The revenge of the authentic

 In 2016, visionary architect and theorist Léon Krier held a lecture at the international seminar 'Architecture and Traditional Building Crafts', in which he explored the concept of 'fake'.

Creation is personal expression through imitation. What? This seems to be a nonsensical paradox: creation is supposed to be an original expression, while imitation reflects lack of ideas, so: no expression, let alone personal expression, but 'fake', something inauthentic because lacking the personal signature. But the process of creativity is much more complex than such simplistic assumptions suggest.

The creative mind uses available means to turn them into personal instruments of expression. It is impossible to develop a craft, without the necessary imitation of means. In the process of absorbtion, the means are transformed because the context within which they will reappear, will be determined by the creative mind. This changes the meaning of the means, and they become 'new' in the process, in the sense that they themselves are 'old' but their function within their new context turns the whole into a new creation. This is the secret of the great creators, including the great innovators: artists, composers, architects, writers, poets, philosophers.

Krier explains that the artifice of modernist buildings simply erode in the course of relatively short time because of structural flaws, while the authentic remains of ancient architecture still stand high, in spite of the ravages of time. Here is his lecture - rather sketchy at places, but it all hangs together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQdmsyqTp1U

 What would be the lesson for classical music, for contemporary music?

Clearly, the fear of imitation would have to go, and be replaced by a better understanding of the creative process in terms of originality, personal signature, expression, mimetic mindset. Ages of practical knowledge of how to write meaningfuol music offer a wealth of means to learn from, and to turn them into authentic instruments of personal expression, for whatever expressive purpose.

Knowing the craft of the past is necessary for any future development of the art form. This goes beyond style: under the surface, the musical dynamics (including psychodynamics) of Lassus, Monteverdi, Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, etc. etc. are the same - it is only the surface level which takes-on a different character in every period, in the hands of every composer. So it is with architects, painters, poets, writers, etc. It is a fundamental process profoundly embedded in our human nature.

Krier is a pioneer and a visionary, and in the same time a very practical, rational man. His project design for the quarter Tor Bella Monaca, in the Roman suburb of Alessandria, is of a stunning beauty, and entirely designed according to the practical needs of modern humans, and on a welcoming human scale, using the local Italian traditional style but translated into a contemporary idiom which is also timeless, universal, demonstrating the relationship between tradition and interpretation.

The design was sabotaged by the Roman administration and then boycotted by the media, no one image of the presentation has been published in Italy, and this video is the only visual information to be found on the web, published by Krier himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyNmj-hQVg4

Europe is structurally bad

In Die Zeit a noteworthy article: ‘We, eternal racists‘. Claim: Europe is structurally racist. Without colonial exploitation and slavery, the development of Europe’s prominent place in the world would not have been possible:

“Europas Aufstieg wäre ohne koloniale Ausbeutung und Versklavung unmöglich gewesen.“ 

https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2020-06/rassismus-in-europa-kolonien-geschichte-verdraengung-sklaverei 

In an understandable and laudable attempt to make readers more aware of unconscious racist behavior, the whole of European history and identity is painted as racist: everything European is white privilege, a luxury bought on the destruction of ‘The Other’: the non-European. There is, by implication, no European achievement, in whatever field, which can escape the burden of crime on a vast scale. Enlightenment values, democratization movements, human rights formulations (postwar Eleonore Roosevelt) are ALL Western products which have in them a concealed contempt for everything that is not European/Western (did Indians or Chinese or Africans have any say in the formulation of human rights?). Western culture is thus also entirely and structurally racist, a product of a vile civilisation.

All of this is a flagrant lie. For instance, historical research has revealed that, although colonial exploitation has contributed to Europe’s wealth, and many economic activities could somehow be related to slave trade, these forms of exploitation consisted only in small percentages in relation to the total of economic benefits. In such accusatory generalizations, the benefits that ‘the colonies‘ experienced are, conveniently, left out of the equasion. For instance, recently the International Institute for Social History in Leiden (Netherlands) have carefully calculated what the contribution of the Dutch slave trade was in 1770 to the general wealth of the country. In that year, the atlantic slave trade was at its highest. It appeared to be 5,2% of the gross domestic product. For other European countries at the time it will have been something similar, on average. The idea that all European wealth is due to exploitation and colonial suppression, that it is somehow ‘stolen’ from non-European areas, leaves out all the other trade, like fishing, exchange of goods which were produced within Europe, etc. 

https://knaw.nl/nl/actueel/nieuws/de-betekenis-van-de-atlantische-slavernij-voor-de-nederlandse-economie-in-de-tweede-helft-van-de-achttiende-eeuw 

It makes one think of cultural critic Edward Said, one of the founders of the academic field of ‘postcolonial studies’, who in ‘Orientalism’ claimed that all Western attempts to understand ‘the East’ and ‘Easterners’ were distorted projections of Western fantasies, all coloured by racist prejudice. The reality is, that many European scientists spent much and sometimes all of their life time locally to explore and understand Eastern cultures, the products of which fertilized European science and culture, and greatly contributed to the understanding of the ‘Orient’. Not for Said: only people like him, who were orientals by birth, could say something worthwhile about their own culture. If this is not cultural racism, I don’t  know what else it could be. His connection with Daniel Barenboim is thus tainted with quite an amount of unscientific posturing.

The implication of such idiocy as exposed in the Zeit article is, that European culture as a whole is supposed to be tainted by crime and that any rejection of it is morally justified. So, not only painting, literature and science is burdened, but also classical music, which is the product of white privilege based upon exploitation of ‘the other’, i.e. classical music is inherently racist by its sheer existence. Structurally so.

It is understandable that people with a personal distaste for Western culture, and/or for classical music for political reasons, would wholeheartedly welcome such ideas, they seem to justify any attack upon any Western art, especially what is inherited from the past.

 

Simple question: were all the great European artists who have contributed so much to the culture as accessible to and as a possession of the whole of humanity, responsible for the society in which they were born? 

I think one cannot object loudly enough against such absurd ideas which have nothing to do with reality.