Arquivo para a ‘Museology’ Categoria
The fear of change and not evolving
14
Jul
The great lesson of Joseph of Egypt is that 
under an apparent “slavery” or difficulty is hidden a necessary change for peoples and nations to develop, in history the departure of the Hebrew people from the “promised land” is even desired by God according to the biblical text in Genesis (Gn 46,4): “I will go down with you to Egypt and I will bring you back from there when you return; and it is Joseph who will close your eyes”, he says to Jacob (Israel) and asks him to take all his relatives.
The Egyptian Civilization was formed from the mixture of different peoples, among them, the Hamites, the Semites and the Nubians, who emerged in the Paleolithic Period, and it is probable from recent archaeological research that the Jews went to make their settlements in the Hyksos region who were defeated by the Egyptians.
In the year 3200 B.C. Menes unified the kingdoms of lower and upper Egypt forming the Egyptian Empire and Menes being its first emperor and pharaoh, the Jews went there later in the year 1750 BC. and stayed until 1250 BC. as slaves because they were feared by the pharaohs.
Most likely it was during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses was the son of Pharaoh Sehti I and Queen Tuya. He was the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt. At the age of 10, Ramses was sure that he would assume the throne when he was recognized as the “eldest son of the king”, having fought at a young age alongside his father in the conquest of Lebanon (see the map between the blue and red lines).
The last pharaoh was Xerxes I, famous for the battle of Thermopylae, where the Greek general Leonidas would have fought with only 7000 men, and prepared an ambush in a pass between Thermopylae mountains, but the Greeks were betrayed and the strategy was discovered.
Also from this period, the repentance of the brothers of Jacob (Israel) who struggles “with God”, and of the brothers, especially Judah, who regrets having sold his brother Joseph as a slave, shows how in the story of an evil one can take a good if errors are recognized.
Even the bad seed can flourish even if it is planted in bad but fertilized soil.
The Semitic Origins of the West
07
Jul
Our culture and society is often referred to as
Judeo-Christian, but if we look deeper into history, Judeo-Christian culture descends from Semitic, and thus both Arabs and Jews descend from Semites, as does much of North Africa.
At the root of three great religions is Abraham: Jews, Arabs and Christians, here is his pilgrimage from Babylon of the Chaldeans, the Biblical narrative places him in Ur of the Chaldeans, is the neogenesis of these three great peoples, of which only a few eastern peoples where these religions already penetrated and also some originary peoples where there is still their initial religiosity.
Abraham goes through two great civilizing crises the Babylonian fall and after his pilgrimage to ancient Assyria arriving at the city of Aleppo, which under the rubble of the war and the earthquake still exists in Syria today, and then from to the Hebron valley, where he spent by a second civilizing crisis in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, where there were orgies and decadence.
He leaves there and goes towards Egypt, and his son Isaac will also remain a nomad, the fight between his sons Esau and Jacob is famous, Machado de Assis has a book with this name and we could say that the polarization of humanity is older than we think.
From Jacob will be established the lineage of the 12 tribes from his sons, and from the lineage of Judah will come David, while from the lineage of this one will come Joseph son of another Jacob, and of Joseph be born Jesus.
Understanding this Abrahamic descent, with all the struggles and contradictions that have taken place in history, is fundamental for us to understand both Christian, Islamic and Jewish culture, an inter-religious and multicultural dialogue is possible if we understand that the history of a single God, just as a distant historical past unites these peoples.
Religious fundamentalism prevents this dialogue, the evangelist Matthew who was an enemy tax collector of the Jews, refers to his own conversion like this (Mt 9,10): “While Jesus was at the table, in the house of Matthew, many collectors came of taxes and sinners and sat at the table with Jesus and his disciples” and Jesus will say “it is the sick who need doctors” and completes the teaching by saying “I want mercy and not sacrifices”.
How much division, hatred and violence in the name of God, this is not religion, it is just fanaticism.
