The Blindboy Podcast - Gammy Rococo Haircut

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Art podcast. How the artistic movements of Baroque, Rococo and NeoClassicism reflected the society and politics of their time Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, what is the crack and welcome to this week's blind boy podcast. Shout out to all my brand new listeners, mostly international boys and girls. What's the crack? If you're a new listener, I'd suggest you don't have to exactly go back to the very start, but I would suggest dipping into I think we're on episode 105 or 106 now so there's loads and loads of episodes and I would suggest dipping back into them

because they're on varied topics and this podcast isn't necessarily sequential I had a class weekend there did some live podcasts in Kilkenny and in Cork, they were fucking fantastic, thank you to everyone for showing up and being sound

some lovely fucking podcasts that I can't wait to share with you when I get the chance just a tiny plug for 3 gigs live podcast that I have coming up next week on the 22nd

Sligo, Sligo Live still tickets available for that, please come along to that if you're in Sligo, that's going to be good crack, and then the only other two that I'm going to give a big plug for, because do you know these are almost sold out after I mentioned them

about two weeks ago but there's a few tickets left for Dublin because you're always asking me for Dublin podcasts so in Vicar Street

on the 19th and the 24th of November I have two live podcasts and I think there's about a hundred tickets left for each night so go and get those if you'd like to come along to a live gig

so yeah last week's podcast was about climate anxiety I enjoyed I enjoyed doing it because like I like a podcast where I'd been getting a lot of DMs about climate anxiety about people talking about

their mental health being affected specifically by the climate so I decided I'd address it and I like to address queries and questions that ye give me but it's about shit that I'm currently going through as well because that means then for me just by talking to ye

talking through it talking through my feelings around it it allows me to process shit in the here and now so I did enjoy it even though a couple of people I don't know a couple of people felt anxious around know a couple of people felt felt anxious around it a couple of people

felt anxious around the fact that i'd even spoken about climate anxiety that it maybe is a bit too raw um i also read out a brand new short story from my book my book by the way another little plug before we move on my book of short stories the new one which is called boulevard rain is going to be in shops on november 1st but you can pre-order it um and if you pre-order it you will be in with a shot to get a a print a drawing that I've done a print of a drawing that I've done that is also signed by me and there's only so many in existence

so if you pre-order my new book of short stories from easons.ie you depending on whether they're gone already but I don't think so you'll get this exclusive print that's signed

and no one else will have it and I won't be doing any more alongside getting the book for the same price as it is when you buy it on November 1st you can also go to Book Depository and Amazon if you want but it's Boulevard Wren brand new book

of short stories writing it for the past two years and holy fuck am I glad to not be writing something at the past two years and holy fuck am I glad to not be writing something at the moment I'm really enjoying not having that pressure

the only thing I have to worry about at the moment is doing my live gigs and doing this podcast and I won't be taking any more creative projects on it say

until 2020 I just want to have until before Christmas I'm getting one or two days a week where if i if i have the available time i can play video games and i wasn't able to do that in a while so i'm back playing video games in my underpants and that's how i'm using my leisurely time and it's a fine time of year to be doing it. Because there's nothing better than a dark, cold evening outside. And firing up the Xbox.

It's enjoyable. It's the right time to be doing it. You get guilty when you do it in the summer, you know. So this week's podcast is... It's going to be a hot takey podcast. Long time listeners will know that I'm a huge fan of art. I'm a huge fan of art, painting, the history of art, trying to understand art. I fucking adore art. And I haven't done a podcast on art in a while and a lot of people have been asking me to do another one. We've done podcasts on.

One of the first podcasts was about. Caravaggio. It was about. About the life of Caravaggio. It was a kind of a conspiracy theory. That I had based on the life of Caravaggio. That. The reason he used so much black.

In his paintings is because he was. trying to be a cheapskate. And how that went on to influence the work of director Martin Scorsese. So there was a Caravaggio podcast. I did one on Impressionism, I believe. I did a podcast on William Hogarth. I did a podcast on William Hogarth and his, I think it was Hogarth's work, but against the backdrop of gin overtaking early industrial revolution English society. Then there was a podcast on performance art.

I really enjoyed that one. Again, I don't know the names of these podcasts because I give each podcast quite a ridiculous name that has nothing to do with the title. So there you go. It's tradition that I... Fuck it, what am I going to do? If I was on radio or TV, they'd make me name the things properly, so fuck it. I'm going to name a podcast with whatever name comes to me. And if you want to find out what each podcast is about, the easiest way, just go onto Spotify. If you go onto Spotify, you flick through them, and I give a tiny little synopsis in the description of each one.

But, yeah, there was a performance art podcast about a guy called Chris Burden, Yeah, there was a performance art podcast about a guy called Chris Burden who... Chris Burden who had his friend shoot himself... had his friend shoot him in the arm in the name of art and he also nailed himself to a Volkswagen. So we spoke about

performance art and understanding it and understanding why it's important and why it's not just because modern art in particular it's it's really exclusive and it annoys me because a lot of modern art it's it's difficult to understand unless you're initiated into the language of art unless you've studied art or really put some effort into it a lot of modern art

the average person just goes what the fuck are these idiots doing you know and I don't like that about modern art I'm someone who I like art to be democratised I'm you know

I'm a fan of creativity creative expression being a part of literally everyone's fucking life. Not this idea of only artists create art. I think everybody should create some type of art as just part of existing. And it doesn't mean it has to be existing and it doesn't mean it has to be brilliant it doesn't mean it has to go into a gallery it doesn't even mean that it's good enough that you'd want to show your friend but i do believe based on the fact that all of us every single fucking one of us as children enjoyed coloringing in playing with crayons and building Lego

all of us like had this creative free part of ourselves that needed to art is beautiful on an individual level because ultimately what you're doing right and this can go for

writing a song painting something knitting something crafts you know kind of creating something that's visual or aural or even prose whereby you're using you know words

but the words create something that's it's not just communication it's something beyond it it's important because what what what art does what what creative expression does it allows us to process emotions that are going on inside us right a lot of our emotional world whether it be fear pain anger desire fantasies whatever a lot of it kind of exists in the unconscious mind as this little feeling that you can't put words on and you can't visualize and you can't understand it it's just there at the back of your head, like a little insect, and art allows all of us to process it and get that out in some way, in whatever way, this is why people who, you know, who haven't gone near crayons since they were two, pick up, we'll an adult colouring book for instance and they walk away from it after an hour feeling energised and feeling, you're feeling a sense of internal

resolution, you feel as if something inside you has been resolved and you mightn't even know what it is it's a sense of completion and it's just it's it's a weird thing about today's society that some of us leave that behind at about the age of five and you're you're kind of broken into groups of people of you're good at art and you're not good at art so So you go and do something else. Whereas I believe all of us should be doing something. And you can throw it into the bin. At the end if you want. You know.

