Bon anniversaire, Claude !
Hé, Claude, we visited le musée du quai Branly last year. Tant pis, we didn't see you there.
We?
Let me think, perhaps you were with someone else, not me. But I know that it's nobody other than myself who told you that the museum was inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Lately, you have been making remarks as if you had been with me, but...
Minor details shall not get in our way, my dear comrade! I should have asked you earlier---how did you like the museum?
It was very nice.
And?
Very well done.
Anything else?
I just can't get too excited over an anthropological museum. The objects that they display were not made for that purpose, unlike Western paintings and sculptures.
That does not diminish their value.
Certainly not. However, they are in the wrong place, because they can be fully appreciated only in situ.
A set of bow and arrow shows its greatest functional beauty when used to hunt a deer, for example.
You got it. Buddha sculptures did not interest me much, until a few years ago when I saw one in the center of a very small temple. Before then, I saw them mainly in museums. It shone subtly in the darkness. It was sublime. That experience convinced me that the so-called anthropological objects removed from their original environments are akin to fish out of water.
The sculpture made sense to you in its natural habitat.
It came with its context, which I think is important. In contrast, paintings and sculptures in the West are produced under the assumption that they will find permanent homes in sitting rooms.
Wouldn't you say museums, instead of sitting rooms, in the case of Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami and the like?
Or, the Nth spare room of obscenely rich collectors. None of their works is meant to be used in ceremonies or in everyday life, and that is what differentiates the art in the West from the traditional art in the rest of the world.
I have seen Chinese vases adorning rooms with no flower in them, though.
I would say their principal function is still to hold flowers.
What about Chinese scroll paintings?
Those function in the same way as Western paintings, I admit. Let me rephrase "the rest of the world" as "the part of the world in which houses were traditionally not decorated as in the West." Anyway, when Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and others encountered the art from Africa, they were astonished.
By the abstract nature of it?
Yes, and also by the fact that no record existed as far as the names of artists and the dates of production were concerned.
Can we say that the emphasis is more on the utility of objects than who toiled to create them?
I think so. If a sculpture reveals extraordinary artistic value, the artists/artisans who were responsible would be appreciated by the community, but the object is seen more as something that the community as a whole produced and owns.
It must also mean that there would be support for the artisans during the production period.
I imagine that the community provides food and other necessities so that they can devote all their time to making objects.
There used to be a similar system in the West. Musicians and painters, even mathematicians, were employed by rich patrons.
Such arrangements are not quite the same, because the parties involved had some kind of a contract, an agreement between two individuals. And more often than not, we know who paid and who did what work in return.
In other words, the West came up with individualism the earliest and the trend is spreading around the world.
Individualism is irresistible, because it legitimizes the me-me-me desires in us.
If so, we are moving from systems which suppress such biological and primary urges to one that celebrates them.
It's a regress, don't you think?
Hé, Claude, we visited le musée du quai Branly last year. Tant pis, we didn't see you there.
We?
Let me think, perhaps you were with someone else, not me. But I know that it's nobody other than myself who told you that the museum was inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Lately, you have been making remarks as if you had been with me, but...
Minor details shall not get in our way, my dear comrade! I should have asked you earlier---how did you like the museum?
It was very nice.
And?
Very well done.
Anything else?
I just can't get too excited over an anthropological museum. The objects that they display were not made for that purpose, unlike Western paintings and sculptures.
That does not diminish their value.
Certainly not. However, they are in the wrong place, because they can be fully appreciated only in situ.
A set of bow and arrow shows its greatest functional beauty when used to hunt a deer, for example.
You got it. Buddha sculptures did not interest me much, until a few years ago when I saw one in the center of a very small temple. Before then, I saw them mainly in museums. It shone subtly in the darkness. It was sublime. That experience convinced me that the so-called anthropological objects removed from their original environments are akin to fish out of water.
The sculpture made sense to you in its natural habitat.
It came with its context, which I think is important. In contrast, paintings and sculptures in the West are produced under the assumption that they will find permanent homes in sitting rooms.
Wouldn't you say museums, instead of sitting rooms, in the case of Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami and the like?
Or, the Nth spare room of obscenely rich collectors. None of their works is meant to be used in ceremonies or in everyday life, and that is what differentiates the art in the West from the traditional art in the rest of the world.
I have seen Chinese vases adorning rooms with no flower in them, though.
I would say their principal function is still to hold flowers.
What about Chinese scroll paintings?
Those function in the same way as Western paintings, I admit. Let me rephrase "the rest of the world" as "the part of the world in which houses were traditionally not decorated as in the West." Anyway, when Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and others encountered the art from Africa, they were astonished.
By the abstract nature of it?
Yes, and also by the fact that no record existed as far as the names of artists and the dates of production were concerned.
Can we say that the emphasis is more on the utility of objects than who toiled to create them?
I think so. If a sculpture reveals extraordinary artistic value, the artists/artisans who were responsible would be appreciated by the community, but the object is seen more as something that the community as a whole produced and owns.
It must also mean that there would be support for the artisans during the production period.
I imagine that the community provides food and other necessities so that they can devote all their time to making objects.
There used to be a similar system in the West. Musicians and painters, even mathematicians, were employed by rich patrons.
Such arrangements are not quite the same, because the parties involved had some kind of a contract, an agreement between two individuals. And more often than not, we know who paid and who did what work in return.
In other words, the West came up with individualism the earliest and the trend is spreading around the world.
Individualism is irresistible, because it legitimizes the me-me-me desires in us.
If so, we are moving from systems which suppress such biological and primary urges to one that celebrates them.
It's a regress, don't you think?
Posts
