Cool, American-Style

What do we mean when we say someone is cool? Who are the coolest of the cool? What does it mean when a generation decides a certain figure is cool? Is coolness a constant, or does it change over time?

These are just some of the questions explored in the exhibition American Cool now on display at the National Portrait Gallery.

Exhibit curators are quick to point out that their exhibit, which includes the 1940s to the present, should be viewed as a conversation starter, not the final word on the world of cool.

In order to be included in the exhibit, the cool personifiers had to demonstrate 4 characteristics: They were:

• an original artistic vision carried off with a signature style
• a sense of cultural rebellion
• instant visual recognition and iconic power
• a recognized cultural legacy.

Using those guidelines, you get athletes like Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan, screen stars like Steve McQueen and Mae West, jazz greats like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, journalists like H.L. Menken and Hunter Thompson, and comedians like Lenny Bruce and Jon Stewart, all of whom are among those pictured. In addition to still photos, you can also view movie clips and music videos, as well as listen to music clips from featured artists such as Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen.

Can you identify this smoking cool trio?

One of the more interesting items offered for examination is the Alt 100, a list of the 100 figures who didn't make the final showing, but received strong support from members of the curating team.

But perhaps the most telling message to be taken from the captivating look into coolness is the stark portrayal of the fact that while coolness may last, the time of the possessor of the cool is definitely finite. 

A picture of actress Lauren Bacall had been featured in the exhibit since it opened. However, yesterday the curators were required to post an addition next to Bacall's picture. Now, it reads In Memoriam as Bacall had died one day earlier at the age of 89. 

If you want to check out the cool display and see how the choices there fit in with your definition of cool, you have until Sept. 7, when the exhibition is scheduled to close.

American Cool @National Portrait Gallery

Welcome to our 1st Monday Must-See post. On Mondays, we will offer an entry about some current exhibit in DC you should see. Sometimes, we will write the post. Sometimes, it will be taken from another publication. But no matter who is the writer, we believe it will showcase an exhibit you shouldn't miss. 

Cultural concepts are always fuzzy, but that doesn’t make them useless. We may never know the exact beginning or end of Romanticism or the Gilded Age, or where lies the line between art and entertainment, or what distinguishes great talent from genius. But that doesn’t make those concepts hollow, just fluid and approximate.

A new entertaining and insightful exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery confronts one of the most dynamic and hard to define concepts in American cultural life — the cool. “American Cool” broaches its subject through photographs of people who helped define and embody the cool since before the idea had even taken definite form, to the current day when it is highly questionable if the “cool” is still meaningful. 

If you want to continue reading this article by Philip Kenicott which 1st appeared in The Washington Post, click here.

Smithsonian Sunday: Beyonce Bounced from Cool Category

DC's Smithsonian museums (there are 17 of them here in the city) are among America's most treasured and visited places. But the Smithsonian also publishes a series of some of the most interesting, fact-filled blogs appearing anywhere on the internet. Each Sunday, The Prices Do DC re-posts an entry that initially appeared in one of those highly-readable blogs. Hope you enjoy and maybe we'll see you soon at the Smithsonian.

Beyonce: Cool or not?

Everyone knows what "cool" looks like. It’s a pair of legs encased in worn jeans, slung over the sides of a Harley. A cigarette rimmed with red lipstick. The dark tint of a jazz musician’s sunglasses, which he wears onstage–at night–as his saxophone cuts through the din of a smoky club.

The term, which was first coined in the 1940s by Lester Young, the lead saxophonist in Count Basie's orchestra, has become ubiquitous in today’s slang. It’s also grown nebulous, conveying everything from a sign of explicit approval–“Cool!”–to an object’s cultural cache. But what makes a person... cool? 

Together, Frank Goodyear, a curator of photography and co-director of the Bowdoin Museum of Art, and Joel Dinerstein, a professor at Tulane University, have tried to answer that question. “American Cool,” an exhibition that the two co-curated at the National Portrait Gallery, is a collection of 100 photographs of men and women who’ve exemplified “cool” throughout history.

“When we use the word cool today, especially as an adjective, we’re tending to refer to something rather than someone,” says Goodyear. “What do we mean when we say someone is cool?’”

To continue reading this post, click here.