Posts by giovanni tiso
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In Europe the phone book has everyones profession in it, as a title
I beg your pardon?
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Er, really? because in Germany (...) it's a convention to call yourself Dr X in pretty much every situation.
Germany has the highest ratio of James Bond villains per head of population than any other country, yes.
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Quick! Is there a doctor of English on this plane? This man's participles are dangling!
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Belatedly and for what it's worth, I'd like to acknowledge what TracyMac wrote here.
Hear, hear.
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Happy Easter
Indeed. The whanau and I just consumed abundant mericonda, which is always a source of peace and joy.
Apologies for not leaving the conversation once and for all when I said I would, and clearly should have.
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It was not meant for anything except (it seems) to be in a grave - to be beautiful, to be for the delectation of the dead.
Yes and no. They are very beautiful - Mum just confirmed to me there are some ombre della sera painted on the walls of the François tomb in Vulci - but they also had a place in the symbolico-magical order of the necropolis. The shadow, along with the demon, was one of the components of what we nowadays call the soul.
And those Marian Maguire prints are horrible.
Could we institute a new rule? That if somebody calls me a fraud then you have to wait at least an hour before declaring something I genuinely like to be "horrible".
Because in the final analysis: I don't know much about art, but I know what I like.
(Apologies if this has been posted on this thread already. Maybe I was just pretending to have read it through, you know.)
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You have not read Boardman; you attempted to deceive me and the readers of this thread. I called you on that. You are a fraud.
Jesus Christ.
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When I quote John Boardman, top Greek art history man, saying the Greeks had no concept of art as we understand it, Giovanni says I have misinterpreted Boardman. When I ask Giovanni to show where Boardman supports his argument, he falls silent.
I dispute that the quotes you offered mean anything more than what they say - namely that the Greeks had a different concept of art from ours. I think you take this notion, which, again, is hardly new or controversial, much further than he does. I asked you to specify with a couple of examples, one in particular regarding the fame of Phidias and his works, and you replied that if I had read the book I'd know the answer to my query. So I'm going to go with "bollocks yourself". Perhaps your idea is so powerful that it doesn't need talking about.
The Greek ideal of beauty was mimesis, the imitation of nature. Creativity as we understand it was unknown to them. Greek sculptors did invent, did not make sympbols, did not allegorise. The made marble look like flesh.
Unlike Leonardo and Michelangelo, you mean, who dissected cadavers (at considerable personal risk, it must be noted) in order to make their sculpted bodies look more exact?
Besides, you're limiting yourself to classical sculptures. How about all their satirical or comical statuary. Are you telling me that the Greek depictions of Pan or of Priapos are mimetic? Boy I bet a lot of people would like to be introduced to the model for this work (which is Roman, but just impossibile not to link to. Here's a Greek one). And what about black figure pottery, which is after all Boardman's main area of study. Isn't it highly stylized, and densely symbolic? The figure that enters a picture from the left is the winner in battle. Are you telling me this used to happen in real life?
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I'd add that it is of course political advanteguos, from a colonial perspective, to hold philosophical positions that subsume the experience of a culture within another. So to suggest that Maori didn't do art is far from innocent. It allows amongst other things to claim that colonisation broadened the options available to the colonised, without extinguishing those that they already possessed. We gave them a better world. Their humble craftsmen can now be fully-fledged artists.
The reality is that those new options came at the expense of others, and that there is a world lost in the transition. To retain a lived memory of what art meant for Maori requires first of all to acknowledge that toi had a complex meaning that is worth preserving. It wasn't just craft in the almost pejorative sense that the word has for Europeans, or a set of ornamental motifs. It was integral to the Maori worldview, and performed meaningful functions in the society that produced it. Just like Western art, or any other art.
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I am sure you would have found a way.
Hardly, for the simple fact that I agree with it.
But all the people who study non-Western material culture - anthropologists and the like - are united in saying that the traditional cultural practices of non-Western peoples cannot be described as art.
According to a definition of art that pre-empts the inclusion of the traditional cultural practices of non-Western peoples, I'm sure some of them probably can. The problem with that definition of art of course is that it doesn't apply to the contemporary Western art world, let alone anybody else. Art for art's sake, as an object of aesthetic appreciation without practical, social or political purposes, never actually applied to a time in history - certainly not to the Rinascimento for which it was supposedly coined - and is a notion utterly shattered by twentieth-century artists. It still enjoys some institutional currency, and does a lot to help grease the wheels of the global art market, but it obscures more than it reveals. We ought to feel free to reject it, and not just because it demeans the indigenous culture of our nation - although that's not a bad reason.