The Off Topic Topic

[Josquius]

Returning looted items when it's safe to do so is only right.
Stuff like the Elgin marbles however... Far iffier and less clear cut.

Greece is unsafe for sculptures and monuments?

They weren't looted. They were bought from a guy who bought them from the legitimate government of Athens.

[Eddie Teach]

Why should you have to travel to a country to learn about it? By all means, compensate the source country if the acquisition was dubious, but there's no need for every artifact to reside near its origin.

[Sheilbh]

About the same amount as of satanic cults kidnapping babies for dark rituals, I'd say. Moral panics are moral panics.

FWIW, always been ninja turtles around here.

And in the UK the video nasties panic when the British Board of Film Classification were in a particularly restrictive mood and there were loads of campaigns against violence on TV/film. (There's a really good recent horror film by Prano Bailey-Bond called Censor which is about the video nasty craze - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRrhXjH1M70).

We didn't have satanic panic but we definitely had a massive moral panic about violence on film/TV and especially anything kids could see.

FWIW I only remember it being ninja turtles but I wonder if that's me mentally ret-conning what I grew up with Weirdly the film was ninja turtles.

[HVC]

Parts of the world had a "ninja panic" the way the US had a "satanic panic".

That's why in Germany it was called "American Fighter" and "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles"

I can maybe get racial sensitivity, but ninja panic? Where there a lot of criminals running around dressed in black ninja costumes in the 80s?

About the same amount as of satanic cults kidnapping babies for dark rituals, I'd say. Moral panics are moral panics.

FWIW, always been ninja turtles around here.

At least there were goth kids the Americans could point to at shout "see"

[HVC]

Returning looted items when it's safe to do so is only right.
Stuff like the Elgin marbles however... Far iffier and less clear cut.

Greece is unsafe for sculptures and monuments?

They weren't looted. They were bought from a guy who bought them from the legitimate government of Athens.

My understanding, which could be faulty, is that Elgin got the ok to take damaged or neglected stuff and just decided to take everything lol. Wasn't there a big brouhaha in the uk when he actually brought the marbles back and he sold them at a loss to the government to save face?

[Sheilbh]

My understanding, which could be faulty, is that Elgin got the ok to take damaged or neglected stuff and just decided to take everything lol. Wasn't there a big brouhaha in the uk when he actually brought the marbles back and he sold them at a loss to the government to save face?

Yeah it was hugely controversial at the time. And worth noting there's occasionally polls on this and it's only about 15% who think they should remain in the British Museum but, obviously, it's not a massive priority issue.

There is a sliding scale of wrong in the British Museum. At one extreme I'd have the Benin bronzes which is just indefensible, then you have your standard imperial looting through to dodgy acquisitions with extreme power differentials but not formal empire (which is where I'd put the Elgin Marbles but also the Chinese collection) and then you have stuff that is actually probably okay - the Japanese collection, for example.

I think the Greeks have campaigned really well for the Elgin Marbles to be returned - but Nigeria has been arguing for restitution of the Benin bronzes and many other items for decades and that was literally plundered. We massacred a city and carved up its cultural heritage for display. Similarly the British Museum has Ethiopian religious artifacts that are really cherished in Ethiopia, particularly tabots which are incredibly holy in Ethiopian orthodoxy. They are so sensitive that the British Museum won't ever display the tabots - but hasn't returned them and says they can't legally return them. I think some of the importance of the Elgin Marbles is slightly because they are perceived as European and in effect a legacy of treating a European, white country in the way Europeans treated the rest of the world. There's a strong case they should be returned but they attract vastly more attention than things that are worse in terms of how we stole them and their significance, especially in the African collection.

The other slight question I have about the Elgin Marbles is that I think a lot of art in national galleries have a similar sort of background - there's less campaigning about art but I'm not sure how justifiable a lot of it is. For example the Prado is the best art gallery I've ever been to - it has an incredible Flemish collection which comes from Spanish occupation of the lowlands. Similarly the Louvre has a lot of stuff that was picked up from Italy in one of France's many wars there. In the UK National Gallery it's more "grand tourists" but that's basically rich English people going to bits of Italy - often where there'd been a war (that sometimes the Brits had been involved in) picking up incredible art because the local elites need ready cash instead.  I think it's incredibly dubious and I'm not sure I can think of a reason why we should treat art differently, but it doesn't seem to attract the same sort of attention or campaign.

[HVC]

I think it's because people view art as private, so at worst you're stealing it from a person (usually a rich person, so screw them anyway).

[Josquius]

I would say with the marbles a deal like Italy recently reached is the way to go.
Greece recognises the British museum came into ownership fair and square and the British museum loans them to Greece forever.

[Maladict]

I would say with the marbles a deal like Italy recently reached is the way to go.
Greece recognises the British museum came into ownership fair and square and the British museum loans them to Greece forever.

I don't think the Italian piece was loaned, but given back. Initially for an 8 year period, which was later changed to permanently.

Getting the Greeks to recognize fair and square ownership is not very realistic. The Greeks consider Ottoman rule a military occupation, for a start. And why does it matter anyway?

[mongers]

Returning looted items when it's safe to do so is only right.
Stuff like the Elgin marbles however... Far iffier and less clear cut.

Greece is unsafe for sculptures and monuments?

They weren't looted. They were bought from a guy who bought them from the legitimate government of Athens.

Josq.'s tranformation into a reactionary small c conservative is all but complete.

I expect you to buy a flag pole in a couple of years, so you can fly the union jack outside and intimidate the renters of your multiple buy-to-let properties as they arrive to pay homage/the monthly rent.