The noosphere and oral culture
06
Jul
The period of oral culture predominated
before 3000 BC, although there were scribes in Egypt, cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia and ancient Babylon, there was also writing in Ancient China and also in the civilizations originaries in the Americas: Mayans, Aztecs and Incas.
The form of dissemination of culture and, therefore, of the evolution of the noosphere was through prophets and oracles, whose main function was the transmission of oral culture and preceded literate and philosophical teaching, until we have a more notable turn in Greco-Jewish culture -Roman.
In biblical terms, according to Genesis reports, using genealogies presented in the bible, we can say that it is at least 6 thousand years old, but if we understand the narrative, Abel was a shepherd and Cain was a farmer, so this narrative begins at the moment when man becomes more sedentary and the civilizing process becomes clearer, the fact that Abel is a shepherd is symbolic for biblical language.
If this is a fact without historical proof and also Noah and the flood are still an eternal search for documentation, however their sons Shem and Ham can already be found in history, since the Semitic and Hamite peoples are registered in history, and Jafé who was to dwell in the tents of Shem.
The Semites were the dawn of the Mesopotamian cultures that peaked in Babylon (1792–1000 BC) and were later dominated by the Persians.
Prophets and oracles will be fundamental in ancient cultures, they should have a certain “divine” illumination so that history does not get corrupted and customs are changed.
According to Genesis 11, from the Flood to Abraham passed about 292 years, and from the birth of Abraham to the settlement of Jacob in Egypt passed about 290 years, ‘from Abram to the coming of Christ is about 2000 years, and then begins an era of written culture, and thus the gospels appear while in ancient Greece the Socratic and Platonic schools, since we know of Socrates through Plato and then the Aristotelian school, period that the schools and writings are fixed.
It is not about overcoming oral culture, but it appears together with writing, handwritten books, which later became famous for copyist monks, this period is called scriptorium.
Oral culture remains with native peoples, also among African peoples, printed writing will be a conquest of modernity, so to speak of schooling is to speak of modernity, and now we are in a new transition due to new media.
Visit to Rome, Counteroffensive and Pulitzer Prize
15
May
The week was all about Ukraine: a visit to Rome and the pope, advances in
Backhmut and photos from the war that drew attention when they won the Pulitzer Prize, the photos are shocking and perhaps say more than words, since today there is even incomprehensible rhetoric favor of war.
In the strategic plan, there is no Portuguese analyst Germano Almeida pointed out: “here in the West we are not yet aware of the plans, so there is a Ukrainian idea that this is just the beginning and nobody knows where in fact this counter-offensive can be launched because the Bakhmut’s question could be a first diversion maneuver [discussion] and the essential thing and the mass offensive could be elsewhere”, says Almeida.
The visit to Italy, in addition to the country’s already declared support, the visits to Italian President Sérgio Mattarela and with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, he also participated in a talk show on Italian TV, about the pope, all that is known is an agreement humanitarian assistance to refugees.
The images that won the prize also have a Brazilian on the list: Felipe Dana, from Rio de Janeiro, who filmed and photographed scenes from Bucha, the most cruel and violent massacre carried out by Russia in Ukraine (first photo below), it is worth remembering that the war was also from Vietnam had awards on the horrors there.
Some images from the 2023 Pulitzer Prize given to several Associated Press photographers, including the Brazilian, if words don´t move, maybe the images will.
For a philosophy of the look
13
Apr
It already exists, I even looked for the roots and couldn’t find it and that’s where
the problem lies, dialoguing with what is present in culture, philosophy and art about what the look is and how it is possible to develop it from there onwards in order to dialogue with contemporary culture.
For example, a good reading of Schiller we have already mentioned this week his “Aesthetic education of man”, in art I did not quote Gustav Klimt on purpose, he has elements of symbolism and all art literature recognizes it, but his “art nouveaux” brings something again (photo of his work the hug).
Edgar Morin, when analyzing “Mass culture of the 20th century”, emphasizes the multiple meanings of modern man: “the language adapted to this anthropos is audiovisual, the language of four instruments: image, musical sound, word, writing. A language that is all the more accessible insofar as it is the polytonic involvement of all languages” (page 45) and thus this look can be both dispersed and integrated, giving this new language a new look.
