The Real Real Thing: Wendy Steiner in Conversation :: February 3, 2011; 6:30 pm :: Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia PA.

Our culture is fixated on the pose, the state of existing simultaneously as artifice and the real thing. In this reading and conversation, Penn literary scholar Wendy Steiner discusses her latest book, The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art. Joining Steiner in conversation are Jeffrey E. Green, Jim English, and Jean-Michel Rabaté. A book signing will follow.

Why do so many contemporary visual artists use models — often themselves — when for much of the twentieth-century, explicitly model-based representation was relatively uncommon? What is a model, and what role do models play in the creative process? How are contemporary artists exploring the ethical potential of culture through the idea of modeling? What happens to art when virtually everything is virtual?

In The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art, Steiner explores these questions among others and in doing so asserts that the symbolic importance of the model has much to teach us about the contemporary human condition well beyond the confines of ‘art’. Connecting self-objectifiction and our society’s emphasis on the visual — ours is a ‘culture of the gaze’ — modeling holds a rich ethical potential for understanding the domains of media saturation and virtuality. As both real and artificial, the model is a paradoxical icon of our contemporary moment, and can be found in a vast array of public figures. From celebrities, to bloggers, and even avatars, all in some way can be understood in relation to this issue of modeling. As the body politic becomes fundamentally artificial, to raise the question of the model is to think through the major questions and ironies that define our present moment.

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 Times Literary Supplement. She is the author of many books, including Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (Free Press/Heinemann) and Literature as Meaning: A Thematic Anthology (Longman/Penguin). Prof. Steiner led the Penn Humanities Forum as its Founding Director from 1999–2010.

Jeffrey Green, a democratic theorist, is author of The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship (Oxford University Press), which was awarded the First Book Prize from the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association.

Jim English, Professor of English and Director of the Penn Humanities Forum, is author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard University Press), which was named Best Academic Book of 2005 by New York Magazine.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, the Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, is a leading figure among the generation of French theorists taught by Derrida and Lacan, who has published or edited over twenty books on Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. Among his recent books is The Ethics of the Lie (The Other Press).