The Real Real Thing ─ The Model in the Mirror of Art

Our era is defined by the model. From Victoria's Secret and America's Next Top Model to the snapshots we post on Face-book and Twitter, our culture is fixated on poses, the momentary merger of artifice with the real thing.

In this bold view of contemporary culture, Wendy Steiner shows us the arts in the process of a wholesale reorientation. Her story begins at the turn of the last century, as artists abandoned the representation of the world for a heady embrace of the abstract, the surreal, and the self-referential. Today though, this "separate sphere of the aesthetic" has become indistinguishable from normal life. Media and images overwhelm us: we gingerly negotiate a real-virtual divide that we suspect no longer exists, desperate for what J. M. Coetzee has called "the real real thing." As the World Wide Web renders the lowercase world in ever-higher definition, reality-based genres such as memoir and documentary are taking over, and even novels and filmic fantasies invent model-protagonists who step outside their fictions. Steiner shows the arts searching out a new ethical stance through such figures: by stressing the model's identity as a real person beyond the artwork, they acknowledge the audience's independent existence, too, unpredictable and equally constitutive of artistic meaning. In the process, the arts are redefined as real-world interactions exploring the promise of empathy, reciprocity, and egalitarian connection.

A masterly performance by a penetrating, inquisitive mind, Vie Real Real Thing is that rarest of books, one whose provocations will inspire readers to take a new---and nuanced---look at the world around them.

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 the Times Literary Supplement. She is the author of many books, most recently Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art.