Hmm, I can probably come up with a few things but that's hardly the point. I don't make a career of my sexuality, my alleged marginalisation, my chronic need to resist whatever normal people do. I don't bathe in mud and photograph myself, nor indulge in pointless performance art that no one would ever watch if it weren't funded by the Arts Council.
People who are content don't need to show off or crave attention in this way. Maybe these alleged artists weren't loved when they were young? And is there anything there that didn't shock in the 1960's but has since grown stale and tedious?
And now I come to think of it I laughed out loud, twice, while listening to an Aporia podcast two days ago. And my drawing class teacher praised my drawing. That made me happy. I wonder when the last time was that those 'artists' laughed out loud. Perhaps when Margaret Thatcher died?
I have a relative who was a performance artist back in the 1960's, his main schtick being covering himself in filth. He is now Professor Emiritus of Fine Art. I can't imagine anything worse than spending an evening with him. And the fact that he did it back in the 1960's when anti-art was still relatively new doesn't make self-absorbed crap masquerading as political and social comment any better. Its only saving grace was that it wasn't quite as tediously predictable as today's conformist lefty offerings.
I quote Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 2nd ed., p. 4:
"For over a hundred years writers had commonly asserted that the Latin word paganus, from which it was derived, signified 'rustic'; a result of the triumph of Christianity as the dominant, metropolitan, and urban faith, which left the old religions to make a last stand among the more backward populations of the countryside. In 1986, however, the Oxford-based historian Robin Lane Fox reminded colleagues that this usage had never actually been proved and that the term had more probably been employed in a different sense in which it was attested in the Roman world, of a civilian; in this case a person not enrolled in the Christian army of God. A few years later a French academic, Pierre Chuvin, challenged both derivations, arguing that the word pagani was applied to followers of the older religious traditions at a time when the latter still made up the majority of town-dwellers and when its earlier sense, of non-military, had died out. He proposed instead that it simply denoted those who preferred the faith of the pagus, the local unit of government; that is, the rooted or old, religion. His suggestion has so far met with apparent wide acceptance."
If you want to understand the real origins of the association of paganism with the countryside, the folk, and nature - and, indeed, the association of paganism with witchcraft - you can't do better than reading Hutton's book. One of the many exceptionally deep lessons it has to teach is that 'pagan = countryside = non-urban' is _not_ an enemy's description; it was a self-conception right from the start, something that was seized upon by those who wanted to celebrate paganism or even identify as pagan themselves; in many ways the real enemy's description is the idea that Christianity is the religion of the urban elite. (Many revolutionary movements across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have learned the hard way that the peasantry really are _very_ Christian!) The difference was that 'the start' in terms of our contemporary ideas of paganism is not antiquity but rather Romanticism. (Hutton's might be the best book I've ever read about the legacies of Romanticism, even if that's not how he'd sell it.)
Art by self-absorbed, resentful people who need to cheer up a bit.
Ha! What have you enjoyed recently?
Hmm, I can probably come up with a few things but that's hardly the point. I don't make a career of my sexuality, my alleged marginalisation, my chronic need to resist whatever normal people do. I don't bathe in mud and photograph myself, nor indulge in pointless performance art that no one would ever watch if it weren't funded by the Arts Council.
People who are content don't need to show off or crave attention in this way. Maybe these alleged artists weren't loved when they were young? And is there anything there that didn't shock in the 1960's but has since grown stale and tedious?
And now I come to think of it I laughed out loud, twice, while listening to an Aporia podcast two days ago. And my drawing class teacher praised my drawing. That made me happy. I wonder when the last time was that those 'artists' laughed out loud. Perhaps when Margaret Thatcher died?
To be fair, the chap in mud was from the 1970s!
I have a relative who was a performance artist back in the 1960's, his main schtick being covering himself in filth. He is now Professor Emiritus of Fine Art. I can't imagine anything worse than spending an evening with him. And the fact that he did it back in the 1960's when anti-art was still relatively new doesn't make self-absorbed crap masquerading as political and social comment any better. Its only saving grace was that it wasn't quite as tediously predictable as today's conformist lefty offerings.
I quote Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 2nd ed., p. 4:
"For over a hundred years writers had commonly asserted that the Latin word paganus, from which it was derived, signified 'rustic'; a result of the triumph of Christianity as the dominant, metropolitan, and urban faith, which left the old religions to make a last stand among the more backward populations of the countryside. In 1986, however, the Oxford-based historian Robin Lane Fox reminded colleagues that this usage had never actually been proved and that the term had more probably been employed in a different sense in which it was attested in the Roman world, of a civilian; in this case a person not enrolled in the Christian army of God. A few years later a French academic, Pierre Chuvin, challenged both derivations, arguing that the word pagani was applied to followers of the older religious traditions at a time when the latter still made up the majority of town-dwellers and when its earlier sense, of non-military, had died out. He proposed instead that it simply denoted those who preferred the faith of the pagus, the local unit of government; that is, the rooted or old, religion. His suggestion has so far met with apparent wide acceptance."
If you want to understand the real origins of the association of paganism with the countryside, the folk, and nature - and, indeed, the association of paganism with witchcraft - you can't do better than reading Hutton's book. One of the many exceptionally deep lessons it has to teach is that 'pagan = countryside = non-urban' is _not_ an enemy's description; it was a self-conception right from the start, something that was seized upon by those who wanted to celebrate paganism or even identify as pagan themselves; in many ways the real enemy's description is the idea that Christianity is the religion of the urban elite. (Many revolutionary movements across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have learned the hard way that the peasantry really are _very_ Christian!) The difference was that 'the start' in terms of our contemporary ideas of paganism is not antiquity but rather Romanticism. (Hutton's might be the best book I've ever read about the legacies of Romanticism, even if that's not how he'd sell it.)
Wonderful stuff. I think we have talked Ronald Hutton before but I do need to read that.