 Hi, good afternoon everyone. Welcome. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm deputy director for research interpretation and education here. I am very excited to, whoops, breaking the technology up here, to introduce our speaker today, Michael Leija. He is the, this is a long title. I'm going to do it. The James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is, Michael Leija is one of the world's leading scholars of 19th and 20th century American art, and that is not an exaggeration. He's really at the front of the field. His work though encompasses much more than the things that you find in museums, painting, sculpture. He studies visual culture more broadly as a way of understanding an historical period. So by visual culture I'm, yes, talking about art, but I'm also talking about prints, popular illustrations, photographs, cartoons, postcards, advertising. And in his work he asks questions like how do, how do images reflect who we are, but also how do they shape who we are? Professor Leija's first book published in 1993 was called Reframing Abstract Expressionism, and he, subjectivity and painting in the 1940s, and he studied, he looked at the paintings of Jackson Pollock and others and situated them within a broader culture wide initiative to reimagine the self in the midst of a traumatic history in the U.S. This book won the Charles Eldridge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. More recently he co-authored with John Davis a book called Art of the United States, 1750 to 2000, and it's a collection of primary sources, very important for the field. He's currently at work on a book exploring changes in pictorial forms and in social relations associated with the industrialization of picture production and the development of a mass market for images in the mid 19th century. Now, before I welcome Michael to the stage, I want to jump back to 2004 to his book published that year called Looking a Scance, Skepticism and American Art from Akins to Duchamp, which, and the reason is that this book, his talk today really kind of goes back to this work. The volume focuses on American art and visual culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it explores how part of the modern experience in cities, in American cities, was a distrust of ordinary vision as a way of knowing the world and as a way of gathering reliable information about the world. The book won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize back in 2005 but I think we would all agree that this distrust of vision is a very relevant, more and more relevant topic in this era of AI and deep fakes and Photoshop and so I'm so pleased that you're all here. Welcome to everybody online and welcome Michael Asia. Thank you, Martha, for that lovely introduction and thank you all for coming. It's great to see you here. It's also great to see those of you who are online and I can see those of you who are online, even if your camera is turned off. We'll know if you're paying attention. Just trying to get your skeptical juices flowing for this talk. So as Martha said nearly 20 years ago I published a book titled Looking at Scance which argued that a distinctive style of seeing was emerging among audiences for art in the later 19th century in the U.S. Viewers were looking art and not only art but other sights and spectacles as well, more skeptically than they had before. The group of women you see on the screen here strikes me as demonstrating something like this new visual practice, a kind of looking that is wary or suspicious with one eyebrow raised and they would have had good reason for looking in this way because they were living in a culture in which skeptical seeing was a necessity. These particular women were visitors to the World's Fair in Buffalo in 1901 where among the impressive buildings and international exhibitions visible there an army of enterprising marketers was out to captivate trusting souls with advertising tricks or distracting spectacles. These women might have been among the crowds that followed a conspicuous pair of country bumpkins who were parading through the fairgrounds loudly displaying astonishment at the sites and inviting condescending amusement. Some onlookers suspected that they were hired actors and indeed once a large enough crowd had formed they made a pitch for a brand of chewing gum. By this time a vicious circle had been forming for decades as people became wiser to the ways of marketers and hucksters the advertisers became shrewder. Trade publications such as printers ink published articles giving pointers on advertising to a skeptical market as one 1910 article was titled. It was not only manipulative advertising that fostered skeptical seeing around this time recent scientific and technological discoveries were radically altering the understanding of vision. Writer Theodore Dreiser articulated this effect quite vividly so I'm showing you some as you see some early x-rays here. What could seem marvelous or strange Dreiser wondered in a world where x-rays revealed invisible depths and to quote him this new light which before flesh wood aluminum paper and leather becomes as glass sounds quite like some aged Arabian fiction who knows but that rocks and trees may yet be seemingly made to disappear and dark places be made light without any visible influence operating to affect it unquote. As he presented it the visible world was becoming an enchanted realm where fantasy and reality were difficult to distinguish. So far the evidence I've presented to document this decline in trust in visual appearances has been drawn from the print journalism of the period which itself was part of the problem. Newspapers and magazines instructed their readers in the perils of seeing in the modern world and sensationalizing this phenomenon in its reporting and these belonged to a fiercely competitive mass market medium whose own visual evidence was frequently dubious. An example is a practice of fraudulent newspaper portraits. So because wood engraving the medium that was used for reproducing portraits in mass publications at this time wood engraving was a slow process. So newspapers sometimes prepared in advance ordinary portraits for politicians or celebrities whose days were thought to be numbered. The temptation to use these ready and waiting portraits for other purposes was sometimes irresistible. That's the case here when a portrait of Robert Tombs you see on the right former congressman senator and confederate general from the state of Georgia that portrait was sitting idly among the wood engravings of the New York morning journal while its sitter outlived