{"id":225,"date":"2003-04-20T10:52:09","date_gmt":"2003-04-20T14:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/04\/20\/pretty-to-look-at-pretty-stupid\/"},"modified":"2003-04-20T10:52:09","modified_gmt":"2003-04-20T14:52:09","slug":"pretty-to-look-at-pretty-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/04\/20\/pretty-to-look-at-pretty-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"Pretty to look at, pretty stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a42'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A while ago, I wrote a <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/04\/03\">piece<\/a> comparing Eric Blumrich&#8217;s animations to Gericault&#8217;s 19th century painting, The Raft of the Medusa.  But if there&#8217;s a modern-day Gericault, there has to be a modern day Bouguereau: he was one of mid-19th century Paris&#8217;s el painters supremo, extremely talented and much revered and hyped by the ruling class, and a real <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/wm\/paint\/auth\/bouguereau\/printemps.jpg\">first class<\/a> one-man schlock-mobile who manipulated sentiment to the point of seemingly forever giving it a bad name.  In fact, with today&#8217;s simulacra and our fabulous reproduction capabilities, there must be hundreds of Bouguereaus.  But the artist who probably deserves the Numero Uno Bouguoh award of the month has got to be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/articles\/2003\/04\/20\/1050777161737.html\">Madonna<\/a>.  Her reign of schlock coupled with her ability to retain her status as media darling make her the winner, as does her ability, so lucidly explored by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/wm\/paint\/auth\/bouguereau\/venus.jpg\">Bouguereau<\/a> himself, to sanitize reality and meaning out of existence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A while ago, I wrote a piece comparing Eric Blumrich&#8217;s animations to Gericault&#8217;s 19th century painting, The Raft of the Medusa. But if there&#8217;s a modern-day Gericault, there has to be a modern day Bouguereau: he was one of mid-19th century Paris&#8217;s el painters supremo, extremely talented and much revered and hyped by the ruling [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}