The interesting series of reading that I enjoyed and
suffered this week, as a part of my strange way of living in my new situation,
happy like a bookworm in a library and tired like a bear in his cave, proposed
to me a number of topics to follow.
The two most interesting in my personal (and in the case of
the blog de facto indisputable) opinion are:
·
a repetition of last blog’s thematic of “history
and memory for the big public: the fundamental and yet misleading role of media
in shaping our sense of the past”
·
house museums: on the verge of beauty and
boredom
·
radical chic art and the futility of the hipster
history.
(They are three, I know; but the third is so heavily charged
by my personal, wrong and shameful distaste for performing art and everything
remotely linked to Duchamp that I can’t purposely write about it).
This two, as I said, arguments by themselves couldn’t
represent the readings properly, so let’s mix them together.
I remember a good number of house museums that I visited: a
farm with a reconstruction of the life at the time, Washington’s Mount Vernon, the
birth house of Napoleon in Ajaccio, a marvelous palace of Cardinal Spada, which
is perhaps one of the first of his kind, being there without any major
modification from the Seventeenth Century.
But the one that is connected the most with the readings is
the house of an academic. A very sophisticate man, art critic, English
literature scholar, his name was Mario Praz. I had to read one of his books for
an undergraduate class of mine. The book is almost esoteric and often difficult
to decrypt, but express clearly a deep love for objects, and indeed he was also
a great collector.
The first time I went to the house I went because of the
name: my entire life I was attracted by anything that was military, thing that
perfectly collide with my pacific attitude (I hope so), but drove me and my
poor parents with me all around the most unvisited museums. No museum was as disappointing
as the Napoleonic one: indeed it was a house, full of art and dusty stuff
apparently piled in the most disorganized way. Only after ten years, when I read
the book for class and I had to go again to the museum, I understood the
strange logic of beauty behind the collection and only learning from the text
the history of some objects I could understand their value.
Literature, readings and emotional connection: objects and
rooms are nothing but meaningless junk if there is not knowledge, interpretation
and interest. I was impressed to read about the displays in Mark Twain’s house
(ok ok Mr. Clemens) and I wandered what a little bit of imagination could have
done in Mario Praz’s house.
Imagination and entertainment are at the center of the other
idea that was twisting around in my mind while I was reading. Trying to learn English
while I was waiting for the clearance of my Visa Status, I went to the right
place: YouTube. I found a very neat program “The Edwardian farm”. Despite it
suffered the capital sin of being a reality tv show and the even worst one of
having historians and archeologist as actors it was a really educative series
that was easily putting the audience in the context of the everyday life of a
farmer of the late Nineteenth early Twentieth Century.
Intellectual and sophisticate beauty or reality tv show: I
don’t know what is the correct answer, if there is one. In a perfect world
everyone would see a very beautiful and educational reality tv show, one that
increase not only the knowledge, but also the perception of the world; everyone
would be an historian and everyone would read the kind of heavy military
history books that I like. But I would not like to be in a world like that perhaps
because as Marx (Groucho) said once “I would never be part of a club of a which
I am a member”.
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