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Art Nouveau and Art Ancien
Mar. 15th, 2010 11:59 amVia ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
silksieve: Art Nouveau Disney Princesses! Aren't they adorable? My favorite is Aurora. (Never mind I've never seen Sleeping Beauty... maybe I should do something about that.) I'm so sad there isn't one for Belle, though!
I've always liked Art Nouveau; it's a pity it didn't last longer as a style. It was, I guess, too ornamental - what an odd culture we are, that a thing can be too pretty to be art. I've run into this in art history - a touch of disdain about how ornamental, gaudy even, Archaic (as opposed to Classical) Greek art is.
The Greeks themselves didn't have a word for art: they had techne, which could refer to sculpting or shoemaking or anything that required skill to do. I'd like to think this means they held shoemaking (like sculpting) in high esteem, but given the wages they paid the Parthenon craftsmen - a drachm a day, subsistence level - I think they thought of sculptors as low-status makers of particularly lovely shoes.
silksieve: Art Nouveau Disney Princesses! Aren't they adorable? My favorite is Aurora. (Never mind I've never seen Sleeping Beauty... maybe I should do something about that.) I'm so sad there isn't one for Belle, though! I've always liked Art Nouveau; it's a pity it didn't last longer as a style. It was, I guess, too ornamental - what an odd culture we are, that a thing can be too pretty to be art. I've run into this in art history - a touch of disdain about how ornamental, gaudy even, Archaic (as opposed to Classical) Greek art is.
The Greeks themselves didn't have a word for art: they had techne, which could refer to sculpting or shoemaking or anything that required skill to do. I'd like to think this means they held shoemaking (like sculpting) in high esteem, but given the wages they paid the Parthenon craftsmen - a drachm a day, subsistence level - I think they thought of sculptors as low-status makers of particularly lovely shoes.