Get yourself some fucking Lego. If you like. If that was your buzz when you were two. Get some Lego for yourself. And make something. Whatever the fuck you want. Or get yourself Lego for yourself and make something, whatever the fuck you want or get yourself some clay or marla or some paints or an instrument

and the most important thing when you were doing that shit when you were two or three or four you didn't care whether it was going to be good or bad you really didn't you're just doing it for the sake of doing it

because that's how children's brains work so try and get back to that place you're doing it for the sake of doing not for the sake of having something good at the end I mean I often wonder I think because when you're like

two or three and you make a little painting or you make a little song or you make something out of Lego naturally the child goes to the parent and says mammy mammy daddy daddy look what I did and

I'd say it's that reaction it's that parental reaction depending on that is when we as little humans decide whether or not we should continue with art or not continue with it yeah because

you'd want to be a right prick of a parent if you're turning around to your two year old or three year old and saying that crane crayon drawing is shit i think most parents actually if their toddler creates anything lego uh painting whatever the fuck most parents are kind of just really happy and proud to see something that they created now engaging in a degree of cultural expression so most parents would just think whatever the kid does is brilliant and fuck it

up onto the fridge and say fair play to you and it could look like shit but no parent is going to tell the child actually no um because i know i have friends now no no friend who's a parent will admit this but I do have friends whose parents like actively did if my friend will say showed a talent for music or painting whatever they were actively discouraged from a young age by the parent because the parent was terrified

that their child would grow up to be an artist and therefore grow up with quite limited career opportunities because you know that's the case you know if in this world of commodification

trying to make it as a fucking artist in 2019 tough going lads so a lot of parents, will, react badly, to a child showing creative tendencies, going oh fuck, oh shit no,

I want them to be, an accountant, or to work in actuary, or, yeah and I know this, because I do, I get a lot of emails lads, I get a lot of emails I get a lot of emails from

ye and people just saying I work in finance and I really love art so much but I work in finance

to please my parents and I I'm very unhappy and I really just want to paint I get a lot of those emails so yeah there would be certain parents who would actively discourage their children

when they show signs of creativity but maybe not do it in a nasty way maybe more of a that's class but have you seen this ledger do you like do you like money here's a fiver

but you know beyond parental approval of your early creative efforts I think yeah there's another factor I think it's when you go to school and you start comparing

yourself to other children and their creative efforts and you go comparing yourself to other children and their creative efforts and you go into school and you think you're enjoying your crayon you're drawing with your crayons and you're enjoying your colouring in

and then there's another student in the class and they're just fucking ridiculously good and then maybe the teacher gives them praise and then we decide no this isn't for me i was on the opposite i was i was the student in the class whereby when i did go in it was like wow he's good at crayons and that definitely reinforced uh i don't know my confidence over the years to decide i'm going to be an

adult who does art professionally do you know what I mean but yeah all of us do that for yourself if you want to do something for yourself to improve your general well being and to give yourself a greater sense

of purpose or meaning okay like because it's winter now so you're going to be spending more time indoors just do invest in something a little bit creative paints lego

adult colouring book bit of poetry a fucking a model airplane whatever the fuck something that ideally doesn't involve your phone

or a laptop and something that means kind of get getting your hands dirty and messy and experiencing smells of paint

or smells of glue or whatever do that for yourself and notice the the sense of joy that will come over you from simply doing it

and the only the only thing I'll say to you is banish the the idea of this is going to be good or bad banish that if that is present

then forget about it art should be about play same way as it was when you were a child okay so yeah this week's podcast it is going to be art related but specifically history of art and what i want to talk about is i want to look at one or two artistic movements specifically the the painting leg of these movements and i want to show you how how art reflects society how artistic movements reflect whatever is going on in society at that point whether it be intentional or not and just as a way to democratize art i i don't like i don't like people being intimidated by painting i don't like people

who walk into a gallery and start treating the gallery like it's a church and feeling that you look at an upper painting on the wall and you go i don't know why this painting is so great but those other people who are really smart do so i'm just gonna pretend fuck that that's uh that type of attitude is much more to do with the inflated monetary value that's been placed on art as a way to avoid tax than it has to do with actual art all art modern art high art renaissance art whatever the fuck you want very easily accessible by anyone um with a set of ears and a set of eyes so that's what i want to talk about this week a few artistic movements and how they were directly influenced by the how they reflect the society and politics of the time so i'm going to focus on

painting specifically because that's it's the one I know most about in this context. So, there's many, many different movements and periods throughout the last thousand years, we'll say, that define specific artistic movements. And when we hear these, like I said, if you you're not initiated if you haven't studied it or taking time to learn it when we hear these terms we can just switch off and go this isn't for me um so what i want to try and do is democratize some of these movements and understand why they're fucking class and why what i really want to do.

Is explain. How each of these movements. Visually. Reflect. The culture they operated in. This podcast mainly will be about. A movement called Rococo. And a movement. Called Neoclassicism, which

were both kind of around the 1700s, 1800s, both centred mainly around France in particular. In order to understand Rococo, firstly, I'm going to give a brief mention to what preceded the Rococo era. I'm going to talk about the Baroque period. Now, each of these movements, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism, Baroque, Rococo Neoclassicism They encapsulate Loads of shit, they encapsulate Crafts

Music Theatre Architecture Painting Landscaping Design I'm going to focus on painting because Painting tended to be At that time painting design, I'm going to focus on painting, because,

painting tended to be, at that time, painting, painting would have been, the most important, painting, in the 1600s, 1700s, was truly seen,

as something, really magical, and spiritual, in a way that, sculpture was as well sculpture was too but painting in particular more so than architecture or design painting was seen as a spiritual magic it was seen as i mean you have to remember lads all, alright? So let's just go Baroque, okay? Sixteen fucking hundreds. Europe.

Like, the average human being... We live in a media-saturated society. So you and I are bombarded non-stop with 2D images of 3D things. Like, we take it for granted like the 20th century and the 21st century we see video photographs illustrations cartoons non-stop that's our life so you know right now we inhabit a world that's almost the exact opposite of someone in the 1600s. You know, we have a compartmentalized reality where we have our online reality, where we live kind of virtually in a screen, and then our everyday actual reality. But you need to step back into a fucking society where people didn't see pictures very often

like there there wasn't newspapers in the 1600s 1600s I believe it would have been it was after the printing press so the emerging middle classes and stuff would have had access to

the odd print. But most people, you wouldn't come across posters or images or anything really. Maybe once a month if you were fucking lucky. So visual culture wasn't a huge part. Depending on the church you went to. If you were a peasant if you were lucky maybe your church had one or two paintings that represented

a religious fucking thing but often people would have encountered folk art by which I mean folk art is that it wouldn't have been seen as high art it would have been more design take for instance

England in the 1600s like do you know we don't seem to have this tradition in Ireland I don't know why maybe we did and we just got rid of it when we got rid of the Brits but if you go around England especially around the villages

do you know the way their pubs have mad names like the King's Head or the Dog and Duck or the Fox and Hound, right? And all the English pubs are called that and you're wondering, what the fuck? What are the Brits doing calling their pubs these things? We just have like O'Riordan's and Sons. We name our pubs after family names. But in England, the Dog and Duck and the Horse and...

