By MARSHA MERCER
“You can’t
fake true cool,” Bob Dylan said in his Chrysler Super Bowl commercial as a
photo of James Dean flashed on the screen.
Dylan, selling
cars at 72, and Dean, the “Rebel Without a Cause” actor who died in 1955 at the
age of 24, are among 100 certified cool Americans in a new exhibit at the
National Portrait Gallery.
The
“American Cool” exhibit of mostly black-and-white portraits includes actors
Lauren Bacall, Marlon Brando, Benicio Del Toro and Steve McQueen; musicians Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Jay-Z and
Bonnie Raitt; writers James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy
Parker; and athletes Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Jack Johnson and Michael
Jordan.
Not one president
or elected official made the list, but if the Presidents Day throng of
exhibit-goers was an indication, Washington is hungry for cool. It’s also
possible, though, that the gray heads who were grooving to cool Marvin Gaye had
given up on the long lines upstairs where, for one weekend, visitors could look
at David Datuna’s “Portrait of America” through Google glass. There’s cool and
then there’s new cool.
I almost
skipped the “American Cool” exhibit, thinking that once cool is enshrined in a
museum it can’t be cool anymore. Plus, while I understand that museums need to attract
visitors, I hate to see them pander.
The
Newseum, for example, has been struggling financially for years despite
thoughtful exhibits on such topics as Civil War journalism and JFK. Desperate
last fall to recoup losses, it opened a major exhibit of 60 costumes,
“hilarious props” and other paraphernalia from the 2004 movie “Anchorman: The
Legend of Ron Burgundy,” just before a movie sequel was released. Stay classy,
Newseum? I think not.
But “American
Cool,” through Sept. 7, manages to be entertaining and thought-provoking. The captivating
images make us think about the elusive quality of cool. I watched as writer Joan
Didion, leaning against the door of her Corvette Stingray in 1970, mesmerized three
young women for several minutes.
Fred Astaire is there but not Ginger Rogers. The only
entrepreneur is a young Steve Jobs, long-haired and bearded, riding a
motorcycle, bareheaded.
My idea of
cool runs more to George Catlin than George Carlin – but neither is in the
exhibit.
Fortunately
for us, Catlin painted native Americans in the 1830s before their way of life vanished forever. He gave up a successful
business as a portrait painter in Philadelphia and headed west on several trips
he paid for himself. Eighteen of his colorful portraits hang on a curved
staircase in the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Art, which adjoins the portrait
gallery.
It’s seems odd
that Carlin, a comedian famous for his biting social commentary, didn’t make it,
although Lenny Bruce did. Carlin won the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American
Humor just a few days before he died in 2008.
And Twain may
be the father of modern American literature but he’s absent too – not because he
pre-dates cool, a concept born in the jazzy 1940s. Walt Whitman and Frederick
Douglass made it.
The exhibit
is the product of five years’ work by two cultural historians with doctorates
in American studies, Joel Dinerstein and Frank Goodyear III.
Dinerstein is
director of the American Studies department at Tulane University, where he
teaches a class in the history of cool. No, he tells students, he himself is
not cool nor can he teach them how to be cool. Goodyear, a former photography
curator at the portrait gallery, is co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum
of Art in Maine.
To make the
cool list, someone had to have three elements of these four: originality of
artistic vision and of signature style; cultural rebellion in a given
historical moment; “iconicity” or high-profile recognition, and a recognized
cultural legacy.
And they
needed something else: a great photo. Carlin met the other criteria but no suitable
photo could be found. He appears on an Alt-100 list of runners up, along with Tony
Bennett, Clark Gable, Jerry Garcia, Jack London, Norman Mailer and Janis
Joplin.
No worries.
When you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be in a museum.
©2014
Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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