It is no longer specific to a single medium (sound, image and objects have existed as art since time immemorial), for Morin this is “of the game that lies on the fabric of practical life” (idem) and this symbolism in Klimt is in fact a vision integrated, but not specific to him, I also see it in Kandinsky his works also seem to have music and poetry, even though they are just pictures.
In cinema, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, in one of the paintings of this film Life, integrates painting and cinema by giving movement to Van Gogh’s paintings, thus, more than multimedia, these artistic movements can be called transmedia, due to the fact that they integrate aspects of art .
This re-educates and stimulates the look, but there is the aspect of the possibility of dispersing the look, but nothing can do this more than modern horizontal monomedia and social “media” are not out of it, so the re-education of the look goes through the stimulation of other senses and the spiritual that is not that idealist (see previous post) that are separated.
So, despite being a symbolist, it is fair to think of Klimt as a member of “art nouveaux”, since he helped to create the Secession Movement in Vienna, whose objective was to break the conservative traditions that were rooted in history and create an internationalist and comprehensive vision. of contemporary and timeless artistic genres.
The integration of this vision in new media is the presentation at the historic Atelie des Lumiéres, in Paris, of a transmedia animation of Vang Gogh (foto), which inaugurated a series in 2018 precisely with the work of Gustav Klimt also animated.
For this reason, it is not a synthesis of opposites, but the fusion of artistic horizons in movement, the current crisis is the dualistic vision of the world, of art and of values that are timeless.
MORIN, Edgar. (1997) Cultura de massas do século XX (Twentieth-century mass culture(. trans. Maura Ribeiro Sardinha. 9th. edition. Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Forense ed., 1997.
What is beautiful for idealism
12
Apr
We contradicted in the previous post the vision of vision and beauty of
the idealist sense, but Schiller himself is a descendant of this vision, even though he tried to rebuild “the unity of human nature”, in this he is right, he thought of rebuilding in the modern idealist way.
For Hegel, aesthetics, and therefore the Beauty, is the science that deals with the artistic beauty and not the natural beauty, for him the natural beauty is a product of the spirit (Geist), and, because it is a product of the spirit, it participates in the truth and what exists in nature, see that the spirit as well as the idealist “transcendence” is linked to nature and to the human, it is far from the mystical spiritual.
For an internal revolution to idealism, three currents of art are immersed in it: symbolism, classicism and romanticism, for many modern authors, I quote Byung Chul Han, the culture of the smooth, the flat and the “transparent” (glass, glass, etc.) plastics, etc.).
This pseudo-revolution that took place within idealist art is called self-overcoming, a kind of what was called in German idealism the New Hegelians, but it makes an even deeper division in art: painting, music and poetry.
Sculpture is considered a “noble” art, says Hegel: ““Sculpture introduces God himself into the objectivity of the external world; thanks to it, individuality manifests itself externally through its spiritual side” (Hegel, 1996, p. 113), again the exterior is objective, a sculpture and not a Being, the other and with him all his subjectivity.
Symbolism, on the other hand, was the one that “seeks to achieve the union between internal meaning and external form, that classical art achieved this union in the representation of the substantial individuality that addresses our sensibility, and that romantic art, spiritual in essence, surpassed” (Hegel, 1996, p. 340).
Seeing the consequences of this “romantic” thought, Hans-Georg Gadamer will criticize Dilthey’s romantic vision of consciousness, with serious consequences for modern historicism, almost all of which are idealistic and distant from reality, thus creating the “ideal” model for consciousness is for the beautiful and not to transform it as the idealists think to do.
I consider art nouveau, mainly by Antoni Gaudí (in the photo Casa Batlló, in Barcelona) the most faithful expression because it recovers natural elements (light, color, air and nature) without “affections” and traces of symbolism and romanticism, such as for example, present in the “Style Tiffany” in the United States or the “Style Glasgow” in the United Kingdom that has elements, in my view, of symbolism, although also called “art nouveau”.