expectations. When a portrait suddenly was wanted to illustrate a story about a swindler named Garrett Underdunk who sold hundreds of dozens of fake eggs to grocers in Patterson, New Jersey. Tombs picture seemed to the editors like it might do the job. Don't ask about the fake eggs because I have no idea why there would be such a thing as an egg foundry which is what produces these fake eggs. Unfortunately for the morning journal Tombs died the same day as this portrait was used and so the paper's deception became conspicuous and roundly condemned and that's why I know about it because of that brouhaha. Not only were visual artifacts being used in deceptive ways but vision itself as a perceptual faculty was proving itself an unreliable tool at this time. X-rays exposed its vision's inability to penetrate surfaces and worse the visual system generated its own illusions. Spiritualists and occult philosophers tracking visions, specters and apparitions joined an unlikely alliance with psychologists formulating explanations for illusions, hallucinations and false visions. Unreal sights of all sorts with a focus of intense interest in public discourse. Unreal sights of all sorts with a focus of intense interest in public discourse none more so than spirit photographs and no spirit photographer was more notorious than William Mummler and here you see two examples of Mummler's work. In the spring of 1869 Mummler was brought to trial in New York City on two felony counts and one misdemeanor all having to do with fraud, larceny and obtaining money by trick and device. He was being prosecuted in short for selling fraudulent photographs. He'd been attracting a great deal of publicity for his spirit photographs like these which were made through darkroom trickery and it's no simple matter to make some of these photographs to make a picture in which the ephemeral figure of the spirit has limbs that wind around the sitter in some cases so that it's some things are passing behind and some in front. Mummler was a talented trickster. These were made through darkroom trickery but Mummler was able to convince his patrons that as a spiritual medium he was able to make his camera reveal spirits that the human eye could not see merely by placing his hand on the camera during the exposure. The newspaper accounts and published records of Mummler's trial offer unusual insight into the development and diffusion of skeptical viewing of photographs. Earlier in the decade many Americans had learned to discern truth in the Civil War photographs of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner but now photography was being revealed to that same public as yet another field for the practice of deception. One expert witness after another testified that photographs could be manipulated through multiple exposures and darkroom handling to yield what passed for spiritual presences. One surprising feature of the defense testimony is that so many of Mummler's supporters claimed to have been highly skeptical initially. They took advantage of Mummler's services while suspecting that he was a fraud. David Hopkins for example a manufacturer of railway cars testified, I thought Mummler before I went there was a cheat. I watched Mr. Mummler just as carefully as I could but could find nothing. Hopkins told the court that as an overseer of many workers he was in the habit of watching people suspiciously to see that they did not cheat or steal from me. He said, I've been sometimes deceived but not often. The banker Charles Livermore was part of the team of investigators who had prepared a report on Mummler for the New York Sun newspaper. He told the court I went there with my eyes open as a skeptic. Livermore sought to throw Mummler off balance he said. He made an appointment for a sitting on a Tuesday but went on Monday to disconcert him. When Mummler was ready to make one exposure Livermore quote suddenly changed my position so as to defeat any arrangement he might have made. In another I made him suddenly bring the camera three feet nearer to me and then instantly proceed to take my picture. I was on the lookout all the while unquote. Several witnesses testified that they had used false names in their initial dealings with Mummler deliberately withholding information about the spirits they hoped to see. Portraying their support of Mummler as a conversion from skepticism was a good rhetorical strategy in the courtroom and no doubt it was emphasized for that purpose. However more than a legal strategy skepticism was a fundamental virtue essential to any individual's dignity and self-respect. To be labeled credulous was an insult that impugned one's intelligence and discounted one's testimony. So the first core argument of the Looking Ascant's book is that the lived experience of U.S. citizens in the late 19th century induced skepticism toward vision and visual artifacts as a survival strategy. The culture demanded it. The culture was producing it as participants in an aggressively capitalist economy as inhabitants of the nation's modern cities, as targets of competitive marketing, as participants in the new mass culture, as beneficiaries of modern science and technology, as believers in spiritual realms, everyone had to process visual experiences with some measure of suspicion, caution, and guile. Erosion of the public credulity to use the words of the time was a topic of concern discussed in the popular press. So that's the first core argument of the book. The second one is that the visual arts, that is the fine arts as well as the larger visual culture of commercial amusements, illustrations, and advertising played complex roles in this process, fostering this suspicious way of looking and responding to it. The artists themselves had been shaped by this culture, so they understood the dispositions of their audiences. Suspicious lookers themselves, they learned to engage a viewership that peered out through skeptical eyes. Their art indulged skepticism or wrestled with it. So I'll give you a brief introduction to examples of artists who did either, either indulge skepticism or wrestled with it. Thomas Aikens was an artist who wrestled with skepticism. His work was designed to counter any doubts a viewer might have about the truth, the truth value of his pictures. I'll illustrate briefly with one of his paintings, this one. The champion single skulls, Max Schmidt, in a single skull from 1871, now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This picture commemorated the victory of Schmidt in amateur races on the school kill, and its exhibition brought Aikens to public attention. He was working with