tang dynasty times

Anatomy of an Art Collector: Utz Part 2

1) Utz (Part2)
OK, I confess: I just cannot get  Utz (see Utz Part 1) out of my mind. Utz, of course, was the unforgettable porcelain-crazed "hero" in Bruce Chatwin's best-selling novel about the highly enigmatic collector of Meissen porcelain; who, living in Cold War Czechoslovakia, again and again contemplates defecting to the West. Each time he leaves Prague, however, he always returns, preferring in the end to remain a prisoner of his precious collection.

The novel is often brought up when people talk about the psychology of art collecting. Any such discussion inevitably leads to the question of what exactly is an art collector?

Of course, the simple answer is that an art collector is a person who collects art, right?

Well, Kant-- in all his glory-- added some important provisos to this definition (all of which Utz magnificently embodies), and these provisos would prove to have a profound impact on Western art history. Indeed, they have functioned as a vicious stumbling block in any cross-cultural appreciation of art when one is moving from West to East.

What exactly did Kant have to say about art, then?　Tackling the way in which Kant's Critique of Judgment has effected our modern Western way of thinking about art, Stanley O'Connor (of Cornell University fame) writes that our modern way of talking about art is strongly based on

"the assumption that collectors, critiques, and the generality of the interested, urban, literate, art public subscribe implicitly, at least to some of the following: Art is a realm of its own differentiated from other activities of life; artworks are autonomous and self-sufficient; their purpose is simply to be rather than to instruct, to edify, or be of use; the artist creates out of some kind of inspired freedom and in this way the art work differs from that made by the craftsperson, who is subsumed by purpose and constrained by craft subscription; and, finally, the proper response of the viewer is disinterested contemplation of the object of art for its own sake rather than as an instrument of the viewer's purpose or desire."

Not only is the above summarization of Kant's ideas essential for truly understanding the concepts that inform our own modern response to art, but it is also helpful to keep in mind that these ideas originating in Kant's writing are not universal; as, in fact, most of the rest of the world does not view art-- nor do they practice art collecting-- in the same manner.

Based on Kant-- enslaved by Kant, in fact-- Joseph Alsop, in his book the Rare Art Traditions, defines the art collector's project in the following manner: The art collector 1) Collects art for no other reason than for art's sake; that is, the works of art are sought as (in Kantian terms) "an end in itself;"   2) An art collector has a defined category; and 3) with this category, the whole then becomes greater than any of the parts.

The above definition is interesting for several reasons. First, the idea of category explains why authenticity becomes so important; and this-- therefore-- is the reason that should a national gallery discover that one of its masterpieces is not authentic (that is, a fraud), the work of art is immediately pulled out of the collection (and then put in storage). Nothing outwardly has changed about the painting or sculpture-- which people had otherwise been appreciating for decades perhaps-- but its authenticity has been undermined, and therefore the work loses its value (sometimes as much as 95% of its value).

More interesting perhaps is the idea that should a person collect works of art for any specific "purpose"-- they have placed themselves outside the category of an art collector. Napoleon's many, many "souvenirs," as well as Catherine the Great's buying art as a way of joining the European Club are the obvious examples. This is because the trophies that Napoleon dragged home from Egypt and elsewhere where not brought home as "art for art's sake" but rather dragged home as war booty.

Treasure gatherers (whose prizes are valued for the material worth of the object) are also-- for obvious reasons-- discounted.

And, finally, Alsop's last category of the bogus art-collector: the aesthete. Alsop actually does a great job of hinting at what is perhaps a real (or not) distinction between the art collector and the aesthete; the aesthete being that person who, rather than searching for objects to fit a certain category, instead purchases for what Alsop describes as "use plus beauty;" that is, the aesthete's project is to simply surround herself with beauty and beautiful objects. Alsop would argue, this is not the project of the true art collector as a true art collector never buys objects of art for purpose or usefulness. Like most Western discussion about fine art, Alsop is much indebted to Kant for his ideas.

 2) A Western-style Japanese collector: Hideo Kurita
This brings me to my next man: a certain Hideo Kurita. Two weeks ago, we took the train over to Ashikaga to spend the afternoon at the Kurita Musuem. The museum is the collection of one man and is composed solely of his great collection of Arita (Imari)and Nabeshima porcelains (An overview history of these famous Japanese porcelains can be found here).

Japanese porcelains are not my cup of tea. In general, I find the color of the clay to be sickly and even the overglaze painting is almost always under-whelming to me. However, the museum is quiet and there is a great restaurant and teahouse (along with many beautiful buildings on the grounds, including a traditional climbing kiln/noborigama). And, most important Hideo Kurita's great love of these porcelains is apparent no matter where you look. His passion is well, not quite infectious, but at the very least it is *humbling*

The museum stands as the culmination of Kurita's passion, and his loving attention to each and every detail is what really intrigues. Walking in the main gallery, I immediately thought of Utz, for in the most prominent place in the entrance was a tiny arita-yaki blue and white vase. Like Utz's harlequin, this vase was the start of it all. Kurita was still a university student, but he knew he had to have it. To think that that one very small and sweet vase would be the spark of what would be an explosion of collecting activities costing a fortune and spanning his entire life is hard to believe, really.

