Nigel Spivey

When one thinks of the Greeks, one often thinks of beauty, right, (Beauty!)—I suppose one thinks of Keats, perhaps: although I’ve never read a whole book of Keats—and so it is surprising how much more like folk art it is, than anything after the Renaissance, basically. I already knew that, I guess—I’d created a tag for my US folk artist, ancient medieval indigenous and folk art—but it’s still surprising, just on the initial flip-through, right. Yeah: I mean, even contemporary commercial art is much more like a sort of simplified “Renaissance” (that most unprecedented of movements, at least for visual artists) or realism, sort of thing, than either a folk or a sort of fashion-forward 20th century and after return to a less representational sort of thing…. The Greeks’ art isn’t ugly—ugly is like, Antonin Artaud’s poetry, say, (although to be fair to the French, if, say, you’re tired and uncomfortable and you’re not quite all the way back home and that’s not quite right, you know: sometimes life is ugly; just, “do” ugly, therefore, right…. Just don’t do it like Antonin Artaud, right), or Shadow President Hitler (although…. Yeah, okay: never mind. Voldemort! Latium Fakium! Morto—In—, Toto!!!), rather than art that is simply plain, right. One forgets that for the Greeks, coming at the beginning of things, things were of course rather plain.

Lord knows what an art history guy will make of millennia-old classical plainness, though, right. (French guy hiding behind/displaying painting) Je suis l’arte! Je voudrais une belle sauvage!….

~Some goddamn thing, right. Which is why I don’t buy arts books anymore, even when I have the money; I borrow them…. I just wouldn’t feel right giving those people my money. I can give, say, Brené Brown my money. A whole range of people. But not the art history books of these times: never again.

And yeah, that’s just from the flip through: you can get a vague idea of an art book from a flip through, unlike I guess what you might call an ‘ordinary’ book, but quite like a tarot deck, right. I never post the review of a deck until I’ve meditated through all the cards, (usually 3-4 in a sitting, up to twice a day—my two daily meditations—but sometimes I only do it with tarot once and occasionally neither time, I think; also sometimes I fall out of the habit of doing it for awhile, naturally, of course)—and a lot of art prose books would be better if the writer simply selected his images and then meditated on the pictures as though they were tarot images, rather than to view images from the past as nothing else but way stations of the robot-men along the journey of their civilization, right.

Some of that is fine, but, people imagine that nothing else is even ~acceptable~, which is why people read novels, and not art history, right. Art prose. Does anyone ever think that it should be ~good~ prose, lol?

…. But yeah, it’s not an infuriatingly awful book—it’s a Baby Boomer writing in the 90s; another couple steps back in the decades or the generations, or just a hundred years ago, the style would have been more willfully evil and cruelly opaque/leering from on high—but it is essentially just about the context of the art: “Greek Art: The Social and Historical Context”, would have been a much truer title, right—it never gets ~inside~ the art as an Experience, as ~art~, right…. Not that there’s anything wrong with Homer, really—no, not quite—but it’s just very misleading, right. It’s like if you bought a book, “Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë” and “Chapter One” never appeared, right: it was just about her childhood’s history and 19th-century British gender relations, right. Very…. Misleading. Not quite true.

…. But it’s curious, you know: before there was any snobbery against contemporary art, as opposed to the ancients, there was snobbery against ~art as such~, right…. Well, the less said about that, right.

…. “True, there are ancient mythologies, but! Everything points to the idea that the true nature of the world is boredom and fear.”

That said, the old excavators from 1876 or 1900 or whatever who poised for a picture with their workers, looking for the “Homeric world” or whatever, because they loved “Greece”—I mean, really, they look like pictures of a slave master and some useful furniture, right.

…. Steps in the process of writing in an interchangeable, un-creative way:

1. Paraphrase Homer
2. You got it!

Right?…. I mean, some Homer is helpful I guess, but I can’t imagine an intelligent Greek person doing Homer not adding to or interpreting the story in some way, right: otherwise, why tell it?…. It’s kinda the same with any story, you know; the dull boy just wants praise for being good enough to look something up, or memorize it, right…. Ah, the dull, dull boy…. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re an actor, right: but if you’re a writer, people don’t really form the letters in different ways, now do they: not in our printed books….

…. Pictures worth printing maybe:

—(21), p. 43: The Throne Room at the Mycenaean Palace of Pylos, c. 1500 BC (reconstruction drawing by Piet de Jong)

Wealth

—(91), p. 153: Athenian black-figure amphora painted by Exekias, showing Achilles and Ajax playing dice, c.540-530 BC. h. 61 cm, 24 in. Vatican Museums, Rome

Because they look goofy. Gods, those eyes! So goofy!

(I am not sorry.)

…………

(whoops, that part was supposed to come at the VERY END, 🤦‍♂️ )

…. The Greeks could be as talented, artistic, wise, as Southern Californians or anyone else you like, but a lot of loose, glib talk is made over the Greek colonies. It’s still considered a niche topic, to be persecuted, promoted, or probably simply ignored, as you like, to talk about the Greek, in the beginning, and the wider classical, later, (Greek, Greco-Roman, and in the end, basically just Christian) colonization of Europe and what it really meant to how people felt and what happened in their lives. The grand abstractions of wisdom turned into the idea that one culture was better, and indeed, destined to supplant the others, and look down on them and oppress them in the mean-time, right: just the introduction of a sort of cruelty into Europe and its history that hadn’t existed before, and by and by that cruelty was extended to almost the entire world, basically. The Californians built the schools, and the Texans bombed the people who weren’t allowed to go to them, basically.

