500 Posts and Happy 2015!

January 1, 2015...HAPPY NEW YEAR! I start off each year with the proper greeting. Sometimes I modify the layout of the blog, but I've decided to leave it as is for now. However, I have added a link to the bklynbiblio Instagram account, so check it out and follow me there, as well as on Twitter (where we now have reached 515 tweets). The big news, however, is that this New Year's Day post also coincides with the 500th post on this blog. The image above is from the Fortune 500 list from 2014; the bold, gold numbers seemed appropriate for a New Year's association. (It is strangely coincidental that two years ago we reached the 400th post on New Year's Day.)

When I first started this blog back in August 2008, I envisioned it as a space where I could write and see the results of my writing. I was still taking courses in my doctoral program, and I lamented that I could not spend more time writing my own work. A blog seemed to be the most logical way to do this. People claim that blogs today are dead, and arguably social media products like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the preferred way of maintaining communication. But I still find this blog an effective place for me to write. It is a virtual zone where I can be creative or critical, analytical or entertaining. It is an aesthetic arena in which I can share images of works of art so they can be admired and contemplated as objects of beauty and constructs of social engagement. What I never imagined was, more than 6 years later, that I would still be writing this blog and that I would reach my 500th post. It is a milestone, and I am admittedly proud of this accomplishment.

As always, I find these centenary markers an opportunity to share some interesting statistics about bklynbiblio. Since August 2008, there have been 91,565 page views. That works out to be approximately 1189 page views per month. More than half of the traffic coming to the blog is from U.S. Internet addresses, but after that the traffic comes from, in order, the United Kingdom, France, Ukraine, and Germany. (This is an interesting contrast to the top countries when we had hit 400 posts: UK, Germany, Canada, and Russia.) About 40% of readers use Internet Explorer to read my blog posts, followed by 26% on Firefox and 19% on Chrome (note: I use Chrome for all my blogging). Most interesting, of course, are the blog posts that rank as the highest viewed. Amazingly, #s 1 and 2 have retained their top most popular posts, while #3 moves up one from its former position. The next two are new entries and I'm pleased to see at #5 one of my Monthly Works of Art. Here are the official ranks:
#1. Male Enhancement [Jul. 5, 2010; 2090 views]
#2. Review: Yinka Shonibare MBE [Sep. 6, 2009; 1038 views]
#3. Is It Baroque, and Do We Fix It? [Aug. 7, 2011; 513 views]
#4. Post-Queer Art History [Oct. 13, 2009; 445 views]
#5. MWA II: Vatican Shepherd [Apr. 7, 2012; 438 views]
Among the ranks for #6 through #10 are my obituary of art historian Lionel Lambourne and my post about the sale of Simeon Solomon's signed copy of his 1871 prose poem A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep dedicated to Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Although this blog is a way for me to express myself, my writing only has perpetual value because there are readers out there who appreciate, agree, disagree, comment, "like," and respond to these words over time, if not on this blog directly, then in emails, on social media, and in person. Thank you, readers, for helping bklynbiblio reach its 500th post. Here's to reaching 600!

MWA XXVII: Landseer's Dog

This morning, I discovered on Twitter that it was #WorldDogDay (aka #NationalDogDay). I always wonder who comes up with these official declarations, especially considering I don't recall ever having celebrated this day before (and who wouldn't want to celebrate Dog Day!?). So this morning I celebrated by tweeting a few dog-themed paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chatsworth in Derbyshire, England (home of the Duke of Devonshire--and they tweeted back), and the work you see here from the Victoria and Albert Museum: The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, 1837, by Sir Edwin Landseer. A herding dog rests his head on the coffin of the shepherd who was his master, his empty chair in the background echoing the loss. You can almost hear the dog whimper in sadness from his expression and bodily position. The Romanticized rustic setting of the farmhouse or stable where the casket is set adds to the overall sadness of the painting. By today's standards, however, the sentimentality exuded by this painting is scoffed at by most who find the scene ridiculously saccharine, particularly because this was once accepted as a form of high art. When one thinks of dogs in art, what is the one picture everyone thinks of and laughs about as the height of bad taste? The infamous picture of dogs playing poker, of course. Admittedly, scenes such as that take anthropomorphism to a new extreme, but one shouldn't be so quick to dismiss all animal paintings because of that kitsch scene (which, perhaps important to note, was part of an advertisement scheme to sell cigars to men).