We have the Horse and Hound actually in Limerick. We do, yes, we do actually have this in Ireland. In Limerick, we have a pub called the Horse and Hound. So yes, it did exist here too, obviously. So, yeah, let's just take the Horse and hound in Limerick as an example now I don't know how old the horse and hound is but in Britain you will have pubs that will go back hundreds and hundreds of years

so the reason the Brits would call their pub the dog and duck or the horse and hound is people couldn't read like in 1400s,s 1600s people lived at home and if you had any bit of money and you went traveling you'd stay at an inn or a tavern or you might go for a pint in a pub or whatever and these were the conduits between villages where people would visit okay but people couldn't read so what it would mean is that if you were asking for directions because people could obviously communicate with words but most people couldn't read you'd say where's the nearest tavern and

you'd say to the person giving directions go into that village over there and you're going to find a building and on the front of it there's a little painting of a dog and a duck and that then becomes known as the dog and duck because the dog and duck didn't have the words dog and duck outside it because in the 1600s most people couldn't read so you have even today in limerick the horse and hound it says the horse and hound but there's also a little painting of a horse and hound so that's kind of where visual culture is at in the 1600s in the baroque period as we call it um the vast majority of people not really having access to incredible paintings unless you went to the dog and duck and you saw folk art which was someone's best efforts at drawing a dog and a duck i don't think many of these signs exist because

they would have been on wood or if you were lucky you went to the you know the chapel in your village or the cathedral might have had some art and art was truly used as a magical type of communion with God if you're visually starved in the culture that you live in and you see

a fucking shit hot painting of Christ up on the cross and you don't have a TV to look at you don't have a smartphone A fucking shit hot painting. Of Christ up on the cross. And you don't have a TV to look at. You don't have a smartphone. That's going to knock you off your fucking socks. That's going to make you come back to church every day. Just the simplicity.

Of seeing something so dramatic. And something so realistic. On a 2D surface. When you live your entire life in 3D that would baffle the brain like the thing with art and painting you can't teach a person how to draw or how to paint right you can teach the odd little technique or whatever but ultimately in academic painting as you call it for someone to begin the journey of i'm going to become somebody who is able to draw and paint what you're learning is is not so much techniques with your hand but you're you're training your brain to to see differently you can only teach someone how to see okay and the complexity

of you know taking something in the real world three-dimensional space and then your brain translating that into a two-dimensional flat surface like that's fucking huge now for us in our media saturatedsaturated society, where we exist alongside two-dimensional images the whole time, it's not that much of a great leap for us. You know, like right now, you can fucking take out your phone right now, and you can take a selfie,

and it's like, you know, you look into the mirror, and essentially the mirror is a 3D reflection. So it's still 3Dd or you go to your go to your friend and there they exist in real life three dimensions and then you whip out your phone you take a photograph boom two seconds they're translated to a two-dimensional flat surface okay with perspective with like to someone in the 1600s that's a massive leap that is a huge fucking leap our visual culture allows us to access the 3d to 2d journey very easily and quite often someone in the 1600s not a chance that's why things like perspective needed to be discovered. Perspective simply being that thing in the, like, it's the Father Ted thing, right?

Perspective start, we only start seeing perspective in paintings, and this is well before the Baroque period that I'm talking about now, I'm talking 1600s. We only started seeing perspective in paintings in the 1100s the 1200s with artists like Giotto and Paolo Uccello and simply perspective was I think it was Paolo Uccello had a painting of a battle around 1210 and he had the genius idea of I'm going to paint the trees in the background smaller and when they're smaller they will look far away and Paolo Uccello did that in the 1200s and that was

like it was like the internet being discovered like it was fucking huge because if you look at cave paintings that could be 30,000 years old they're very flat two dimensional images but you don't have perspective you don't have something like

as complex as three dimensional distance existing on a flat surface you don't see that in cave paintings you start to see that in the 1100s, 1200s with Paolo Uccello and early, what I call them Byzantine painters

so anyway, back to the fucking barack period the 1600s so yeah what was i getting into i was trying to explain how painting is a religious spiritual genuine type of magic to the average person in the 1600s not just to the average person to the painter themselves to the painter's patron to kings to queens to fucking merchants painting is a true magic and if you possess the gift and ability to paint great pictures you are seen as possessing a type of magic which which at the time is not, it's a gift. It's where we get the term fucking gift from, or genius, or enlightened.

It's, God is travelling through the fucking artist. That's what people genuinely believed at the time. So what Baroque painting is, and Baroque painting, it'd be one of my favorite types of painting to be honest before the baroque period of the 1600s we had the renaissance okay now the renaissance you'd be quite familiar with very quickly what was the renaissance it was when when western european culture left the middle ages or the dark ages and certain painters and artists and

scientists started to rediscover ideas from it was a renaissance of Greek and Roman ideas they started to look at the sculptures the Greeks and the Romans were doing and going fuck that was class let's have a crack at that again because this medieval art is fucking terrible like Giotto in the 1100s and paolo uccello like they you know represent the perspective but art of the byzantine period and 1100 1200 1300 it's really shit there there isn't perspective it's there's not a lot of skill at all it really was a time of intellectual poverty do you know but the renaissance it was the rebirth

of classical ideas blah blah blah out of this we get the likes of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci Donatello, the turtles the real important painters but Baroque comes after the renaissance and Baroque

it takes like everything the renaissance painters the confidence that the renaissance painters that like the huge advancement in renaissance painting with the perspective shading color theory all this stuff fucking the use of oil paint we see this absolutely flourishing in the 1600s with Baroque painting, but what is Baroque painting? so in order to understand Baroque painting you need to understand

Europe of the 1600s and a massive thing that had happened in the 1500s obviously the age of discovery let's not call it that the age of discovery let's not call it that the age of brutal colonization of people who happen to live in fucking

North and South America who are eradicated let's not say the age of discovery please that's my western brain but that and also Protestantism the Protestant Reformation happens in the

1500s right and the whole the thing with the Renaissance is that you had wealthy patrons Florentine cunts from Italy who had a load of money and they became

patrons of the arts and they would basically give loads of money to artists and painters to go paint a brilliant fucking painting there of Holy Mary, will you? And then I'll get into heaven, right? And the Pope will think I'm class. And that was the deal. It's like, if you were wealthy in the renaissance if you'd load of money you filled you you gave michelangelo and leonardo and donatello you gave them loads of

money to paint religious things and because the catholic church at the time was so corrupt and there was a thing within catholicism called indulgences whereby the church had gone so far fucking removed from the ideas of christ 1500 years previously that catholics in the 1500s were like i can buy my way to heaven because you have to it wasn't like today where most people are like look this this god business is probably bullshit, heaven is probably bullshit. Back then, people really believed it. Really and truly believed it, and believed that artists were a type of... that they believed that God moved,

and Jesus moved through the fucking artists, and that's how they had this ability to create these amazing 2D representations of real life and these biblical scenes, alright? So, wealthy people were giving money to artists to create as much religious art as possible, to make it as beautiful as possible, to adore and worship and grace, not only God and Christ, but also to win favour with the fucking, the popes and the cardinals who had the real power. Okay, so it was a bit of that too.