Returning to the previous post, there is a confusing vision of ethics because it is separated from aesthetics.
Libraries and Wars
31
Aug
In the 1950s, shortly after the Second World War, the Brazilian
documentation magazine translated and published an article by Carl Hastings Milan on the Wars and the loss of documents and libraries.
He had been director of the Birmingham Public Library, where he opened the first branch of services for African American authors and readers, the article is available online and shows a face of the war for libraries in reference to the previous post we made on this blog.
The transcriptions into Portuguese were made by Sylvio do Valle Amaral and the original article follows the war in September 1944, published in The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science in Philadelphia.
The article begins by indicating the interruption and discontinuity of journals and publications during wartime, in addition to the material loss and lack of exchange of many documents.
The author emphasizes this loss where: “London publishers and booksellers lost millions of volumes in 1940-41. Several famous British scholarly libraries, and dozens of public ones, were damaged or destroyed. Several European countries, Russia, China, in addition to the Philippines, have suffered or are now experiencing a similar fate, but the saddest is yet to come” (MILAN, 1950, p. 50).
In advance many works were taken or hidden from German libraries, but the destruction and looting represent a cultural attack according to the “infamous” author who was credited to Hitler, it is important to look at this for history so that it does not repeat itself now.
Among the author’s denunciations is that also in the defeat: “Newspapers recently reported the burning of books in Naples, before the withdrawal of the Nazi army” (idem, p. 50), and thus a part of history is erased, regardless of of what those documents represent, they are an important cultural testimony of a time, which, because it is outdated, is subject to criticism, but there is no right to erase it, they are cultural documents.
It reestablishes the role of libraries, now also in crisis due to a distorted view of digital technology that we also post here, but the author says for that time: “Basic to the reestablishment of intellectual activity throughout the universe, is the reorganization of libraries” and ignoring this is a crime against the cultural preservation and memory of the people.
After emphasizing cooperation and support for libraries in Latin America and elsewhere, countries discuss the training of librarians:
“Despite the common recognition, in the United States and abroad, of the imperfections of our methods in preparing young men and women for library work, a surprisingly large number of students from abroad come to this country at normal times to obtain what schools of this specialty can offer” (MILAN, 1950, p. 53)
Milan, C. H. As bibliotecas, os intelectuais e a Guerra, trad. Sylvio do Valle Amaral. Rio de Janeiro: REVISTA DO SERVIÇO PUBLICO, AGOSTO DE 1950 (original in 1944).
War and peace
30
Aug
I read a recent commentary on Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) that another Russian
writer Ivan Turgenev claimed that knowing and reading Tolstoy is better than reading hundreds of works of ethnography and history” to know the character and temperament of the Russian people, conservatives such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) who came to be considered his successor, and Vladimir Lenin leader of the Soviet revolution who considered him one of the greatest Russian writers.
Many of his books were for the cinema, recently (2012) Anna Karenina was rewritten for the cinema, under the direction of Joe Wright, and was nominated for an Oscar and won the best costume design, but a masterpiece by Tolstoy is the book War and Peace.
From War and Peace I remember impressions and some loose phrases, and the context of the book that talks about the tsarist wars of their context and time, but which is revealing of Russian thinking about war, and that its scourges are not ignored.
The book deals with the lives of 5 aristocratic families, in the period from 1805 to 1820, in the midst of the march of Napoleonic troops and their brutal impact on the lives of hundreds of characters.
There are figures such as the brothers Natasha and Nikolai Rostóv, Prince Andrei Bolkónsky and Pierre Bezúkhov, the illegitimate son of a count whose spiritual quest serves as a kind of thread in the novel and transforms him into a complex and intriguing character of the 20th century. XIX, and whose pursuit will be a complement to peace in the midst of war.
A kind of refuge similar to the book-stealing Girl, which in this case is in the context of Nazi Germany and she will find in the books a refuge for the dark environment of the rise of Nazism in Germany.
