Azaran on 25/3/2024 at 13:17

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Maybe wait till adulthood for actual surgery to see if it's a phase, or the person really is trans.

(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7415463/) And by the way



The whole thing about people feeling they're in the wrong body, that's exactly what it is.

Cipheron on 25/3/2024 at 16:46

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The point could have been better made, as in the link I provided in the last page. The romanticism of the countryside was linked to the rising middle/upper classes during the industrial revolution, and the new accessibility they discovered of such places due to the railways.

While the artist themself wouldn't have had any such motivations, that was the cultural milieu which created the market for that specific art at that specific time.

So I definitely think comparisons could be made between that art's historical relevance to Britain and southern American art from the plantation era that would have depicted idyllic (white) southern life. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the art itself, or the person who made the art, but the mere existence of the art itself is due to some less than stellar circumstances.

heywood on 25/3/2024 at 17:41

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Works of art are not documentaries. Motives are being ascribed to these paintings based on 21st century values in the absence of evidence of those motivations in the art itself or by the artist, and in apparent ignorance of the broader romantic movement. I think they are being hijacked to serve modern intellectual interests. Just because colonialism was happening at the same time doesn't mean they are works of nationalist propaganda.

Nicker on 25/3/2024 at 19:06

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I don't think that modern interpretations, like the plaque in question, are ascribing motives in the sense of some preconceived propaganda purpose, intended by the artist or their patrons. That said, producing saleable paintings, pleasing to the monied class, was certainly a motivation for working artists.

But idyllic, pastoral scenes, cannot be divorced from the social politics of their day. Even if they avoid direct comment or criticism of the time they were created in, they cannot help reveal truths about the historical context in which they were made. What was left out says as much about the industrial age as what is depicted.

When James Douglas landed here, on Vancouver Island, in the spring of 1843, he found fields of clover surrounding groves of lush oak trees shading a blanket of royal purple flowers. He declared it was is if a piece of heaven and fallen to earth. A living landscape worthy of John Constable's brush. A piece of Britain, half a world away! A sign from God.

He didn't know that, what appeared to be untamed wilderness, was an engineered landscape, just like the “wild” forests of England had been for centuries. This land was carefully groomed by the Lekwungen people, over thousands of years. Brush was suppressed to create pasture for deer and fields where the Camus Lilly, a critical food source, could thrive. While there were no fences, every family knew and respected the traditional boundaries, for these plots.

There is little doubt for me, that the romantic landscape paintings of that era, played a significant role, inspiring and maintaining the emotional and spiritual justifications for British colonialism, even at that late date. Side note; by the time Europeans made contact with indigenous populations of the Pacific Northwest, the diseases introduced by Columbus, thee hundred years earlier, had already killed at least eighty of West Coast First nations people. A generation after Douglas arrived, measles and small pox reduced the native population to a few hundred om the south island. Just saying.

Pretending that art from the colonial period is merely decoration, is not only a bit dishonest, it is, quite frankly, impossible. Requiring us to ignore historical context and simply enjoy the pretty picture, is rather like excusing misogyny and racism in classic literature, because everyone back then was doing it. We can't hold previous generations directly accountable to modern norms but we can't simply ignore art's passive and active role in history.

John Turner was a contemporary of Constable and Palmer but he incorporated the smoke and chaos of the Industrial Revolution in his landscapes. The View of Lee, North Devon may not be (https://www.pablopicasso.org/assets/img/paintings/guernica3.jpg) Guernica but it still speaks volumes about its age. You cannot pretend otherwise.

Well, you can pretend, I won't

Starker on 25/3/2024 at 21:23

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While works of art themselves may not be documentaries, it's not like you can't or shouldn't bring a work of art into a broader context of what was happening culturally, socially, politically at the time. Romanticism was not just some hippy-dippy "let's just enjoy pretty nature because all these ugly machines have appeared" movement, it was also a criticism of the age of rationalism and enlightenment and the industrial progress that was rapidly changing society. Romanticism itself cannot be divorced from the way people perceived the world and thought about it. And I would argue that the ways it reacted to things and the seeds it planted are itself highly relevant to the art it produced.

Also, who says we can't bring modern perspectives into art that is not from "our era"? This discussion is relevant to us, to our understanding, to our interests. It is perfectly valid to discuss old works according to our current understanding of them. It's not like we have to (or necessarily can, even) descend into a medieval mindset every time we discuss Chaucer.