Still Struggling

I've had a terrible time finding a mythology that seems relevant and that I find interesting. While reading more of Mythologies for inspiration I realized that many of Barthes' topics were derived from public exhibitions, either from an art gallery, natural history museum ("The Family of Man"), science expo ("Plastics"), the movies ("The Face of Garbo"); so I decided that I would perform a mythology on whatever was happening at the Boise Art Museum, which is a show called "Art and the Environment." In line with the theme, 'landscape' seemed like a good choice because it is distanced from and has meaning separate from what it represents, but I was mistaking an image's history for its existence in nature. I feel like I need to review Barthes' essays for the relationship of the authenticity of an image in relation to the thing it represents. I may find answers there. I'm sure the nature of the landscape has been addressed by art scholars and it may not need further examination. It seems passé to analyze such a long-established and inherently unchanged genre. Perhaps a genre is the wrong thing to analyze. For the sake of the exercise I need to find something else which has immediate relevance.

I keep getting stuck on evolutionary concepts like the single mother and discotheques, not new (replacement) uses of older things like wine--which Barthes covered as Frenchness, and might hold up as the new American pretension a la Sideways. I force myself to consider alternative exhibitions of contemporary American culture: the infomercial, and all I know are Snuggies, the George Foreman Grill, and the TimeLife Hits of the Decades series hawked by by-gone veejays.

Perhaps it's the camera. Or the telephone. But these again are evolutionary. Having one's picture taken used to be special and required a formal sitting. Later it recorded only special moments. Two decades ago we were limited to 24 or 36 exposures to a roll and had to ration pictures to the important moments because each shot cost money. The early aughts saw the prevalence of digital cameras which was to shortly lead to their ubiquity as they were made smaller, cheaper and of ever-increasing quality as they were--and have been--integrated into our devices: telephones, iPods, and computers, and they are always with us. And our cameras don't just take pictures. They are tape recorders and video cameras, and of a vastly higher quality than the professional equipment of just twenty years ago.

Cameras are now what wrist watches used to be; they are no longer for the few, but have been democratically cheapened to overcome the problematics of access to technology; they also, in conjunction with the phones they are part of, often serve as the sole personal timepiece of their owners. The telephone, and the integrated camera, are making the wristwatch anachronistic.

[more as it comes]