I see a common feature in these two books, which is this “refuge”, something between the spiritual and the reader, but both manage to create, in a suffocatingly hateful environment, gaps and spaces of peace and spiritual elevation.
If war comes, what will be our refuge, at what level of spiritual life and knowledge do we want to put our lives that will be at risk, I believe these are contemporary readings.
TOLSTOI, L. (1889) WAR AND PEACE, transl. Nathan Hskell Dole, NY: Ed. Thomas V. Crowell & Co.
People who resisted empires
04
Aug
The great Persian empire expanded from Cyrus the Great in the
year 558 BC, and dominated the Medes and took all of Mesopotamia, Cyrus respected the culture and customs of his enemies, but expanded his empire to Egypt, and advanced over the Greeks, but was defeated by Athens.
After Darius I, Xerxes I and his son Artaxerxes also tried to conquer Greece and failed, in the year 332 BC. Emperor Alexander of Macedonia the Great organized an invincible army and ended up taking Greece and eventually winning the Persians, establishing a new empire, Macedonian.
Alexander’s death from typhoid fever or malaria (the poisoning hypothesis is not accepted by historians) the dispute between generals ended up weakening the empire and starting a decline.
The period established between the starting point of the Classical Era is pointed out with the first record of the poetry of the Greek Homer, in the 7th-8th centuries BC. and will extend to the period from 300 to 600 A.D. which is called Late Antiquity, when the Middle Ages begin.
In this interregnum between the Macedonian Empire and the Roman/Byzantine Empire, Greek culture developed in classical antiquity, which is deeply influential to this day with the so-called Western culture.
Greek culture and language were for that time what the English language is today, great developments were made from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, names in several areas of knowledge stood out: Hippocrates in medicine, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides in theater , Apelles in painting, Phidias in sculpture, Archimedes in mathematics, Aristarchus, Erastothenes and Hipparchus in astronomy, are some important names that still influence our culture today.
This small nation was a great founder of concepts and thoughts that reached our days: the Organon and the Ethics of Aristotle, the Geometry of Euclid and Thales of Miletus and Pythagoras in mathematics.
They won battles uniting the city-states, but they were a small people with a strong culture and humanistic values that are remembered to this day, although they can be modified and updated.
Plague, War and Famine
19
Jul
This vicious circle seems to perpetuate itself in history, and the
recent data and provocations of the war in Europe not only frighten, but cause a justifiable fear when it is observed that all over the world there are “fans” on both sides, and it is not a game , but a great genocide like any other war, but of greater proportions because it can involve the greatest world powers.
The generation that witnessed the horrors of the first two wars no longer remembers it, counting from the start date, the assassination of Duke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, by a Serbian nationalist and which is considered the trigger of the first war.
What preceded it was a period of European politics from 871 to 1914 called “Paz Armada”, where there is an intensification of disputes over markets, colonial territories and a vision of predominance in European geopolitics, where the Austrian Empire stood out. Hungarian to which Francisco Feerdinad was heir.
A documentary about the rise of the Nazis in Germany can be seen in a documentary made by the History Channel, and we will see a similar scenario: recent wars, economic crisis and not mentioned in the documentary: the Spanish flu (1918-1919).
The parallel with the growing tension between NATO and Russia in the current Ukraine war is evident, and therefore the fear of a war of civilizing proportions must be feared, including the inclusion of Serbian separatists, whom China is accused of send weapons.
The future scenario is one of a market crisis, especially in grains that will affect, in particular, the poorest, is already a visible scenario for many analysts. Global Hunger Index reports show that violent conflict is a major contributor to hunger (photo).
Civilization proportions are due not only to the number of nuclear weapons, but to more than 400 nuclear plants spread across the planet, the documentary on what the Nazis thought helps to reflect on our thoughts on popular “myths” and “fantasies” .
There is no vigorous force that fights for peace, but small attitudes such as gestures of empathy and friendship can help to overcome the current growing climate of hatred and lack of love.
