estebanana -> RE: Polyfía (Feb. 7 2023 20:10:07)
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I had an art history teacher ( I had several, probably 7 or 8 over my art history reading) but this one guy I didn’t like very much, but it was a literature, art history, philosophy class that was mandatory because this fellow was the head of the dept and it made him impassible unless you passed this course. He was a show horse leftist who was self aware of his proclivity for drama and his own leftist agenda. I dislike him personally or as a teacher, but he got off a good lesson every so often that I absorbed. I have a classmate who went on to study philosophy who is also a ridiculous impulsive impractical leftist who loved this teacher, but when we were traveling together in China on an art history trip he tried to beat me to death with one of those old black Bakelite phones. But that’s another story. Anyway the teacher, this was 1994, said multiculturalism in academia was forced farce because it’s not real multiculturalism, it’s theoretical multiculturalism. It’s a sanitized curriculum intended to deliver a democratically curated version of multiculturalism, I think Adam Neely was educated after me in a system pushed this kind of academic washing of how we see ourselves fit into world culture as Western European cultural inheritors. I see it as an approach to cultural guidance that has become over burdened and overdetermined with making sure the heathens from San Bernardino, the white dudes like me, receive enough cultural information from outside their home trainin’ to become well rounded citizens of the world. This is all fine, but it’s artificial, forced and not often helpful. The teacher I’m writing of understood this while at the same time was a provocative teacher in respect to challenging white dudes from white holes in the wall. He said multicultural education is missing one big point, corporatization or globalism has been the problem, not the solution to expanding people’s minds on how cultural diversity can permeate society, particularly US culture. He simply pointed out that in 1992 in San Francisco there fewer independent movie houses than there were in the 1960’s and 70’s. The movie theater industry was being bought up small house by small house by AMC and other corporations that put small cinemas out of business. Ray, his name, says when he was a radical young leftist in the city during the late 1950’s and 60’s that one could go to several independent cinemas where the films were picked and curated be knowledgeable cinema directors that showed film from all over the world. It was a glorious free market of relatively low cost immersion in cultural diversity. If course I remember this as well because I went to international cinemas from the time I got out of high school in 1981 to the time I had Ray’s Methodologies of Moderism course at SFAI ten years later. I already had a decade of multicultural film education and enjoyment simply by living and going to a diverse range of movies with friends from other countries. Ray’s point was well taken by me and I’ve applied it to other subjects like music, it usually makes sense as a framing device for analyzing multiculturalism or what ever that means in academia now. As for rating oneself as an old fart, I think when you achieve a high functioning level of curmudgeonhood that one can say anything about how farty one has become. I remember in 1984 seeing the film The Color of Pomegranates from one of the two existing prints in the entire world. Nobody was watching this film then and it was banned in the Soviet Union as it was made in Soviet Georgia and was a film that used a medieval martyr to metaphorically criticize communist oppression from Russia. How times have changed. Now the film is known as ‘Sayat Nova’ and is in the Criterion Collection and also on YouTube. People still don’t understand it, and it’s not really taught in the politically correct academic multicultural classroom today. It’s neither understood by the PC left or the willfully ignorant right.
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