Phobias and fear have been integrated into the American culture for almost the entirety of its establishment. According to Sean Quimby, Syracuse University librarian and facilitator of the lecture “American Phobia: Collecting the History of Fear”, there are many manifestations of fear but two primary trends in the American way of life. The first is a dogged invasion of fantasy and the second is the gradual emergence of therapeutic culture.
The first trend that Quimby talks about is Americans’ obsession with the posed threat of invasion. One example that he gives of this is Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race in which he speaks about Henry Osbourne and his belief is the greatest danger is that people with the traits of religious grounding, or the Aryan race, dying out. The non-Aryan race threatened their existence. The next example that Quimby gives was the 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. This radio show gave a fictional story of Aliens invading the world and it resulted in about six million people actually believing the story was a reality and instilling fear among all of them. Hadley Cantrill, a Princeton Professor, commented on this naiveté of the American public by saying that it was due to Americans’ inability to distinguish reality from fiction. The second trend that Quimby talks about, and spends a significantly less amount of time discussing, is the therapeutic culture of fear. The example that Quimby gives is God. He says that God is now being absorbed into this path of fear in a way that people’s belief in a higher being helps alleviate the uncertainty and horror of phobias.
The lecture as a whole did not present a clear thesis and nor was it very informative. Rather Quimby jumped around speaking of different figures and books that dealt with fear and the concepts of fear that Americans face, but had no unifying thought for all of these examples. The lecture was also not very in depth. It was a brief and only scratched the surface of the patterns and commonality of Americans’ fears and phobias. The lecture would have been better and more informative if Quimby gave historical examples and spoke more of the typical phobias that present themselves in American culture.

Bin Dahn, is an extremely talented artist whose exhibit “Life: One Week’s Dead” pays homage to the soldiers and more specifically the victims of the Vietnam War. His art work gives a definitive testimony to the Vietnam War and it’s soldiers. Dahn, to create his work, takes leaves and covers them with negatives so that the leaves loose their chlorophyll and then duplicates images onto them. The images he creates incorporate portraits of soldiers from the war in which he obtained from the Life Magazine issue, One Week’s Dead, which was the inspiration for his projects. In Dahn’s lecture he explained that after visiting Vietnam, he realized that remnants of the war linger in the landscape and thus the reasoning for using leaves to portray his ideas. His art works depict what it would be like if the leaves and landscape of Vietnam could talk, the leaves are what contain the war. By placing the portraits of these soldiers on leaves, Dahn is in a sense giving testimony to the Vietnam War and allowing the stories hidden in the landscape surface. Dahn also said in his lecture that photos are the DNA of our memory. So by surfacing these photographs, Dahn is giving validation to the war and allowing his audience to take in pictures of the soldiers and at the same time the feeling of the scenery.
Bin Dahn’s art can be a reflection of current times as well. Many compare the Vietnam War to the current Iraqi War for ambiguous reasons of entry and unnecessary deaths. The vagueness of the faces of the soldiers in the grass art works can represent any and all of the soldiers of the Vietnam War and can even represent the soldiers of the Iraqi War. The faces represent the men who fight in all the wars of the United States to defend our nation.
In Susan Sontag’s “The Image-World”, she examines the concept of photography and its importance in society. Sontag states “a photograph is not only an image…an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a foot print or a death mask.”(p.350). This applies completely to Bin Dahn’s exhibit. His art work portrays the real but it also is “a trace…stenciled off something real”. His pictures are of the real men who died in Vietnam and their stories are coming from the remains left at the site. The grass that begs to tell its story and the fallen men who are trying to break through. Whatever it was that the pictures were not able to capture, the landscape made up for. Sontag also states that “Photograph collections can be used to make a substitute world, keyed to exalting or consoling or tantalizing images.” I thought this concept applied to Dahn’s pictures because they do create a new world. When examining the grass art work, standing close gave a distorted view of what was actually imprinted on to the grass, it looked as if it were simply shards of grass placed next to one another. Upon a second examination from a farther distance, the portraits became more apparent. Despite the clear distinction of a figure, the faces were undistinguishable making the pictures capable of being anyone and everyone, a representation of all soldiers of the war indication of all their presences. Allowing the pictures to be any and all soldiers creates a new world of more general war scene than the specifics of the soldier actually portrayed in the picture.

1. Art is a concept that is left up to the interpretation of an individual based on their preference to aesthetically pleasing pieces of work.
Over the summer, I went to Manhattan to see the “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. There were a lot of interesting paintings and sculptures throughout the exhibit but the one painting that really struck me was a painting called “Grain of Sand”. The painting is a circle and is extremely colorful and bold. Its comprised of many different faces and miscellaneous shapes and designs. The colors of the picture and the intricate designs captivate you into examining the piece of work and spending a great deal of time with it. I got lost into the sea of colors and shapes and refused to move as my friends wanted to move on. The reason I was so taken aback by this art work was because it was so different than conventional pieces I was used to. It was not a landscape or portrait and didn’t have a specific color scheme, rather it incorporated anything and everything the artist wanted to have. The artist, I believe, wanted to try and grab hold of the audience of his painting and try to scream out to them and I believe he was very successful in this manner.

2. In Thierry de Duve’s essay “Art was a proper name”, Duve explores the definition of art as a word and as an entity. He takes you through a journey as a person unfamiliar to the Earthly concept would discover it. His thoughts and theories are extremely similar to the definition I always attributed to the concept that is art. Art is a vast … that encompasses an infinite number of meanings and a great deal of different interpretations. As Duve states in his essay “Either the ontological status of the work of art is an empty set, or it is an infinite one; either nothing is art, or everything can be.” (p.11). I completely agree with this statement. Since the definition of art is left up to the individual, it can encompass as much or as little as a person believes it to be. Art can be defined as anything from a painting, to a song, to a piece of literature, to, as we saw in class, a ready-made urinal. There is no limitations put on what someone can consider art because every person walks away from the same object with a different feeling evoked, experience undertaken, and idea developed. Whose to say that what you enjoy and believe is art, is not truly the definition of what art is. Duve also says “that humans give art an autonomous place, with magic and religion on one side, and science on the other.” (p.5). This shows that humans give great value to art by placing it by itself in a different theory from the other established notions. I, as well as Duve, believe that everyone can decide for themselves what exactly art is, if it’s anything at all.