So, eros appears in the form of this tiny blue and white vase. Kurita falls in love and thereafter is obsessed, and his obsession-- like Utz's-- has two aspects: the desire to possess and the desire to know. This can be said of all love affairs, and it could only be hoped that a love affair between two people could last as long as this one did for Kurita . This desire to know, in fact, is what separates the true art collector from the aesthete and is again connected to Alsop's ideas of categories; that is a true art collector is the person who sets out to build a collection of a certain category and in the process becomes something of an expert in this category.

 3) Matsuda Takashi & the Collectors of the East
What is interesting about Hideo Kurita, in fact, is that, while his project is familiar enough to us, in fact, he was quite unusual for his time. And, indeed, his collection was the first ever in Japan to be dedicated to one type of ceramic art (Imari, etc.) Kurita has less in common with traditional Japanese concepts of art and art collecting, instead being more along the lines of the European-style private collecting practices we see in men such as Percival David, JP Getty, or the other great Western-style Japanese collector, Magosaburo Ohara. 

I am in the middle of re-reading Christine Guth's book: Art, Tea and Industry: Matsuda Takashi and The Mitsui Circle. It is without a doubt the best book about Japanese art collecting I have ever read (unfortunately it is now out-of-print). The book, for me, more than anything pushes Kant's theories on art to their limits, for if we were to hold with Kant's theories on true art collecting, well, then there wouldn't have been any true art collectors in Japan till men like Kurita and Ohara came around in very recent times. I personally became really interested in this topic both through my own practice of tea ceremony (which opened my eyes to this different concept of connoisseurship and art collecting) but also through the translation I do for the Hiroshima University professor, whose work is in aesthetics (see my post here).

The professor takes this concept to a political level claiming that this overwhelming and unquestioned acceptance of the Western concept of fine art is a form of "cultural colonialism." He and I argued over his insistence on calling it a form of "violent" imperialism. I, as always, lost the argument, but..... well, if we put aside the question of overt power, at least we can all agree that within aesthetics this Kantian conception of art and the upholding of the fine arts reigns supreme down today. Indeed, the professor says that even in Japan scholars who want to work outside the Western concept of fine art, have a very hard time getting funding and publishing. In his own work, he straddles the line between aesthetics, education and sports (sports because he is trying to grasp at a wider definition of art where "practice" is central-- which is another crucial point-- see below). 

There are, of course, other traditions, and going back to my truest desire of owning a "Martaban" heirloom jar, I recall that these jars, of course, were never meant to be looked at objectively behind glass. Along with all heirloom (pusaka) objects of SouthEast Asia (including Kris daggers, spears and musical instruments) the great jars of Borneo had an ontological reality that was woven into the context of daily life; as I wrote in the UTZ (part 1), it was an existence that  stood on the boundary of the human. the medicinal and the spiritual (or religious). That is to say, these objects, rather than being something that existed "as objects in themselves" for objective contemplation, rather exerted what O'Connor calls a "controlling pressure on imagination"-- which really only points to the power that works of art have to affect our hearts and minds.

Here is the full quote by O'Connor who is discussing the fantastical stories and myths that surround such heirloom objects; including their ability to fortell the future, go on walkabouts and even bear offspring:

"What we do see here, I think, is an account of pots as they would to someone grounded in a tissue of memory and expectation, inhibiting a familiar landscape amid tutelary spirits and ancestral guardians. We are directed in these stories to look at pots not as self-sufficient entities but at the traces of their activity, at how they bring together and make possible the practices and expression of a way of life. It is the power of these heirlooms to *seize and exert a controlling power on the imagination, to enforce their vital presence in a field of experience, that is the most striking characteristic of the myths. The aura around these wares, the radiance that shines through them, is the quality of a thing as filled with presence."

We actually see something similar at work in Japanese aesthetics as well; in particular with the heirloom or named objects (o-meibutsu) found in Tea Ceremony. The famous heirloom objects venerated in Japanese art history, are given names and take on a life of their own in ways similar, in fact, to the jars. For example, there have been teabowls believed to have been cursed and tea caddies (cha-ire), in particular, were thought to contain the life force of their present and past owners. Guth writes:

"The mystique associated with these and other imported tea caddies cannot be attributed solely to their intrinsic aesthetic properties, however. More than any other utensil, a tiny tea caddy was equated with the living essence of its owner. It was small enough to be carried on a person or in one's baggage, and it could, in fact insure its owner's protection: the owner who presented his tea caddy to an adversary was often trading for his life. Because of this, tea caddies often served as tokens of fealty or succession. Nobunaga, who confiscated Hatsuhana from its owner in 1569, eventually presented it to his son and heir."

My tea teacher as well went to great length to make sure that I understood while most of the attention is paid to teabowls during any tea gathering, in fact, practitioners all value their tea caddies above all. My teacher said the largest amount of money she ever paid for anything was for her favorite tea caddy. I cannot even recall what it looked like-- all I remember is she said it cost more than her car.

Takashi Matsuda, one of the great collectors of the very early 20th century, owned a tea caddy called White Dew. The tea caddy received its name from a poem about green willows and white dew from the Kokinshu, and was kept lovingly in several layers of nested paulawnia wood boxes. Of course, the tea caddy had its 3 changes of clothing: casual, semi formal and formal (you can see these shifuku in the picture below). While the casual shifuku was often made of 16th-18th century Indian sari, which arrived in Japan by way of Canton (which is why they are known as "Canton kireji"), the formal shifuku were created out of antique pieces of brocade (often from the great Continent).