…. And basically, you’d just think that ~~Greek art~~ would have something to do with, ~~how Greeks felt~~, right. You know. Like how you’d think that, I don’t know, “I’m sure that the color of your skin will have no effect on services received”, you know, or, “I’m sure that in the bulk of cases, people try to get ahead the right way”.

You know: if you were in fucking la-la land, right. ~That has nothing to do with The Machine, little girl! The Machine is very upset that you question his methods! Punish yourself!~

Right?

…. But yeah: why would anyone write about sex, if they thought it consisted on marble colliding with marble, right? And so unpleasant, I’ve heard honest men say, right…. It’s as though you were to write about the Nazis and every other page were like, ~oh the blood! Oh dear mother! What, why so much blood~ It’s like that—inappropriate—, only worse, really….

But yeah: these Greek girls, right. I know we all have roots; I’m sure Hermes is sneering right back at me, me with my pale face Irish girls, so beloved by Hitler: that’s right, Hermie, and by me…. OMG, but these Greek chicks, their faces, OMG…. A face that’s perfect for a sister, (if one is to remain in the city, that is, but perhaps not, well, I don’t know), or a social worker, or a government bureaucrat—a preacher, perhaps: a dispensator of the Anglican faith, right….

Ok, I’ll stop. 🛑 😏

…. It’s like, with the rise of Greek patriarchy in classical or historical times or whatever, and the end of matriarchy or the matrilineal society or whatever it was, it’s like artists were deathly afraid to show women as worthy of depiction, of being worthwhile enough to paint/sculpt, right. ~That’s how things Used To be! No going back to Those days, not no way: not no way…. ~ It’s like: men are more worthy; therefore, men are more beautiful; they have better bodies…. They just never grew tired of painting balls, you know. (No! Sculpting them!)

…. It does seem kinda pedantic, you know.

—(grandly) “This is the Goddess of Victory. She’s being carefully preserved.”
(Child Hermes) (whispers) She doesn’t have a head. People are supposed to have heads.
—(nonsense!) “What has been done, Cannot Be Undone…. Come, there are more “preserved” bodies—ah…. Deities.”

Like how it is better preserved for that fact that it doesn’t have a head, you know?…. It’s museum-thinking, you know…. I’m tempted to say it’s the reason why people would rather watch bad television and interpret it poorly, you know…. Of course, it isn’t the Whole reason: but it IS part, you know….

…. Mediums speak to the dead. Art historians defend them from the intrusions of the material world, and set themselves up as their vassals, right.

(wind whispers around the statue with no head and exposed balls)
“My Master wishes you to leave. Begone! Begone, cruel fools, who know not what ART is….!”

…. Really it is MUCH, simpler, to just plunder the statues and bring them back here to London—they ~do~ seem rather British, to my eyes: British like ~me~; not like rascal footmen and maids—than it is to do what we can that modern Greeks might be able to take care of their own peoples’ statues, you know…. I figure as long as their blond successors can sit prim & smug, the shades of Dead Greece lie easy…. (comes to art) Funny to think they actually Meant something to someone once, though, don’t you like? I wrote a whole book about the wretched things, and they don’t mean a damn thing to me. It would be so hard, so hard, to look at it as art, and not as bones, you know…. It would be like if that Mussulman walked into a Catholic church in London, what would it mean to him? It doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. So hard; so difficult…. “You’re not trying: so how can you know if it’s difficult or not?” Who said that? People are not supposed to be rude to me, you know! That is one of the Great Rules of Politeness: one of the greatest…. (last picture) But remember children, wherever you go, whatever you do, whatever time and chance befalls: always remember, children, that old white men knew about Greece. 🇬🇧

…. And yeah, I guess that’s often the ultimate fate of the 100% Objective writer, you know: he never really gives you a proper sense of the views he disagrees with, whether by quoting or in any other way, whether it’s Byron’s criticism of the art thieves, (almost like the thing with the Church and the Jews, it sounds like: England replaces Greece like it replaces Israel), or the view that art is generally, or at very least largely or often, religious and/or about-meaning, you know: he just states that it’s wrong while essentially avoiding it, so that you can feel like you know enough to condemn something you know essentially zero about, you know. Over-clever rascals who don’t know the first fucking thing about anything they lecture people about are the bane of civilization, but if you have a fucking degree, people bow the knee, you know. Hail Caesar! Caesar, Caesar, my bird needs a little bread and we’re all starving: my wife and kids are dead, terrible famine, and I think it’s too late for me, but if you could just give me half of that slice of bread, my pet bird might make it…. Oh, thank you, Caesar! Bless you! So kind! So good! I’ll bring this back to my pet bird, directly! Never let anyone say that going through the proper channels and not having your own, creative ideas—(dies because he’s starved to death).

~Right? That’s what we’re trained to be. That or maybe a soccer player or a cashier. Obey or act out. But don’t THINK, bless you: the wise ones don’t like it!!!… (lisätietoja)