Culture Shifts
Featured Painted in History: Cultural Memory of Camille Doncieux
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Leah Fryer
Camille Doncieux was painted by Claude Monet nearly forty times during her lifetime, but she is missing from history. After her death from illness, Monet's second wife Alice destroyed all of Camille's personal artefacts. What remains are Monet's paintings of her and a single photograph. Everything we know about her is through secondary accounts and analysis of her in paintings. Yet, Camille's likeness is shown around the world, seen by millions of people every year in museums and on reproductions of these paintings found on postcards, tote bags, prints, and more. The public knows her face but may not think twice about who she was or what she may have been like. Exploring the idea of cultural memory, I examine how such a prominent figure in Impressionism still remains widely unknown to the general public. There is something to be said about public consumption of art and recognizable figures within these works. How does Camille exist in cultural memory and what is her place in history outside of being Monet's first wife, model, and mother to his children? By taking a closer look at Camille, there is much uncovered about Monet and how he treated his first muse, shedding light on Camille's personal struggles as a woman in nineteenth-century France and as partner to an aspiring painter.
Featured The Roles of Arts of Hospitality Influence Social Development: Propaganda Expressed Through Literature and the Visual Arts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kim Thu Le
This study employs qualitative approaches with an ethnographic perspective to explore how the arts have been used to facilitate discussions in a hospitality environment among various participants, including visitors, tourists, researchers, and academics. The focus of this study is hospitality within the arts and how it facilitates discussions among writers, artists, and scholars. Drawing from literature and the visual arts, this research explores three case studies. The first focuses on the story of Burma Shave (1927 – 1963), a pop-cultural icon in America during the Depression. The second case focuses on Jewish humour and its critics and how it prompted audiences to recognize truth and contemplate human duties. The third case reveals complementary persuasive arguments, with the visual arts employed to explore Luther as a humanist activist in Germany from 1500, and the expansion of Lutheran viewpoints globally with complementary perspectives. In the context of the arts of hospitality, the question arises: How do the arts of hospitality create powerful tools, fostering social cultural development?
Unsettled Minds: Material Preconditions for Openness and Change View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Erich Schnekenburger
Philosophy, in its many forms, ought to concern itself primarily with an understanding of the processes by which social formations and human lives are improved and denigrated. The emergence of critical theory in the 20th century exemplifies this attempt to understand the structural influences on thought and perception as necessary capacities for progressive change. While contemporary immanent critics such as Axel Honneth, Rahel Jaeggi, and Charles Taylor participate in developing and outlining mechanisms of change, they have lost a crucial element of earlier Frankfurt-style forms of critical theory. That is, real social change requires both an understanding of the mechanisms by which change is possible and the necessary structural changes required to enable those mechanisms. By reintroducing the critiques of modern industrial society within the works of Adorno and Marcuse, as well as the structures of openness and attention in the work of Simone Weil, I argue that we must not ever separate our basic capacities for the thought and attention from lived human experiences which are structurally and forcibly shaped.
