Of Chinese New Year and artsy ramblings

Shocking... I've only posted TWICE since CNY last year... That's once every 6 months. I guess the tiny handful of you guys that do actually visit have given up already =) Apologies, I've indulged too much in my private, offline journal to find enough time to write in here. The second "barrier" to writing in this blog is that I've changed email address, and stupid Blogger doesn't allow blog users to change the email associated with their account. It's too much of a hassle to log in on my old email add here, esp when this logs me out of my iGoogle account.

Anyways, how are you finding the new layout? It's a special temporary one just for CNY - I'll be switching it again after Feb is over. I rather like it, actually, even though the column is annoyingly narrow and the designer forgot to write the code to enable comments. It's quite "Chinesey" and festive without being too in-your-face bright. Quite impressed that I managed to play around with HTML after nearly 2 years without doing any (the last time I changed my blogskin), and I even manage to insert some code and fix the comments problem!

Ok, this post is going nowhere. Since my last "update for 2007" post I've gone through the inevitable hell of assignments and exams. Sem 2 has started, and it's pretty unbelievable that these are my last few months as an undergraduate. I refuse to continue being a student after July, but as things stand, I have yet to formulate a "life plan". CM's been berating Phing and I over this ehehe...

On a different note, it seems that my prose has somewhat deteriorated. It's lost a certain... eloquence. I haven't neglected my reading, but guess I haven't been articulating myself often enough recently. The advantage to regularly maintaining a public blog is that I'm always very conscious of how my language is presented to the whole wide world (not that many people do read me), which means my writing skills are constantly maintained by the process of writing for the public. When I'm writing in my private journal, I simply reel off whatever thoughts run through my mind without too much concern over the elegance of my syntax.

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Anyway, just finished watching a great episode of the anime Gallery Fake. The basic premise of the series are stand-alone incidents around Reiji Fujita, the owner of an art gallery called 'Gallery Fake' and his assistant, Sarah. As you can guess, most of the art that passes through Fujita's hands tend to be excellent copies indistinguishable from the originals to the untrained eye, but the business itself is a facade for his 'black market' dealings of rare original pieces. Fujita himself was once a curator at the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY- omg I want that job!), and has regular conflicts with Sayoko Mitamura, the head curator of another Japanese museum. Mmm.. any drama based on art is a surefire favourite of mine, but unfortunately subbed episodes don't appear often as most subbers are intimidated by the art-heavy references of the series.

To summarise, Episode 13 is set during Fujita's student years where he assists tattooist prison inmate Shimoda in creating a Michelangelo-inspired Buddhist fresco for a prison's dome ceiling. Many years later, Mitamura attempts to prevent the destruction of the now-abandoned prison and tries to purchase the frescoed ceiling for her own museum, but Fujita had already bought the rights to the building, and proceeds to blow it up in accordance with Shimoda's last wishes. At the end, Fujita obviously had some regrets that such a work of art is destroyed, but the conflict is outweighed by his loyalty to the artist's wishes.

This brings us to the conundrum of art's true ownership.

Virgil wanted his (unfinished) epic Roman poem The Aeneid to be burnt after his death, and similarly, Michelangelo himself nearly destroyed his rather excellent poems. Very fortunately, Virgil's friends ignored his last wishes, and thus we have the blessing of modern Western civilisation's first epic literature. When a piece of art is physically mobile, the artist owns the work unless a publisher/patron owns the commission rights, or it is sold off. Much like how Leonardo da Vinci had every right to destroy his Mona Lisa for the 10-odd years in which he carried the painting around. But when the creator of works with considerable artistic merit dies, do we have a duty to honour and fulfill his request to destroy his unsold works, or do we have a duty towards society to preserve such artefacts integral to our culture? One can argue that works of art, especially those of important historical significance, are an integral part of our cultural inheritance. For example, William Turner gave some of his paintings to the National Gallery so they would forever belong to the British people. No one would challenge Turner's artistic ownership of his works, but what if Turner gave his paintings to the Gallery on the condition that they would be destroyed on the event of his death? Could you bring yourself to destroy a Turner painting?

The second aspect of this discussion is the physical ownership of art. When the work is on a physical medium that belongs to the artist, ie the paper that a book is written on, the canvas and frame that the painter himself purchased, they have a right to destroy it. But when the art is part of another's property, like a fresco which is an integral part of a building's ceiling, who has greater right to it - the artist, the property's owner if it is privately-owned, or the public? If Ghiberti wanted to destroy his Gates of Paradise on the Florence Baptistery and the Florentine council was not opposed to it, does the public have any right to protect the Gates? On another dimension, the Mona Lisa (the most famous painting by Italy's most famous artist) belongs to the Louvre (France's most famous museum) and by extension, the French people. Who has more right to the painting - the cultural structure and legacy that gave birth to such genius as Leonardo, or the French cultural identity of which the Louvre is an intangible part?

This brings me to the final aspect of cultural ownership. When a work of art is an integral part of a culture, especially if it does not have a specific physical owner/creator, who can claim the greatest ownership over it and to what degree? When the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001, there was a global outcry, but too late. Unfortunately, the Taliban were the ruling government of Afghanistan at the time, and the collective Afghanistan people were too oppressed and suppressed to mount any resistance. Imagine if the Chinese government decided to destroy the Great Wall, or the Egyptians the Pyramid of Khufur, to use famous examples. (There are no legal inheritors of these cultural artefacts, unlike the still-existing Romanovs who could arguably stake a claim over Romanov palaces seized by the Bolsheviks, or the descendants of the Qing dynasty who could stake a claim over the Forbidden Palace etc) If the Malaysian government decided to pull down Fort A Famosa, we would probably lynch them. But when the Bok family illegally obliterated Bok House a couple of years ago, the Malaysian public should have put in a greater effort to stop them, as the Bok House was the sole remaining colonial proper Palladian structure left in our cultural inheritance. (Telekom Museum and the Coliseum don't count as full Palladian.) Unfortunately, our heritage ministry seems to have taken that reprehensible cultural blindness to any part of our collective legacy that's not Malay.

(But I veer dangerously close to digressing from the discussion.) Further complications arise when more than one culture can claim cultural ownership of the work. Continuing the Mona Lisa analogy, the painting was legitimately purchased by King Francois I, so the French have legitimate physical ownership of the painting even though everything else about it is Italian. However, part of the Parthenon's frieze was famously stolen by Lord Elgin during the loot of Athens, and the so-called Elgin Marbles in the British Museum have become an integral part of British culture, even though they are fundamentally Greek. Looting does not constitute a legitimate transfer of physical ownership - however, to an extent the British can claim some cultural ownership of these priceless Greek treasures.

So to sum it all up, the conflict between the artistic, physical and cultural ownership of creative works makes the "arts" as a whole terribly fascinating. I guess even with the lack of a clear "life plan", the fact that I just spent more than an hour writing the above discussion demonstrates that irresistible hold the arts sector retains over me, and that no one should be surprised if that's what I go into after graduation. And also how I've got a little too much time to waste, plus a rather sad, nerd-ish propensity to turn blog entries into essays.

In memorium:

(Copyright Azrul Kevin Abdullah, 2001)
I can't seem to find the photos of Bok House I took for my History of Art A Levels thesis, so I'm posting this haunting B&W photo instead.
Incidentally, I met Azrul himself in August 2007 when I attended a photography workshop at the Annexe Central Market.