The statue population

 

Besides the insanity of the reaction to a feast of Bacchus featured in the Olympic opening, it has made me think of how a city educates you.

In American cities, the urbanscape educates you in the beloved symbols of fast food, in soaring buildings, and in statuary that is generally clothed, generally figurative, and generally about some general or president.

Even the statue of liberty is heavily draped.

If you grow up in an Anglosphere city, these things are normal. If you grow up in Paris, or Montpellier, or Genua, or Rome, these things aren’t. In these cities, your parents stroll you in the baby carriage, when you are a baby, amidst a wilderness of buttocks, breasts, and penises. The statue with all its human parts showing is part of the landscape. This is one of the enduring effects of the Renaissance “rediscovery” of paganism.

However, even the fact that there is a goodly proportion of bronze and marble statues showing off their privates would not make Continental culture that much different, if the urbanscape in Paris, Rome, Montpellier etc. was not so heavily oriented towards mass transit and walking. New York is, in this respect, a very European city. In most American cities, however, the bus using population is mostly working class. If you are driving your SUV, or Tesla, or pickup truck from your home in Alpharetta to your law office on Peachtree in downtown Atlanta, you are probably not going to be looking out of the window at any sculpture on the way. In fact, in the Atlanta metro area, the common popular experience of sculpture is the side of Stone Mountain, depicting a buncha slaveowners riding horsies.

Perhaps the most be-statued city in the United States is Washington D.C. I can’t imagine living in D.C. and not having some statue friends. Yet, scan the Wiki page of D.C. outdoor sculpture and you will find that there is not an undressed mook among the whole lot. Well, save for some of them in the Hirschhorn statue garden.

Here, by contrast, is a page devoted to the “male appendages” of Paris statues. Asking the perennial question, why are they so small? Which doesn’t puzzle me, since I know, as a man, what it would mean to stand out in my altogether on a cold day in a Paris park.

By these standards, the Bacchanal at the Olympic opening was most notable for its modesty. From Henry V to the bals musettes of Jazz Age Paris, there was mucho display of the human body. Although in the late sixties and early seventies there was a fad for prancing around nude on stage, that – shall I use the old wanker’s word, Rabelaisian? – that carnival culture has faded.

It is an interesting contrast with the deluge of porno in which we live, globally. Which is centered in the United States. I’m not sure of the cultural meaning, of what to make of this stark divide.