So, Renaissance art became quite theatrical, quite emotional, epic. You know, most definitely it became fucking epic. These huge paintings that depicted things from the Garden of Eden. You know, the Sistine fucking Chapel, lads. God and Adam. You know, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. It became epic, dramatic. Fucking Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay.

Carry on. And then the Protestant Reformation happens in the 1500s, and the whole shtick with the Protestant Reformation is that Protestantism came about, quite simply, because it was one chap, Martin Luther, just going, the Catholic Church is after fucking running away with itself. The popes and cardinals are having gangbangs,

which they were. The popes are starting wars. Rich people can buy their way into heaven. They're spending all this money on fucking art. It's Catholicism, and Christianity has become this overindulgent, opulent, corrupt, ridiculous perversion of Christ's teachings.

And anyone who subscribed to that idea, who were protesting the irrationality and silliness of where Christianity and Catholicism was, anyone who protested that became a Protestant. Okay, they were protesting it. And from Protestantism, you get like Lutheranism and fucking Calvinism. But at the core of Lutheranism and Calvinism is they reject everything that Catholicism was doing. In particular, the visual extravagance of Catholicism was doing in particular the visual extravagance of Catholicism so Protestant churches you know you know

like churches were fucking like full of this gorgeous fucking art with gold and jewels and giant windows and to let God's light in

and they were very expensive affairs that were supposed to bring about awe shock and beauty to the congregation right so artists were fucking artists architects sculptures were flying it during the renaissance essentially building uh using art to create fucking power so that the average person goes and walks into the person who's the only art they see is a fucking dog and a duck in a pub walks into a cathedral and goes wow this is fucking amazing this is so beyond anything i can even imagine it must be the work of god and therefore you have power so protestantism was like fuck that shit if the catholics have these giant expensive churches

where all they give a fuck about is showing off and bling and gold then our churches are going to be the exact opposite protestant churches became a really a really boring gray box with pews with very little art very little windows just a very simple church their diets became simple like this is probably going a few hundred years more but I'm pretty sure Protestants invented cornflakes

as a way to stop wanking but basically Protestantism became about visual simplicity austerity, pairing things back, abstaining from pleasure, okay? Abstain from fucking sex, abstain from overeating, abstain from drinking too much, and abstain from the visual stimulation of beautiful fucking art,

the visual stimulation of beautiful fucking art the visual stimulation of epic art this was seen as an indulgence and showing off in the same way that it was a sin essentially within protestantism so what barack art is barack art starts to go okay so the protestants are now rebelling against the excesses of, the visual excesses of Catholicism. So what Baroque art is, is it's Catholic funded art kind of turning the level up five times as much. So Baroque art is fucking fantastic. Some of my favorite artists are Baroque artists operating in the 1600s.

Caravaggio, Velazquez, Rembrandt. Some of the finest fucking paintings ever created. Okay. And this is Baroque art. It's an aggressive response to Protestant austerity and minimalism. If the Protestants want to worship in a fucking box with one window, then we're going to create epic paintings of religious scenes. Way better than the Renaissance Carrion.

We're going to bring a degree of realism to it and really make them colorful and brilliant with the exception of Caravaggio of course like I mentioned on the previous podcast Caravaggio as a baroque painter did not use a lot of color because to use color is to spend a lot of money pigments were expensive so Caravaggio 90% of his paintings black, but then with a single light down the middle, where the colour is centred around the middle with these giant paintings. Caravaggio was also a criminal and a murderer. My personal theory, I think Caravaggio was

taking a commission for 10 grand, spending 500 quid on paint, black is one of the cheapest paints going and I think he was saving money and then spending the rest on fucking hookers and drink alright

but the importance of Caravaggio is like I said earlier okay you can't teach someone how to paint you can only teach someone

how to see by which I mean before you learn how to see as a painter when you look at a field language gets in the way of seeing you go grass is green therefore the field is green but a painter knows no

today that field might be purple depending on the light of the sun so to become a painter and become an artist, you have to train your brain to move beyond language and to see things as they actually are. And you remove grass is green, roads are black. Do you know what I mean? But Caravaggio,

and not just Caravaggio, Baroque painting in general, it not only had these incredibly dramatic, emotion-filled, biblical scenes. From an academic and technical point of view, it's some of the fucking most amazing oil paintings you'll ever see. Where real human models were used. Caravaggio would have been the rebel. Because what Caravaggio would do is because he lived a life of vice and he was hanging out with crooks and criminals and prostitutes sex workers sorry um what you had is he used to get in a lot of trouble because he would get like

some lad he'd been on the fucking on the lash with for two weeks who stinks of whiskey and caravaggio would get him to pose to be christ and he'd paint his dirty fingernails and at the time some people were like you're painting christ a little bit too human there i don't think christ would have looked like he had a three-day fucking hangover caravaggio but that is it's the birth of fucking realism it's the birth of grittiness do you know Rembrandt, incredible fucking painter did some of the most amazing self portraits you'll ever see

Velazquez similarly but these were Baroque painters and like I said Baroque was responding to Protestant austerity and minimalism. So what I want to get on to... Fuck, we'll do an ocarina pause.

40 minutes in. Ocarina pause. Alright. An advert for something you didn't need probably went in there. On April 5th... You must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. advert for something you didn't need probably went in there. The first Omen, only in theaters April 5th. to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind.

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Okay. So we were talking about Barack. 1600s. And. Barack was incredible. It was fucking amazing. Theatrical. Emotional.

Epic. But most importantly damn fine fucking academic art incredible technical skill ability use of paint

use of colour real fucking good art okay and that's the 1600s so let's start going to the 1700s, Baroque starts to turn into, in France in particular, a new type of art called Rococo, Rococo lads if you don't mind me saying, is fucking shit, Rococo in my opinion opinion it's one of the worst periods

of visual art of painting in the fucking in the last thousand years it really was and it came from Baroque painting and the problem with Rococo is it took

if Barack like I said was about drama emotion epic all these things theatre it took all that shit but then it didn't take the realism it didn't take the idealism it didn't

take the technical skill the paint the ability it discarded that and just hung on to the kind of the emotional elements i'll tell you if you want to see the closest transition so Barack is mid 2000's HBO TV box sets Rococo

is Netflix so if you look at we had a golden age of television in the mid-2000s. We had The Sopranos, we had Oz, we had The Wire, Six Feet Under, right? This huge explosion in the 2000s, mainly centered around the channel HBO, where all of a sudden television was on par, if not having more integrity than cinema for the first time ever. Like, before HBO, good shit. Like, films that told amazing stories, that were technically brilliant, that fucking touched on the human condition this only happened in the cinema

like the work of Martin Scorsese something like Taxi Driver who he himself explicitly was influenced by Caravaggio and he'll be the first one to say it HBO in the mid 2000s lads was baroque it had all the epic drama

and cinematography of like Scorsese but also the gritty realism amazing writing All the epic drama and cinematography of like Scorsese, but also the gritty realism, amazing writing, and a commentary on the human condition. And this is present in, like I said, Sopranos, The Wire, fucking Six Feet Under, Oz, all this. But then Netflix comes along. The thing about Netflix, right?