an elaborate method of constructing images from numerous preliminary studies involving extensive scientific research into anatomy, optics, perspective, reflection, and motion to begin with anatomy. Here are some examples of anatomical studies that he did, not in preparation for that particular picture, but as part of his process of learning to represent the human body. These are examples that go into a great level of detail to get the musculature exactly right, and he learned that through dissecting cadavers and studying anatomy in a medical school alongside medical students. And here, in this detail of Schmidt's anatomy, notice the meticulous musculature, which is incongruous in the brightly lit setting. He's out on a river on a sunny day, and so there's going to be a lot of reflective light bouncing off the water onto those backlit shadows. The modeling resembles a studio portrait more than a plein air picture. This is not a great example to compare it with, but it's probably too much in the other extreme, as Manet is deliberately flattening out, of course, the contrast for purposes of his own aesthetic program. But I think many might be closer to the truth of the kind of modeling of the arm one would see in such a brightly lit situation than Aiken's It's Here. But Aiken's approach is deliberate. It conveys more information about anatomy than veridical representation, representation that took the light into account, would allow. Perspective is an example of another kind of close study that Aiken's undertook for his pictures. We don't have the one he did for the Schmidt painting, but he would have made one like this in order to position Schmidt's boat so precisely in receding space, getting exactly the right length of the foreground and the background to conform to the perspective diagram that was shaping the space of the picture. Then we have things like this, a study of reflections and how they appear on moving water. This is operating in the background of, well, when we look at the picture again, you'll see that it is moving water that is represented here, water that scullers are passing through and ores are moving around, and it's that water that's reflecting very carefully the objects that are behind. Cast shadows also studied scientifically by Aiken's how the, what kind of shape and what kind of intensity a shadow would have at a certain distance from the object casting it. And then there's sculling, the art of sculling itself. Aiken's was a practitioner, he knew it, and he was making sure that people knew that he knew it by putting himself in the middle of this picture. That's a self-portrait rowing into the distance on a boat signed with his name. That's where he signed the picture, Thomas Aiken's, and dated it, 1871. Notice that his hands are in the right position so that you don't crack your knuckles as you're drawing the ores back. And you can see the oarpools, these pools left by the ores as he moves into the distance are, there's very little perturbed water, they're very smooth, they're evenly spaced. That's a measure of his control as a sculler. And also about boat design, that's something else that you see. Seeing the ore rings remaining intact on the water's surface, which enables the viewer to know more precisely the rowers' spatial orientation and trajectory, like everything else in the painting, they've been rendered in careful perspective. But are they too intact? Are they a little too tightly contained? And are they too close together for a boat that would be moving at the speed of Aiken's as it's receding and making that wake as it moves? For the purpose of conveying a clear narrative in the picture, they work very efficiently, but they might be unrealistic, they might be contrivances that serve to tell the story more so than the truth. And what about the absence of reflections in the picture? I mean, notice how this white bridge and this red boat should have reflections somewhere around here, you know, if you think about the reflection of this tree and their relation to those other forms, why is there no sign of them in the water? When there's so much, look at this, this is an area where you can see the careful attention to how reflected forms in moving water would be shown. Aiken says clearly left out some reflections if they would interfere with the telling of the narrative of the motion of this boat from downriver coming upstream here and Schmidt allowing his oar to begin dragging. He was making beautiful pools all along until just about here and he starts dragging his oars and Aiken's moving in the opposite direction downstream. So that narrative was important to him, he wanted that to be clear and he would have to leave out some things from his other careful preliminary studies in order to get that narrative front and center. Aiken's commitment to, so this picture, sorry, this picture contains many odd disjunctions despite the laborious scientific preparatory studies or rather because of them. Aiken's commitment to communicating scientific truths about the visible world led him to bump up continually against the limits of the seen world to contain and display truthful information. Contemporary viewers recognize the evidence of arduous analytical research that went beyond appearances in his work as they did the conflicts that such studies created. One critic wrote of the disjunctions, this is what happens when an artist paints what is instead of what seems to be. A rift was opening between the truths of scientific knowledge, knowledge systems, and the ambiguities or deceptions of perceptual experience. And Aiken's went to the limit to paint a world of appearances that was better able than ours to display its natural truths and capable of putting to rest any viewer's suspicions of deception. So Aiken's is an artist who is wrestling with skepticism in his audience. A very different way of engaging skeptical viewers in painted illusions is evident in the hyper illusionistic still lives of William Harnett. Harnett was the most prominent and influential Trumploy painter working in Philadelphia and New York in the late 19th century, Trumploy being French for fool the eye. So meticulous in their rendering of objects and keeping the space so shallow that there are no real, not any real strong cues about the deception involved in the illusion. Writers marveled at Harnett's paintings and sometimes praised them as extravagantly among the most remarkable illusions ever produced by the brush of an artist. Such claims stand out even in the hyperbolic commentary on contemporary illusions from this time. Newspaper articles discussing Harnett's work sometimes