Sep 04 2024 6 mins 5
Some lad on Twitter said these modern statues are proof that the West is still thriving and we are in a Renaissance:
This is a good chance for me to dunk on the poor lad and illustrate a juicy idea - we’re not… and these statues are the opposite
When we contrast them to the real Golden Ages we get a clarity on why they come aboutYou see, there were two peak expressions of Western Culture:- The Athenian Golden Age of 500 BC- The Rebirth of this in 1500 ADWhen you look at the art from these periods you see a surreal shift in presence in the worksLook at this brilliant breakdown:
The top two are known as kouroi statues from 600BC Greece - this was the century before the Golden AgeThey have an autistic and frosty glare - they seem a bit lifeless and dudOf course they are powerful in their own way, but they are a representation of something, they're not aliveThey were known in their time as "symbols" of YouthAround 500BC something like a gear shift takes place - the Greek statues develop rich expressions and a sort of "individuality" - the statues themselves look aliveThey have presenceThis took place alongside a huge explosion of culture in ancient Athens - the arrival of Theatre, the creation of drama, the Olympics, Philosophy, and great festivalsThis is the period Nietzsche called the Birth of Tragedy He spent his life wondering how such a moment happened, and how to get back to such a momentThis is the actual meaning of his work
Strangely, you can see how the Renaissance had the exact same shift in psychologyMedieval art is fun and quirky, but it has a cartoony and flat feeling to itAll of a sudden the Renaissance brings a full return to an "aliveness" and presenceMichelangelo said he felt like he was freeing an angel trapped in stone when carving David
The outpouring during the Renaissance also was a total cultural expansion - philosophy, science, art, and even medicine went through paradigm shiftsOur age is not defined by this aliveness at all, we are much more like the rigid and frosty medieval cartoons or the "representational" statuesAi has the effect of killing off this "lifelike" quality in artThis is all a symptom of a far deeper and stranger problem - a dead soulMost of the charlatans in our time try to convince you otherwise, that we are in a New RenaissanceIn order for us to even start on that path, we'd need a psychological revolution - everything is downstream from that...If you want the full breakdown