Each of the nested boxes had the previous owners name written in calligraphy (often by the Grand Tea Master of the Time) and the tea caddy itself was always placed inside a wooden hikiya canister (to further protect the precious jar). The "poem about green willows" which gave the jar its name was painted delicately in golden lacquer on the dark wood of the hikiya.

We can already see how this collecting practice, involving poetry, brocades and practical use, ownership and preservation practices differs greatly with Western-style collecting as represented by Kurita or Utz, for example. 

There are many accounts of Westerners being absolutely astounded to watch the powerful men of 16th or 17th century Japan-- wishing to show their honored guest their greatest treasure, taking off the protective layers that surrounded these jars: Three wooden outer boxes containing cloth that contained a wooden canister which finally contained the treasure. And imagine their surprise when a tiny, almost black earthenware jar was lovingly passed to them for perusal. (The jar's shifuku were, of course, kept in their own set of boxes).

It was all about context. Many jars are kept in American collections, of course, but just like the great jars of Borneo, they are stripped of their context. For as Louise Allison Cort writes:

"In the process of returning White Dew to its storage bag, hikiya and boxes, reconstructing the bundle and tying it up in the sky blue furoshiki, one is struck by how many people's labor has contributed to the bundle: the potter, of course; several owners and chanoyu school masters; all the craftspeople whose work went into the sewn cloth and bags, the joined boxes and turned hikiya; the lacquers; the man who turned the ivory lid; the cord makers. Further removed yet not less important are the dyers and weavers in China who produced the fabrics used to make the shifuku. One might even include the Kokinshu poet who composed the poem bout the green willows. In the creation of a chaire like White Dew, *out of an anonymous little jar selected from among hundreds of similar jars*, there was a conscious effort to integrate it on many dimensions into the flow of Japanese cultural traditions. It was ultimately a communal effort of imagination, spurred by a shared reverence for self effacing craftsmanship. Without this, White Dew is just another jar; all cha-ire, indeed, are just another jar."

"Just another jar"-- yes, poor Kant has been turned on his head. For the work of art being celebrated was not made but *discovered* and does not in any way exist objectively outside of time, place or context. And, its appreciation cannot be separated from its purpose either.

Museums, of course, are another "by-product" of Western aesthetics. In Japan, traditionally, art works were not objectively viewed out of context, but rather were stored very carefully in pauwlania wood boxes and wrapped in layers of protective cloth and only brought out for appreciation during certain events. For example, when they were to be used in some way (for example, used during a tea gathering, or displayed in honor of a special occasion). This was the traditional Japanese manner of art appreciation and connoisseurship."

Another very interesting point to bring up as well is that while knowledge and objective appreciation were the hallmarks of the Western tradition in Japan, the notion of practice or practitioner was as central to art collecting as it was to the practice of art. A better way of saying this is that there was not this sharp differentiation between artist and art collector as we see, for example, in the case of Hideo Kurita or JP Getty.

 In the East, of course, there is this long history of the traditional artist-scholar gentleman, which sees as ideal the "cultured gentleman" who is adept in one or more of the traditional arts, is well read and well-traveled. Even the infamous Li Qingzhao, who is often cited as an art collector gone awry, was perhaps even more well-known as a poet then as an art collector. No matter how hard you look, all the famous art collectors of the East (who collecting under traditional means) were themselves adept at some art: often calligraphy and sometimes music, painting or chanoyu. And, most importantly for our debate, the art collected was above all: "beauty plus use."

O'Connor, in his discussion of the jars of Borneo, states that

"Modern art theory deprives art of its context and in this way beauty has been banished to museums as something apart from daily life."

I am not the first person to make this point, but I think it bears repeating, that when we banish beauty to museum glass cases, we are in an effect banishing beauty itself from our daily lives. So, that in this way, our lives become enslaved to a kind of Heideggerian efficiency whereby only the rich can have "use plus beauty" and the rest of us must be content to go and see beauty at the public museums on our days off (this was the basic concept behind the founding of the Met, you will recall).

To be continued...

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Recommended books: 

**Christine Guth's Art, Tea and Industry: Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle 

**Asian Art (Arthur Sackler Gallery): Art Collecting (Fall 1991). This is a great publication, which includes the article by Stanley O'Connor.

**Louise Allison Cort's Looking at White Dew (in Chanoyu Quarterly No43). This article is about Matsuda's prize tea caddy White Dew, but rather than discussing its history, she focuses exclusively on the object within the context of traditional Japanese art appreciation practices. Here is the Kokinshu Poem:

浅緑糸よりかけて白露を玉にもぬける春の柳か (古今２７）
Spinning out
Tender green threads
And slipping off
Beads of white dew--
The willow in spring

** American art collectors Peggy and Richard Danziger are unusual in two regards. First was their choice in art. They fell in love with Japanese tea utensils, and their collection exists as the finest outside Japan (I think White Dew, in fact, is part of their collection). Also unusual is that they were committed to understanding their collection from a Japanese traditional aesthetic viewpoint. And, so they too became practitioners. I am not certain how much they practiced tea, but I do know they remained very adept at the essential Japanese practice of toriawase, which is the creative display of objects in the tokonoma. (On aspects of practice in Tea, see here) For, as was mentioned, in Japan, people do not traditionally display their objects as part of the decor, but rather bring them out on special occasions where they are arranged in unique and always different ways. The choice of objects and display manner must reflect the season and the event. Usually, it hints or affects at some shared cultural context (perhaps a poem or a past tea gathering) in which all the participants share, but also can feel stimulated by the hosts fresh and creative take on the context.

