This is a long one.
Nostalgia and Kitsch: An Investigation
In my first thought paper for September, I began to arrange my thoughts on how nostalgia is (or is not) related to my artwork, specifically the series of mannequin tintypes that I am producing. Geoffrey Batchen’s book, Forget Me Not, was referenced extensively as it not only gave a clear explanation of how nostalgia is related to memory, but it also provided examples of 19th century photographic portraiture that spoke to an aesthetic sensibility that I strove for in my work. When speaking to my MFA advisor regarding this paper, I was given some extremely helpful criticism. First, I neglected to provide a clear and in-depth definition of what nostalgia is. Second, my advisor brought up a word that had been mentioned during the June residency in regards to my tintypes, but up until now I had no clear understanding of its implications. That word is kitsch. Both nostalgia and kitsch have largely negative connotations; both play a significant role in the world of contemporary art; and as I have discovered, these two terms often overlap when being discussed.
“Nostalgia tantalizes us with its fundamental ambivalence; it is about the repetition of the unrepeatable, materialization of the immaterial.”
-Svetlana Boym
Svetlana Boym’s book, The Future of Nostalgia, contains a treasure trove of information about the roots of nostalgia, and explains in depth how its effects have permeated so much of modern thought. Nostalgia, from the Latin for “return home” (nostos) and “longing” (algia), was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss doctor who was struggling to understand why Swiss soldiers stationed abroad were suffering from mysterious symptoms of fatigue and indifference to their surroundings. Nausea, loss of appetite, cardiac arrest, and suicidal tendencies surfaced in the most extreme cases. However, when asked to talk about their homes in the Alps, the soldiers would snap out of their lethargy and talk at length about fond memories of favorite sights, sounds, and smells from the homeland. Cures for this disease of the imagination included leeches, opium, and most effective, a trip home to the Alps (Boym, 3-5). During the American Civil War, nostalgia in soldiers was seen as “a shameful disease that revealed a lack of manliness and unprogressive attitudes (6).” Interestingly, nostalgia in this case was a symptom found mostly in soldiers of a rural background. Civil War military doctor Theodore Calhoun wrote, “The soldier from the city cares not where he is or where he eats, while his country cousin pines for the old homestead and his father’s groaning board.”
In her book, Boym contends that the modernization of society from the 17th to the 19th centuries, in the forms of industry and capitalism, changed the focus of nostalgia from merely the loss of an idealized physical home to “the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values (8).” As distances became more quickly and easily crossed thanks to technological advances, the concept of time also changed and became more complex. Trains pulled freight farther; telegraph lines allowed for near instantaneous communication between time zones (which, incidentally, were invented to allow for ease in creating shipping schedules for the railroads). The cogs began to move faster, and society had to learn to keep up. This idea of modernity was translated into art as well, most notably by Charles Baudelaire in his 1860 essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” In it, the modern artist is urged to record what is happening at the moment, especially in the cities, where progress is swifter and more noticeable. Nostalgia in effect became the ideological opposite of progress; as the latter looked optimistically to the future’s broad horizons, the former yearned for a past that could never be attained.
There is more than just one type of nostalgia. According to Boym, people who are nostalgic can be broken down into two separate types: reflective nostalgics and restorative nostalgics. Boym states, “Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance (41).” The author posits that restorative nostalgics do not realize they are nostalgic; they believe that they are seeking out truths. Restorative nostalgia can, for example, show itself as a kind of blind patriotism to country, a held belief that a beloved nation or system of government is threatened by outsiders who wish to tear apart its “perfect” order. Stains on the government’s record, like a past racial persecution or unjust war, are ironed out or glossed over to protect the nostalgic view that everything in the past was wonderful, and in order to restore the “homeland” it must be brought back to those glory days. Restorative nostalgia is akin to revisionist history, and Boym even makes the connection of this kind of nostalgic to conspiracy theorists (43).
