The Dandy and the Entrepreneur

On Tara Burton's "Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians"

I recently read an advanced copy of Tara Isabella Burton’s forthcoming Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians.

The book argues that we moderns invented the idea of the “self-made” man and even constructed a theology around it to justify our self-deification. Albrecht Dürer’s self-portraits are merely the prelude to our full-b…