On the Danziger collection and toriawase:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0D91E3DF933A2575BC0A961958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

**Also for more on practice in tea ceremony, see this excellent online article:

http://metamedia.stanford.edu/projects/SeeingThePast/314

**Collecting Chinese Art: Interpretation and Display  (Colloquies on Art and Archeology in Asia No. 20, Percival David Foundation) Tim Foster analyzes prices of Chinese art at auction to discover what forces determine monetary value (and the results would show Kant to be alive and well at Southey's) and Hiroko Nishida discusses tea ceremony's early days, before the influence of Zen, when the practice existed for the sole purpose of appreciating priceless Chinese art (karamono). From the very start the focus of tea ceremony was the creative presentation and *subjective and shared* appreciation of art objects (at the very start those art objects were composed solely of Sung and Yuan dynasty imported works of art that had been at one time part of the great collections of Shoguns or emperors). 

**Finally, one of my all-time favorite books by my hero, French Scholar Michel Beurdeley, The Chinese Collector through the Centuries ... There is so much to say about this book, but. for now, I will just copy a poem written by the tragic lady art collector par excellence, Li Qingzhao. Lady Li and her scholar-official husband had built up one of the finest collection of ancient bronzes-- not to mention books (unbelievable volumes of books) in Chinese history. She and her husband were known during Song times for their schoalrship and passionate love poems (many to each other). They were like movie stars. That is until the Jurchens stormed the walls of Kaifeng and everyone had to run for their lives. Leave behind the collection? She screamed, Never! And so it went. Here is her last poem

"The wind dies down, the scent of flowers fills the dusty air
The flowers are fading.
When evening comes I am too tired to dress
But I still have my pieces. My beloved is gone, all is finished.
I cannot speak wthout weeping." 

For more of shifuku:
http://www.teahyakka.com/HISTkireElayout.html

From an old email to a friend about imari porcelain:
In tea ceremony, fabrics from the Silk Route are
preserved
  and conserved
   and prized--
actually, they probably really only to continue to exist in Japan. The world owes a debt to Japan and their imperial family at least for this. Any scholar wanting to study silk road textiles, culture, dead central asian languages or musical instruments usually finds their way to Japan-- for some of the best surviving samples are stored safely in shosoin.

Tea ceremony kireji are mostly based on the old textiles preserved in Shosoin-- either Indian (and Persian) textiles, or the ones from the Continent: Sung, Yuan Ming or Qing textiles:
(My own formal kobukusa is a reproduction of a Yuan textile preserved in the shosoin. It is the oddest shade of blue that the more you look at it the more you think its really green. The pattern is made up largely of a jade color background upon which there are red lacquer color phoenixes. the brocade thread is stunning against the simplicity of a black raku bowl-- so says my sensei)

see:
http://www.teahyakka.com/kirejiEmain.html
http://www.teahyakka.com/HISTkireElayout.html

These kireji are not stored away behind glass, but rather are cut up and used to make tea ceremony fukusa-basami (the wallet used for holding your kanshi, etc.) and the kobukusa (tiny textile cloth used to set the teabowl on ), etc.

21st Asian History Carnival: Part 1 (Hiroshima & the Olympics)

   

The Eighth Month-- it was without a doubt overwhelmingly taken up with China and its "coming out party." An Internet acquaintance, a Noh actor and teacher, who was in Nagasaki around the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb, remarked that,

The entire world seems to be swept up with talk of the Olympics. Swimmer Kitajima retained his title during the breaststroke competition and Olympic news took up an overwhelmingly great part of today's newspaper. I wondered, what about Nagasaki? Checking, I found a short article on page 3 of the Sankei. As we enter an age where those who actually experienced the atomic bombing are growing fewer and people no longer know of war, have we perhaps forgotten what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? 

I am spending the summer in Los Angeles, but I imagine, like in all the Augusts of years past, things in japan have been relatively quiet concerning the anniversaries of the bombings. Probably Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓) was shown on TV like it often is around this time of year, and there may have been a short mention on the TV news both evenings.  I heard that this year PM Fukuda decided not to visit the shrine, so things may have been even quieter than usual...

Below, are some of the Hiroshima highlights (albeit the slim pickings) we saw across the blogosphere. My personal favorite was Eric Rauchway's Post One Bomb, in which he discusses Truman's statement to the American people after the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I recalled that last year this idea of One Bomb was also the focus of discussion in a different way. If we put Hiroshima aside for a moment and focus on the second one: Even if we were to accept that Hiroshima was necessary, what about Nagasaki? Was the second bombing bombing in any way justifiable?

Yes, two bombs. 

On that note, Japan Focus linked to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Declarations here. And, also on Japan Focus, these August Nuclear Thoughts by Gavin McCormack

Cliopatra had this on Hiroshima Revisionism by Robert James Maddox and this on dwindling US Army manpower by D.M. Giangreco.

Also, KML (No, that's not a city in Malaysia) sent me this Japanese Post, which is well worth reading. About the HBO film, White Light, Black Rain (see this article), which addresses-- vis-a-vis the film-- not only the Japanese as victims, but Japan's role as aggressor as well. (The film came out last year and was shown in theaters in Japan I believe last summer as well as this summer).

