What Causes a Golden Age like The Renaissance?
Some lad on Twitter said these modern statues are proof that the West is still thriving and we are in a Renaissance:
This is a good chance for me to dunk on the poor lad and illustrate a juicy idea - we’re not… and these statues are the opposite
When we contrast them to the real Golden Ages we get a clarity on why they come about
You see, there were two peak expressions of Western Culture:
- The Athenian Golden Age of 500 BC
- The Rebirth of this in the 1500s AD
When you look at the art from these periods you see a surreal shift in presence in the works
Look at this brilliant breakdown:
The top two are known as kouroi statues from 600BC Greece - this was the century before the Golden Age
They have an autistic and frosty glare - they seem a bit lifeless and dud
Of course they are powerful in their own way, but they are a representation of something, they're not alive
They were known in their time as "symbols" of Youth
Around 500BC something like a gear shift takes place - the Greek statues develop rich expressions and a sort of "individuality" - the statues themselves look alive
They have presence
This took place alongside a huge explosion of culture in ancient Athens - the arrival of Theatre, the creation of drama, the Olympics, Philosophy, and great festivals
This is the period Nietzsche called the Birth of Tragedy He spent his life wondering how such a moment happened, and how to get back to such a moment
This is the actual meaning of his work
Strangely, you can see how the Renaissance had the exact same shift in psychology
Medieval art is fun and quirky, but it has a cartoony and flat feeling to it
All of a sudden the Renaissance brings a full return to an "aliveness" and presence
Michelangelo said he felt like he was freeing an angel trapped in stone when carving David
The outpouring during the Renaissance also was a total cultural expansion - philosophy, science, art, and even medicine went through paradigm shifts
Our age is not defined by this aliveness at all, we are much more like the rigid and frosty medieval cartoons or the "representational" statues
Ai has the effect of killing off this "lifelike" quality in art
This is all a symptom of a far deeper and stranger problem - a dead soul
Most of the charlatans in our time try to convince you otherwise, that we are in a New Renaissance
In order for us to even start on that path, we'd need a psychological revolution - everything is downstream from that...
If you want the full breakdown
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A psychological revolution may not be upon us, but the seeds have been laid down and well sown into culture, by the likes of Carl Jung, and his student Jordan Peterson, both highly original thinkers. These are far from accepted by the mainstream, but that's not a problem. A Renaissance-level surge of creativity is brought on by local nodes of enthusiasm that feed off each other and reenergize one another into a cultural snowball, or fireball, surging in libido (as in life-force). Our generation's libido is hijacked by porn. We are not strong enough to overcome the intensity of addictions on offer in the modern world. God help us.
I heard that the in Ancient Greece the explosion in artistic quality was after a major period of war where they had to come to terms with the fragility of life.
Also it is alleged that Greece had the most flourishing art when it veiled women, that sexual promiscuity is inversely proportional to artistic output. I cannot verify these claims.