90% of everything onflix is fucking shit what netflix did is netflix borrowed so netflix has box set television and you know netflix does come out with some original series and they're good right they're fucking great but 90 of it is fucking shit and what they've done is they took the feeling of mid-2000s box sets they took the cinematography the use of soundtracks the use of lighting the fact that it feels like cinema yet it's long episodic content they took all these beats from mid-2000 hbo box sets but then started rolling them out in a cookie cookie cutter format as netflix original content but what they don't have quality of writing quality of acting they don't comment upon the human condition in a deep way not all but a lot because netflix churns it out so that right there is the difference between barack and rococo so rococo comes about in the 1700s so if barack

reflects a society that is openly rebelling in glorious fashion against the minimalism and austerity of Protestantism Rococo starts to represent, it stands for fucking nothing, Rococo represents opulence and rich fuckers wanking off into bushes like the most telling thing about

Rococo is that the name means nothing it it name means nothing it it truly means nothing there was another French word called Raquel or something like that that had something to do with art that looked like that was based on seashells but Rococo

means nothing it's a made up word it's like the word selfie before I continue if you're because I'm conscious I'm trying to do a visual a visual art kind of stream of consciousness chat here but it's happening

in a purely purely aural format so if you want to get an idea of what 1700s Rococo art looked like

before I continue on to it I'll tell you the most famous rococo painting and you most definitely have seen this i guarantee you know it because it would be one of the most famous paintings in the world and get a look at it and then i'll explain to you why it's shit uh fragonard so jean fragonard f-r-a-g-o-N-A-R-D, and the painting is called The Swing, Fragonard's The Swing. That would be the quintessential Rococo painting. So because this podcast is about how visual art and painting reflects the society that it comes from, let's take a look at the post-BBaroque society that Rococo flourishes in. So we spoke

about the emergence of Protestantism, but also the age of brutal, quote-unquote the age of discovery, the age of brutal colonialism. Okay, so, let's focus on France. France is a major colonial power. France, by the 1600s, 1700s, has stretched its fingers outward throughout the world. Taking big chunks of Africa. The Middle East. Fucking Canada. The West Indies.

Down around South America. Basically the. The world. That Rococo painting comes into. It's colonialism. Which is essentially. Like in European countries. There's always like.

The monarchy and the papacy and nobles and shit like that they were always wealthy there was always a class of incredibly wealthy people and then peasants underneath but colonialism colonialism brought forward a new level of wealth, an unseen level of wealth, because colonialism at its root, what it is, it's the brutal, vicious extraction of wealth and resources from colonized lands, and then transferring those wealth and resources to European countries, which essentially makes the clergy and the monarchy and the fucking,

what do you call them, the posh cunts that aren't monarchs, the elites, it makes them incredibly wealthy. So in France, 1600s, 1700s, let's start with the king Louis XIV, because it kind of starts with him. Louis XIV becomes disgustingly wealthy, let's start with the king louis xiv because it kind of starts with him louis xiv becomes disgustingly wealthy and so do the nobles they become a level of wealth unseen because of colonialism because quite simply let a lot of gold a lot of resources, they're just robbing from countries far, far bigger than France. So it's the roots of the privileges that you and I enjoy today.

You know, you and I live like Louis XIV did in the 1600s just as a given because of how we as a society still to this day exploit and extract resources from countries that we take it from but anyway so Louis the fucking 14th he's an absolute monarch right he's pure and utter

I am fucking king and that is it and a king can do whatever the fuck they want and a king is entitled to whatever they want so Louis XIV France

if you're if you don't have any money if you're a peasant in France under Louis XIV then you don't have a particularly good life because Louis XIV is just looking out for Louis

and importantly his nobles because even though a king as we've learned from King John do you know, with the Magna Carta a king can be as much of a prick as he wants and have as much money as he wants but you have to look after

your nobles, but what happens is Louis XIV he was king of France for 74 years. And he died at 76. So he was king of France since he was 2. Longest ever king of any fucking European nation. So Louis XIV. Very entitled.

Aristocratic. But what he did right. And he was very much about. Centralised power. That France should be run from one place and one place in particular in particular for Louis it was the palace of Versailles and the palace of Versailles was this gigantic aristocratic compound of utter royalty with very high walls and you know it was where the one percent lived they lived like billionaires and everything outside the palace of versailles did not live like that and what louis did too is so previously you'd have had you know french nobility jukes fucking i don't even know the language language they use, but dukes and whatever the fuck, other types of royalty that aren't king or queen.

All these rich cousins and whatever. This is, no, I'm glad I know fuck all about monarchies. This is the opposite of British people not knowing anything about colonialism or French people not knowing. I know fuck all about monarchy. So the king and other wealthy people who are also royal would have previously lived in duchies. Is that what they called them? They'd have been all over France.

Okay, in different parts. Normandy, Avignon, whatever the fuck. But Louis goes, lads, I want all my nobles in the same place so he actively throughout his uh kingship in 74 years or whatever it was encourages all the nobles to move to the palace of versailles they start abandoning their lands as such you know having absentee landlords so now you have by the time of louis the 14th's death this ridiculous amount of wealth concentrated only around the palace of versailles

and it becomes completely centralized politically economically and culturally so rococo starts really it's with Louis XIV's fucking death and then Louis XV comes along, Louis the fucking XV becomes king at the age of 5 he was Louis XIV's grandson

he becomes regent at the age of 5 a regent is it's when you're officially like, king or queen, but like, you're too young to run the country, so,

someone else, some duke, was effectively, ruling, while, Louis the 15th, was shitting his pants, so when Louis the 15th,

becomes 13 years of age, then he's king of France, so Rococo begins with him, because Louis the 15th, now, the other thing as well, that's actually very important important is so louis the 15th there right so he gets he's regent from the age from the age of 5 to 13 and that's almost a decade where there's no king as such uh instead this duke or whatever has taken over responsibility so what happens during this decade period his granddad louis the 14th was this absolute monarch but you've 10 years with no king

so a lot of the cultural focus and power shifts more to the aristocrats that are hanging around the palace instead of one king and that there i i think that's like the birth of rococo right there but then louis xv becomes 13 and he becomes king and then continues on the opulent centralized traditions of his granddad where everything is focused around a small amount of incredibly rich dickheads in the planet in the palace Versailles who the walls get higher and they slowly, they're having a clue what's going on in the rest of France.