Finally, Jonathan Dresner's Post on the teaching the subject is also of interest as, indeed, I think it echoes frustrations felt by students of history as well as teachers of history.

As I said, though, it's been quiet.

The big news, of course, has been the Olympics. There is such an overwhelming amount of information that--- I present Peony's Unabashedly Opinionated List of Olympic Highlights. Enjoy!

For me, it was undoubtedly Jonathan Spence's 4th and final Reith Lecture that kicked off the season. (The transcript is here) In what was a 4-part series of lectures on China, I think many of you will agree that this last lecture stood out in what was otherwise a sleep fest. From ethical ("something elevating personal character") to national (something "in the name of nationalism") Spence's lecture did a great job of tracing the transition of sports in China.  It was of  particular interest to me as I am working on a translation of a philosophy paper in Japanese on a similar theme about the contemporary transition of sports in the West (from ethics to aesthetics: see this if you are interested in this kind of thing).

Xu Guoqi, who I hear has written a book about China and sports, wrote an article for China Beat explaining Spence's last lecture here. In addition to outlining the lecture's highlights, he also discussed some of the problems with the series as a whole (and indeed, it could have been so much more...) Also, of interest, was his Post on Ping Pong Diplomacy Revisited.

Moving on to the Opening Ceremony...First, without a doubt, I think Granite Studio's Jeremiah had the best hands-down "coverage" of the ceremony in Real Time-- see his Live Blogging of the opening Ceremony.

For an anthropological view of the opening ceremony: see this Post (also at China Beat) by Haiyan Lee. While I didn't really agree with the author's premise regarding the use of "ritual," I still thought this was an outstanding piece of writing and highly recommend it. As he says,

So is not the motto for the Beijing Olympics, “One world, one dream,” a tad naive? It’s a beautiful ideal, but it ill prepares one for the inconvenient fact of human plurality and the inevitable clashes of desires and interests. Might not “Many dreams, a single planet” better serve China as well as the rest of the world?

Moving on, China Beat had a series of interesting Posts about the Olympics in the media of various countries around the world. Here is the view from Israel, and these from Vancouver, New Zealand, and this one from Japan. All the views from around the world were really thought-provoking, and this one from Japan ended with the following words:

As one Japanese media observer said to me, it is doubtful if such negative coverage would be happening if the games were in Europe.

These words, I think were really prophetic as to what was to come.

Yes, the media. 

I have a friend who is recently returned to the US after almost two decades in Sweden. Talking about the media, she remarked that, "One can read an entire US newspaper and still not have any idea of what is going on in the world." She lamented that she is now forced to try and get all her news from various sources online. For me, no where was this more clear than in this month's US Olympic coverage. Is it just me, or would you call it low on reporting and high on spin? What is this need to put a gloss on everything? It wouldn't be so bad if the themes were not repeated to the point that people start regurgitating them as fact.

Talk about a Propaganda Department

Some of the cliches-- like the Nazi Games' comparisons-- were being trotted out in Spring before anyone had seen anything yet... See, this.

I think there were two main refrains-- or non-stories. 

The first was the "lip syncing CGI-enhanced children"  Never mind that this was not the first time lip-synching appeared in an Olympic Opening Ceremony (Pavarotti in Turin, for example); and never mind that China was putting on an international event that was being "staged" for the media; still, this song was sung so many times across the Internet as to become truly nauseating. How is the "enhancements" we saw in Beijing any different from everything coming out of Hollywood?  

And the second was the way too-repeated comparison to the 1936 Games staged by Nazi Germany. This was repeatedly stated-- but never argued-- in much the same way as Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech. Would the US media have dared to "go there" without backing up its claims if they were talking about France or Austria for example? Or Russia?

Zhang Yimou and Lenifenstal? Even the New Yorker repeated the references with no real explanation. I found it discouraging to say the least. And, no, I will not link to the sites. (But, I will give you Mary Beard here and here)

The US media coverage, indeed, made me really appreciate China Beat. And, my favorite contributor to China Beat, Jeff Wesserstrom had these 5 Gold Medals to give out for media sources that dared to move beyond the cliches.

And Michael. How could I ever forget Michael. See The Opposite End of China for the same issues where he highlights what is perhaps really at stake: the treatment of the ethnic minority groups (See his Posts here and here, for example).

However, having said that, I did want to recommend this from the China Digital Times: Zhang Yimou and State Aesthetics. Three Posts from the Chinese blogosphere are translated into English on the art and vision of Zhang Yimou.

Zhang's vision as the national aesthetic? It is true that watching the opening ceremony, the synchronized movements of thousands of performers was absolutely awe-inspiring. For a country with a collectivist focus, which also happens to have the world's largest population, it seemed fitting. And, yes, it did recall performances out of North Korea as well, as Zhu Drake explains (in #2):

Zhang Yimou is a master at directing  totalitarian group calisthenics. The visual impact of his art is built on it. Images of uniform soldiers, forests of arms and flags, and huge waves of dust are all used by him to show off the great power of an empire and the strength of unified will. The aesthetics of mass games is a form of fascist aesthetics, which existed during the  Nazi movement. The unity it advocates seems lovely: all people are subject to a supreme will and they break into deafening cheers for it.

Are the utilization of 2008 drummers, for example, representative of fascist aesthetics? I am open to the idea-- but hardly persuaded. Especially considering the fact that in Asian dance in particular, the synchronized movement of many dancers is considered to be aesthetically pleasing-- in a way perhaps greater than in the Western dance traditions-- where there is usually a prima ballerina dancing in front of the corps.  

