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.

    • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
      9·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • urshanabi@lemmygrad.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        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

    • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
      4·
      1 year ago

      Sinkevich. Author of “With fire and sword”, “Deluge” and the third one whose name escapes me at the moment

      • Łumało [he/him]@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.