Key West The Newspaper

by Kim Pederson…….

Confluence is an interesting word. In strict terms, it means a place of coming together (which reflects, confluentially, on the blog I posted yesterday). The word appears most often in “confluence” with references to rivers and streams but it can apply to other things as well (meaning us). Yesterday, I experienced a strange confluence. I saw the video clip of the former ISIS member confessing at his trial at The Hague to destroying historical buildings in Timbuktu in Mali. Also yesterday, I read “David’s Ankles,” a story by Sam Anderson in The New York Times Magazine. It’s a fascinating piece, mostly about the micro-cracks in the ankles of Michelangelo’s David, cracks that could experience a catastrophic failure, as in the statue’s legs break and it collapses, if the center of gravity shifts too far. This could happen, say, if Florence, where the David resides, experiences one of its many earthquakes.

The David has experienced it’s own share of human abuse, both as an unwieldy, imperfect, 25,000-pound block of marble and after Michelangelo finished it. The completed statue’s left arm was broken off when someone threw a bench out the window of the building behind it (when the sculpture was still out in the open). Someone else took a hammer to one foot. And that’s just the physical abuse. It leaves out the thousands of tourists having their picture taken cupping its genitals or the “two women…pretending to hold the David’s penis simultaneously, as if it were a trophy fish.”

Anderson also notes that art has suffered willful destruction pretty much since its inception:

Destruction takes many forms, not just the sudden apocalyptic crash or the long-term degradation of rain and ice and wind. There is death by inaction, death by neglect. There is also death by reverence, death by ubiquity, death by subtle retail-shop humiliation.

Re the reverence death, he mentions how the Italian monk Savonarola twice gathered all the nonreligious art in Florence along with other objects that might tempt sin such as books, mirrors, cosmetics, clothing, musical instruments, and even playing cards, “piled it all 50 feet high in the central square and set it on fire.” The first event in 1497 was the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities.

The monk’s motives were not evil. One of his central themes in preaching was railing against the rich for exploiting the poor. He and his followers also wanted to rid their city of vice. They just got a little carried away with it all. They needed the guidance of the Roman playwright Terence, who supposedly was one of the first to say “moderation in all things.” Instead they got the rabid equivalent of Oscar Wilde, who’s view was “everything in moderation, including moderation.”

The upshot of all this is that, no matter what the reason or cause, everything is finite (except cockroaches of course). But the neat thing is that in spite of all the extremely cool art works that are no longer with us or will soon leave us, we keep making more extremely cool artworks. These all, in one way or another, carry the DNA of their predecessors. And we will keep doing this, at least until the Earth plunges fatally and finally into that black hole that Nova keeps warning us about. And after that, who cares?

* Portrait of Girolamo Savonarola, Fra Bartolomeo, circa 1497-1948. Public Domain.

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.