Reflective nostalgics, on the other hand, do not take themselves so seriously. While they may long for a time and place in the past, they understand and delight in the fact that memory is fragmentary and that time is fluid. States Boym, “the focus here is not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time (49).” Humor and irony are allowed to penetrate reflective nostalgia, unlike restorative nostalgia, and it is also much more focused on the individual and his or her own understanding of time and space.
There is no doubt that I am a nostalgic, just as there is no doubt that much of my artwork carries a nostalgic tone. It is also clear after reading Svetlana Boym’s book that I fit her definition of a reflective nostalgic more so than that of a restorative nostalgic. I am not tied to a more perfect ideal of the past that I am attempting to resurrect, and I certainly do not carry a blind faith that our nation was built on a foundation without imperfections. Before I began my MFA residency, I had considered myself a realist. That is, I felt I understood that both tradition and progress had their importance, but I had distrust for those that held too much reverence for one over the other. Without understanding the past, how can one do right for the future? Without thinking about the future, how can one act responsibly in the present? And without acknowledging the absurd and unique qualities of history and time in the first place, how can one truly appreciate the world around him?
________________________________________
“Serious artists are inevitably aware of kitsch: they fear it, are constantly on guard against it, and if they flirt with kitsch it is with a sense of risk, knowing that all artistic effort is wasted should you ever cross the line.”
-Roger Scruton
As stated, there were some comments at the June AIB residency by students and professors that my series of mannequin tintypes perhaps contained elements of kitsch. This was echoed during a phone conversation with my advisor just this past month, although both of us were a bit unclear on the precise meaning of this very charged term. To investigate, I began where any studious, intellectual student would begin his research: Wikipedia. The website defines kitsch as “a term of German origin that has been used to categorize art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style. The term is also used more loosely in referring to any art that is pretentious to the point of being in bad taste, and also commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass.” Famed critic Clement Greenberg wrote an important essay in 1939 titled Avant-Garde and Kitsch, in which he states, “Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time.” To Greenberg, kitsch referred to realism in art, regardless the medium. Michelangelo paintings, Hollywood movies, and any kind of readily available commercial art – comics, tap dancing, Tin Pan Alley music – all fell into the category of kitsch. The only way to elevate art beyond kitsch, according to Greenberg, was to make it abstract or completely non-representational in the model of artists like Picasso, Mondrian, and Kandinsky. Paint should be about paint, and should not pretend to be anything else.
In 1999, British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote an essay titled Kitsch and the Modern Predicament which responds to Greenberg’s original essay and updates the meaning of kitsch in art for a contemporary audience. His first argument is that Greenberg’s faith in non-representational art as a remedy to kitsch turned out to be misguided: “take a stroll around MoMA, and you will encounter it in almost every room: avant-garde, certainly—novel in its presumption, if not in its effect—but also kitsch, abstract kitsch, of the kind that makes modernist wallpaper or is botched together for the tourist trade on the Boulevard Montparnasse.” However, Scruton agrees with Greenberg’s postulation that kitsch is a phenomenon of capitalism and, in a broader context, the Enlightenment and people’s loss of a religious faith. He states, “Faith exalts the human heart, removing it from the marketplace, making it sacred and unexchangeable. When faith declines, however, the sacred loses one of its most important forms of protection from marauders; the heart can now more easily be captured and put on sale…the Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be: hence the emotion that they offer is fake." A kitsch object has a sentimental value that has been sold and is now empty, caused by commercial enterprise and absence of faith.
