The Wake

A pair of grand openings representing the cultures of celebrity and coffee has occurred at the University’s Wilson Library in the past two weeks. Though they are physically separated by three of Wilson’s six floors, these two unveilings are more closely related than they appear at first glance.

The fourth floor of Wilson Library was radiating with warmth and energy on yet another cold evening last Friday during the debut of the most recent Gorman Rare Art Books exhibit, The Birth of Celebrity Culture in the City of Lights (1880-1900). The exhibition, which runs until April 27, showcases a vast diversity of images from periodicals and books within the Gorman collection, illuminating the role of the popular press in the creation and maintenance of the “celebrity” figure in late nineteenth century Paris.

The curator of the exhibition, Sarah Sik, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History, has woven a delicate and revealing narrative of the fin-de-siècle “celebrity,” employing a keen sensitivity to the historical trends and cultural affairs that dominated and affected the period.

In her essay that accompanies the exhibition, Sik reveals how the popular press, in an age of “modern, image-based societies” reinforced “the human impulse to read outward appearances as an index of inward qualities.” Ultimately, this reinforcement resulted in the production of “flat, saleable images that admirers and critics” could “invest with their own desires and fantasies.” Such subjectivity, Sik observes, often led to an identity and a public image that the celebrity had little control over.

Both engaging and accessible, The Birth of Celebrity Culture in the City of Lights (1880-1900) serves as an important critique of a period that, in many ways, remains significantly relevant to our own image-conscious society. Sik brings these elements to life, compelling the viewer to reflect on the mass production and distribution of visual representations in 21st century America.

Moreover, all of the research and compilation of materials for the exhibition was done within the walls of our own Wilson Library. Consequently, along with providing a most enlightening exploration of turn-of-the-century French popular culture, the exhibit also demonstrates the scope, range and depth of the University of Minnesota Libraries’ collections.

This demonstration is precisely where and how the previously mentioned relationship between the two openings begins to occur.

It often seems that students would rather sit in a noisy, dimly lit café quickly browsing the internet than huddle with a stack of books beneath the illuminating and enlightening bulbs of our libraries. Further, the students may defend their Google-based research in the name of pragmatism and convenience. How much more suitable it is, indeed, for our minds, cast in the mold of this fast-paced Information Age, to rely on a simple query which receives a response within seconds!

Similarly, many may argue that our own University has resorted to this very method of inquiry with its recent “greatest question” campaign, suggesting and supporting the idea that we have no time for the cultivation of in-depth investigations that seek to unearth answers within the library’s stacks and archives.

If only more students would venture as Sik has into the depths and caverns of the Annex or the Rare Book Room – those mysterious and labyrinthine bastions of resources – for the answers to their “greatest questions!”

The students, however, resist.

Accordingly, in a whole-hearted effort to bring the students back into these much-neglected houses of knowledge, our dear libraries have installed their very own chain of coffee shops, including a new one – just opened – in the basement of Wilson.

With this in mind, the opening of Sik’s The Birth of Celebrity Culture in the City of Lights (1880-1900) is quite timely. The students, having found and made use of this new shop – thereby re-entering the corridors of the Wilson Library – may happen to encounter this collection of prints, witnessing firsthand what treasures are within the reach of an inquisitive mind.

Fortunately for students, Sik’s exhibition displays the remarkable fruits of her research, which remains the very essence of what a library as great as our own has to offer.

Let us all hope, then, that the opening of the Wilson Library’s most recent installation proves the effort to have been as thoroughly researched, as intelligibly documented and as successfully carried out as Sik’s exhibition. If not, let us at least hope that the library has accounted for the potential leaks, spills and discarded paper cups, which may be left in the student’s wake.