I just need to do some venting because i have been trying to get more educated lately about various forms of art throughout history and the more i read the more angry i get with the way the entire subject is treated from such a Eurocentric and frankly often outright racist perspective.

And this is not just a problem in the West, throughout the world somehow Europeans have managed to brainwash the entire rest of the world into idolizing their art, their music, their culture and putting it on some kind of pedestal as this sort of gold standard. Why the fuck do parents in Asia for instance so often send their kids to learn to play European classical music instead of the music of their own countries? Why is it that when you read about the “greatest composers of all time” they are all some pasty Euro fuckers, most of them making art primarily for the consumption of wealthy aristocrat patrons?

As if other cultures weren’t also making various forms of art for thousands of years - and many of them were no less sophisticated. (And mind you even in Europe the representation exludes the art of the lower classes, who certainly had their own music and culture that was distinct from that of the upper classes.) For once i’d like to see an African, Middle Eastern or Asian painter, writer, or composer of music traditional to their own regions get praised and elevated to the same level of respect, admiration and universal recognition as the European “classics”. Why do we constantly have to put up with this big circlejerk about how “great” some toffs in wigs were for writing music that in large part only the rich could afford to have played for them because it required an entire orchestra with an absurd amount of performers?

Of course i know the answer to these rhetorical questions, it’s because the dominant culture in any society tends to be the culture of the ruling class. I understand this but it still pisses me off how inescapable European upper class culture is. One of the tasks ahead of us when the revolution comes will have to be the dismantling of the centuries of accumulated cultural hegemony of the Euro bourgeoisie. The Soviets were right to encourage socialist realism as a radical departure with the bourgeois culture of the capitalist system. We need a global cultural revolution.

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.mlOP
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    1 year ago

    It’s one thing for Europeans to think that way, i expect it of them, the racism and the cultural superiority complex, but what makes me really mad is when non-Europeans internalize that shit, looking down on and denigrating their own cultures while idolizing and worshiping the culture of the colonizers. And it’s not just the arts, i mean worshiping in the literal sense too. So many colonized peoples have literally adopted even the religion of the colonizers, and now hold on to it as an integral part of their own identity even though it was forced on their ancestors by the sword, with mass genocide, torture and brainwashing camps (the so called “mission schools”). I mean just think about how twisted it is that in the US the overwhelming majority of the descendants of slaves abducted from Africa now worship the god of the slavers…