Anti-antipodes: Fan Art and Pop Culture

Today we did an early morning jaunt to Vatican City. We were careful not to buy rosary beads from the vendors on the streets, because we'd heard that these weren't authentic rosary beads. I mean, imagine how you'd feel if you got home and found your beads didn't work, and you couldn't get service and support from the Vatican. I bet it's one of the first things they ask on the rosary help desk: "did you buy authentic beads from the Vatican shop?" Then if you answer yes, they ask you for the serial number. (And you can't just use one of the cracked serial numbers downloaded from the net; they've already blacklisted them.)

Cool story, bro

The piazza outside of St Pete's shows just how much you can get done with a vision and a little bit of help from people who want eternal rewards (and some that weren't given a choice). It also reminds one that one can steal whatever one likes from other countries and erect it in honour of one's deity, and by right of self-acknowledged rightness and the implicit approval of one's deity, it becomes "not stealing but preserving for everyone's edification". (The same trick works with a national identity substituted for a deity.) Anyway, nice obelisk, dudes.

Columns and fountains. Size matters.

Still, I shouldn't be applying modern morality ideas (like respect for another nation's sovereignty) to ancient practices. Times were different then. We shouldn't expect timeless unchanging stability of moral values or anything, should we.

While walking though one of the Vatican museums I overheard a guide saying that a lot of Roman art included young children and wine - because they found the idea of drunken children amusing. Whether this was true or not didn't matter to me as much as the idea that a lot more of this antiquity overload was the humorous pop culture of the day. We think of the great artists of the past as mostly very serious people, but they were still people and their humour had to show through. One also must realise that a lot of we think of as high art was just fan art of the day. Bernini was happy to sculpt fan art of Ovid, Virgil, biblical stories, etc. Is it too much to see a kind of Mary-Sue-ism when an artist puts his own features on his rendition of David?