[Josquius]

Returning looted items when it's safe to do so is only right.
Stuff like the Elgin marbles however... Far iffier and less clear cut.

Greece is unsafe for sculptures and monuments?

They weren't looted. They were bought from a guy who bought them from the legitimate government of Athens.

Josq.'s tranformation into a reactionary small c conservative is all but complete.

I expect you to buy a flag pole in a couple of years, so you can fly the union jack outside and intimidate the renters of your multiple buy-to-let properties as they arrive to pay homage/the monthly rent.

I've always been into a facts based view of imperial stuff (and well everything else) rather than the black / white washing that is typical of many :p

[Jacob]

I can maybe get racial sensitivity, but ninja panic? Where there a lot of criminals running around dressed in black ninja costumes in the 80s?

My understanding is that it was a combination of:

1) Buying into the hype about the super-effectiveness of "ninja" weapons and training.

2) Fears of maladjusted teenagers and young men going on violent rampages, whether for social alienation reasons or for criminal motives.

Basically, those memes about "while you did [ x ], I studied the way of the blade" or some dork with nunchucks somehow thinking he looks dangerous and intimidating with them were believed not just by the dork doing them, but widely enough that it made sense (in some areas) to cater to them to assuage people's fears and/ or score cheap political points.

That's my understanding anyhow.

[Razgovory]

Youtube really, really, really thinks I want to see NSFW photos of Lily from the AT&T commercials.

[Sheilbh]

Oh RIP Peter Brook one of the most influential theatre directors of the 20th century
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/jul/03/peter-brook-obituary

On the productions that made his name here:

Nineteen sixty-two was the turning point, after which, for Brook, theatre would always take precedence. He came to believe that cinema had acquired a spurious reputation for "reality", when in fact its images are frozen in time. Theatre always asserted itself in the present. It was more real, more risky, dangerous and disturbing. This was the year when his Theatre of Cruelty group, based on the writings of Antonin Artaud and set up with Charles Marowitz at Peter Hall's new Royal Shakespeare Company, inspired the uncompromisingly harsh King Lear, the first of three historic RSC Brook productions that examined the compulsiveness of human cruelty and help, to this day, to define cultural London in the 60s.

Lear was followed by Marat/Sade (1964), Peter Weiss's virtuoso take on the terror in revolutionary France, and US (1966), a company-devised show in reaction to the Vietnam war. Marat/Sade, in which the unknown Glenda Jackson burst on the world as the inspired rustic assassin Charlotte Corday, proposed the sanity of madness in the aftermath of unreason's tenure of power; the production was adapted for a film version in 1967, with many of the original cast. US rudely broke the silence beneath which the British government condoned the escalation of conflict in Vietnam. It was the most overtly political work Brook ever did; anticipating, as Hall has pointed out, the confrontations of 1968. Although sometimes mocked for its naivety, it asked a lot of embarrassing questions, marked a rare moment of global actuality in British theatre, and made clear to Brook one theatrical road down which he would not go.

Lear, Marat/Sade and US established the Brook legend in Britain. Success became triumph with the radical and witty RSC A Midsummer Night's Dream of 1970, in which the wood near Athens became a bare white box, Puck walked on stilts, Oberon commanded the action from a swing and Titania rose imperiously on a scarlet feather boa. Inspired partly by Jerome Robbins's ballet masterpiece, Dances at a Gathering, admired in the west for its clarity and in the Soviet bloc for its subversiveness, "Brook's Dream" became even more famous than Bottom's, ran on Broadway, and marked his departure from both the anglophone theatre and the proscenium stage.

In 1964, he had directed a production of Genet's The Screens at the RSC's Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, then literally a warehouse, and it launched the adventure that was to inform the rest of his career. He had begun the charge through the proscenium arch and into the auditorium so that audiences and actors could share the same "field of life". He was not the only director to take theatre out of the theatres, in Britain or in Europe, but he was the most effective. The charge became a stampede, and by the end of the century at least two generations of younger theatregoers had grown up for whom the proscenium arch itself was an alienating presence - the exception, not the norm.


Paul Scofield, seated, as King Lear, in Peter Brook's historic production for the RSC in 1964. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

In The Empty Space, adapted from his four Granada lectures of 1968, Brook declared that you can take any space and make it a bare stage – "You don't need red curtains, spotlights and tip-up seats" – and he divided theatre into four kinds: the deadly, in which nothing happens; the rough, which is real but lacks vision or head; the holy, in which narrative, performance, spectators and place come together; and the immediate, which changes all the time.

In hindsight, these lectures read like Brook's farewell to Britain. There was no money – and no will – to fund a Peter Brook company whose prime purpose was not performance but experiment and research. French cultural policies were both more cosmopolitan and more open to risk-investment in the individual artist. Over the previous decade, Brook had directed the French premieres of several key plays of the time so, in 1970, when French faith was backed by funding from the French government and from the Ford, Robert Anderson and Gulbenkian foundations, Brook moved to Paris. He was 45, in mid-career, and at the height of his powers.

There, he founded the International Centre of Theatre Research (ICTR). Its vision was a form of theatre comprehensible to all, dealing with universal emotions. The first actors were recruited from France, Britain, America, Romania, Poland, Italy, Mali, Nigeria, India and Morocco. Brook chose – in his own words – "people who had been marked by life, but not too drastically". The aim was to see if there was a "form of theatre which acts like music", and appeals to audiences of many kinds.

[celedhring]

I'll add that he casually played a part in revitalising the Barcelona theatre scene in the 1980s. He became enamored with a warehouse in the old 1929 Expo buildings, and said that if that was turned into a theatre he would open it with one of his productions - which he did and now that's the #1 "serious" theater in town (Mercat de les Flors).