I guess Im not the only one to be getting annoyed either as this is just off the presses from Jeff Wasserstrom.

Finally, I present another favorite from this year's Olympics-- The Olympics’ “civilizing” legacy: St Louis to Beijing. The article by Chinese sports historian Susan Brownell, first appeared on Chinabeat in May. Here is an interview with the author from the Seattle Times (note the comments as well which took issue-- as many might-- with her last paragraph).

And, last but not least, are Jim Gourley's photographs of Beijing's CCTV Building (one of his photographs is at top). One of the big stories coming out of these Olympic games has been the tremendous "Olympic-fueled" boom in new Beijing architecture. If you haven't taken a look at Jim's photographs yet, they are recommended viewing! And he also kindly sent along this from the LA Times' architecture critic: Christopher Hawthorne in China. Also recommended is China Beat's Eric Setzekorn, who did a 2 part series on Beijing architecture here and here.

Update: Of special interest to translators perhaps, but Chronicon Mundi posted this piece (which has been picked up here and there already around the blogosphere) on Olympic-style translating! Here for those who may have missed it. 

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Thanks to everyone who sent in suggestions-- and thanks to all for reading. Stay tuned for Part 2 soming up next month:

September 21 (大吉）　Part 2:  Notable Posts for Early Autumn

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If you have any suggestions for interesting Posts, please leave a comment here (The comments will not be published, and therefore only I will see what anyone comments-- so feel free to suggest your own stuff!) The librarian says he is still hoping for Korea & Japan-related Posts!

The 21st Asian History Carnival

 

Tang Dynasty Times will be hosting the next Asian History Carnival, so our librarian Señor Borges is hoping for suggestions for possible submissions.

The Carnival will appear in two parts.

August 23 (大吉）:        Part 1: Special Edition (Olympics & Hiroshima)

September 21 (大吉）　Part 2:  Notable Posts for Early Autumn

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If you have any suggestions for interesting Posts, please leave a comment here (The comments will not be published, and therefore only I will see what anyone comments-- so feel free to suggest your own stuff!) The librarian says he is especially interested in opening ceremony and olympic coverage posts (since he's not very sporty!) but more than anything, Korea & Japan-related Posts would be appreciated!

Le Dolce Vita: Welsch's Undoing Aesthetics

What is better-- to live a short and glorious life, or to live a long and easy one; a short life of stunning achievments which are talked about well into history-- or La dolce vita?  

I am preparing to start work on a new translation project for a philosophy professor I have worked with for several years now at a larg national university here in Japan. Going through some of the supplementary papers he wanted me to read, I discovered Wolfgang Welsch.

A philosophy professor at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Welsch works in aesthetics and is somewhat well-known in Japan (perhaps even more than in the US where his books are harder to find).

I am reading Chapter 1 of his Book, Undoing Aesthetics. The chapter is particularly interesting in light of my recent recollections of Heidegger and our Post-Modern paradigm. You will recall, that in my last Post, I began by laying out Heidegger's concept of "the clearing" -- or the history of the various understandings of being that have characterized Western European civilization. From heroes and saints to Kantian maturity and post-modern resources, Heidegger paints the history of the West in terms of cultural paradigms which he thinks have served as the background social practices that inform behavior and thinking.

Reading Welsch, I believe he would not disagree with this. However, he wants to stress the aesthetic dimension to this. Based on Nietzshe (who gets this from Kant), Welsch writes that

Nietzshe showed that our representations of reality not only contain fundamental aesthetic elements but are wholly aesthetic in nature. Reality is a construct which we produce, like artisans with fictional means-- through forms of intuition, projections, ohantasms, pictures and so on. Cognition is fondationally a metaphorical activity. The human is animal fingens. (22)

Animal fingens.

Like artists or virtuostic constructors we create forms of orientation, which must be as movably and elastically constituted as reality itself is fluid and changeaful. All our forms of orientation are aesthetic in a threefold sense: they are produced poetically, structured with fictional means, and in their whole mode of being of that floating anf fragile nature which had traditionally been attested only to aestheticc phenomena and had only been considered possible with these (22).

Now, my Professor in Hiroshima is interested in this expanded notion of aesthetics as it will help him, he believes, get beyond the narrow understanding of arts and aesthetics (specifically that of "the fine arts") that has held sway (dominated) the field of art history for a century or more in Japan. Indeed, the Western concept of fine arts versus crafts was totally alien to the Japanese and runs counter-intuitive to the traditional view of the arts that have informed Japanese thought on the subject for centuries.

I am also very interested in this topic, but more I am interested in the way Welsch is characterizing the manner in which human beings construct their various understandings of being as something which is fundamentally aesthetic in quality. I think it is an interesting point. 

However, what I am having a bit less success in understanding is his idea that our Post modern situation can be viewed in terms of an "aestheticization process." This sounds like a good thing-- as if everything is becoming more beautiful or pleasant (in the sense of a Disneylandification) but that is not necessarily all that Welsch is talking about.

In what he calls surface aestheticization , Welsch describes contemporary life as being concerned with the aestheticization of urban spaces ("a program to further the kitsch"); aestheticization of our bodies and even the aestheticization of own psychological states (or "the aesthetic spiritualization of our souls"). Hence, prettified store fronts, hard bodies, beautiful noses and meditation retreats in Colorado as he describes it.