mentioned that a police guard had been stationed nearby to ensure that viewers kept their hands off. When his painting The Old Violins, when you see on the screen, was exhibited at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition in 1886, journalists wrote that spectators attempted with their fingernails to remove the newspaper clipping, brilliantly rendered, just below into the left of the violin. One Cincinnati reporter, here let me show you a detail of that, it's pretty good. One Cincinnati reporter even admitted having run his own hand over that clipping and here's what he said. While the iron hinges, the ring and staple and the rest are marvelous, the newspaper clipping is simply a miracle. The writer, this writer being one of those doubting Thomases who were by no means disposed to believe their own eyes, was permitted to allay his conscientious scruples by feeling it and is prepared to kiss the book and so help me it is painted. I like to so help me an oath to convince any skeptical readers who might doubt not only that the clipping was painted but that the critic was telling the truth about it. Lots of skeptical defenses operating here. Harnett's paintings invited skeptical viewers to engage in a game of visual acuity and wit. Are the things before you real or are they painted illusions? They were sometimes exhibited in taverns and saloons like this one where low light and impaired perception increased the challenge of discernment. This is Theodore Stewart's upscale saloon on Warren Street in New York where our Harnett's after the hunt famously sparked endless debate and hilarity. Skepticism could easily become misguided and lead to blatant deception. Though we must be skeptical of such newspaper reports, they alleged that some naive usually rural viewers of Harnett's paintings suspected that they were being duped by the proprietors of cafes and bars who hung real objects on a wall and claimed that they were paintings. In these cases, the country folk did not simply fall for the painted illusions, they believed they were being made the butt of a joke. So-called rubes maintained that, quote, nobody can take them in and that the objects are real objects hung up with the intent to deceive people, unquote. Such viewers were not credulous innocents, they were not unskeptical, they were just clumsy skeptics or wild ones. One of the features of Harnett's paintings much admired by early commentators, this is the painting that was hung in Stuart's saloon. One of the features of Harnett's paintings much admired by early commentators was the strong impression of sensuous texture radiated by the still life objects portrayed in them. The surfaces of familiar things acquired heightened tactility through Harnett's use of lighting and chiaroscuro, the way they were modeled in light and shade, as well as through his juxtaposition of contrasting materials. One commentator from the period was explicit on this point. The artist shows the highest skill in the representation of textures. The wood is wood, the iron is iron. The brass is brass, the leather is leather. The fur of the rabbit and the feathers of the bird tempt the hand to feel their delicate softness. Viewers were tempted to touch the paintings not only to verify that the objects were painted, but also in hope of tactile gratification. So having seduced viewers to desire the pleasures of touching and holding material things, Harnett's paintings pawned them with passages that suggest points of entry into the illusion. Here is his still life violin and music from 1888, which offers a particularly clear example of this. The painting shows various items hung on the door of an old wooden cupboard. The lock is undone, the glass pangs disengaged, and the door has swung slightly open, throwing a strong shadow magnified by the angle of lighting. As if these elements were not enough to induce a viewer's attempt to open this door, Harnett has given the bare wood at the edge of the door just opposite the lock a smooth worn finish. This device, accomplished by laying an even brown wash over the green of the door, enhances the invitation by assuring spectators who might yield to the impulse of a splinterless and pleasurless tactile experience, a splinterless and pleasurable tactile experience. Harnett's calling card is mounted on the door at the lower right, one corner curling out toward viewers, inviting them to follow it into the crevice between the two boards. An emblem of the artist, the card occupies the very position the painting leads the viewer to desire, one foot in and one out of the illusion. At the same time, the card seems an instrument of entry. In marked contrast to Aiken's paintings, Harnett's activate the skepticism of viewers. They engage in a game of pictorial illusionism that induces psychic conflict, leading viewers to succumb visually to an illusion at the same time that they recognize it as an illusion. The paintings demonstrate that seeing through an illusion does not diminish its effects. In the modern world of the U.S. in the late 19th century, this was a familiar and somewhat disturbing experience. Harnett's paintings alleviated that anxiety by making it part of a delightful game. Let me introduce briefly one more example drawn from the early 20th century before moving closer to our present time. No artist a century ago was treated more skeptically than Marcel Duchamp. When he exhibited his new descending staircase at the Armory Show in 1913, he was widely reviled as a charlatan perpetrating a fraud upon his viewers. American Art News, in the first of its several reports on the exhibition, said the painting was, quote, already the conundrum of the season in New York. The critic explained, up to the present writing, I understand that no one has yet been able to make out what looks like a collection of saddlebags, either the lady or the stairway. The next week, the same publication offered a $10 prize to anyone who could find the lady in the painting. Two years after the Armory Show, Duchamp arrived in New York, where he was already an art celebrity. In three months, he became fluent enough in English to be interviewed by the American press, and through that medium, he stoked the publicity engine as effectively as anyone. Here's a clipping of one of his interviews, his newspaper interviews. Headlines labeled him an iconoclast and put in bold face the most provocative of his remarks. America is the country of the art of the future. Cubism was the prophet of war. The American woman is the most intelligent of her sex, and the subtitle there was, hasn't she proved it by making her husband in his role of slave