And they have too much money and all the gold is coming in from Africa and from the West Indies. And they live lives of wealth so extreme that it's meaningless wealth. And taking it back to that painting that i spoke about Fragonard the swing Rococo art is this highly decorative unrealistic shite

decorative, unrealistic shite that it doesn't reflect like anything to do with the human condition, it's, Rococo art is like, it's in influencers Instagram, it reflects only only this kind of make-believe life of romantic excess that's only experienced by a small degree of royalty in France. It has lost all connection with humility, the human condition, real people's lives or even the humility of religion. Rococo art is notably, and it's quite strange for art around the 1600s, there's no religious connotations, because at that time, they'd gone beyond that. This was the time of libertinism. It's like,

Rococo art, it's influencer culture it's do you know that weird period in rap music late 90s after Tupac and Biggie got shot late 90s

2000s before the recession when rap music became obsessed with bling culture and all rappers rapped about

was popping bottles of Cristal and how many gold chains they have Rococo was bling it was meaningless hedonistic

kind of scenes of the opulent lives that the rich people in the palace of Versailles lived and it didn't reflect at all any type of reality and like I said taking it back to Baroque I mean you can make the argument of religious scenes similarly are also a level of fantasy a lot of Caravaggio's paintings are fantasy. They're very dramatic. You know, the Baroque paintings,

now 100 years previously, lots of drama, biblical scenes that never happened. So yes, it's still fantasy. Focusing not on excess, but penance, pain, suffering. Rococo, there's no penance or pain in Rococo. Instead, it's excesses. You know,

Fragonard's The Swing, this, you know, incredibly stylized posh bird with a beehive fucking hair on a swing and her lover on the ground in this idyllic garden. That's what Rococo was. But what makes Rococo shit is it had abandoned all academic principles of art. So, what I mean is in Baroque art, at least Caravaggio was painting real models. He was painting real things.

He was using the human eye to translate 3d into a two-dimensional space rococo wasn't like that if you look at how the trees are painted in fraganard's painting those trees never existed in real life the artist didn't sit down and look at a tree and try and translate that onto a page. They didn't reflect and absorb. The beauty and randomness of nature. What you're seeing instead is. Someone painting a garden from memory. Look at how little.

The leaves on the trees. They're not real leaves. They're just a technique. Stubbling on the canvas. Overly. Even. a technique stubbling on the canvas overly even like there's slight references to

like in the renaissance you'd reference back to Greek and Roman art you see that sometimes in fucking Rococo painting but what they're referencing

is what are those angels called with their babies cherubs a lot of cherubs and cupid shit and but

most of all they're just bad paintings it leans much more towards decoration than it does fine art sometimes the people in the paintings may not have even existed they could have been people that were simply than it does fine art. Sometimes the people in the paintings may not have even existed. They could have been people that were simply drawn from memory rather than a person who posed.

So it's a period of art where it's frivolity, bling, decorative shit is placed far, far above anything else to do with art. So that's why it's kind of it's crappy art when you compare it to what has gone before and what comes afterwards but most offensive of all about Rococo painting is

this is a time when you know we're on to Louis the fucking 15th at this stage and then Louis the fucking 15th at this stage. And then Louis the 16th. Like, it's before the French Revolution. So, the upper classes are living in the palace of Versailles in this incredible opulence. Absorbing in the excesses of the colonies. And meanwhile, the people outside the high walls the regular people of France

are really suffering you know France has one or two bad years with tax or sorry with crops and shit like that so they start introducing taxes but the taxes only tax the poor and don't tax the rich so you have a society that's ready to fucking crumble that's ready to boil over and ready for a fucking revolution but meanwhile all the rich people are in the palace of versailles and the art that is being that they're commissioning that they're asking for that they're that they're asking to be created from it's Instagram influencer shit it says nothing there's no greater meaning behind it

it's just like someone with a photograph of their latte and a perfect sunlight coming in it's not real it's reality television everything today that you can look at in culture that's all, it's only about

aesthetics and image and making other people feel like shit like that's, like influencer culture, I understand it's fine and people like to follow influencers but ultimately what it's about is bragging about a fake life that you have in order and we watch it and we think we feel inspired but we

don't we we just feel uh it's someone else just reminding you that they're living a better life than you are and we try and aspire to it but ultimately it brings our mood down, that's what Rococo art was and it became gaudy and highly decorative and bling someone with too much money and no taste all of that

shit, you trace it right back the roots of it to Rococo, you look at how Donald Trump, you look at Donald Trump's living quarters and Trump Towers and you look at the spaces that Donald Trump decorates for himself in his own house.

White walls with just this ridiculous gold all over the place. Unwittingly, Trump's fucking style that he prefers, its roots can be traced to Rococo he doesn't have a fucking clue about that but it's the signifier of meaningless opulence and a libertine lifestyle libertines at the time it was a culture in the 1700s which was again based

in France I'll do a separate podcast on libertinism, but it was just rich little shits going, I'm going to dedicate my life only to the pleasures of the senses. Only to the pleasures of the senses. And that's what Rococo is. Rococo is cocaine. it's rococo is cocaine rococo is a rich person at a party doing the best cocaine they can find and talking fucking shit that's what rococo is and it reflects like i said france at the time louis the 14th louis the 15th like louis the 14th like I said he was the one who was like took this colonial wealth

and said let's everyone with money live in the palace of Versailles by the time it gets to Louis the 15th who was made king at the age of 5

he has no context for anything other than that so it's a true meaninglessness and I don't want to sound excessively mean on Rococo art like artists like fraganard or watto like all they're doing is like an artist has to earn a living and an artist in the 1600s

they have to paint what their fucking patron is asking them for. So Baroque painters were mostly being commissioned by the church or people who wanted to impress the church and they were looking for, I need epic biblical scenes with incredible technical ability because people will associate your technical ability with a spirituality. Right? Rococo wasn't like that rococo was very dull rich people who lived an existence of only indulgence with zero experience of suffering hardship or regular people and they were now, doing the commissioning, and they're going, to talented artists, like Watteau,

and Fragonard, and they're saying, just fucking, paint a paint, I'd say they sat down, with Fragonard and Watteau, and said, last week,

me and the lads, went to the meadow, in the Palace of Versailles, and we had a fucking, huge orgygy and got pissed drunk and then someone someone did a shit into the lake and then we killed a swan with a rock and then we then we killed a servant ha ha ha paint that here's 10 grand that would have been Rococo so these talented artists when your clients are in that way and don't have any desire for realism or anything like that the painter is just simply going to go

well this fucking idiot who's pissed all the time, he doesn't want me to go outside and paint a real tree, so I'm going to paint trees from my imagination. And I'm going to paint skies from my imagination. And the leaves in the trees are not going to be real leaves, they'll just be daubs of my brush. And I paint him and his friends just wanking each other off. Grand. And you get what you pay for.

So that's why Rococo is the way it is. It was a small number of fucking dopes. With too much of everything. Doing the commissioning. And ultimately. The great failing. Of. Rococo art and painting.

