Over at the Guardian Jonathan Jones is blogging about Beard and Smith on the column:
blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/03/trajans_column_row_spirals_off.html
And I confess that (breaking my rule again) I posted a comment. It was when I saw myself being accused of pedantry that I tipped over the line. Why go on about these trifling details when the real point about the column is is massive dominance of the Roman skyline etc? Answer, Jonathan, is that I was reviewing a book that was ABOUT such trifling details!
Posted by: Mary | 13 Mar 2007 08:36:12
timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2007/02/is_zadie_smith_.html#comment-63083388
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Choppa's response
All this ties in with how we see, understand and respect or not DEATH. Another Cantab blogger does the honours at "Digging up the dead":
http://kenodoxia.blogspot.com/and asks "How should an archaeologist treat the dead?"
Given the artistic perfection often seen in funerary monuments (the insides of mummy cases, of pyramid tombs) or otherwise only partially or wholly inaccessible works (cave paintings, the parthenon friezes) it's pretty clear that the audience for the work as such in all its detail was not the real living people in the community that threw it up. One or two maybe, at the most, singled out by privilege, but perhaps none at all. The imagined spirit world provided a satisfactory motivation for the effort involved, combined with reward to the artists and the usual oppressive assertion of power and ideology against potential doubters (or reluctant artists).
Our own day is slowly replacing the spirit audience with democratically and ideally equal human beings of flesh and blood. Zadie S and other novelists have all their artistic detail slapped on the marble slab of public access for appraisal and dissection like a haddock at the fishmongers.
Some artists and craftsmen still produce for minimal audiences (jewellers, commissioned portrait painters to the ultra-rich, architects to the same, etc), and a war is still being fought (as it has been for centuries now) for everyman's right to access and to appreciate and judge the best of contemporary and past art. Sometimes the public wins (free entry to the BM, virtually free access to old books on the web, the good side of Google), sometimes the obscurantist privateers, elitists and gougers win (the sacred eternal copywrong crowd). When it comes to public spaces, the obscurantist moneybag advertisers have it all their own way, sickeningly.
JJ got hold of the wrong end of the stick here by branding Mary B with pedantry and the inability to appreciate a damn fine phallus :-) Let him go to St Petersburg (Leningrad) and do a couple of weeks' penance before the most phallic column of them all.
http://www.tcaup.umich.edu/stpetersburg/alexander.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xjy/403309501/
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