/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>23913

If we're talking about aesthetics, than Athens is only interested in a very narrow, rather anachronistic view of the western tradition as something triumphant above the horrid and degenerate shadows of savage peoples. Some time in the middle of the 20th Century, after the colonial imperialist era ended, our ideas about this began to change. It might have something to do with the success of modernists like Picasso who basically adapted African art and brought all kinds of new attention to it.

Non-western art has had a Huge and Immeasurable impact on our modern visual language. You have to really have your head dug in the sand to try to deny its importance behind a smelly racist diatribe.

Things HAPPENED. Jazz happened Rock happened, Modernism happened, I'm sorry, but they happened, and they are having an extremely important impact on our culture.

We began to see the Western tradition WITHIN the BROADER CONTEXT of human art of the time. It's within this context that we can even begin to understand "classical" greek sculpture as it was then: painted, life-like (as realism was understood then) within a long tradition idol worship that would continue into European medieval art, figuration, and indeed, our modern conception of what a human looks like.

Because you see Athens, if we think a beautiful woman looks like a Greek statue and not the woman in the picture, as it did for 18th Century Japanese, it was because of Greek art is what we had, it's how we understand the world, and in its defence, it had an amazing power and longevity which is still very much with us today in ways we can't even begin to measure.