why we don't live in a post-racial society

Because even images as provocative as Dsquared's new ad campaign featuring Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista, conceptually, are racializing. In a clever Nickolas Muray meets Robert Mapplethorpe kind of way, bodies in these photographs become markers of beauty and race, while contention between the two colored/marked bodies creates visual interest but demarcates difference. Dsquared ads are normally shot in black and white photography... perhaps the creative directors decided to take "black" and "white" to another level. You can check out the ad campaign at www.dsquared2.com.

block out with your c**k out

Polaroids: Mapplethorpe is coming to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and for the first time, in a long time, I’ve never been so excited about the line-up of exhibitions coming to campus. Perhaps because Robert Mapplethorpe represents a sore spot in American art history. An avant-garde photographer and grade-A badass, Mapplethorpe’s confrontational and abrasive artistic reputation is complicated with Polaroids in that the display of rudimentary, cheaply produced images reveal the artist’s process of aestheticizing bodies in the likeness of classical Renaissance drawings and artistic explorations of the human figure. Mapplethorpe’s photos will be shown in tandem with From Michelangelo to Annibale Carracci: A Century of Italian Drawings from the Prado, not to “legitimate” the curatorial claims of Polaroids but to provide patrons with multiple examples of a trajectory of discovering the body through sexuality, love, and emotional fervor. You can check out both exhibitions in January 2009.