Tying in to my long post yesterday about Philistinism, Welsch sees this as focusing our cultural practices so that:

In surface aestheticization the most superficial aesthetic aesthitic value dominates:  pleasure, amusement, enjoyment without consequence. This animatory trend today reaches far beyond the aesthetic enshroudment of individual everyday items-- beyond the styling of objects and experience-loaded ambiances. It is increasingly determining the form of our culture as a whole. Experience and entertainment have become the guidelines in recent years. A society of leisure and experience is served by an expanding culture of festivals and fun. And whilst some of the all too strident offshoots of aestheticization, or singular aspects of the cosmetics of reality, might raise a smile, with its extension to culture as a whole, this is no longer a laughing matter.  

Both Heidegger and Welsch seem to be describing similar phenemomena-- and neither, it seems are happy about what they see. I guess my main problem with Welsch is while I am interested in his seeing the aesthetic aspect of epistemology (the fictive elements or aesthetic foundations of things like scientificic theory or world-view constructing), still I am not convinced that we have become homo aestheticus.

The ancient Greeks, after all, were also very focused on beauty. Beautiful bodies, beautiful clothing and jewelry, the finest harpists and choruses, gorgeous theater and pagentry, banquets and love affairs. The Odyssey is intoxicatingly full of references to craftsmanship and finery...

Welsch is desribing a different kind of aesthetic focus I think, which is not completely clear to me. But he insists that everything is being "aestheticized."

He is best, I think, in his essay, Sport as Art, in which he traces the manner in which sports has moved from being conceived ethically (ie, Mathew Arnold's famous conception of "sport builds character") to that of an aestheticized form of amusement. Interestingly, though I'm not very sporty, still I think I still see sports in the older light, as something that should be "good for you"-- mind over matter, etc. Welsch does a really fine job, however, tracing the way sports is no longer viewed as an edifying practice which is an essential part of a proper education. Now, he says, "Sport has become a show for the amusmement of the entertainment society."

Yes, la dolche vita.

Still across Adonis' empire-- whether East or West, I am not necessarily seeing a rule of taste in the manner in which he is describing exactly. A hedonism yes. A philistinism, absolutely. At the same time, however, I would posit something quite different, and that is that our imaginative and creative powers and aesthetic sense is actually diminishing, and even what he describes as being an aesthicization is more like a useful prettification or efficient standardization of form and type....

Self-creation and Richard Rorty's poeticized culture? ( see this) It is also interesting in terms of Shusterman's thinking on modern aesthetics, body focus (somaaesthetics: see this)  and pragmatism... Yes, the pragmatists-- they remain impossible to ignore.

And this for Conrad  (to delight unto beckoning).

Penelope Waiting for Odysseus

 What is better-- to live a short and glorious life, or to live a long and easy one; a short life of stunning achievments which are talked about well into history-- or La doche vita? 

Some may recall that I have been listening to Hubert Dreyfus' Heidegger lectures on my iPod. I enjoyed them so much that I am now re-listening to his Philosophy 6 Lectures-- which have the intriguing title of From gods to God and back.

The class had a different title back then, but this actually was my very first class at Berkeley some twenty years ago (almost). And, just like with the Heidegger lectures, listening to Professor Dreyfus' voice all over again is just the most nostalgic experience I think I have ever had (It seems that I am now getting to the age where I can experience "nostalgia"...)

Ostensibly about the Great Books, Dreyfus inherited the class when he first arrived at Berkeley probably at least a decade before I got there. Professor Dreyfus-- being Professor Dreyfus-- however takes the class and runs. And even though Heidegger is nowhere on the syllabus, Heidegger remains the elephant in the room. Dreyfus begins the very first lecture with a presentation of Heidegger's concept of the clearing.

If humans have no essential nature as the Existentialists tell us (ie, "existence precedes essence"), then it is humans themselves who assign meaning to being. That is to say, that humans assign meaning and interpret not only the world around them, but their understanding of being itself, so that being is in fact intrinsically embedded within all the shared social and cultural practices by which we have been socialized and through which we understand the world around us. It is this understanding of being that Heidegger refers to as "the clearing" (lichtung). So fundamental and often times unconscious to us as well, these shared practices so inform how we understand things, that anything outside the paradigm will show up as incomprehensible (just like trying to get a flat-worlder to think about the earth being round-- it just "doesn't compute"). For another explanation see this.

To be perfectly clear, this goes far beyond what I have been talking about concerning our cultural heritage, cultural patrimony and memory, for example. This is not only to say that many of my friends in Japan would find it difficult to grasp the meaning of this Post's title (as their images of marital fidelity spring from different sources) but more that this shared background dictates everything from how close we stand to other people when we talk, to how we understand the deepest philosophical concepts concerning being itself.

(Special note for Conrad)

Dreyfus talks about these concepts of being in terms of Greek temples and European cathedrals. For us now, the ancient temples of Greece or the Medieval cathedrals are "sights"-- for those dwelling within those paradigms however, the temple or the cathedrals stood as what one scholar has called encyclopedias of stone. Everything made sense and everything was intelligible as part of an all-encompassing world-view, and therefore their experience was utterly different from how we today experience temples or churches (perhaps with the exception of practicing Catholics)

Even more illuminating are the various understandings of what it means to be a human being. Two that Dreyfus brings up a lot are heroes and saints.

