been there, but have had many friends with
children try to explain how you are completely overwhelmed with
stimulus there, but still the place feels "empty" "soul-less" "surreal" etc.
For a theorist to be able to unwrap how hollow nostalgia can culturally
exist as our new hyperreal normal is a monumental act.
Even though this book was translated to English in 1983, the ideas contained in it are still being sorted through to this day. This year's Whitney Biennial—"the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States" has the title "Even Better Than the Real Thing, acknowledg(ing) that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is complicating our understanding of what is real."