it’s funny how western art culture privileges naturalism. you see it in visual art too - people think african sculptors were/are “primitive” because they don’t sculpt anatomically-correct human figures, people laugh at medieval european paintings because the faces are so round and the eyes are so big and the cloth doesn’t drape right and why does baby jesus look like a tiny man. you’d think no one in any culture before 1600s italy had any idea what a human person looked like. but obviously they did; they were just making choices in the context of a different visual culture. you might as well make fun of cartoonists for making people’s heads and eyes so big and their mouths and bodies so tiny - but ofc we’ve got a blind spot to things in our own culture. same thing is true with acting, and singing. styles that were super popular in their day now seem overly schmalzy and affected to us, but that’s because, you know, we’re not capital-r Romantics, and we’re in a different artistic culture with different values
no artistic history is just an evolution of “artificial” to “naturalistic". maybe our current fixation on realism has to do with the advent and accessibility of photography, or western obsession with artistic techniques that are exceptionally difficult and time-consuming to cultivate (like pointe ballet or wagnerian opera singing, both of which also require a lot of time and money and other resources to learn how to do)
“There should be a word for the microscopic spark of hope that you dare not entertain in case the mere act of acknowledging it will cause it to vanish, like trying to look at a photon. You can only sidle up to it, looking past it, walking past it, waiting for it to get big enough to face the world.”
Traditional fables from the Republic of Congo are collected in a new book, Congo Tales: Told By The People Of Mbomo — and illustrated with painterly photos that have a touch of magical realism.
Anonymous asked: Honestly, the Royal family is no worse than any other Uber rich family. Honestly, some American politicians are richer than them, and blaming the current royals for the actions of the Empire is kinda unfair....
“We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”
“So many tender and painful, sweet and bitter, emotions crowd in my soul–yes, there are painful and bitter ones. You cannot dream how bitter it is for me when people don’t understand me, when they mistake what I say, and see it in the wrong light.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, from a letter to Mikhail Dostoevsky, written c. October 1832
