If you live in or have visited a major city over the past year, chances are you've come across some version of the various new "immersive" "Van Gogh" "experiences." Staged by for-profit companies and marketed heavily on Facebook, these "environments" promise to bring audiences closer to the beloved paintings of Vincent Van Gogh through the magic of digital enlargement, animation, and projection. In this episode, Sarah and Tina are joined by Swagato Chakravorty, a fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art whose doctoral work in art history and film and media studies focused on the history of screens. Together, they attempt to get to the bottom of just what makes these experiences so appealing to audiences, and how we might think about them as aspects of visual culture related to ideas in art history, instead of just dismissing them as unsatisfying reproductions outright.

A clip from the newest episode of our SEEN series, a benefit of becoming a patron of the podcast: www.patreon.com/arthistoryhappyhour

Back in February 2015, we discussed the history of 19th century French political satire in response to the tragedy of the mass shooting at the offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo. In the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol in January 2020, our minds turned once again to the relationship between politics and the visual arts. This time around, we thought we would extend our conversation into the early 20th century, focusing on the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich and "Suprematism," which he developed in the heady years leading up to the Russian Revolution. While Malevich's iconic "Black Square" paintings can seem like a radical break with the past, in this episode, we look at the trajectory of his career to understand how they emerged out of the context of early 20th century Russian and European avant-gardes. We conclude by discussing how a non-representational painting can still "represent" political ideals, and also touch on recent scholarship that revealed the painting's origins in anti-Black racism.