banker look almost ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world? And so forth. The painter of the infamous nude thrust sex into the face of the puritanical culture and exploded figurative bombs one after another that represented complete reversals of prevailing opinions to use the breathless language of the reporters. And in the winter of that year, as his celebrity flourished, he began a period of concentrated work on the readymates, the most famous of which is this one, Fountain, from 1917. He submitted this urinal titled Fountain and signed Armut to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. He interposed this fictitious middleman, Armut, between himself and the work as he would when he presented other works purportedly by his alter ego, Rose Selavi. The name signaled trickery. Armut inevitably brought to mind the popular Mut and Jeff comic strip. Duchamp gave the object a new name, Fountain, that required viewers to see it allegorically as both itself a urinal and a work of art, a fountain. It invited viewers to observe transformations in the object as it shifted between those identities, its aura as a work of art, waxing and waning. Fountain would put viewers on their guard. It presented a problem demanding skeptical perception and suspicion, no amount of which would enable a solution. While Fountain was rejected from the unduried exhibition, Duchamp tried to orchestrate a media spectacle around the event. He created a stir by resigning from the board of managers of the Society of Independent Artists and said, quote, I have handed in my resignation and it will be a bit of gossip of some value in New York. This is what he wrote to his sister about the whole fiasco. He arranged to have Alfred Stieglitz photograph fountain, that's the photograph you see here on the screen, and keep the work on display at his 291 gallery for a week where it would be available to curious critics, journalists, artists and others. Meanwhile, he and his associates tried to persuade sympathetic critics to come to the gallery to see the scandalous object and to write about it. One of Duchamp's associates, Louise Norton, wrote an essay on fountain for The Blind Man, a magazine that Duchamp co-edited. She wrote, there are those who anxiously ask, is he serious or is he joking? Perhaps he is both. It puts it rather up to you. There is among us today a spirit of blog arising out of the artist's bitter vision of an over institutionalized world of stagnant statistics and antique axioms, who words left no doubt that fountain was designed to put skeptical viewers on alert. The possibility of deception was always endemic to modernist art. While it was an art that defined itself in opposition to the deceptions of appearances and the fraudulence of illusionism, it necessarily presented its audiences with far greater risks of fraud than the academic art that it challenged. Modernism's perpetual reinvention of the fundamental tenets of artistic practice and aesthetic evaluation meant that its public would always be scrambling to devise frameworks for interpretation and estimation of quality. When standards of achievement are constantly being overturned, the window for deception is wide open. Modernism intensified and revealed the risk of fraudulence always present in representation and fountain underlined this fact. Philosopher Stanley Cavell has written that, quote, the dangers of fraudulence and of trust are essential to the experience of art. Modernism only makes explicit and bare what has always been true of art, unquote. Duchamp threw this aspect of modernism into high relief for the New York viewers of the Armory Show and the Independence Exhibition. Those audiences and critics habituated to constant vigilance against deception and delusion immediately recognized the magnified risks of fraudulence modernism posed. Well, Acons, Harnette, Duchamp formulated and tested important strategies for making art that engages an audience of skeptics. From our advantage in the present, their work might strike us as a little bit quaint on this front. I suspect most of you will agree that the cultural demands on us, 21st century viewers of art, the demands on us to be skeptical viewers have only gotten more intense. One might even say they've become relentless and excruciating. Trust is something rare now as we learn from those who study such things, the Pew Research Trust, documenting declining trust in government and each other by significant amounts. So the Pew Trust has charted this precipitous decline and the dangers associated with it. Even our most banal daily behaviors demand skeptical assessments. If you click on the wrong picture, your computer might be taken hostage or your identity stolen. As a teacher, I can't just grade the arguments in student papers. I have to try to discern whether AI programs were involved in producing them. Artists have moved with the times, or at least some of the most interesting have. We still have artists redoing Duchamp's ready-mades and asking familiar old questions about the boundaries of art. This notorious piece from 2019, Maurizio Catalan's piece called Comedian, which was a banana duct taped to the wall of a gallery at Art Basel, Miami, which sold for $120,000, incidentally, just is reactivating an old dynamic. The fear of being duped or being taken advantage of by an avant-garde artist is greater than ever, but not so interesting anymore. In the 1960s and 70s, some artists began directing skeptical attention to different boundaries, not the one between art and non-art, or between representation and reality, as Akins had. They shifted the pressure to boundaries between categories of pictures. Did the pictures we were presented with actually belong to the categories that they resembled? Early movements in this direction were pop art. For example, Roy Lichtenstein's large-scale painting of a comic strip. Were pop art paintings comic strips or advertisements or photographs? This is not pop art. This is photorealism, a late 60s, 70s phenomenon that was similar in so far as it was emulating another medium, another category of pictures in the medium of painting. This is a photorealist painting by Richard Estes, and it's called Double Self Portrait. You can see his own reflection in the store window standing by the camera that made the photograph on which the painting is based. So the picture is advertising its photographic basis rather than a basis in the world. It's the photograph that is the boundary between photography and painting that is being pressured here. Then the challenge of these kinds of movements was ratcheted up a notch by the pictures