The Marble Veneer of the Roman Empire

Part of the objunc process is, by the use of scans and printing, to allow the images to evolve and develop over multiple generations. This gives them the opportunity to retain aspects I like, and abandon those I'm no longer interested in. This is a second generation, birthed of this earlier post.

I expect that I will continue to complain about politics and other Americans, I suppose that, as soon as possible, I should acknowledge that I am completely aware that political art is played out, cliche, and so five years ago.

Remember the first anti-Bush art piece you saw and how dangerous it seemed at the time. Now things are so bad that it's obvious and cliche to bitch about it on the page. The art establishment censored itself. LOL

Any time I see red, white and blue used in a composition, it makes me cringe. Thank you artist, I get it, Bush sucks, Americans dropped the ball. I'm not entirely sure what that means; to be so aware of the problems that we've created and, still, be so impotent to find solutions, it's really very frightening to me.

I'm listening to the first hour of the Diane Rehm Show's, Friday News Roundup for July 4th. It's even more bleak than I thought. There was concern about the attention span of young people, the inability of the public to penetrate the surface of issues in an analytic or substantive way, the difference between access to information and actual possession of information with regard to the internet, and general civic awareness. I'll go into it later, it was a lot to digest.

They did sort of mention the Roman practice of building with this revolutionary new material, concrete. It was a quick mention for them, but I think it's a really interesting analogy. They built in a way that was similar to the monumental buildings and temples of the Greeks, except the marble was only a veneer. For instance, The Pantheon, is all surface; the internal structure is concrete and cheap brick. The marble is a disguise, an attractive surface hiding the vulgar guts of the place. Why do things as well as the Greeks, when we can pretend with half the effort?

I don't know if the guests realized how apt an analogy it was.