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shahana dastidar
Sunday, 25 October 2009
the Efficacy of Pizza in curing Dengue
is something that needs to be researched. It seems to have worked wonders on the brother of mine. Perhaps we should try it on my poor old antique dog as well...
And speaking of old stuff (I seem to be mired in it), valiant and concentrated work continues on this topic. The question of the moment - why bother to keep old stuff? Throw it away. Demolish everything. Make new stuff. Its a valid point. And, in fact, conservation architects seem to demolish more than normal ones. I mean most architects just start with a blank slate, conservation folks usually start with some selective demolition.
So about this selective demolition-ing.
Who decides
what to remove,
what to keep,
what is pretty,
what is useful,
what is pretty useful, prettily useful, usefully pretty, neither pretty nor useful
Artistic, aesthetic and frequently historical values are highly subjective stuff. But of course the fact of the matter is that age gives an artefact value that cannot be argued with. Antiquity makes it indifferent to praise and criticism from us, trying to place a value on it today. Its value at the time of its creation could have been something very different. Who knows really?
Ever read The Picture of Dorian Grey? Oscar Wilde writes in it, 'the one charm of the past is that it is the past.' So that's putting it clearly. It is valuable because it is old. However, considering the fate of the unfortunate Mr. Grey, perhaps what he meant was that one should leave the past alone. The charm lies in the fact that it has already happened. Its done. Its gone.
So what to do?
photograph it and demolish it?
preserve whats left of its charm from a bygone era?
actively recapture its charm from a bygone era?
or do what we indians do best - figure out how this bygone era charm stuff is going to make us rich.
Next up: Making money off bygone eras.......
But before that I'm going to feed some modern day pizza to my historical artefact doggie. She's neither pretty nor useful. But she's absolutely got ALL her charm. Sometimes one keeps old stuff just because one wants to, you know. No rationale no logic no reason no shit. Reading for this week - The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
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Hoarding old stuff is therapeutic. Relive the Glory days or the Dog days. Also great for gloating to spouse/child/etc. Heehee.
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