It is a general question that can include anything so interpret it however you feel you can contribute best. I have read that a lot of those beautiful ancient Greek statues in simple white marble weren’t always that way. They were originally painted in all kinds of bright color schemes and just plain tacky as hell until the paint wore away and they were discovered again.
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians tend to heap praise on any ancient work of art yet I can easily believe that the ancients had their Ed Hardy type artists and maybe even tacky trinket shops for visitors in some places like Venice, Italy back in the day.
Do any academic types pull up some types of artifacts from the ground and immediately throw them away because they are of such poor quality or try to pass them off to someone that doesn’t know any better?
Academic types digging stuff out of the ground are usually more interested in it as archeological evidence rather than for its artistic merit (if any). Of course ther was bad art back then, and sometimes it is still dug up, but you don’t hear about it as great art because it does not get displayed as such in our museums.
Another factor is that the stuff that is generally agreed to be very good is much more likely to have gotten itself preserved, simply because people, at various points in its history, have valued it.
Just because they were brightly painted doesn’t mean they were tacky.
There are plenty of crudely made ancient artifacts. Many religious shrines had the equivalent of souvenirs that pilgrims could purchase as a memento of their visit.
“Academic types” are generally more interested in the cultural context of the artifacts they find. Sure, some artifacts are more significant than others but they are not going to just “throw stuff away.” And I don’t know why an academic would have an interest in “passing them off” to someone who doesn’t know any better.
No it doesn’t have to but through modern forensic technology and CGI, I have seen some recreations of marble statues with the original paint shown. Any Precious Moments staff artist would approve but most people would be shocked.
With this one, I was thinking about something so common it is essentially worthless no matter how old it is. If archaeologists excavated New Orleans 2000 years from now, they would find traces of the literally billions of Mardi Gras beads thrown over the years. It is interesting the first time you find some and figure out what the significance was but it gets pretty old when they show up everywhere. The lack of large scale mass production would be a limiting factor for most ancient artifacts but there must be some that are essentially worthless. I know that most Roman coins are essentially worthless because there were so many made for example and new ones are found all the time.
For statues, marble was very expensive meaning the hacks would probably have done smaller works in clay and terra cotta which is less likely to survive, and those who could commission a statue could afford to say “that’s crap, start over”. Though even what does survive has masterpieces and the more “eh” statues.
The problem here, as Colibri and njtt have alluded to, is that you seem unable to distinguish aesthetic evaluations, on the one hand, from evaluations about historical and cultural significance, on the other.
In terms of aesthetics, or what we might loosely term “artistic merit,” i know very few archeologists, anthropologists, or historians who “tend to heap praise on any ancient work of art.” Nor, in most cases, do they tend to be especially critical or dismissive of the artistic merit of such artifacts.
I know archeologists and historians of the renaissance and medieval and ancient worlds, and for the most part they are less interested in whether artifacts from their chosen periods are “Ed Hardy type” or “tacky” or “poor quality” (in an artistic sense), than in trying to work out what those artifacts can tell them about the societies and cultures that they are studying.
It may surprise you to know this, but even in much more recent times, art doesn’t have to be avant garde or highbrow to be socially and culturally significant. The fact that something might be (in your opinion, or even in the opinion of the archeologist or historian) tacky or ugly doesn’t mean that it can’t illuminate in some way the society that it comes from.
An ornate silver teapot from the eighteenth century might inspire our admiration for the care and detail of its crafting, but a plain earthenware teapot can tell historians just as much about the dietary and social significance of tea-drinking to ordinary people in the American colonies. Similarly, archeologists and historian are often just as interested in a plain, unadorned drinking cup from an ancient household as they are in an ornately-painted vase; sometimes more interested because, as njtt notes, it’s often the more elaborate stuff that has been chosen for preservation.
Small but important nitpick: the Christian Audiger line of “Ed Hardy” clothing is widely regarded as highly tacky, probably rightfully so. However, the artist whose name he licensed to use in the clothing line, Don Ed Hardy, is one of the most influential and groundbreaking tattoo artists of the 20th century and is today widely regarded as a painter, printmaker and graphic artist (who also made a metric assload of money on the side letting Audiger use his name).
In a college-level Art History class I took, the teacher showed us a picture of a “classical era” Greek painted pottery that showed one bearded male person butt-fucking another. She made a remark that seemed aimed at getting us to think more critically about modern efforts to censor art works.
I wondered: Just because some ancient artist painted that, and just because we commonly believe today that ancient Greek mainstream culture was accepting of homosexuality, doesn’t necessarily mean that paintings like that were considered “proper”. Would such a painting have been considered perfectly socially acceptable art in its day? Or would it have been considered as unacceptable pornography?
This was a point often stressed by the heads of my archaeology and anthropology departments in undregrad, that while what captured the attention of the masses were the tombs in the pharoahs in the Valley of the Kings, what they were equally if not more interested in were the middens, the trash dumps that accumulated the refuse that illuminated what day to day life was like.
If it adds anything to the discussion, some ancient artifacts are shockingly cheap these days - you can buy ancient Egyptian faience beads for next to nothing. Which is, honestly, pretty cool.
This. And wait! It gets [del]worse[/del]better! In an Intro Anthropology class I took, the teach pointed out that a valuable archaeological thing to find were coproliths, from which they could learn a lot – especially about ancient peoples’ dietary habits.
Just from the two roots of the word, “copro-” and “-lith”, I instantly figured out what a coprolith is. Can you?
No, I understand that just fine. It is meant to be an open-ended question and not one to be taken defensively. It does seem that most mysterious ancient objects are given a high level of relevance to the culture in question especially when it comes to religious practices. I can understand that because there isn’t a lot of source material to work with and there are grants to justify but what if some of it is just the work of a hack or prankster. There is no reason to think that they didn’t have them back then too.
What if someone 2,000 years from now excavated the present L.A. region and found one of Paris Hilton’s silver, diamond encrusted tampon holsters? What does that say about California life in 2012. Well, some but you get the point.
Many, perhaps most, human cultures have indulged in the extravagant use of color in their public art. On a global scale, “most people” would not be shocked by the colors shown on Greek sculpture, even if you are.
Good examples but you should have put a warning label before that Hindu temple. I am not sure if I can sleep tonight now. That is supremely bad architecture cross-bred with a crayola factory. No offense to any Hindus.
The others aren’t that bad though. I am not saying that bright colors always bad. Quite to the contrary. I am just talking about things that would be tacky or kitsch no matter when they were made by most people and that doesn’t depend on my approval.
I once read Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste by Gillo Dorfles. The author considered the entire Hellenistic Period to be trashy. Although based on the examples he cited, I decided that I liked Hellenistic art better than Classical Greek art. Then again, I’m a hick.
If you go far back enough, anything, even stuff that was cheesy crap in its day, has sociological or anthropological importance. Usually it has to pass a kind of mental boundary that makes everyone accept it as History and not just Old - typically, 100 years is long enough.
(Yes, he really said that.)
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