I just need to do some venting because i have been trying to get more educated lately about various forms of art throughout history and the more i read the more angry i get with the way the entire subject is treated from such a Eurocentric and frankly often outright racist perspective.
And this is not just a problem in the West, throughout the world somehow Europeans have managed to brainwash the entire rest of the world into idolizing their art, their music, their culture and putting it on some kind of pedestal as this sort of gold standard. Why the fuck do parents in Asia for instance so often send their kids to learn to play European classical music instead of the music of their own countries? Why is it that when you read about the "greatest composers of all time" they are all some pasty Euro fuckers, most of them making art primarily for the consumption of wealthy aristocrat patrons?
As if other cultures weren't also making various forms of art for thousands of years - and many of them were no less sophisticated. (And mind you even in Europe the representation exludes the art of the lower classes, who certainly had their own music and culture that was distinct from that of the upper classes.) For once i'd like to see an African, Middle Eastern or Asian painter, writer, or composer of music traditional to their own regions get praised and elevated to the same level of respect, admiration and universal recognition as the European "classics". Why do we constantly have to put up with this big circlejerk about how "great" some toffs in wigs were for writing music that in large part only the rich could afford to have played for them because it required an entire orchestra with an absurd amount of performers?
Of course i know the answer to these rhetorical questions, it's because the dominant culture in any society tends to be the culture of the ruling class. I understand this but it still pisses me off how inescapable European upper class culture is. One of the tasks ahead of us when the revolution comes will have to be the dismantling of the centuries of accumulated cultural hegemony of the Euro bourgeoisie. The Soviets were right to encourage socialist realism as a radical departure with the bourgeois culture of the capitalist system. We need a global cultural revolution.
Even the byzantines hated their "fellow westerners" who came over, took their capital and declared themselves the "actual Roman empire" in Latin while the actual Romans resisted their occupation. On side note even studying the story of Math you get this fun phenomenon where a bunch of Mediterranean mathematicians develop a lot of cool stuff, then a 1000 years of silence (because Europe did nothing of value) and then suddenly after the Crusades they mysteriously "discover" a whole lot more math that sounds awfully similar to Arabic and Indian concepts. It usually goes Pytagoras -> Zeno -> Archymedes -> ?????? -> Euler
Islamic Golden Era!
Thanks for mentioning this. Though I think it is well known that Arabic and Indian societies were ahead of Europe with regards to mathematics for a long time, I have never thought about the lack of famous mathematicians outside of Europe. That being said, any serious mathematician would say that being a great mathematician is just as much as being at the right place at the right time as a being a genius. It is sad that these names are, if not lost to history, at least not well known, but praising any name of a discipline that builds on previous works in the way mathematics does is a little wrong in the first place. Even the dickhead Newton admitted as much with the "shoulders of giants" comment with regards to himself.
Basilla Irene is my favorite part of this. Einhard made up some shit about Charlemagne visiting Constantinople because Irene asked him to marry her. The letters probably did not exist and Charlemagne certainly didn't travel that far east. Irene ended up being couped by her nephews (or cousins, I'm still away from my library) to restore a man on the Roman throne. Just around that time, because the pope saw the Roman throne as technically vacant, and his position as weak in relation to the surrounding Italian principalities,he in invited Charlemagne to Rome under false pretenses and tricked him into a ceremony where he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. This didn't change relations with the east however, the Ottomans becoming the sultan of Rum did that. Most of the "lost" knowledge came frome raids and trade with the Muslim world, notibly the reconquesta in Iberia (see the La Chanson de Roland for more).