Word: greekness
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...must be said, straight off, that The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy, now at the National Gallery in Washington (it goes to the Metropolitan Museum in New York City in March), is a very odd show. Largely composed of loans from the Greek government, it combines a number of profound, exquisite and completely irreplaceable works of art, which wiser owners would not have exposed to the risks of travel, with an utter shallowness of argument about their social and ritual meanings. Insofar as an exhibition can assemble great sculpture and have practically no scholarly value, this...
...reason is that The Greek Miracle is an exercise in political propaganda, and has to embrace stereotypes that no classicist today would accept without deep reservations. First, the exhibit wants to indicate how Greek sculpture changed in the classical period, by showing its movement from the frontal, rigid forms of 6th century B.C. kouroi, whose ancestry lay in Egyptian cult figures, to the more naturalistic treatment of balance and bodily movement one sees in works such as The Kritios Boy (circa 480 B.C.), which was found on the Acropolis. And it demonstrates this in considerable detail, through marvelous examples...
...orientation course for those who don't know much about classical Greek sculpture -- and as a source of unalloyed aesthetic pleasure for those who do -- this show ought not to be missed. But neither should its second premise be taken seriously: the idea that there was some causal connection between the advent of the classical style in sculpture and that of democracy in Athenian politics. Both happened at roughly the same time: in the late 6th century an Athenian aristocrat, Kleisthenes, made an alliance with the people of Athens in order to defeat another noble, Isagoras, and pushed through...
This is why classical Greek sculpture, in its original form, was so very unlike the version made of it by Neoclassicists 2,000 years later, and recycled in this show. "No symbols or special trappings of divinity," writes Gage, "were required beyond the figure's physical harmony. The most perfect beauty, to the Greek of the 5th century, was the pure and unadorned." But classical Greek sculpture was neither pure nor unadorned; its decor has been lost or worn away. Were we to see it in its original state, we would find it shockingly "vulgar." All the great figures...
...TANKER AEGEAN SEA NEVER MADE PORT. Loaded with nearly 24 million gal. of North Sea crude, struggling in heavy seas, the Greek-registered vessel foundered on rocks near the entrance to the Spanish port of La Coruna and began leaking from at least two of its nine tanks. As a series of explosions tore through the ship, sinking its bow and adding to the sludgy deluge, rescuers evacuated all of the 29-member crew by helicopter. The accident occurred at almost the exact spot along the northwest shore, nicknamed the "Coast of Death" for its toll on sea traffic over...