Any good books on the subject?
I recently saw some Van Gogh paintings and people really love/talk a lot about them, but it seems to me to be a bunch of white people just doing white people stuff.
Look at the wikipedia page for The Starry Night
Lots of words about what he meant and his mental state at the time, even tho he himself didn't talk much about it and sent it off with 9 other paintings.
Was it common for painters to support themselves with their art at the time? Is it common in history to have such a class of people? What sort of people brought the paintings? What did they think of them? What were the paintings made from? Where were those materials from and how where they made? Were painters considered "Artist" at the time, or more of a technical crafts man, like a black smith. How much money did they make? When did people decorating themselves and their environments turn in to "Art" for white people? Etc etc.
Those sorts of questions and answers are much, much more interesting to me than the mental state of some dude.
Maybe I'm just discribing an Art History book, but don't know enough to know what I don't know.
edit: also, dude cuts off his ear and then stays in a two story hospital room for a year that catered to the rich? I thought the dude was poor?
In addition to John Berger and Ways of Seeing, Walter Benjamin is the other big name for a foundation in Marxist art theory: https://www.reddit.com/r/modernart/comments/mpikm5/walter_benjamin_the_work_of_art_in_the_age_of/
I also run that subreddit with at least one other mod from here so it is/will be a socialist art subreddit. Modernism is an extremely radical period with a lot to teach us.
edit: I also like that you intuited most of the big questions of Marxist art criticism. Art as a culmination of productive forces, as a commodity versus something with cultic significance, as superstructural spectacle and class warfare. The other big thing I'd point you in the direction of is the anticolonial side of modernism with movements like Negritude. It provided a really interesting counterweight to movements based around colonial extraction like Japonisme/Chinoiserie/cubism. Art as understanding wider psychic phenomenon, like the transition from machine worship and utopianism in futurism to the terrified babel of Dada and focused reform efforts of Constructivism/Social Realism in the wake of WW1, is also super interesting from our perspective.
Music history textbooks are the same way. Nearly all of the recorded music before the 20th century in Europe is written for the church or for royal courts. This isn't because people outside these institutions didn't play music; it's because only these institutions had the resources to store music in written form.
Handel is probably one of the first "real" musicians to make money without relying on the church or a court (he relied on season tickets, more or less) and he was a fucking hardcore grifter. Mozart was basically a music teacher, though he wasn't above mixing with the music hall for Magic Flute.
Not till Rossini in the 1820s do you really see some hardcore commercialisation in "High Music" (Rossini retiring filthy rich at 35 to invent professional foodposting)
That said, a lot of folk music was saved by rich amateurs, particularly ones like Ramsey and his "definitely not a Stuart supporter just really love the songs bro" angle.
It's worth speculating what we would hear if there was an Alan Lomax type traveling around Europe during the medieval, renaissance, or classical eras. How similar would those recordings be to the surviving written music?
Alan Lomax
There were, during the classical era at least. We actually have a lot of folk pieces from the last 1000 years.
Allan Ramsey, for instance, collected Scottish Lowland music of the late 1600s, even weaving them into a ballad opera. And of course, Gay's Beggar's Opera of the 1720s carries most of the hits of the day and previous eras. The opening song is "Sumer is icumin in" a popular Anglo-Norman folk song of around 1200. A dance tune (more of a chord progression really before the 1600s) "La Follie" from the 1400s is still sung today by second rate classical crossover artists ("Say another prayer in the night" is the most well known modern version, I think.) Germany had a real hardon for adapting folk songs for reformation hymns, as did non-conformists.
In the renaissance court composers started to steal folk tunes as part of their push for "Greek Simplicity" and composers have continued ever since or adapted folk methods in their compositions. Flotow uses "The Last Rose of Summer" as his key leitmotif in "Martha" and he isn't the only one.
Also, with many many people getting musical training of some kind singing styles were more...classical (well, baroque) in western Europe than you might think, even for "low" music. (EDIT: here's one of Ramsey's, not for the faint of heart to sing, gonna be using all the octaves you've got.)
Of course, sometimes it goes the other way. Compare the French 18th century court ballad "Plasir d'Amour" to Elvis' "just can't stop falling in love with you".
Yeah, its the same thing that happened in the fossil record. Even today, the majority of living things don't have bones, and even if they do, the most of the animal is soft tissue and lost to history. I imagine that there was lots of really, really cool art/music that simply is lost to history for forever. I'm reading The Dawn of Everything and turns out that humans have been dope for a long time, but 99% is lost to history because they didn't have written records (that we know of/survived to the modern day).
Great quote on this from the 14th century scholar Ibn Khaldun:
“In a way [my undertaking] is an entirely original science. In fact, I have not come across a discussion along these lines anywhere. I do not know if this is because people have been unaware of it...[but] perhaps [people] have written exhaustively on this topic, and their work did not reach us... The knowledge that has not come down to us is, after all, larger than the knowledge that has. Where are the sciences of the Persians...the Chaldaeans, the Syrians, the Babylonians...the Copts and their predecessors? The sciences of only one people, the Greeks, have come down to us...as for the sciences of others, nothing remains.”
Or so David Graeber would have you think lol. I loved that book. Will probably read a second time.
Yeah, impossible to know.
But he makes a pretty convincing argument, if you assume humans be dope.
For those that don't know, this is the kind of thing he is talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_Point
A giant monument that seems to have been built for religious activities. Hard to imaginge that there wasn't cool music and art going on at the same time. Considering the construction would have required many generations and planning between hundreds of people, all without evidence of any centralized power structure.
Vincent van Gogh was poor, he was bankrolled by his younger brother Theo (who died shortly after).
Look up “primitive art”, there have always been class divides in commodity fetishism
T J Clark is pretty great and I'm pretty sure is a Marxist. Can definitely recommend his books! Also Mark and Allan Antliff
