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| Philippe Halsman |
The thing about “cool” is that it shows itself equally in moments of
distress or pleasure, driving people indifferently to greatness or
stupidity. It comes from gritty streets and prices out the people who
live there; it pulls couples together or cleaves them apart. And even as
its meaning dissipates from overuse, you still can’t talk about Miles
Davis without mentioning it.
Cool is, in short, a story about America, full of contradictions and
unresolved riddles, a mask that often reveals more than the face beneath
it.
You won’t find it preserved under glass at the Smithsonian – except that, ahem, it is now on display
at the museum’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, in a parade of
images that say a lot about how the nation sees itself when it pretends
everybody is looking. They are also pretty cool. (Or, as the art
historian Robert Farris Thompson categorizes in his essay “An Aesthetic
of the Cool,” it’s a “metaphor of moral aesthetic accomplishment.”)
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