As we are all sitting in our living rooms or working in our kitchens, essentially under house arrest, I have been fascinated to see all the people, famous and not at all famous–from the Prime Minister of New Zealand to the Rolling Stones to my anonymous friends in AA–being broadcast from their most private spaces, at home. I find myself looking at their books, their lamps in the background, their art on the walls. My favorite YouTubes have been the fantastic mashups of people all over the world playing instruments or singing together, performing in their home situations.
So let me wax professorial for a minute. In studying art history, and cultural history for that matter, we learn that one of the most important aspects of the transition to modernity was the breakdown of the rigid distinctions between private and public life. These distinctions had, of course, been most rigidly maintained for women, many of them being kept so tightly confined to domestic life and private worlds that they might as well have been in a sultan’s harem. While men in the nineteenth century defined public spaces and were free to become flaneurs and artists of the street, even women who had the means and the support by family to create art did so for the most part within the confines of their private spaces. Just think of those hauntingly beautiful images by Clementina Hawarden, photographs in the 1860s within her well-to-do household, or the famous close-ups by Julia Margaret Cameron. Private spaces–the home–were the venue of women. These photographic tableaux may have been carefully staged, but they were still an expression of the artist’s daily world.
It often seems that now, in the 21st century, all those divisions between private and public spheres have been obliterated, that the complaints are rife about no one having privacy in the age of social media, and cameras are everywhere, capturing every moment of everyone’s daily comings and goings. But this time of “social distancing,” in which all of our performative, public spaces have been closed down temporarily, has demonstrated that there was after all one last bastion of privacy left, even for public figures: our homes. Personally, I have found the experience of seeing performers and celebrities in their own domestic environments absolutely exhilirating, as they shed some of their public personas just by being in their own living rooms, as they sing to us, or tell jokes while their cat or dog or kid walks by. I find myself examining their lamps, for example, or what’s on their kitchen counters that is also on my kitchen counter. It makes their performances, to me, more authentic, and thereby more impressive. The other night I watched the “virtual” presentation of a tribute to Stephen Sondheim, in which all the performers were singing in their living rooms or, in at least one case, in her bathroom next to the tub. Bernadette Peters sang a capella, no make up, standing in her kitchen against a tiled diamond-designed wall with crooked candlesticks and a lamp visible in the background. It was like seeing a Raphael out of its frame and off the museum wall, being able to appreciate fully the immediacy of the artist’s craft. 
End of ruminations! In my Zoom meetings–another perceptual experience altogether–I also spend a lot of time examining where people are sitting and what’s behind them. In some cases, people choose completely neutral backgrounds, or position themselves so you can’t see much of their material belongings, while others–inadvertently or not–display their aesthetic in the art behind them. Again, I read these images to glean information about my anonymous friends’ lives. This at home experience has equalized us all in what I see as a good thing: we all have private spaces where we feel at home.
And rejoice when we see a cat enter the at-home weatherman’s report!
So I’ve succeeded in ending again with a cat!
esauboeck 