I should be doing more to appreciate the lack of marvel movies in today's popular culture. I once yearned for marvel movies to have this level of irrelevance. They used to feel almost ozymandian, like an empire that had no beginning and no end. and now tony stark iron man is naught but two vast and trunkless legs of stone.
There was a whole ass Star Wars movie that premiered last Friday and it got overtaken by a million dollar horror film on the following Wednesday, nature is healing.
I am not a fan of most modern art that tries to be contemporary, edgy, statement making, or 'oh look I'm so cool bc its a banana taped to a wall' Some people do it authentically, and while I may not love the thing they made, I can respect it. Lots of people see something authentic and try to emulate it but you can feel that it's a mimic. For instance, the student at my school who had seen the installations that are meant to look like piles of trash spilled from the corner of a gallery and felt inspired, so poured a pile of trash on the ground. It didn't land as art. Custodians cleaned it up. There was a whole drama about it. Honestly, I think them cleaning it up is more compelling than the original art bc it makes you consider whether its still art if no one can tell. If that was on purpose, I'd maybe like it. T'wasnt.
But Ai Weiwei, man. I'm not obsessed with him, and for some reason my brain deletes his name regularly so I have to search the internet using weird descriptions, but every single time I think about him, I have to take a second. The piece I first heard about, which is his most famous, is Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995)
That's a 2000 year old urn, getting casually, irreparably, shattered on the ground. He dropped two of them actually, to make sure he got the shot. Those urns get referred to as being worth a million dollars. But, as he said:
Ai explains that when he came across these Han dynasty ceramic objects, they were just a dime a dozen: “I still have a photo of when I was in Xi’an. There was a farmer sleeping on top of these two urns waiting for someone to pay him a few hundred yuan. For him that was a few months’ salary, but even then nobody wanted them.” x
He has a ton of them, and another of his works, Colored Vases (2006-present) takes Han Dynasty and earlier, like, fricking neolithic pottery, and coats them in super intense modern colors and materials.
I am obsessed with archaeology and early humanity and the nature of who we are. On paper, I should despise this man, and I should curse his name each time he pours paint over another relic of an ancient time. And its done sloppily by the way. It's not a meticulous repainting like he's restoring them. It's drippy and rushed, and they're gorgeous.
If I'd heard about him in advance, or if I had been in a shitty mood the first time I saw his work, I probably would hate him.
Instead.
It hits me in the gut each time and makes me think about mass production and modernization. About the way we invoke nostalgia and reverence for the past, even when there was nothing special. These urns were considered garbage for a long time. They were, for the time period, mass produced. They're the terra cotta planter at a Lowes. What makes them special is that they're old, and that suddenly, China wanted to invoke ancient glory.
This isn't the sole artifact that science has to examine. This isn't an exceptional, royally commissioned Celadon from Korea. There's so many of these out there he could just buy up a bunch of them off street vendors.
It's the way something can be precious without being rare, or rare without being precious, and that value is not a fixed thing. The way that age doesn't matter until a culture decides to revere it.
Do you know how many ancient monuments and constructions got stripped for parts by people a couple centuries later?
We had a meltdown when Notre Dame lit on fire. When activists want attention they throw soup at the Mona Lisa. First, it's super well protected from that. Second, its not in great shape. Third, it's only revered bc I guy tried to steal it.
But that first piece. Dropping a a Han Dynasty Urn.
There's a thoroughly neutral challenge in that piece that always gets me. It's a bold statement, don't get me wrong, and it is a controversial piece.
An artist who saw that an wanted to mimic it, might throw it, or shoot it, or hit it with a bat. It would be aggressive. But if you make the destruction aggressive, you're undermining the point. You've elevated the value of the thing you're destroying by making it a big deal. He didn't. Look at those photos of him. He's staring at you, and he's not backing down, but it's almost casual. It's less a look of 'fuck you' and more a look of 'and? so what?'
It was mass produced then, and the value we put on it is fake. The only reason you care is because its old and someone told you that you should. If someone broke that thing two millenia ago, yeah, it was annoying, and you needed a new one, and maybe you were broke so that sucked, but it wasn't controversial. Maybe the cat knocked it off the shelf and you grumbled, but you still pet the kitty after bc the noise scared them.
Anyway. I saw a post talking about excellent art, and this slammed into the front of my mind again.
There's something in this held up next to genAI, but that isn't fully formed in my brain yet.
People love natives in such a superficial way. People wanna stand with natives when we’re talking about the trees, and the land. People wanna stand with natives when we talk about philosophies of love and togetherness. But as soon as it’s time to talk about political side of being native. About dismantling a system built on the genocide of our people. About how we need a new system that isn’t built upon capital gain and benefitting white bodies. About putting up a fight. About how the colonial state we reside in is a disgusting imperial plague on this land. Suddenly y’all don’t wanna talk native.
"They spent hundreds of years trying to assimilate my ancestors, trying to create indians like me, who could blend in, but now they don’t want me either. They can’t make up their minds.
They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.
They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.
Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in
TLDR- Modern agriculture pollen is low in nutrients, and there aren’t enough wildflowers. Science has to develop vitamins to supplement the diets of agricultural bees. So plant some wildflowers for the wild bees near you.
According to Russell Mills, who created the artwork, a live album was also planned as a companion to Closure and artwork was made for it, but the idea was scrapped.
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