artists of the 1970s and 80s, who sometimes appropriated advertisements of works of art wholesale. People like Sherry Levine, this photograph, it's a gelatin silver print, copying a previously existing photograph by Walker Evans. Is this an illustration of a work of art, or is it another work of art made from a prior work of art? And simulated movie stills, Cindy Sherman, putting herself into situations, framing images that make us wonder whether we are seeing a still from an actual movie from an earlier period or whether this is a work of art piggybacking on that kind of imagery. Some of the anxiety triggered by these works concerned our mastery over the categories of pictures that we must process and live with every day. If those categories are slippery or insecure, the costs of our mistakes may be quite high. The work of art's relation is not to the real world per se, but to the world of representations became the challenge requiring skeptical assessment. Artists interested in political critique also adopted this approach, simulating campaign materials or advertisements. Hans Hakka was one who did this very early on, pointing to problems in Ronald Reagan's cutting of social programs with that slogan, yes, my son collects unemployment too. That's for economics. And the other advertisement on the side, it's a phony advertisement pointing to the cruelty of American Cyanomid, the parent company of Brecht, which was telling its female employees of childbearing age at this time that if they were exposed to toxic substances in their work, they have a choice of either quitting or taking reassignment to a lower paying job or becoming sterilized to go on with that existing job. Some performance artists impersonated powerful figures to call attention to hypocritical policies or behaviors. So we've got fraudulent advertisements and campaign materials, but there are also these artists who are masquerading as government officials and corporate executives, like the yes men. This is their piece, Survival Ball from 2006, a protective suit that would enable wealthy individuals to survive climate disasters or civic strife. Here you see the product in the corner, you see that guy with the head popping out of it. You wear that suit and you're protected, you know, obviously this is a parody of the dangers that these the Halliburton Corporation is actually exposing the world to, but here they're putting together a product and advertisement that calls that hypocrisy, calls it out. The artists pretended to be Halliburton executives holding press conferences and making presentations at professional conferences, and they confronted members of Congress insisting that their constituents be supplied with these suits for their own safety. And there are photographs of Arlen Specter being chased by individuals in this suit as he's trying to avoid confrontation. We can't be sure, I mean just carrying on with other performance artists who who also work in this mode, we can't be sure that our workplace has not been appropriated by a conceptual or performance artist for a work of some kind or an artistic project. Pilvi Takala, for example, is a performance artist who masquerades as an ordinary employee over a period of a period of months to find ways to disrupt institutional operations, to expose buried assumptions about good and bad behavior and about how these codes are enforced. So the people we work with, who on a job might be artists making art of our work, we have to, that's a ratcheted up level of skepticism required to be able to pick out that kind of development. And with the arrival of artificial intelligence and deep fake technology, new ways of impersonating humans emerged. In 2019, Bill Posters and Daniel Howe released Big Data, a series of five AI-generated deep fake artworks into Instagram's algorithms. Released as a digital intervention and a subversion of, this is in their words, it was this, these works were released as a digital intervention and a subversion of the digital influence industry. Our approach was to take AI and machine learning to hack and subvert the power of celebrity influencers. We believe these five video pieces of the world's first contemporary art, deep fakes, created to interrogate the power of computational propaganda. And so this, the piece you see on the screen is one of the five, which went viral on Instagram and then trended on Twitter and was quickly picked up by the New York Times, Good Morning America, ABC News, and so forth. And it shows Mark Zuckerberg saying what we wanted to hear him say, you know, he's increasing the transparency, advertisements, and taking measures to protect elections. One extreme and distorted form of skepticism is what psychologists called conspiracist ideation, a mindset that to quote one study, typically attributes the causes of crises and social upheavals to the secret workings of powerful agents who control events favorable to their interests rather than to the public. Conspiracy belief is a judgment. This is continuing the definition from one of these papers. Conspiracy belief is a judgment that it is probable that an actor or group of actors is secretly working to produce an unlawful or harmful outcome for others in society. Some people are more disposed than others to see events in conspiratorial terms. We'll learn our recent history. This conspiracist mindset has generated outlandish theories, sometimes utterly free of anything close to what might pass for evidence, think QAnon or Pizzagate, or the opposition to COVID vaccines. But not all conspiracy theories are evidence free. However, some contemporary artists and activists have chosen to focus their work on exposing the exercise of power by forces that prefer to remain unseen. Among these are the collective forensic architecture based at Goldsmiths College in London, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, or individual artists like Alfredo Yar and Trevor Paglin. I'll show you one of Paglin's works as an example of conspiracy-based art. One facet of Paglin's work grew from his 2009 book Blank Spots on the Map, The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World. He photographically documented classified military intelligence facilities calling attention to military black sites, that is, sites that do not appear on maps but can be documented in the real world. That's why his photographs are usually taken from great distances and are a little blurry. He also traces government and private satellite systems and other technologies that exert enormous but often unseen influence. This is to say that some evidence-based forms of conspiracy theorizing