notes.husk.org/likes images.

THE (UN)DAILY PIC is “Glass Tears,” a 1933 image from the fabulous Man Ray show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wall text said that the photo was conceived (and used) for an ad for smudge-proof mascara.

Other texts explained that the second image at the top of this post, from the pages of the spring 1922 issue of the culture magazine Feuilles Libres, was the first publication of one of Man Ray’s great photograms, with more published that fall on a page in Vanity Fair (my third image).

I’ve been working through ideas about the way that modern artists (and especially Marcel Duchamp) realized that, since the Renaissance, Western fine art has always been about picking out certain objects to use as art, rather than creating objects that were inherently art-full. (Because nothing stands as art, without being used as that.)

Man Ray’s integration of fine and commercial art is grist for my mill, but I’m more interested, right now, in how fine art got adopted into the world of the commercial. I wonder if art directors intuited the modernist blurring of borders that I’ve been thinking about: If, at any given moment, an object might or might not be working as fine art, that meant that it might always be available for commercial purposes.