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estebanana -> RE: Do the Classics Suppress Contemporary, Creative Works of Music? Literature? Art?" (Aug. 26 2015 23:47:14)
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quote:
As an inducement to Dudnote and others to read the book, and at the risk of cruelly oversimplifying Meyer's thesis, I offer the following condensation:
Meyer notes that the history of the arts is marked by long periods of very little change-- periods of stasis. The art history of Ancient Egypt, much of Chinese history, Persia, many other examples, show that stasis typifies much the greater part of cultural history. This pattern was broken in the West with the advent of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the rise of science, the simultaneous weakening and multiplicity of religious doctrine, new philosophies, etc., such that for several centuries now, we think of successive movements in the arts-- let's say baroque, classicism, romanticism, modernism for example--as the normal paradigm; the New replacing the Old every 15 or 20 years. So stasis was replaced by change, growth, movement, "progress".
Meyer postulated, though, a return to stasis, but stasis of a completely different kind from the glacially slow reworking of a few themes that typified past cultures over centuries and even millennia. The new stasis is instead the cumulative result of a vast multiplicity of trends, movements, artists, styles, materials in constant creation and dissolution, but on a small scale and a short timeframe. The cultural signal-to-noise ratio drops to the point where no dominant artistic impulse can expand and mature enough to generate a viable tradition or school of large or lasting proportion. Here I quote:
".....change and variety are not incompatible with stasis. For stasis, as I intend the term, is not an absence of novelty and change-- a total quiescence--but rather the absence of ordered sequential change. Like molecules rushing about haphazardly in a Brownian movement, a culture bustling with activity and change may nevertheless be static. Indeed, insofar as an active, conscious search for new techniques, new forms and materials, and new modes of sensibility.....precludes the gradual accumulation of changes capable of producing a trend or a series of connected mutations, it tends to create a steady-state....."
So, Brownian motion. Or the snow on the screen of an old TV; the stasis of continuous, small-scale change. The arguments for Meyer's thesis are drawn from a wide range of disciplines, sources, authors, and cannot be summarized here, but they are cogent and fascinating, and I again encourage those interested enough in the subject to read Meyer for themselves. And Meyer's insight is given more credence, as I have indicated, by the advent of technology only dimly foreseen in 1967; technology that serves, via instant, global communication, to further particularize and yet homogenize any and all artistic experience.
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Ok FINALLY, you talk about the text itself instead of admonishing me to read it until I get it. You know it is insulting and patronizing to tell someone over and over to read book you think they don't understand.
Now that you've outlined what you think is good about the book, I can take that and tear it apart and reason out why I still think the basic premise is a poor reason to write a book.
Meyer is not the the only one who's made that comparison between stasis and movement. It's not that difficult to follow, the examples may be good, but the conclusion is still not an absolute truth, or even important for other readers.
The conclusions he reaches are crummy. In the final analysis people like Meyer claim, and lament, that there is an end to an 'ordered' view of history and that the it's sad that the 'ducks not longer line up neatly for us to count'. The problem is that this kind of linear view of how history works has been taken apart a put back together many, many times since then.
And you still don't take up the books that I have mentioned not only in this thread but in previous threads where you have flogged the Meyer book over my poor wretched back.
Seriously, you keep telling me "Oh poor Stephen you must read this book until you get it, until you understand it." Ok. I went to the library and dug out your book, read it, disliked it, told you why, and yet yo still never bother to read anything I mention.
And I'm a bad guy because I call you out on this? Good luck.
quote:
So, Brownian motion. Or the snow on the screen of an old TV; the stasis of continuous, small-scale change. The arguments for Meyer's thesis are drawn from a wide range of disciplines, sources, authors, and cannot be summarized here, but they are cogent and fascinating, and I again encourage those interested enough in the subject to read Meyer for themselves. And Meyer's insight is given more credence, as I have indicated, by the advent of technology only dimly foreseen in 1967; technology that serves, via instant, global communication, to further particularize and yet homogenize any and all artistic experience.
This part is still complete nonsense.
Right now there is more classical art and realism being painted and drawn more than any other time in history by virtue of the fact that there are more artists today. I chuckle when I hear people say realism is dead and they get all sad and misty at the passing of great art into the abstract and self indulgent realm. Because of modern communication, the internet and fast safe travel more artists are able to move around the world and the internet to study painting, and help each other an influence each other by internet communication.
In Florence in in 1505 there were a few studios, perhaps a dozen, and a few hundred artists making the work we today call "The Classics". The signal to noise ratio in that time period was just as great as it is today, but the only reason we see it in more sharp focus is because process of historical organization history has selected it out for us. We have historical hindsight and this is a selective kind of vision. Previous to Meyers grand theory, (and it's not original to Meyer, it has it roots in 19th century German art historians, and further back in French art history keeping and on through Bernard Berenson's categorizations) historians and epistimologists had begun to to work on ideas that looked at the way in which knowledge is archived, history is sorted, and how pieces of history are selected out a reassembled into an illustration of how one society or culture views history.
This a particular work by Meyers work comes at a time when art historians are beginning to write about an idea that runs counter to the type of historical over view Meyer holds true. And this is why his conclusions are false. Histories are not one history in sequential order for every cultural vantage point. Meyer holds onto a construction of history which makes a Western cannon of history be at the apex of how one should order the sequence of what he calls lulls or periods of stasis.
These periods are seen as distinct creative zones because of the way history has been carved into bite sized chunks, the reality is that there is an over arching trajectory of human consciousness through art and the 'stasis-progress-stasis' model does not cover the ways in which similarities between vastly different time periods remain in connectivity. There is in the Stasis-Progress model a lineal time arrangement of art movement to art movement that provides a clever and convenient explanation for how one style evolves into the next, but there also exists a more 'global' (not literally global, but global in the sense that is is universal) connection between separate tie sequences.
Now in the end Meyer argues that there is an end to history, this is a preamble to Postmodern theories that most people take with a grain of salt today; He says a culture comes to a cultural culmination or reaches a level of continuity that cannot be surpassed and thus peters out, resulting in stasis. He cites Egyptian art and in it's classical form regales with it's virtue. This is fine, but it does not account for the way shifts between periods really happen. What he calls cultural inactivity, because he wants us to think BIG and see grand vistas, causes us to forget to look at the over arching connective sequences that move counter to the grand sweeps in history, there is counter current or undertow or geologic movement that is always in play in history that a grand sequence of linear set cultural events can't track.
These slower moving artistic trends are like cultural plate tectonics, they move slowly and are vital to the set up of the what some historians want to call the bigger more important events. These are transitional moments which are as important as cultural high points. A good a example of a transitional period would be Late Dynastic Egypt where the last 'grand' dynastic art is becoming less common and the Fayum period dynasties produce realist high quality funerial portraits in wax.
To be cont.
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