In this existential scheme, Western history is not an unfolding progression of human development, but rather a history of several major understandings of being ( major paradigms or interpretations of being). None are better or worse than the others as some illuminate certain aspects of our humanity while others illuminate other aspects of our humanity. In that way, the heroes as represented in the Iliad or Odyssey don't really have it more or don't really have it any less "right" than we do. They just understood things differently.

Take Odysseus. The reluctant hero. He never wanted to leave his fields nor his wife. And Ithaca wasn't all that easy either. It was a rocky island where one had to work and feed oneself and weave one's own clothing... it was no Land of the Lotus Eaters. And yet, he never for a moment stopped wanting to get back, did he? He even stooped to less than dignified means to try and get out of the entire thing. Agamemnon and his ill-thought out war. Isn't that also intriguing--how much he didn't want to go? He never forgave Palamedes either for foiling his strategy for getting out of going off to Troy, and he bid his time till he could had his revenge.

Odysseus-- he just wanted to go Home.

He seems so familiar to us-- and yet, Odysseus also remains strangely un-familiar as well. He did, after all, go and fight. Heroically. All for honor and for a woman. Large-scale warfare for an insult over a lady? Well, it does sound odd. Not to mention the meddling ways of all those gods with their interesting human-like flaws....Penelope too was not exactly as she seemed either. And don't even get me started on Aeneas and Dido.

The Greeks were also un-familiar to the Medieval Christians as well for don't forget Odysseus was banned by Dante to the 8th level of Hell.

Even now, one can get a sense of this dis-connect when one travels overseas. People no matter how far you travel are fundamentally the same. We are born, we love our parents, we grow up, marry, love our children and then die. This is our biological nature. And yet, at the same time, our cultural background informs so many details of daily life, of how we think and how we understand ourselves and the world; how we raise our children and how we view "Country" or Heritage. Even if you buy the evolutionary psychology line, still I think it is apparent that the way in which we share an understanding of being affects the way we view the world around us.

So, returning back to the West, where once being was understood in terms of heroes and slaves (in ancient times) and saints and sinners (in Medieval times); and where power was positioned as a myriad of gods and the Good --versus God and the Church during Medieval times-- what have we now?

What is our Post-modern understanding of being? Dreyfus, elaborating on what Heidegger said about technology, I think gives an interesting answer.

Our post-modern understanding of self boils down to Resources. Not only things, but people (even our very selves) are viewed as resources to be used, bought, sold or bartered. Expressions of this understanding of being could include a striving to live lives that utilize our capabilities to the utmost; self-help, self-improvement, being the best you can be, etc. This is neither bad nor good... and people manifest this to differing degrees, though I do thinks modern people (myself included) have this desire to "get the most out of life" and "to develop" as people and individuals. All of these concepts, which were I think apparently absent from the ancient or medieval anthologies.

Dreyfus has an interesting anecdote in the first lecture, in fact, about St Augustine who amazed people with his story of St Jerome who was able to read the Bible silently. It seems difficult to imagine now, but before that time, people did not have inner lives in the way we think of them today and in fact people did not even read inside their heads, but read aloud. (Incidentally, my son is still unable to wrap his mind around the concept that I read without speaking)....With the Medievals, however, this stress on prayer and quiet reading-- and then later with our personal relation to God became ever more important. It was during ancient times a very alien notion, he tells us.

Returning back to our Post modern understanding of Being in terms of resources, relationships too can be viewed in terms of a cost-benefit analysis.

Are they useful? Are they conducive to bringing out the best in me?

And the post-modern Good? It is the Will to Efficiency; whereby the economic good is the economically efficient; the moral good is the most good for the most amount of people... you get the picture.

Art, religion, relationships, education, political policy all must serve the greater good-- that is, it must be useful or find itself obsolete. This goes well beyond materialism or efficiency as an adjective. This last point has so much resonance, I think, when we start talking about "American Philistinism" or "Where have all the Intellectuals gone?" it is a useful place to begin-- as indeed, education is no longer viewed as something to edify but rather as something that will serve a useful purpose, and intellectuals themselves are under the gone to be Relevant. People who care about intellectual matters are seen as snobbish and in Ivory Towers and indeed it is publish or perish-- (ie, be economically useful or find yourself another job) It wasn't always like this either (Recently I "read" a biography about Joseph Needham and his career would be quite frankly impossible today. Scholars just can no longer freely follow their interests that far afield.)

Conrad also does a really good job of presenting the issue here?(it is way far down but also see Xensen's comment 9/18/2007)

Heidegger, according to Dreyfus actually did find something worrisome in our post-Modern paradigm of Efficiency as the Good. And that is, it seems to imply a philistinism that actually defines as "Inefficient" all other paradigms-- thereby becoming a kind of black hole of all other paradigms. Other ways of doing things no longer "make sense" since they are inefficient and therefore "bad." Heidegger believed this was a fundamentally different understanding than all that came before it. For example, even during the crusades, the Christian Crusaders were not going out export their way of life in as much as they wanted to reclaim the holy Land and push the other side back.

This, I think is also interesting in terms of cross-cultural understanding, historical research and even the way we think about contemporary culture for anything not seen as efficient is therefore viewed as being irrelevant.

Yes, Philistinism.

And as Goethe said, "The Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own"

On Technology, see this paper (esp. the part on libraries with reference to this post of mine and this one too at Conrad's).