By the 1960s, Scruton argues, artists armed themselves against kitsch with a brand-new weapon: preemptive kitsch. Scruton states, “The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch; far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody... preemptive kitsch delights in the tacky, the ready-made, and the cut-out, using forms, colors, and images that both legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it.” Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons are good examples of artists who intentionally use kitsch in an attempt to embrace it yet circumvent its pitfalls. Probably the best, most recent example of this strategy is Damien Hirst’s outlandish For the Love of God, a platinum-cast human skull studded with over 10,000 pure diamonds. The piece contains all the right elements for kitsch: it is garish, highly overdone, absurdly pretentious, and the title of the piece itself is a double entendre which acknowledges the kitsch quality of the object while at the same time taking a lighthearted jab at religion in general by referring to God and death. In reading Scruton’s essay it is clear that he has a strong dislike of kitsch, but he offers no clear answers on how to avoid its traps. In the end he simply states, “Through family, religion, and the forms of public life, we shield ourselves from the horrific vision that surrounds us—the vision of ourselves as fakes. That is perhaps why we should value kitsch. It flows all about us and warns us that we must tread carefully and be guided by those who know.”
________________________________________
Kitsch and nostalgia are both based in sentiment. Nostalgia most often plays off of genuine sentiment and longing, while kitsch bastardizes the sentiment and makes an inferior copy out of it. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym cites an example of Russian author Vladimir Nabokov attempting to tiptoe around the trapdoor of kitsch while retaining a narrative relating to nostalgia. Nabokov’s memoirs relate the story of Mademoiselle O., his Swiss governess, who on her first trip to Russia remained strongly nostalgic for her home in the Alps, to the point where she recreated a Swiss-style home in her Russian dwelling. After the Russian revolution in 1917, Mademoiselle moved back to Switzerland but instead of quelling her longing for her homeland the move made her nostalgic for Russia. She began to decorate her Swiss home with Russian trinkets. Boym states, “The only place Mademoiselle could call home is the past – mainly, the past that she framed for herself.” In describing the setting of Mademoiselle’s mountain home, Nabokov writes about a mountain lake in which he sees a swan flapping its wings. He recognizes the swan as a ready-made metaphor for Mademoiselle’s longing for a perfect home, or love, that doesn’t exist, but he doesn’t want to be trapped by this overdone, sappy, kitsch sentiment by simply plugging it in to his writing. Instead, he describes the swan as “an aged swan, a large, uncouth, dodo-like creature, making ridiculous efforts to hoist himself into a moored boat.” According to Boym, “Nabokov interrupts all the clichés and poetic references to the swans of other times” by describing the swan in such an unflattering manner (278-280). He escapes kitsch while retaining an ironic, reflective nostalgia in his examination of Mademoiselle’s constant longing for something and somewhere else.
Are the mannequin tintypes that I am producing and displaying at AIB appropriately labeled as kitsch by those who have done so? After this investigation, I must say that they are not. Firstly, I am not creating work that tries to "legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it," as Roger Scruton puts it. In other words, I'm not trying to make preemptive kitsch. The tintypes, in their process and in the manner which they are painted and framed, speak to and are influenced by an American folk art tradition but they are by no means an attempt to poke fun at the ignorance of such artists. In fact, my feelings for this type of work are the exact opposite of derision; I find them engaging, charming, and very interesting (in fact, instead of kitsch I would say that there is a quality of camp in my work. In Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag defines camp as “a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character.") Further, I don't feel that the tintypes I'm making are an "inferior copy of an existing style," though others may disagree. I am not trying to be sentimental, especially for sentimentality's sake, and I sure hope that my art isn't "pretentious to the point of being in bad taste," as Wikipedia puts it. I intend for my tintypes to remind viewers of the art of the 19th century and the sentimentality that existed there, but my hope is that viewers find more than just that in the work. I want to connect the subject matter to more modern ideas of memory and remembrance, some of which I mentioned in my last thought paper. As such, I intend to do more than repeat empty conventions and formulas of the past.
Nostalgia and Kitsch: An Investigation
In my first thought paper for September, I began to arrange my thoughts on how nostalgia is (or is not) related to my artwork, specifically the series of mannequin tintypes that I am producing. Geoffrey Batchen’s book, Forget Me Not, was referenced extensively as it not only gave a clear explanation of how nostalgia is related to memory, but it also provided examples of 19th century photographic portraiture that spoke to an aesthetic sensibility that I strove for in my work. When speaking to my MFA advisor regarding this paper, I was given some extremely helpful criticism. First, I neglected to provide a clear and in-depth definition of what nostalgia is. Second, my advisor brought up a word that had been mentioned during the June residency in regards to my tintypes, but up until now I had no clear understanding of its implications. That word is kitsch. Both nostalgia and kitsch have largely negative connotations; both play a significant role in the world of contemporary art; and as I have discovered, these two terms often overlap when being discussed.
