Whatever "The Bone Chalice" has turned into lately, it's still alive. Originally it was meant to be how a worship service can truly become a sacred event: what happens in the human embodiment and how to call it out. It's still that, but also responds to the recovery of the whole human as a thinking entity, the cutting edge research on neurology, our new understanding of deep space and infinite history, and a lot of other things. It reduces humans to flecks on the eternal windshield, and does not promise eternal life but rather immortal participation as each of us bridges the past to the future.
So here's my latest discovery, of all things a Polish art historian who works in video and is on You Tube. Nothing to read. A name as hard to pronounce as to spell. Waldemar Januszczak. Nothing like the prissy English nuns with bad teeth we've seen before. This link is an excellent introduction to him as well as why I think he's a good thinking and looking guide.
Turkmenistan was a new country when the USSR disintegrated. (-istan means country, not what kids say.) In it is "The Darvaza gas crater, known locally as the Door to Hell or Gates of Hell, is a natural gas field collapsed into an underground cavern located in Derweze, Turkmenistan. Geologists intentionally set it on fire to prevent the spread of methane gas, and it is thought to have been burning continuously since 1971." It's impressively spectacular and a nice metaphor for our current feeling that we are standing on the lip of the apocalypse. Waldemar is not intimidated. Just fascinated.
I found Waldemar through Acorn.com, which is a streaming service that offers BBC movies. I'd run out of murder mysteries and they were pushing two 3-part art series, which turned out to be about much more than just art, particularly in terms of how major cultural movements form and what impact they express through art, architecture, and other forms of creation, all European and tracking through the newly developing "nations" that developed out of kingdoms.
Here's the trailer: https://acorn.tv/baroque/trailer/
Holding up two pearls, one the smooth sphere so admired and the other a misshapen, bulgy, deformed baroque pearl some of us love. The latter is the source of our art term, which is meant to grab our attention after the smooth circles of the previous art aesthetic, the Greek perfectionist versions called Mannerist.
"Art critic Waldemar Januszczak follows the trajectory of baroque from its beginnings as a Vatican-sanctioned religious art style to its ascendance as the first global art movement in this fascinating documentary about an often-misunderstood artistic movement." He sees much as push-back from the effort to reform rotten Catholocism. Protestant, if you like. His title for the three baroque films is "From St. Peters to St. Paul", one cathedral in Rome and the other in England. Travel/pilgrimage is a theme and our stocky guide with his peculiar buzzcut and homemade pilgrim's staff leads his plucky cameraman swiftly along the path, stumping along in his nearly bow-legged determination.
"In Rococo before Bedtime, art critic Waldemar Januszczak pulls back the gilded facade of rococo to reveal the deep imprint it left on politics, culture, religion, and even America's Declaration of Independence." Now travel persists, but pleasure becomes luxury, and eventually all the excess leads to madness. Now we're looking at Trump's demented faces.
Below some quick review from whoever it was who wrote these entries on Wikipedia. (There are no Wikileaks in these vids.)
"The Baroque is a highly ornate and often extravagant style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th until the mid-18th century. It followed Renaissance art and Mannerism and preceded the Rococo and Neoclassical styles."
"This notion of "bella maniera" suggests that artists who were thus inspired looked to copying and bettering their predecessors, rather than confronting nature directly. In essence, "bella maniera" utilized the best from a number of source materials, synthesizing it into something new." Boring.
"By the end of the High Renaissance, young artists experienced a crisis: it seemed that everything that could be achieved was already achieved. No more difficulties, technical or otherwise, remained to be solved. The detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, the innovative use of the human form in figurative composition, the use of the subtle gradation of tone, all had reached near perfection."
We know this attitude. Did you read "The End of History?"
"The later Michelangelo was one of the great role models of Mannerism. Young artists broke in to his house and stole drawings from him. In his book Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari noted that Michelangelo stated once: "Those who are followers can never pass by whom they follow". But it was time to punk all that grandiosity and domination.
"In past analyses, it has been noted that mannerism arose in the early 16th century contemporaneously with a number of other social, scientific, religious and political movements such as the Copernican model, the Sack of Rome, and the Protestant Reformation's increasing challenge to the power of the Catholic Church."
So the social sea changes in the English-speaking Empire-based world go back and forth between frozen status quo based on domination -- if necessary by force, -- and an almost manic freedom of re-ordering and challenge. Corruption is often the symptom of the first and driver of the second. We are on the cusp right now. Sublime scenery of Bierstadt on the one hand and the wild graffiti of Basquiat on the other. (He died of a heroin overdose in 1988.)
This time the change is bigger than the Aquarian Age, maybe bigger than the Independence of Nations, the abandoning of Empire. The life of the planet and everything on it is at stake. Someone is painting, someone is building, someone is composing, everyone is watching. Someone is going mad, like George III.
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