{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"The Painters of 1839 and the Question of Now","description":"Paris, August nineteenth, eighteen thirty-nine. Fran\u00e7ois Arago, perpetual secretary of the Acad\u00e9mie des Sciences, stands at a joint session of the Acad\u00e9mie des Sciences and the Acad\u00e9mie des Beaux-Arts. He reads into the record the technical details of Louis Daguerre's photographic process. The French state has acquired the rights from Daguerre and Isidore Ni\u00e9pce in exchange for life pensions of six thousand francs per year and four thousand francs per year. Sunlight, Arago tells the chamber, can now be made to draw its own pictures.  Within weeks the satirical press of Paris is mocking photographers as mechanics, copyists, charlatans. Paul Delaroche, the academic history painter at the height of his reputation, is reported, perhaps apocryphally, to have said: from this day, painting is dead. Twenty years later Charles Baudelaire writes the canonical hostile statement. He wants photography kept in its place. Useful for documenting monuments, useful for assisting the working artist, excluded from the category of art. The painters of 1839 were wrong. They were also partly right. ","author_name":"Human Meme","author_url":"https:\/\/humanmeme.com","html":"