24. Cindy Sherman, Untitled #458
- Rainey Knudson
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
Perhaps our pervasive sense of anxiety is not just history gearing up for the latest once-every-century catastrophe. Perhaps there’s something far more profound occurring—the death throes of one way of being as a species and the birth pangs of another. Meaning in a broad, evolutionary sense: the death of a way of being that started with the Enlightenment, or even long before that, with Western Civ itself. And the birth of something new, evolutionarily speaking, for our species.
If the way of being that’s dying is the unconscious assumption that we humans are not natural, that nature is this thing over there that’s separate from us, then it’s probably high time we wake up to the fact that we carry that unconscious assumption in everything we do as a civilization. Time to let it go. There have been benefits, surely—we’ve had a good run assuming that we’re not nature. But there have been undeniable downsides.
Admittedly, such a transformation in thinking is not easy or comfortable, and it will not happen—is not happening—quickly. But it’s as natural and inevitable as growing old and dying.
Which leads me to the artist Cindy Sherman, and her remarkable images of women fighting aging. Our expensive, hopeless fight against what we view as the failure of aging is our birthright as a civilization that assumes it is not nature. We age and die badly in our country; we flail against our essential naturalness. What if it doesn’t have to be this way?
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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.
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