would qualify in my book as healthy skepticism, although their prominence in politics and the media at present is dwarfed by unhealthy forms. And lastly, there is artificial intelligence art. Durefic Anadol's videos, like this one, which take all of the information about the Museum of Modern Art's collection and that's information about the reproductions of the works, the look of the works, as well as the metadata about them, the size and the dates and so forth, and sort that information into clusters and generate forms that fill the gaps. Do these do anything more than mesmerize us like a lava lamp? Because that's what's happened. This is a constantly changing flow of forms on this projected screen, which you see here. Or is there value in such work in its frustration of our desire to interpret art as human symbol or expression? The skepticism such work stimulates in viewers now has parallels with those activated by Duchamp's ready-mates. Can we extend the kind of attention we've traditionally given to art to images that result from the processing of data by learning machines, a process devoid of human experience and intentionality? Anadol wants us to see such works as revealing, in his words, a strange world of collective art histories as imagined by a dreaming machine. So to conclude, I want to return to some of the closing sentences in the Looking a Scance book. Here's what I wrote. Our current skepticism about images is sometimes classified as postmodern. I hope these episodes described in the book have shown that skepticism has a long history rooted deep in the culture of modernity and in national values of entrepreneurship, invention, competition, and unregulated marketing. For better or worse, we have inherited the visual culture our modern life and modern values have wanted. Well, I think that's a little bit dated. We don't talk about postmodernism anymore, but still 20 years later, I'll stand by the thought. Thank you. And if any of you have questions or comments, I'd be really happy to hear them. Martha, do you get comments from online as well? Yes. Thank you, Michael. You've given us so much to think about, and I'm sure there are some questions. So I'm just going to ask that you wait for me to pass you the microphone so that everybody can hear and so that people online can hear. And if there are questions from the online audience, and there are quite a few people tuning in online, please type them into the chat, and I will read them. So who'd like to start? Okay, well, we do have one online, so I'll start there. Somebody asks, what do you think about Andy Warhol today? I think Andy Warhol has emerged as someone to be reckoned with, whether you like his work or not. He's had an influence that goes beyond the norm. I would say in terms of the presentation I've just given, I didn't show a work by him, but I very easily could have instead of the Lichtenstein comic strip, I could have shown one of his comic strips or one of his advertisements or one of the many other forms of pictures that he conflated with art and forced us to think about. I think Warhol is an important artist, and many have, I think to some extent he's following in the tradition of Duchamp with dealing with ready-made materials, but he brought a cleverness and a new model of the artist to his work that really was influential for future generations, and it's really shaped the landscape that we live with today. Hi, thank you. Fascinating. I have a question about intention on the one hand of the creator of a piece of art, and on the other hand the recipient of the work, the observer of it, and I imagine sometimes people do some form of artistic expression, and they're not intending to fool you or even play with you, but there may be something in the work that is confusing or causes reflection. And then if you get, on the other hand, people who are looking at the art, I'm not going to be fooled, I'm not going to pay $120,000 for that banana taped on the wall. Well, did the artist have any intention, actually any hope that this would happen? So I think there's a fascinating confusion around intentions and responses, because once you reveal a piece of creativity to the world, then that whole galaxy of responses is going to gather, and you're left over time and forever to interpret that. Yes, wonderful comment. I don't think it's really a question, but I agree completely that, you know, the artist's intention is one thing, it's only one component in the production of the meaning and the significance of the work. What happens to it when it emerges into public space and people start responding and making something of it and it becomes shaped in public discourse as having a certain meaning that's beyond the control of the artist? To me, that's the really important meaning, what happens once the artist's intention and the audience's interpretation mix and the work becomes part of, you know, the way people think, the way they talk, of what they argue about. It's getting to that crux that I think is really the important thing to get at in understanding some of these historical works. Thank you. You described the growth of the intentional duplicity, however, also in a way that, as we're all trying to struggle with now, it's just completely out of hand, it appears. But are we becoming savvy enough and do we have tools or resources that will prepare us so that we are keeping up with what otherwise seems like some days just a hopeless future? Yeah, I understand where you're coming from. I think if we hold on to the desire for some kind of bedrock truth about what was the intent of the artist, what was the meaning of the work, what is its being, what is its essence, we're going to be frustrated. Because I think at present, with AI work, I don't know if we can get the last slide back up on the screen, yeah, with artificial intelligence work, I think there are now some ways of being able to tell whether it was artificially generated or not. But I think the day is coming when we're going to have to live with the ambiguity of not knowing how much of it is human influence and how much of it is machine made. And art has always been the place where we learn to live with ambiguity. It's not science, there's scientific knowledge and then there's non-scientific knowledge which is uncertain and where the ambiguities and doubts and uncertainties have to be wrestled with and we have to work out problems. I think art's going to continue to play that role, it's always going to be one step ahead of what we're able to fully grapple with. But you know, that's the fun of it, that's the challenge. I wouldn't say it's hopeless. We just