Is. Like I said there. Because of who was commissioning it it was truly blind to the actual realities of French society and not only blind but like like it flew in the face of the realities of French society French society if you weren't one of the incredibly rich people living in the palace of Versailles or Versailles you were living in serious hardship living in poverty

not only living in poverty but experiencing quite harsh taxes while the rich are not getting taxed at all they're inventing uh they're living in opulent lifestyles of non-stop partying and reflecting this in their shit art so i mean again to draw a modern analog and i do think this if you look at elements of our culture now, like, let's just take influencer culture again. The average influencer with their daily Instagram posts of their unrealistic body that they've changed with photoshop and their lifestyle that doesn't exist of continual partying and like there's a guy on instagram called dan bilzerian who is

a multi-millionaire and all he does is take photographs all day on yachts and swimming pools with loads of gorgeous models and it's completely fake but like 13 year old boys follow this dan bilzerian fella to look at his unrealistic non-stop sex party and lifestyle on instagram and he's an influencer like that's rococo but if you look at right now like okay the biggest thing that's facing us our society right now is is climate change the reality of climate change and that if we don't act it's gonna bite us in the fucking hoop you know in a hundred years assuming anyone's fucking left to look back will they view like reality tv influencer culture this blind, opulent

ode to consumption this visual ode to consumption that's what influencer culture is will this happening at the same time as the climate has fallen apart

will we look at it the same way because that's certainly what Rococo was because what fucking ended Rococo has fallen apart will be looking at the same way because that's certainly what rococo was because what fucking ended rococo rococo ended when the french revolution happened when the people of france now i'm going to simplify the fuck out of this but when the people of france rose up and demanded a republic and And they rose up. Because of the non-stop partying and ignorance. Of these aristocrats in the palace of Versailles.

With the Rococo art. That just rubbed salt in the wounds. Of the average person in France. Who was just like fuck that. Were tearing down the walls. And people, the aristocrats were beheaded they were given the guillotine and that was the end of Rococo and Rococo exists

as this clueless snapshot as to what was really happening in French society and the French Revolution happens in 1798 but the artistic cracks and the French Revolution happens in 1798 but the artistic cracks start to appear like slightly before 1798 with different artists

mainly the one that sticks out for me an English artist who I've done a podcast on before William Hogarth Hogarth I don't podcast on before William Hogarth Hogarth I don't know where to place Hogarth I don't know what I think realism

he's certainly not Rococo Hogarth interesting character again this is happening in England so Hogarth starts to paint paintings and a series of paintings. So it's almost like a TV box set. He's reflecting the new ills that are falling upon society

because it's becoming industrialized. So Hogarth has very realistic scenes, but also they're satirical. They're not, yeah, okay, so here's the deal. You can replace William Hogarth's stuff in the ballpark of Rococo because visually, Hogarth is not about academic painting. Like I said earlier with the paintings of fraganard and rococo paintings where we said the trees that are in the painting are not not real trees they're trees from the artist's imagination like hogarth hogarth stuff is closer to cartoons like rococo is its illustration

it's some of the characters in the paintings exist in the artist's mind rather than in real life. They're not painting and drawing models. Nor was Hogarth, essentially. He'd have done a couple of studies. But what Hogarth did, he took elements of Rococo aesthetic but brought in fucking satire. Rococo did not have satire. It did not have irony. It was about indulgence and celebration and opulence and cluelessness.

But Hogarth, in England now, starts to do these satirical paintings that reflect... He starts to bring in a moralism, probably based on... It's almost like a response to Baroque, because Hogarth, I believe, was Protestant. So he brings in a kind of a moralism. Because Hogarth, I believe, was Protestant. So he brings in a kind of a moralism. And Hogarth's drawings, like he's got a series of paintings called The Journey of a Rake. I think it's called, is it The Journey of a Rake?

And a rake would be, a rake, okay, put it this way. So a rake would be an aristocrat. It would be someone who inherited a lot of wealth so a rake would be the type of rich prick who's in the palace of versailles living a continual party lifestyle so rococo is only reflect reflecting the opulence of this rake's life with no consequences but hogarth is over in eng doing these paintings that are, borrow aesthetically a little bit from Rococo, but he has like a series of paintings called The Journey of the Rake, and it's a series of like seven paintings, and it tells a story almost like a comic book, and the paintings are like, here's this young rich man, and he inherits a fuckload of money

from his dad, and it's him inheriting this at a young age then painting number two is like this young rake at a party fucking pissed then painting number three is him in a brothel with a bunch of sex workers around him and it shows his utter indulgence and this rake only cares about his own pleasure and his own sensual desires and then by painting number four this rake has lost his money so now he finds an older widower and marries her for her money but then he spends all that and it finishes with the rake in the well-known mental asylum in in london called bedlam and he's basically at the end of his life so hogarth has taken from the rococo style but satirically has a moral story behind

it which is if you live the rococo lifestyle you'll end up a washed up old alcoholic which is what was happening in france in the palace of versailles but it wasn't reflected in the art so hogarth's doing this, okay? Then you had another chap, and the other important thing about Hogarth, Hogarth was smart, so he'd do these paintings, right? But not everyone can afford a painting. But in England and in France,

you have an emerging middle class that's happening because of the Industrial Revolution, the bourgeoisie. And these are people who are no money they would have come from poverty but because they either bought a factory or whatever the fuck they now have access to a bit of money and they want to now buy art but they can't afford fucking paintings like the aristocrats have but they can't afford prints so hogarth starts to get his like a rake's Progress or another one he has is a Harlot's Progress or he has paintings like Gin Alley which I did a podcast on and he starts transferring these as prints and people now can the bourgeoisie like middle class people in the 1700s can start buying his

fucking prints and having them in their gaffes do know, and he's the first one to really start doing that, to opening up his art to capitalism like that, and in fact copywriting, the copyright act, I might be wrong, but I'm nearly sure the copyright act in England, the first ever proper one, was brought in,

because people were counterfeiting Hogarth's work, so the idea of intellectual property. Around art legally. Starts with Hogarth and his prince. So. You're seeing this. You're seeing the failings of Rococo. Reflected in the work of Hogarth in England.

