Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
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Re: Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
#2I am reminded of Steely Dan's "The Caves of Altamira" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt9VCuAbRxc), a meditation on cave paintings, and other artifacts of the human drive to create visual art, such as movies, that are shown on the walls of a darkened chamber, for our delight.
Re: Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
#3The "Interactive Video" on this page is hilariously ill conceived. Once you click a link to start another video you can't jump back to the original video and you end up playing two videos at the same time. The presenter says "Click here" but the "link" is already gone before you can even move your mouse.
Re: Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
#4It's worth remembering in the case of discoveries like this that the oldest instance of the practice is almost certainly far older than the oldest preserved instance of the practice.
Unfortunately, there has been relatively little statistical work done to use distributions of preserved ages to infer the age of origin, and although I recall reading an article in Nature on the problem in the '80's or early '90's it would seem that most of the people working in the field have not really focused on this problem, and instead continue to apply a mixture of "The practice began around the time of the earliest preserved instance of it" and "The practice began earlier by some amount that I will estimate from my gut".
Neither of these is approaches is methodologically sound, and both tend to underestimate the ultimate age of a given practice (or species, in the case of fossils) and tend to underestimate the error bars as well.
Re: Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
#5It's worth remembering in the case of discoveries like this that the oldest instance of the practice is almost certainly far older than the oldest preserved instance of the practice. Unfortunately, there has been relatively little statistical work done to use distributions of preserved ages to infer the age of origin, and although I recall reading an article in Nature on the problem in the '80's or early '90's it wou…
A good point. I would just quibble with your affirmative statement that '... the oldest instance of the practice is almost certainly far older than the oldest preserved instance of the practice.'
It seems to me that whilst it is highly likely the first instance is earlier than the first discovered instance and that this is a perfectly valid conjecture I don't think we have any convincing grounds to state that it is 'almost certainly far older.'
Re: Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
#6As always, Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is topical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
I showed it to a couple of my friends and every one of them fell asleep. I liked it though, and it gives you an interesting look into the modern day behind-the-scenes work these immensely valuable discoveries bring forth.
Re: Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
#7The "Interactive Video" on this page is hilariously ill conceived. Once you click a link to start another video you can't jump back to the original video and you end up playing two videos at the same time. The presenter says "Click here" but the "link" is already gone before you can even move your mouse.
Did you notice that the volume in the player goes to 11?
Re: Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
#8Can you imagine standing next to "one of the oldest figurative depictions in the world, if not the oldest one?"
The philosopher Walter Benjamin spoke of certain artworks having "aura." That one practically glows.
Re: Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
#9[deleted]
Re: Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
#10It's worth remembering in the case of discoveries like this that the oldest instance of the practice is almost certainly far older than the oldest preserved instance of the practice. Unfortunately, there has been relatively little statistical work done to use distributions of preserved ages to infer the age of origin, and although I recall reading an article in Nature on the problem in the '80's or early '90's it wou…
A good point. I would just quibble with your affirmative statement that '... the oldest instance of the practice is almost certainly far older than the oldest preserved instance of the practice.' It seems to me that whilst it is highly likely the first instance is earlier than the first discovered instance and that this is a perfectly valid conjecture I don't think we have any convincing grounds to state that it is '…
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