“Nostalgia tantalizes us with its fundamental ambivalence; it is about the repetition of the unrepeatable, materialization of the immaterial.”
-Svetlana Boym
Svetlana Boym’s book, The Future of Nostalgia, contains a treasure trove of information about the roots of nostalgia, and explains in depth how its effects have permeated so much of modern thought. Nostalgia, from the Latin for “return home” (nostos) and “longing” (algia), was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss doctor who was struggling to understand why Swiss soldiers stationed abroad were suffering from mysterious symptoms of fatigue and indifference to their surroundings. Nausea, loss of appetite, cardiac arrest, and suicidal tendencies surfaced in the most extreme cases. However, when asked to talk about their homes in the Alps, the soldiers would snap out of their lethargy and talk at length about fond memories of favorite sights, sounds, and smells from the homeland. Cures for this disease of the imagination included leeches, opium, and most effective, a trip home to the Alps (Boym, 3-5). During the American Civil War, nostalgia in soldiers was seen as “a shameful disease that revealed a lack of manliness and unprogressive attitudes (6).” Interestingly, nostalgia in this case was a symptom found mostly in soldiers of a rural background. Civil War military doctor Theodore Calhoun wrote, “The soldier from the city cares not where he is or where he eats, while his country cousin pines for the old homestead and his father’s groaning board.”
In her book, Boym contends that the modernization of society from the 17th to the 19th centuries, in the forms of industry and capitalism, changed the focus of nostalgia from merely the loss of an idealized physical home to “the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values (8).” As distances became more quickly and easily crossed thanks to technological advances, the concept of time also changed and became more complex. Trains pulled freight farther; telegraph lines allowed for near instantaneous communication between time zones (which, incidentally, were invented to allow for ease in creating shipping schedules for the railroads). The cogs began to move faster, and society had to learn to keep up. This idea of modernity was translated into art as well, most notably by Charles Baudelaire in his 1860 essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” In it, the modern artist is urged to record what is happening at the moment, especially in the cities, where progress is swifter and more noticeable. Nostalgia in effect became the ideological opposite of progress; as the latter looked optimistically to the future’s broad horizons, the former yearned for a past that could never be attained.
There is more than just one type of nostalgia. According to Boym, people who are nostalgic can be broken down into two separate types: reflective nostalgics and restorative nostalgics. Boym states, “Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance (41).” The author posits that restorative nostalgics do not realize they are nostalgic; they believe that they are seeking out truths. Restorative nostalgia can, for example, show itself as a kind of blind patriotism to country, a held belief that a beloved nation or system of government is threatened by outsiders who wish to tear apart its “perfect” order. Stains on the government’s record, like a past racial persecution or unjust war, are ironed out or glossed over to protect the nostalgic view that everything in the past was wonderful, and in order to restore the “homeland” it must be brought back to those glory days. Restorative nostalgia is akin to revisionist history, and Boym even makes the connection of this kind of nostalgic to conspiracy theorists (43).
Reflective nostalgics, on the other hand, do not take themselves so seriously. While they may long for a time and place in the past, they understand and delight in the fact that memory is fragmentary and that time is fluid. States Boym, “the focus here is not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time (49).” Humor and irony are allowed to penetrate reflective nostalgia, unlike restorative nostalgia, and it is also much more focused on the individual and his or her own understanding of time and space.
