Posts by giovanni tiso
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It kind of looks like it's going to be another post-modernist telling-off ...
I don't think Nina could be accused of being a postmodernist. It is a very strong, highly enjoyable and immensely readable polemic against consumer feminism though.
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Did you read One Dimensional Woman? I wonder if I could hurl a copy in your direction in time for the show... it's only a small book.
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It is noticable that you have brought nothing to this discussion but your own rantings and a chunk of Gombrich which supported my argument more than yours.
Let's stop conversing, you and I, Paul.
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Only with Phidias, and then increasingly with his successors, did any special social status appear to have been accorded to successful artists
And why was that? Incidentally, his statue of Zeus at Olympia was one of the original wonders of the ancient world. So we know they appreciated it enough to consider it a tourist destination, a landmark if you will. But I think you're stretching the conclusions of Boardman and Collingwood (I've not read the latter, but I've read many other arguments on what the word techne meant for the Greeks) far beyond their original intentions. This for instance, is worrying:
I do not like disputing Stephen Davies, because he is right about most things and because he took me to lunch recently, but his argument - that there is some universal aesthetic consciousness - might be based on an incorrect reading of the material cultures of other peoples, one which sees art where none was intended.
You are in fact ascribing aesthetic consciousness to the West alone, as if they had invented beauty. That's just insane. The architects or the many sculptors of the friezes of the Parthenon might have regarded themselves as craftsmen, but there is simply no way they had no appreciation of the pleasing aspects of form. Children understand that. The fact that those aspects are pretty much the only thing that we can appreciate of those objects - because all their other contingent contextual meanings have been stripped from them in the course of history - doesn't change things a jot. But the idea that people throughout the world produced objects which we post-Romantics consider beautiful by some sort of weird accident is not only nonsensical, it's also peculiarly unpleasant. "Seeing art were none was intended" would never, could never be the subtitle of Boardman's The World of Ancient Art. The West might have invented "art for its own sake" or pushed it beyond the limits of other cultures, but that doesn't mean we invented beauty.
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Maybe I'm just stupid. But you're not, so why don't you enlighten me?
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Does artisan mean "without art?"
Heh. No, the root is "person who practices an art".
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I have read Boardman too, and I disagree with your characterisation of his argument. But even supposing you're right, it still doesn't answer my question about the fame of Phidias and Praxiteles, and how their art could mean so much to their contemporaries, seeing as they couldn't possibly regard them as anything other than artisans.
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I thought we had settled on "it's awful, awful art".
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Giovanni, I have been careful to argue my position with cited authorities; I am not just making this up.
You also carefully ignored most of my arguments. So let me ask you a direct question: can you find me in the literature the great shoemaker that the Greeks venerated alongside Phidias? According to your reading of Boardman, the Greeks couldn't tell statuary and shoemaking apart, so I assume they celebrated both of these professions equally. And if not, why not?
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merc: you know how I feel, and it's great to have you back.
Unfortunately this conversation ain't going anywhere - again. Mostly I regret that in a sci-fi discussion we had a little while ago (you did good to be away for that) I missed my opportunity to say "I hold a PhD in English Literature - genre is what I say it is!"
Curses.