You're seeing it a little bit in France too. There's a fella. Chardon was his name. And what Chardon was doing is that it wasn't satirical, like Hogarth was clearly taking a swipe at aristocrats, and saying if you live a life of opulence and ignore everything around you, life is going to come back and get you, not even God, like, you're not going to, not even hell or anything, it's like, if you ride everything around you

drink everything around you eat everything around you you will eventually end up unwell and that's what Hogarth was doing this is not happening in Rococo art but there was a fella called Chardon late 1700s

and he was painting not in the Rococo style something closer to mannerism or realism and he was i'll tell you what chardon was doing he was painting what you'd call kitchen sink right in the 1950s and 60s in both america and britain in the theaters this shit started coming around called kitchen sink drama which was basically drama that centred around normal people's lives in their houses

and this happened on the theatre but then reflected in the new technology of television in the 50s and 60s in America and England so like EastEnders you know what the fuck is EastEnders and Coronation Street it's people who are working class people

who have enough money to afford a television wanting to see their own lives reflected in the television. So this fella Chardon starts painting in the late 1700s while Rococo was going on and he's now reflecting the lives of ordinary bourgeoisie, middle class, emerging middle class people in France and just painting scenes of people at home. People sitting at tables

with food on their tables and shit like that. Again, because the middle class is something new, the idea of simply having a table with food and objects and owning things in your house, that was quite aspirational because a hundred years previously, you just had a peasant class and an aristocracy, and that's it, but now

by the time of the French Revolution, you now have a middle class, and this is a lot of the people who are fucking driving this revolution. So what eventually replaces Rococo? Like I said I consider Hogarth and Chardon to be a little strange intermediary that sign is the art of the french revolution the french revolution is ideologically very much a return to political ideas that stem from greek and roman culture the republic which is a greek idea and fucking democracy demos kratio the people rule okay so democracy and the republic are the ideals of the french revolution eradicating the monarchy and a new way forward the birth of fucking modernity as such although in fairness the french Revolution was inspired by the American Revolution, you know. But neoclassicism becomes the new dominant art form.

There's no more, like Rococo is spat upon as this opulent signifier of the oppressive class. And now you have a new type of art. Which, if the ideals, and this is what I'm saying, how art, whether knowingly or unknowingly, reflects the ideals and what is what i'm saying how art whether knowingly or unknowingly reflects the ideals and what's going on in society if the french revolution is about looking back towards fucking greek and roman ideas neoclassism aesthetically as a style of painting looks back aesthetically to greek and Roman painting in the way that the Renaissance did too. And neoclassicism, who'd be the most prominent neoclassicist painter? Jacques-Louis David. His paintings The Oath of the Horeti or The Death of Marat.

or the death of Marat and what you see with neoclassicism is it's really like gone are the the design and the decoration and the frivolity and drawing from imagination that you see in Rococo

now you're back to academic painting once again the characters that appear in neoclassical paintings are they're based on models um it's not it doesn't have the emotive drama of baroque paintings like Caravaggio but it does have the the realistic attention to detail and the use use of paint. And they're much higher. They're technically of a much higher quality. Than Rococo paintings. But. They're idealistic.

They're quite serious. There's not a huge amount of humour. In neoclassicism. They use. As a high level of visual metaphor. One thing that led to the rise of neoclassicism too., they use, you know, as a high level of visual metaphor, one thing that led to the rise of neoclassicism too, is you have to remember, so we're talking late 1700s, early 1800s, things open up in the world, you know, uh, the concept of the grand tour, like, okay, uh, tour like okay uh the hellenic islands i think her herculaneum wow sorry herculaneum which is a ancient greece site i believe on some islands that was discovered and excavated

like archaeology becomes a thing this is post-enlightenment so things like archaeology become a serious thing that people do with their time so you have fucking uh pompeii is discovered in italy and excavated so now and loads of books and shit and really detailed drawings of every aspect of pompeii are made so neoclassical artists have greater visual access in the way that the renaissance painters didn't to what structures and society actually looked like in Greek and Roman times you also have the emergence of a cultural phenomenon known as the grand tour where young men it was usually men of wealth or bourgeoisie, at the ages where you'd normally go to college, we'll say from 18 to 23,

what they would do is they would go on a grand tour, which meant that they would travel certain designated points around the world that were seen as hot spots of knowledge and culture. And Herculaneum, I can't pronounce it, was one. Pompeii was another. I believe, I think Cordoba, where I visit in Spain, because that was an ancient Islamic caliphate, was on the list as well. But young men would travel the world and began to fetishize history. History, right, the recording and understanding and enjoyment of history

is actually quite a new enough phenomenon. It's something that really comes to light with the Enlightenment of the 1700s and 1800s. Harding and understanding and enjoyment of history is actually quite a new enough phenomenon. It's something that really comes to light with the enlightenment of the 1700s and 1800s. Before that, I don't know, people had too much shit going on in their lives to be worrying about what people a thousand years before were doing. People didn't have the reverence and respect and desire to understand and preserve artifacts. That starts happening 200 years ago and neoclassicism comes from that so you have the with the the physical archaeological tenderness and respect that's being afforded somewhere like pompeii these ruins of a fucking roman city that was buried under a volcano this careful excavation

and preservation and understanding that this is important we must not destroy it this now happens also to the ideas that would have been present in fucking Pompeii which were the republic democracy such and such which is driving the French Revolution

so neoclassical art starts to reflect this and Jacques-Louis David is who you want to look at for that stuff and which is driving the French Revolution. So neoclassical art starts to reflect this. And Jacques-Louis David is who you want to look at for that stuff. And, yeah, I do. I enjoy neoclassical art. I'd be more of a Baroque fan. But I'll take neoclassicism over Rococo because the paintings are a pleasure to look at. They're a little bit stifled they're a little bit serious um neoclassicism then also influences architecture like a lot of fucking buildings a huge amount of

central london is neoclassical in style you see any building that's like the u.s white house which i believe was based on the Dublin Orison Utteron, where our president lives, any building at the front where they have large Roman columns is built in the neoclassical style. The fucking GPO. The GPO O'Connell Street, Dublin, with its huge Roman pillars at the front,

that is a neoclassical style of architecture, whereas, not a lot of fucking rococo the rotunda hospital elements of that would have been designed in the rococo period and and would contain rococo elements it's not like the full extravagance of if you want to see like vomit inducing rococo you'd need to be going to France or fucking Vienna. But the Rotunda Hospital is like a stripped-back Rococo. But GPO, certainly the front fucking facade, that's pure neoclassicism. So it's quite present in a lot of buildings that were built around the 1800s. A lot of London, shit like that.

That's neoclassicism, the new classic. Ironically, I like to visit the British Museum a lot, you know, when I'm in London and you have this building which itself is neoclassical, it's based it's trying to look like an old Athenian temple, 2000 years ago

but in the building itself is the recreation of greek ruins from crete you know and i find that ironic that it's like the building that it's based upon is also the building that's housing it but yeah neoclassicism came afterwards and just to wrap it up that's what i'm getting at it's like art the way paintings look the way architecture looks it's it's reflecting whatever's going on politically or sociologically for the people and it's not sometimes it happens deliberately and sometimes it doesn't sometimes it just reflects the zeitgeist and the zeitgeist is just a name for the general feeling and mood in the air.

And I view neoclassicism as, it's the first modernist art form, to be honest. In its ideals, in its relationship with things like science, political science. The tenets of neoclassicism are human rights uh scientific investigation the concept of rationality the concepts of morality it's an idealistic art form that does try and bring about change and hope rococo didn't rococo is like look at this very long wank I'm having and paint it, neoclassicism was like, we can do things differently, because we have science and industry, and, you know, from that, 20th century, another podcast, but we get fucking modernism, we get like fucking futurism and shit like that, you know, which I'll do a separate podcast on. All right, that was 90 minutes.

There's nothing more I can say. God bless. Go fuck yourself. Talk to you next week. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket

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