There is no doubt that I am a nostalgic, just as there is no doubt that much of my artwork carries a nostalgic tone. It is also clear after reading Svetlana Boym’s book that I fit her definition of a reflective nostalgic more so than that of a restorative nostalgic. I am not tied to a more perfect ideal of the past that I am attempting to resurrect, and I certainly do not carry a blind faith that our nation was built on a foundation without imperfections. Before I began my MFA residency, I had considered myself a realist. That is, I felt I understood that both tradition and progress had their importance, but I had distrust for those that held too much reverence for one over the other. Without understanding the past, how can one do right for the future? Without thinking about the future, how can one act responsibly in the present? And without acknowledging the absurd and unique qualities of history and time in the first place, how can one truly appreciate the world around him?
________________________________________
“Serious artists are inevitably aware of kitsch: they fear it, are constantly on guard against it, and if they flirt with kitsch it is with a sense of risk, knowing that all artistic effort is wasted should you ever cross the line.”
-Roger Scruton
As stated, there were some comments at the June AIB residency by students and professors that my series of mannequin tintypes perhaps contained elements of kitsch. This was echoed during a phone conversation with my advisor just this past month, although both of us were a bit unclear on the precise meaning of this very charged term. To investigate, I began where any studious, intellectual student would begin his research: Wikipedia. The website defines kitsch as “a term of German origin that has been used to categorize art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style. The term is also used more loosely in referring to any art that is pretentious to the point of being in bad taste, and also commercially produced items that are considered trite or crass.” Famed critic Clement Greenberg wrote an important essay in 1939 titled Avant-Garde and Kitsch, in which he states, “Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time.” To Greenberg, kitsch referred to realism in art, regardless the medium. Michelangelo paintings, Hollywood movies, and any kind of readily available commercial art – comics, tap dancing, Tin Pan Alley music – all fell into the category of kitsch. The only way to elevate art beyond kitsch, according to Greenberg, was to make it abstract or completely non-representational in the model of artists like Picasso, Mondrian, and Kandinsky. Paint should be about paint, and should not pretend to be anything else.
In 1999, British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote an essay titled Kitsch and the Modern Predicament which responds to Greenberg’s original essay and updates the meaning of kitsch in art for a contemporary audience. His first argument is that Greenberg’s faith in non-representational art as a remedy to kitsch turned out to be misguided: “take a stroll around MoMA, and you will encounter it in almost every room: avant-garde, certainly—novel in its presumption, if not in its effect—but also kitsch, abstract kitsch, of the kind that makes modernist wallpaper or is botched together for the tourist trade on the Boulevard Montparnasse.” However, Scruton agrees with Greenberg’s postulation that kitsch is a phenomenon of capitalism and, in a broader context, the Enlightenment and people’s loss of a religious faith. He states, “Faith exalts the human heart, removing it from the marketplace, making it sacred and unexchangeable. When faith declines, however, the sacred loses one of its most important forms of protection from marauders; the heart can now more easily be captured and put on sale…the Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be: hence the emotion that they offer is fake." A kitsch object has a sentimental value that has been sold and is now empty, caused by commercial enterprise and absence of faith.
By the 1960s, Scruton argues, artists armed themselves against kitsch with a brand-new weapon: preemptive kitsch. Scruton states, “The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch; far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody... preemptive kitsch delights in the tacky, the ready-made, and the cut-out, using forms, colors, and images that both legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it.” Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons are good examples of artists who intentionally use kitsch in an attempt to embrace it yet circumvent its pitfalls. Probably the best, most recent example of this strategy is Damien Hirst’s outlandish For the Love of God, a platinum-cast human skull studded with over 10,000 pure diamonds. The piece contains all the right elements for kitsch: it is garish, highly overdone, absurdly pretentious, and the title of the piece itself is a double entendre which acknowledges the kitsch quality of the object while at the same time taking a lighthearted jab at religion in general by referring to God and death. In reading Scruton’s essay it is clear that he has a strong dislike of kitsch, but he offers no clear answers on how to avoid its traps. In the end he simply states, “Through family, religion, and the forms of public life, we shield ourselves from the horrific vision that surrounds us—the vision of ourselves as fakes. That is perhaps why we should value kitsch. It flows all about us and warns us that we must tread carefully and be guided by those who know.”