In the 19th century, the painter Landseeer was tremendously popular. His animal scenes were made into prints and distributed worldwide. He was the only British artist to win the Grand Medal of Honor at the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and this was in recognition of his contributions to animal painting. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were great patrons of Landseer, in part because Albert loved greyhounds and other dogs, and Landseer was able to paint them so realistically, giving them personalities that Albert-the-dog-lover saw in the dogs himself. This idea that animals had emotions and should be treated with respect as living creatures also began in the 19th century under the influence of William Wilberforce, who eventually founded the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, of which the American version, the ASPCA, was an unofficial off-shoot). But in the art world itself, the role of animal painting was nothing new. It was recognized by the Academy as a form of genre painting, and animals for centuries had been used as subjects in paintings to convey iconographical representations of pride, sin, sexual prowess, and so on. Grand Manner portraits by Veronese, Van Dyck, Reynolds, and so on, often include dogs or other animals, the visual image telling the viewer that the subject has a sense of refinement and/or is a powerful landowner. And although I am focusing exclusively on dogs for this post, horses were another popular animal that appeared in these same portraits, signifying to viewers the wealth and power of the men depicted by these artists.

Landseer may have painted a few pictures of animals that can be read today as silly or sentimental, but the power of an image such as The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner resonated so greatly his contemporaries that when Landseer himself died in 1873 his bronze tombstone at St. Paul's Cathedral was engraved with the same work of art. It was an appropriate acknowledgment of Landseer's popularity and his significant contribution to British art and animal painting.

Maya Angelou

It was just 8 days ago that the world received news the great African-American writer Maya Angelou had died at the age of 86, having just celebrated her last birthday on April 4th. Her death struck me cold, and it has bothered me since. It's not because we are both Aries and I think we are kindred souls (I wouldn't dare compare myself to her genius). Nor am I troubled that she had died too young, or because I thought I "knew" her in some way. I'm saddened because the world will no longer be graced with the power of her voice and the power of her words. Her last message on Twitter, dated May 23rd, was as strong a message as any she had ever written and spoken: "Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God." I can still hear in my head her recitation of the inaugural poem "On the Pulse of Morning" in 1993--A Rock. A River. A Tree.--and its final stanza, resonant with hope:

Here, on the pulse of this new day

You may have the grace to look up and out

And into your sister's eyes, and into

Your brother's face, your country

And say simply

Very simply

With hope--

Good morning.

These past 8 days I have been distressed by her death. I have felt a rivulet of emotion gurgling beneath the surface of my mind and my heart. I have been in mourning, and I only just realized this fact a little while ago. I never had the honor or privilege of meeting Maya Angelou, but there was always something about her voice and her words that have struck me. I am not alone; she has impacted many people's lives. But I realize that I am mourning the loss of a generation and a past and an understanding of the power of words, how when written from the heart and the mind, and spoken from the soul, words have the power to make a difference on a level that transcends basic textuality. Maya Angelou wasn't a perfect woman. She was something better. She was a human being, just like you and me, someone who made mistakes and learned from them, someone who knew that through our creative minds and bodies, one can make a small difference in this world, a difference that can enact positive change, hope, and love. Watch this short video interview with Maya Angelou that Ann Curry did about 12 years ago. You will quickly understand what I mean.

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All a-Twitter

I've moved another step forward in social networking and I now have a Twitter account (finally). You can follow my tweets by going to @bklynbiblio. I'm not sure yet how much activity we'll have, but in just following some of my friends (and a celebrity or two) it looks like it's going to be another obsessive virtual world worth exploring. I'll be tweeting (and retweeting) shorter posts and link that I don't always get to on the blog, where I can write more substantial posts than the 140 word limit. So stay tuned, because this "bert" is ready to start "tweeting"!