Pirate's Cove

No longer should we look at pieces of art for beauty, for enjoyment. Nope

The climate change clues hidden in art history

As the 1850s were drawing to a close, the artist Frederic Edwin Church was navigating off the Canadian coast of Newfoundland in preparation for his next painting. The search for the Northwest Passage had captured the public’s imagination for much of that decade and Church – America’s best-known landscape painter – was also lured. He chartered a schooner to approach the sea ice and spent weeks among the frozen blocks before returning to his studio in New York with about 100 sketches. (big snip)

As scientists, policy-makers and members of the public attempt to make sense of the climate crisis, art historians poring over artworks are finding all sorts of answers (and a handful of new questions) about how our relationship with nature has changed, about past and present societies’ ideas of climate and even about the physical changes of our planet.

One of the central conclusions art historians have made is that our conception of nature has been dramatically altered in the last century. If you visited the Princeton Art Museum for its 2018 exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, you might have caught glimpses of this transition (albeit one that’s messy, non-linear and far from finished) from immutable to frail nature. (snip)

“There’s a 180-degree switch from a world that we have no control over, to one in which we are actually controlling the fate of the planet, and recognising that we’re not doing a very good job on it,” says Kusserow.

He argues that a noticeable transition, at least in the US, occurred during the 1960s, propelled by the counterculture movement and books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring – whose first chapter is also a speculative fiction short story. The following decades saw artists producing work that was self-conscious about environmental issues and moved beyond romantic representations of the natural world.

OK, once you’ve mentioned Silent Spring, which was a huge load of mule fritters, as being important you’ve proven this is all a joke.

She has noticed the transition even in the last couple of decades. As the impacts of climate change become more striking, so have artists’ approaches. Kathuria suggests air pollution as an example in which changes in the city are forcing artists to react. “Suddenly, we cannot survive without air purifiers,” she says. “We never needed air purifiers in Delhi. The problem is now coming face-to-face, so naturally the response of the artist has become much more direct.”

That’s interesting, because most of the big cities with pollution problems (which is a separate issue from ‘climate change’) are run by the same people who believe in Hotcoldwetdry. Let’s skip to the end

For instance, the best representation of our current emergency is not in temperature charts or in the upwards concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. The climate crisis, and what it means to us in 2020, is better explained with youth strikers’ signs, the debris left behind after a cyclone and the sketches over wildfire emergency maps. To fully understand a climate, even in a painting, we need the cultural artefacts; one must observe the shoes and the dogs.

How about all the debris left after a ‘climate change’ rally/protest? Anyhow, now the Cult of Climastrology is trying to take over art and just ruin it.