Did he talk to people who make those reconstructions?

Why speculate from that outside perspective when you could talk to people who worked on them and the decisions they made. I think that would be very interesting. As is that‘s completely missing and it feels a bit like aimless speculation and stuff that could be answered by just talking to the people making those reconstructions. My experience is that people doing scientific work love talking about it and all the difficult nuances and trade offs there are.

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jtr1 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The ending of the article left me feeling he had more of an axe to grind here. The mostly unspoken ideological background is that classical art is often appropriated by proponents of Western chauvinism to demonstrate their supposed innate cultural superiority. Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally. I agree that a more neutral observer would have been interested in learning the thought process of those researchers.

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marcellus23 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally

If I'm understanding you right, you're suggesting the author thinks that researchers are intentionally doing poor constructions to undermine public perception of classical art as part of some sort of culture war? I don't see anything in the article to suggest this

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sapphicsnail 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The enormous public interest generated by garish reconstructions is surely because of and not in spite of their ugliness. It is hard to believe that this is entirely accidental. One possibility is that the reconstructors are engaged in a kind of trolling.

It's towards the end of the article. He doesn't directly mention culture war stuff but he does talk about it being "iconoclastic." I think it's a reasonable interpretation of what he was saying.

	▲	marcellus23 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don't think it's reasonable. If there's context I'm missing and this guy has written about culture war stuff before, fair enough, but based on this article alone, I'm not seeing any indication of that.
	▲	simiones 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That phrase suggests more that the author believes this is done for spectacle, knowing that it will attract attention to the researcher far more than a nice-looking painted statue would. Basically he seems to be accusing these researchers of doing flame-bait for clicks, like those kitchen-top meal TikTok videos designed to get engagement by making people angry.

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efxhoy 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe my brain is oversaturated with culture war nonsense from too much doomscrolling but that’s where my train of thought went too, even if it wasn’t directly implied.

By claiming our ancient predecessors had terrible taste you can make them look like primitive fools, and make our own modernity appear superior in comparison.

When boiled down to culture war brainrot the poor coloring in the reconstructions becomes a woke statement that the brutish patriarchal empires of antiquity have nothing to teach our sophisticated modern selves and that new is good and old is bad. A progressive hit-piece on muh heritage.

Anything you don’t like is a purple haired marxist if you squint hard enough.

Idk why my brain went there. I’m guessing the years of daily exposure to engagement-farming ragebait had something to do with it.

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nyeah 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I liked the article but this is a very good point.

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mistercheph 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, these researchers have cultivated a public perception that the classical statues we admire looked totally ridiculous and were actually hideous. It is difficult to interpret it as unintentional, when the more absurd your reconstruction, the likelier you are to get press attention and get invited to special events at international galleries.

https://journals.openedition.org/techne/2656?lang=en

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788...

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/12/1109995973/we-know-greek-stat...

https://bigthink.com/high-culture/greek-statues-painted/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh...

https://steemit.com/news/@beowulfoflegend/greek-statues-were...

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arrrg 4 days ago | parent [-]

To get closer to an answer to this you should still talk to the people doing the actual work?

I know that many scholars have an uncomfortable relationship to the PR work their research institutions are doing, but they themselves don’t strike me as unapproachable or closed to nuanced discussion. Seems weird to ignore that perspective and wildly speculate from the outside.

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mistercheph 4 days ago | parent [-]

Who is inside and who is outside depends on your (subjective) spatial interpretation of the situation.

It could just as well be said that a bunch of scholars disconnected from the culture, history, and technique of fine arts (except as objects of scholarly interest) are wildly speculating from the outside about the nature of the objects, and people interested in these things are starting to ask "Why are these silly things being said about the topic I'm interested in? Are the people behind this pranksters?"

Anyways, if there is a misunderstanding here, which I don't doubt is the case for at least some of the people involved, why can't the discourse be had in public about it? The question has been asked as you suggest...publicly. Polychromic revivalists are free to respond in public, and we can all benefit from hearing the more nuanced perspectives get expressed.

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arrrg 3 days ago | parent [-]

How do you think public discourse spaces are created? By approaching and talking to people when you write about them! That doesn’t just magically happen …

I merely would have expected some humility when you characterize the work of other scholars from the outside without even talking to them. (Outside here is relative. Whenever you talk about scientific of scholarly work without talking to the people who do the work you are on the outside.)

If those scholars don’t want to talk to you, fair enough, probably no humility needed. If you don’t want to talk to them (which, fair enough, not everyone is cut out or wants to do journalistic work) you better be humble and maximally charitable, though.

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mistercheph 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Whenever you talk about scientific of scholarly work without talking to the people who do the work you are on the outside

You are ignoring what I said and just reasserting your hegemonic view of scholarly institutions / scientific work. On the contrary, if you zoom out it becomes obvious that our academic research in these matters is ephemeral heat and noise that gets rolled into the dustbins of time.

	▲	arrrg 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Your central claim is that scholarly academic (mainstream) work ist disconnected from fine arts and as such outside of it, no fit to give meaningful answers. That seems like a wild and weird take to me, contradiction everything I know about how the world works. But if that is your hypothesis then I don’t know how you can answer ist without actually engaging closely with those who you say are disconnected.