have to shift our point of view for what we're looking for and think critically about what we've been looking for and whether that's still what we need to keep looking for. I don't know if that makes sense. Hi, thank you so much. My question is kind of along the same vein. I was wondering if maybe you had any advice to push against where art seems to be going or if that's a contemporary double standard because I'm an oil painter and I want to keep oil painting. I would embrace the Duchamp evolution but not the modern-day equivalent. My ultimate question is, is there anything we can do to hang on to this last chapter or is it maybe not the viewer's place to try and hang on? Well, you're not a viewer, you're a producer. So you're definitely a voice and you have to make that voice heard. I've presented a very selective sample of contemporary art. First of all, I'm no expert on the broad field of contemporary art. What you're seeing is work that has struck me as interesting over the past couple of decades in terms of thinking about its relation to skeptical seeing. There's all kinds of great arguments going on in the world of conceptual art. People reacting against this and absolutely wanting us to hold on to certain traditional skills and forms of interaction with art and I hope those battles will continue to be fought out and you should absolutely not capitulate. I didn't want to make an argument for the value of this direction. It's something I'm observing so I think you should go with your gut feelings and vote with your paintbrush for what the future should be like. I think that I feel hopeless too sometimes and there's a certain amount of despair in your question which I feel too and you're a producer of oil painting and Michael you're a writer and a lot of us in the room are. I'm a writer and I now we're in an age of skeptical reading because we don't know if what we're reading is human produced or not and that I am trying to find ways to not be upset about that and terrified by that but of course I am, I don't know, I think we're in a, this is the psychological impact of all of this is so big that you can't, it's like hard to even get your head around it. I want to read a question from from one Margaret Worth online. Is there a figure in our culture today similar to the figure of the Rube or a gullible viewer who might be understood as either actually credulous or used to display the process of acquiring skepticism? It's a good question. Who's the contemporary Rube? I don't know if I should say this. Go ahead, you got an idea? Please. I think for a lot of people the contemporary Rube is the Trump voter. Or the QAnon believer, right? Yes, the QAnon believer, the people who just refuse to, that sort of fall for the deception that's happening. I don't know. Yeah, that would be, you know, that would be a highly contested contemporary Rube. But as would the country folk, you know, the people from the country in the 19th century wouldn't have liked the portrayal of them in this urban press. So that's always going to be the case. Let's see. Margaret's trying to make trouble. I know, I see, I just, I shouldn't say what, I shouldn't say things like that. Does our approach somebody else asks to understanding surrealist art compared to skepticism, such as in terms of how we understand reality or society according to a painting? I guess how does surrealism figure into all of this? Well, surrealism is presenting itself as work that's coming from the unconscious or the irrational faculties in human mind and behavior. And so if you are skeptical that that's not what your irrational looks like or what you believe the irrational looks like, then right, there would be, you know, you are having to bring to bear your critical faculties and whether that artist is truly delving into the unconscious or the irrational in some real way or whether one is just kind of faking it. It's one way of thinking about the test of surrealism. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. I mean, one quick note about surrealism. I think I was really struck in your discussion of spirit photography, which I've always loved in terms of blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined, the real and the potential, the real and the virtual, which is the terrain of surrealism. I would say it's perhaps a more utopic vision of producing an intentional ambiguity in order to dream up a better future where those distinctions don't matter. So I think it's a really interesting question in terms of the historical lineage. I was so interested in the way that you framed this question historically and culturally as well in terms of your treatment of this in the context of American history. And I wanted to ask if you see parallels in other countries and other cultures is this for you a facet of modernism and industrialization and urbanization and writ large or is there something distinctively American about this phenomenon? You spoke a little bit about the Civil War photography, which I thought was so interesting as sort of a document of truth. Is there something unique to American history in the 19th century and the birth of America as a nation that you think also contributes to a particular version of this skeptical feeling? That's a great question. I do think that this is something you would find in any modernizing culture. But I also think that the United States was the place where it became most acute because it was the place where development was unfettered, where capitalism was not constrained and the United States was known internationally as the place of aggressive deceptive marketing. P.T. Barnum was held up as the patron saint of the United States whose humbugs were notorious. There were frauds that people delighted in patronizing despite the fact that they were frauds. So what kind of place is this where people love having false deceptions that are the center of their interactions? When Barnum died in the late 19th century, his obituary in foreign publications held him up as he was like George Washington as the father of the country in some way. So I think the United States did have that kind of reputation deservedly so because I think there is more of this kind of playing with skeptical viewing. I'm no expert on the other modernizing cultures, but this is my sense that it is more acute here. Thank you. Sure. Well thank you everyone for coming and for your great questions. Thank you so much, Michael. Brilliant talk. I hope you keep going with this because we really need somebody to be, I don't know, chewing on this and analyzing it and writing about it. So thank you so much. Thank you, Mark.