I just need to do some venting because i have been trying to get more educated lately about various forms of art throughout history and the more i read the more angry i get with the way the entire subject is treated from such a Eurocentric and frankly often outright racist perspective.
And this is not just a problem in the West, throughout the world somehow Europeans have managed to brainwash the entire rest of the world into idolizing their art, their music, their culture and putting it on some kind of pedestal as this sort of gold standard. Why the fuck do parents in Asia for instance so often send their kids to learn to play European classical music instead of the music of their own countries? Why is it that when you read about the “greatest composers of all time” they are all some pasty Euro fuckers, most of them making art primarily for the consumption of wealthy aristocrat patrons?
As if other cultures weren’t also making various forms of art for thousands of years - and many of them were no less sophisticated. (And mind you even in Europe the representation exludes the art of the lower classes, who certainly had their own music and culture that was distinct from that of the upper classes.) For once i’d like to see an African, Middle Eastern or Asian painter, writer, or composer of music traditional to their own regions get praised and elevated to the same level of respect, admiration and universal recognition as the European “classics”. Why do we constantly have to put up with this big circlejerk about how “great” some toffs in wigs were for writing music that in large part only the rich could afford to have played for them because it required an entire orchestra with an absurd amount of performers?
Of course i know the answer to these rhetorical questions, it’s because the dominant culture in any society tends to be the culture of the ruling class. I understand this but it still pisses me off how inescapable European upper class culture is. One of the tasks ahead of us when the revolution comes will have to be the dismantling of the centuries of accumulated cultural hegemony of the Euro bourgeoisie. The Soviets were right to encourage socialist realism as a radical departure with the bourgeois culture of the capitalist system. We need a global cultural revolution.
All of the brown nosing for western european culture drives me nuts, I hate it and if you were living in Poland you would completely understand.
We try to equate our artists, poets, writers, composers and painters who were either great on their own, or mediocre mimics of western artists, with those same western artists themselves.
We like to think of ourselves as “part of the gang” but really we’re just that “extra friend” that wasn’t invited, gets constantly bullied and for some fucking reason still sticks around.
Give me a name of Polish artist and one of their works from the 19th or 20th century. Before PRL of course. Please do.
No one outside of Poland knows or cares to know them.
And nowadays Socialist Realism gets demonized to hell and back, called a “state mandated totalitarianism” or “russification”.
Yeah and no one bats an eye or cries for Americanization the racist fucks. Recently I’ve heard on the radio of a system called “Child Alert”, and I’m not translating anything here. That’s what it was called, not “Alarm dziecięcy”. “Child alert”.
If that was written in russian they would be flinging shit, pissing their pants and crying about the death of Polish culture and language.
I hate this shithole, it’s culture of being a western brownnoser must be bulldozed and ruthlessly suppresed. Sociailist Poland must be it’s own thing, seperate from this bullshit, and for that to happen…
America must fall.
EDIT: Okay. So maybe I was a bit wrong. As the comments replying to me seem to be contradictory to the statement that no one knows Polish artists lmao
I should have [he/him/debil] pronouns to be honest xD
Give me a name of Polish artist and one of their works from the 19th or 20th century. Before PRL of course
Do writers count?
Yeah, go ahead. If you have one good for you, makes me happy anyone gets recognized outside of here.
Stanisław Lem Is a more contemporary author, but his work with Sci-Fi and futurism has been legendary and has influenced the entire genre significantly.
He anticipated things such as of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and created ideas such as human autoevolution, and the creation of artificial worlds.
Absolutely incredible writer. Solaris is especially fantastic, but the invincible is also good.
He’s legendary. I’m reading Summa Technologiae atm, wholeheartedly recommend it. Here’s a cool quote:
“This would suggest that there is no such thing as transhistorical morality. Phenomena differ when it comes to the scale of their duration, but eventually even mountain ranges collapse and turn into sand because this is the way the world is. Man, a transient creature, keenly uses the concept of eternity. Certain spiritual goods, great artworks, or moral systems are depicted as eternal. Yet let us not delude ourselves: they are all mortal. We are not talking about replacing order with chaos or inner necessity with randomness. Morality changes slowly, but it does change, which is why the greater the temporal separation between two moral codes is, the more difficult it is to compare them. We are close to the Sumerians, yet the morality of the people from the Levallois culture would terrify us.” - Chapter 2, Summa Technologiae
Another…
"And thus a Monte Carlo–type hypothesis of the cosmic roulette—which is a naïve methodological extension of thinking based on the knowledge of extremely simple mechanisms—is replaced by a theory of “cosmic panevolutionism.” The latter transforms us from beings condemned to wait passively for an arrival of some extremely rare circumstances into designers capable of making choices from among the staggering overabundance of possibilities. Those possibilities are contained in the so far rather general instructions for building self-organizing systems of ever increasing degrees of complexity. What the frequency of the cosmic occurrence of these “parabiological evolutions” postulated previously is, and whether they actually culminate in the emergence of what our human understanding calls “psyche,” is a different matter. But this is a subject for a separate discussion, one that would require us to draw on an extensive assembly of facts from the field of astrophysical observation.” - Chapter 2, Summa Technologiae
Sinkevich. Author of “With fire and sword”, “Deluge” and the third one whose name escapes me at the moment
Huh, didn’t know someone would care for Sienkiewicz, but it’s expected. He is the more popular one. Honestly I never read his books because I was instead forced to read Mickiewicz in highschool lmao
But now that I’m no longer coerced into reading these books I might give them a proper read and admire them for what they are and not be required to care the for unnecessary details.
