In the mid-1860s, with the nation immured in a devastating Civil War, two artists emerged as the premier representatives of America's Far West. Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) and Mark Twain (1835–1910) captured the nation's imagination with images that challenged ideas about the West as well as about art itself. In little more than a decade, however, Bierstadt's paintings were being ignored while Twain's name began to acquire something of its present canonical status. Unremarkable as this divergence in reputations may seem today (when “fifteen minutes of fame” has been promised to every one of us), a century ago Warhol's prediction would have been inconceivable. That in itself makes the receptions first accorded Bierstadt and Twain as interesting as the dramatic divergence later taken in their careers. What was it, one might well ask, that so appealed to contemporaries, and why should Bierstadt's success so quickly have palled while Twain's only continued to grow?The question encourages us to transgress the boundaries that separate painting from writing, to shift attention from a given medium onto the larger process by which popularity is won. One of the questions that then emerges is whether artists acclaimed in different media make similar demands upon their audience. Do a certain set of common standards, that is, shape an artist's reception, much as they more self-consciously dictate assessments that scholars will make later on? Or is it simply a matter of being in the right artistic place at the right cultural time? Certainly, the receptions accorded Bierstadt and Twain suggest that the former is true -indeed, that in their case a forceful aesthetic logic was at work.
Examining the perceptions of first-year STEM students on retention factors at the University of the West Indies.