[MUSIC PLAYING]
Ah.
The selfie.
Our world is now consumed by the selfie.
Let's face it.
Some of us have hundreds or maybe
thousands of these pics on our devices.
I mean, who hasn't almost had their eye gorged out
by the selfie stick?
Believe it or not, this isn't a recent phenomena.
Let's dive a little deeper into the art of the selfie.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Support provided by The Glick Fund,
a CICF fund focused on inspiring philanthropy.
Additional support provided by the Christel DeHaan Family
Foundation, in honor of the children and families
of Christel House.
Robert Cornelius was an American pioneer in photography
and produced an image of himself using a daguerreotype camera
in 1839, which is also one of the first photographs
of a person.
Because the process was so slow, he
was able to uncover the lens, run
into the shot for a minute or more,
and then replace the lens cap.
Pretty cool.
Even though the term "selfie" has only been around
since 2002, the debut of the portable camera in 1900
led to self portraits, or selfies,
becoming a more widespread idea.
In fact, Russian Grand Duchess, Anastasia Nikolaevna,
at the age of 13, was one of the first teenagers
to take her own picture using a mirror
to send to a friend in 1914.
Of course, this idea grew even more in the 1970s
with affordable instant cameras, such as the classic Polaroid.
Did you know these are making a comeback?
Yep.
Probably thanks to Instagram is my guess.
But once Sony came out with the Ericsson mobile phone,
in late 2003, the introduction of a front-facing camera
was born.
Now we have fields of cloud servers
holding millions of selfies.
Actually, over 17 million selfies
are uploaded every week.
Before the front-facing camera, artists
had always utilized similar ideas to the selfie.
I mean, check out how many famous artists have
done self-portraits.
Many of these self-portraits were
composed to tell you a story, similar to you
taking a selfie while on vacation
or taking an hour to compose the background of your selfie
by probably adding, you know, the pope or something.
Take, for example, two of my favorites done by Picasso.
Check out the amazing bright colors used here.
Definitely rocking that yellow orange ascot.
By contrast, check out this self-portrait
done just a few years after.
Totally different, right?
This Blue Period painting was done just after Picasso
had lost a close friend.
It's almost as if he took the equivalent of a selfie
and added a filter just so you could better
understand how he was feeling.
The reality, of course, is that he isn't here
to tell the story.
So he's giving us the most amount of detail possible,
with the heavy dark coat, pasty skin tone, and blue-gray color
palette.
However, probably even more closely related
to the modern day selfie would be the composed photograph.
And who better to look at than Salvador Dali.
There is no doubt that Dali would have eaten up
the chance to have an iPhone.
You have to check out some of the photos he would compose.
Like any good photographer, Dali knew how to set up a shot.
And he most certainly wanted to take
the abstract bizarre nature of his paintings
and incorporate it into photographs.
Of course, Dali would be killing it on Instagram with this shot.
It's all about the kitty cat right now.
By the way, did you know that in 2015 it
was reported that more people had
been killed taking selfies that year than by shark attacks?
I'm not making this stuff up.
In fact, it has become such an issue in Russia
that the Russian Ministry of the Interior
released a selfie safety guide in 2015.
Let's face it.
No selfie is worth losing your life for.
Question for you.
What if you didn't have a camera and you
didn't know how to paint?
What would you do?
That's right.
You'd hire an artist.
To better understand how the art of the self-portrait and selfie
came together, we're heading over to the Cincinnati art
museum to take a look at an oil painting, which was basically
a highly composed selfie at the time.
Follow me.
We are here at the Cincinnati art museum,
and we're actually in one of the main hallway gallery
areas that's actually highlighting
different pieces of art.
And I'm here with Julie Aronson, who is one of the curators
here.
I'm just super glad you're taking some time here
to talk about-- we have a massive painting here
in this gallery that we're gonna kind of talk about.
Well, first of all, who actually painted this
and how in the world did it get here in the museum?
This was painted by an English painter
of the 18th century, named Thomas Gainsborough, who
got a start in art very young.
He became interested in art work when he was a child
and convinced his father that, at the age of 13,
he had to pick up and go to London
to study with the masters.
And had a kind of meteoric rise to prominence in the art world.
Did his parents have a background in art or did he
just--
No.
That was something he took an interest in.
And in fact, he wanted to be a landscape painter.
But like many artists who want to be landscape painters,
they needed to do something to make a better living.
And painting portraits is the way to do that.
We have to remember that this was an era when photography
didn't yet exist, and so a painted portrait was
one of the only ways that you could have a record of what
a loved one looked like.
So painted portraits had a different kind of value
than they have today, for both ordinary people
and for the wealthy.
And of course, the wealthy could afford
somebody like Gainsborough and a massive painting like this one.
Tell me about the subject.
Who is this and what's so unique about her?
Ann Ford was a remarkable young woman
in that she was a professional musician.
She started out playing concerts in her home
and aspired to do something that was very advanced for the time.
Women were not professional musicians at the time.
And they weren't thought of very highly.
And in fact, her own father tried
to disrupt her concert career by having
her arrested on two occasions.
And you see that she's got her legs crossed.
That was not considered to be an appropriate pose
for a young woman at the time.
It was considered to be too masculine.
And this is a very sophisticated portrait,
and he shows her to be very confident and very pleased
with her career.
It's something that's very much something that she's proud of.
And you get a sense of that in this painting.
And she has this absolutely fabulous dress,
which is really a tribute to Gainsborough's proficiency
as a painter.
You can see these wonderful-- I mean, sort
of slashing brush strokes in which he doesn't actually
try to describe every wrinkle but he gives you
this feeling of this wonderful, luxuriant, satin fabric.
Yeah.
And was there a unique style that he was known for?
Well, it is really this kind of-- there's
a sort of freedom to the way in which he puts paint
on the canvas that's quite different from many
of his contemporaries.
And it was very modern for its day.
Well, thank you so much again, Julie, for your time.
It was super amazing just to hear a little bit more
about especially the subject of this painting.
Thank you very much.
It's wonderful to be here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
What involves volcanic ash, dangerous chemicals,
extreme heat, expert timing, ground pigment,
and expert creativity?
You guessed it.
Fresco painting.
Check this out.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Fresco painting using wet plaster
dates back to 1500 BC and the island of Crete in Greece.
Of course, fresco can be seen around ancient Greece
as well, often within tombs depicting
scenes of everyday life.
There are even scenes of a couple dudes just reclining
at a banquet.
However, where we really see some incredible examples is
in the ancient--