Just to add, my favorite school book was Aleksander Fredro’s Zemsta (Revenge), and also please check out the amazing movie adaptation by Andrzej Wajda. Shit’s fucking amazing.
Jan Matejko?
His painting “Stańczyk” is very famous among western art circles. He is commonly listed alongside Rembrandt as both being masters of shadows and emotional oil scenes.
Ah fuck I’m getting disproven by more comments. Okay, yeah I forgot about Matejko and the Stańczyk. His paintings are beatiful and his imaginings of our Kings have been the bases for how they are portrayed on currency.
And yes, the stańczyk is quite the meme nowadays. We should turn it into an emote.
I actually didn’t know/forgot the name of the fellow, but instantly recognized some of the paintings upon looking up
Henryk Górecki, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
Krzysztof Penderecki, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima
Chopin, various
ANO KURWA JEGO MAĆ, JA NAWET ICH NIE ZNAM XDDDDDDDD
Except for Chopin of course xdd
Zdzislaw Beksinski would count? His work is intoxicating, it places me into a trance whenever I look at it. I would love to go to Poland and see his works in person!
DOES THE WITCHERINO COUNT?
Poland does have the greatest piano composer of all-time: Chopin.
edit: oops I see he was mentioned below.
I get so sick of “orchestral soundtrack” being like the apparent goal of all media too.
I once read Tom Shales comment that aliens always seem to travel with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
What would you replace it with?
With whatever musical style suited the artistic vision of the product.
Which one would you personally pick? Any movie with an orchestral soundtrack, your choice
All the Michael Bay Transformers movies should have had a rad 90s rave ost
BRO THAT WOULD HONESTLY BE SO COOL
Would have been sick AF
The Michael Bay Transformers movies are a guilty pleasure of my Girl and I
Damn im a cringe hans zimmer enjoyer 😔 but it really is weird how “science” movies only use classical/orchestral music
Ooooo! A place to put my favorite painting!
The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV
"O Sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil’s kith and kin, assistant to Lucifer himself. What the Devil kind of knight are thou, that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a removed, make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee. Fuck thy mother.
Thou Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig’s snout, mare’s arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow, screw thine own mother!
So the Zaporozhians declare you to be a lowlife. You won’t even be herding pigs for Christians. Now we’ll conclude, for we don’t know the date and don’t own a calendar; the moon’s in the sky, the year with the Lord, the day’s the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!"
– Koshovyi otaman Ivan Sirko, and the entire Zaporozhian Host.
i love realism especially this kind where there are lots of people in the picture chilling.
Most of “Western” culture only exists because it was preserved by Arabs throughout the Middle Ages when most of the ancient Greek and Roman texts that remained in Europe were destroyed.
Even the byzantines hated their “fellow westerners” who came over, took their capital and declared themselves the “actual Roman empire” in Latin while the actual Romans resisted their occupation. On side note even studying the story of Math you get this fun phenomenon where a bunch of Mediterranean mathematicians develop a lot of cool stuff, then a 1000 years of silence (because Europe did nothing of value) and then suddenly after the Crusades they mysteriously “discover” a whole lot more math that sounds awfully similar to Arabic and Indian concepts. It usually goes Pytagoras -> Zeno -> Archymedes -> ??? -> Euler
Islamic Golden Era!
Thanks for mentioning this. Though I think it is well known that Arabic and Indian societies were ahead of Europe with regards to mathematics for a long time, I have never thought about the lack of famous mathematicians outside of Europe. That being said, any serious mathematician would say that being a great mathematician is just as much as being at the right place at the right time as a being a genius. It is sad that these names are, if not lost to history, at least not well known, but praising any name of a discipline that builds on previous works in the way mathematics does is a little wrong in the first place. Even the dickhead Newton admitted as much with the “shoulders of giants” comment with regards to himself.
You are correct to be angry. Most cultures have their own musical canon, but years of European colonialism (and the racist mindset that was born from it) convinced basically the entire world that Western classical music was the only shit that mattered. Vid rel.
It’s one thing for Europeans to think that way, i expect it of them, the racism and the cultural superiority complex, but what makes me really mad is when non-Europeans internalize that shit, looking down on and denigrating their own cultures while idolizing and worshiping the culture of the colonizers. And it’s not just the arts, i mean worshiping in the literal sense too. So many colonized peoples have literally adopted even the religion of the colonizers, and now hold on to it as an integral part of their own identity even though it was forced on their ancestors by the sword, with mass genocide, torture and brainwashing camps (the so called “mission schools”). I mean just think about how twisted it is that in the US the overwhelming majority of the descendants of slaves abducted from Africa now worship the god of the slavers…
I especially hate how regional culture is denigrated as “corriente” (common but as an insult), or even worse as “no culture”. While someone that consumes european/american stuff is a “cultured” person, so fucking stupid.
This is just my opinion but I find ballet boring. I’d rather watch Indian dances in bollywood movies. It looks way more difficult and interesting, I wish I realised this earlier.
Ballet is still quite difficult too, but I agree. Bollywood dancers at least look like they’re having a good time.
RETVRN to tacky statues that were commissioned by rich assholes centuries ago that were tacky when they were commissioned.
Imagine soyfacing over this overrated crap instead of this
This got me thinking about 2 videos related to western eurocentrism in art:
Just read books / content created by other cultures then? You can’t be mad at western authors, for having a western view…