________________________________________
Kitsch and nostalgia are both based in sentiment. Nostalgia most often plays off of genuine sentiment and longing, while kitsch bastardizes the sentiment and makes an inferior copy out of it. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym cites an example of Russian author Vladimir Nabokov attempting to tiptoe around the trapdoor of kitsch while retaining a narrative relating to nostalgia. Nabokov’s memoirs relate the story of Mademoiselle O., his Swiss governess, who on her first trip to Russia remained strongly nostalgic for her home in the Alps, to the point where she recreated a Swiss-style home in her Russian dwelling. After the Russian revolution in 1917, Mademoiselle moved back to Switzerland but instead of quelling her longing for her homeland the move made her nostalgic for Russia. She began to decorate her Swiss home with Russian trinkets. Boym states, “The only place Mademoiselle could call home is the past – mainly, the past that she framed for herself.” In describing the setting of Mademoiselle’s mountain home, Nabokov writes about a mountain lake in which he sees a swan flapping its wings. He recognizes the swan as a ready-made metaphor for Mademoiselle’s longing for a perfect home, or love, that doesn’t exist, but he doesn’t want to be trapped by this overdone, sappy, kitsch sentiment by simply plugging it in to his writing. Instead, he describes the swan as “an aged swan, a large, uncouth, dodo-like creature, making ridiculous efforts to hoist himself into a moored boat.” According to Boym, “Nabokov interrupts all the clichés and poetic references to the swans of other times” by describing the swan in such an unflattering manner (278-280). He escapes kitsch while retaining an ironic, reflective nostalgia in his examination of Mademoiselle’s constant longing for something and somewhere else.
Are the mannequin tintypes that I am producing and displaying at AIB appropriately labeled as kitsch by those who have done so? After this investigation, I must say that they are not. Firstly, I am not creating work that tries to "legitimize ignorance and also laugh at it," as Roger Scruton puts it. In other words, I'm not trying to make preemptive kitsch. The tintypes, in their process and in the manner which they are painted and framed, speak to and are influenced by an American folk art tradition but they are by no means an attempt to poke fun at the ignorance of such artists. In fact, my feelings for this type of work are the exact opposite of derision; I find them engaging, charming, and very interesting (in fact, instead of kitsch I would say that there is a quality of camp in my work. In Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag defines camp as “a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character.") Further, I don't feel that the tintypes I'm making are an "inferior copy of an existing style," though others may disagree. I am not trying to be sentimental, especially for sentimentality's sake, and I sure hope that my art isn't "pretentious to the point of being in bad taste," as Wikipedia puts it. I intend for my tintypes to remind viewers of the art of the 19th century and the sentimentality that existed there, but my hope is that viewers find more than just that in the work. I want to connect the subject matter to more modern ideas of memory and remembrance, some of which I mentioned in my last thought paper. As such, I intend to do more than repeat empty conventions and formulas of the past.
It is clear that reflective nostalgia will be a crucial aspect of whatever final project(s) I end up preparing for my MFA thesis next year. More and more the notions of time, place, memory, and home are resting on the forefront of my mind, especially in the midst of yet another moving of my possessions to a new abode. My fiancée and I are currently preparing a 1930s farmhouse in upstate New York to be our permanent residence, beginning October 1st. Then, in mid-October we will be taking a trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where I spent my childhood. We plan to visit, among other things, the Civil War battlefields, the house I grew up in, and my grandparents’ graves (which I have never been to). I have no allusions that I can “go home again” by making this trip; I want to experience, and try to later relate in artwork, the various strands of time and history that exist in this area I once lived in. Battles of national history will intertwine with personal battles of my childhood, and I plan to represent these threads by examining the landscape and notions of place and space as they change during a person’s lifetime. However, this is a subject for another though piece.
