Religious freedom
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I see very little of the spirit of William Morris here, and more that of tohe Left, in the case of some.
In Greece I saw age-old Byzantine frescos ruined with Communist Party graffiti.
‘Except when you destroy and soil the art of the past you also insult and destroy the memory of the workers and artisans who created it. Socialism is to be the maturing of humanity, not the iconoclasm of angry lefties.’
Another irrational tirade against a non existing enemy. We should all be allowed to stand back from our emotional/aesthetic response to art and examine it critically. It’s easy to love the beautiful and that’s why it can be so manipulative and destructive.
I’m happy to let you enjoy the shoddy, but I must be permitted to enjoy the beautiful, like Morris.
. “It’s easy to love the beautiful and that’s why it can be so manipulative and destructive.”
Insecure, eh?
So enjoying Wagner would convert a socialist to racism, and enjoying medieval art would make him go and get baptised Catholic?
We should pay attention to what Marx wrote about religion: The critique of religion is also the critique of capitalism and vice versa. Religion has collaborated with the ruling class thru different class society and it continues doing the same thing in this society, and religion and socialism are not compatible. Personally, I settled my account with religion more than 50 years ago and I will not turn back, and here we are trying to pass the buck in a socialist forum with some ambiguity it is very difficult to understand our world and our reality having a religious mentality
This argument is silly. Nobody is saying you can’t be “permitted to enjoy the beautiful”. How could you not be even under capitalism let alone in socialism? But expect a bit (or even a lot) of twitting if you label yourself an “aesthete” with the connotation that your conception of “beauty” is superior to that of the common herd.
I believe Morris once write of not liking having to cater to the “tastes of the swinish rich” or “swinish tastes of the rich”. I can’t remember which but I am guessing you would find both unfair to swine.
ps. I have heard that there is such a thing as “Marxist aesthetics”. No idea what it is or might be.
Marxist aesthetics is another creation of the School of Frankfurt similar to Cultural Marxism, which is a right-wing conception. Some Marxist Humanists have also adopted the concept of Marxist aesthetics. I do not think Marx ever develop such a conception
Just remembered where I heard of it. It was in this reprint of an article by Plekhanov in the Socialist Standard in 1926. Seems to be more Darwin than Marx.
‘So enjoying Wagner would convert a socialist to racism, and enjoying medieval art would make him go and get baptised Catholic?’
How is it possible to have a rational debate with someone who comes up with such nonsense? I must simply repeat that an exclusively emotional/aesthetic response to art is superficial and tells you nothing about what has informed/conditioned our perception of what is beautiful and how this effects political and moral values etc. I am amused by the idea that anything produced by the Frankfurt school could be compared to anything ‘right wing’ – not that socialists recognise the efficacy of such a right/left perspective anyway.
So how do all of you see the status of preservation/conservation of pre-socialist art in socialism? That’s all i’m asking. People today work on medieval cathedrals, perform period music they have researched, restore stained glass, repair damage etc., learn ancient languages and create their own art emulating long-gone styles. Doing so is exciting for them but does not turn them into political reactionaries or religious freaks. Or would you prefer the past obliterated?
We know how serious apostasy is treated within the Muslim religion, Saudi Arabia has labeled having atheist thoughts as a form of terrorism, yet still there is a shift to secularism.
https://www.dw.com/en/middle-east-are-people-losing-their-religion/a-56442163
Obviously there are some difficulty in acquiring accurate data but one recent survey among 40,000 interviewees by the Group for Analysing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN), which researched Iranians’ attitudes toward religion, found that no less than 47% reported “having transitioned from being religious to non-religious”
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, assistant professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University and co-author of the survey, sees this transition, as well as the quest for religious change, as a logical consequence of Iran’s secularization. “The Iranian society has undergone huge transformations, such as the literacy rate has gone up spectacularly, the country has experienced massive urbanization, economic changes have affected traditional family structures, the internet penetration rate grew to be comparable with the European Union and fertility rates dropped,” Tamimi Arab told DW. “The rise of the so-called ‘nones,’ who do not identify with a particular faith, has been noted in Muslim majority countries as different as Iraq, Tunisia, and Morocco,” Tamimi Arab added.
Yet religious repression is still prevalent in one of the West’s major allies.
Saudi dissident and activist Raif Badawi was convicted of apostasy, or insulting Islam. Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning why Saudis are obliged to adhere to Islam — and asserting that religion did not have the answers to all of life’s questions.
TM – I suppose it varies according to period and what school of art. Personally I always shudder when I see a cathedral – inhuman monuments to a dark perverse superstition. I remember whilst studying at art school we went on a visit to a museum and I came across a tiny paleolithic carving of a bison in stone. It took my breathe away. Both of these reactions are emotional and aesthetic and both inspired me to learn more about medieval cathedrals and stone age art – for profoundly antithetical reasons.
From the cathedrals one can learn medieval techniques of engineering and building, learn about the people of the time, and give the lie to those who think that the fall of Rome meant, as one party member put it, the end of all knowledge.
One can study sculpture, painting, and learn from the materials, which in turn sheds light on social life. Those who want to can study various aspects of life at the time, and a personal distaste for the period is no excuse for depriving others of knowledge of the past and appreciation of the good in it, as well as knowledge of the bad. Once things are destroyed and lost, they are lost forever. If you don’t like medieval art, cathedrals or whatever, you need not go near it, but there are those who do want to.We are products of our history. Robbed of history we are impoverished. One could learn the techniques of medieval art to memorialise the rebels and revolutionaries of the time in new creations employing the old techniques.
Similarly, in music, do traditional music troupes and writers research and perform songs memorialising the Cathar victims of the Crusaders in southern France and celebrate the women troubadours and women literati and poets of the 12th century. Today’s musicians trace the refugees from the Crusade – such as Guiraut Riquier, following him via his developing work among the Moors and Sephardic Jewish composers of southern Spain.
The Orthodox Church in Romania is facing growing pressure to change baptism rituals after a baby died following a ceremony which involves immersing infants three times in holy water. The six-week-old suffered a cardiac arrest and was rushed to hospital on Monday but he died.
Local media recounted several similar incidents in recent years. Church spokesman Vasile Banescu said priests could pour a little water on the baby’s forehead instead of full immersion. But Archbishop Teodosie, leader of the Church’s traditionalist wing, said the ritual would not change.
ALB
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Just remembered where I heard of it. It was in this reprint of an article by Plekhanov in the Socialist Standard in 1926. Seems to be more Darwin than Marx.The Frankfurt School took it from Georgi Plekhanov and Herber Marcuse is one of his apologist
https://academic.oup.com/ct/article-abstract/7/4/362/4258983?redirectedFrom=PDF
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