50 years ago, an artist exhibited an invented Iron Age civilization | Hacker News Reader

50 years ago, an artist exhibited an invented Iron Age civilization

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102 pointsbenbreen22 comments

I've often considered constructing a series of instruments and recording an album of "field recordings" of Ruritanian folk music, maybe with singing in Esperanto or another constructed language. That would be project enough, but it sounds like this guy went a lot further (even though I think his "artifacts" betray their origins a little too clearly for my taste).

A film of the exhibition captures the multimedia aspect well: https://vimeo.com/721486048/description

(Via https://civilizationofllhuros.org/)

Reminds me of Damien Hirst's recent "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable," which was presented as a documentary film but was, in fact, mockumentary.

Related is the amazing Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City California.

>One of his tall sculptural works had been exhibited in a faculty dining room. But people kept mistaking it for a hat rack, which frustrated Daly: He assumed that the value of an artwork was self-evident and that it should be able to “speak for itself.”

I'm of a similar view. I see 2 ways to overcome this.

1) Make more accessible art (in extremis, boobs and such)

2) Make more accessible people (massage, drugs...)

But I'm with Norman on this point : posting an explanatory essay on the wall next to the piece is a very wrong turn.

I saw an early 'Etruscan' exhibit years ago. All the artifacts were so 'pat', so neatly calculated to be interesting that I had suspicions that they were fake.

It can be hard to tell, especially when some folks do fakes with the intent to deceive

An exhibit is the outcome of multiple rounds of curation -- which items are preserved through history, which are acquired by museums, which are retained, which are displayed, and the prominence with which they are displayed. This curation is always going to involve some kind of agenda, benign or otherwise. In a sense you are correct that the exhibit you viewed is fake in the sense of being a fabricated version of reality. But that doesn't mean it was fake in the sense of being fraudulent.

Oh I don't know. They had a convenient mug with the Etruscan alphabet and the Greek alphabet inscribed around the top. What do you know! The letters were one-to-one. And it was perfectly preserved. Not a chip.

The various jugs and jars had insults and humorous comments painted haphazardly across them. Almost as if to entertain the audience who would 'dig them up.'

Just looking at it all my overwhelming impression was, it was just the same sort of stuff my high school class had buried in our Archaeology unit, so our classmates could collect them.

I remember (which is no evidence at all, I know) in my youth, barrows that were investigated int the 1800s and marked 'empty' as suddenly showing up years later packed with handy Etruscan artifacts of just the sort a museum would want.

The Etruscan alphabet was derived from the Greek alphabet, so I'm not sure why that would be suspicious. Etruscan dropped a few letters but otherwise it's very similar.

Unless the artifacts were archeologically excavated and professionally conserved, they probably were fake to some degree. The art market treats ancient artifacts like more modern art, which are to be admired for their aesthetic qualities and rarity rather than what they can tell us about the past. They are to be bought and sold as an investment. They are to be displayed to demonstrate refinement, sophistication, and wealth. The result is that unscrupulous "restorations" that enhance the aesthetic value of and apparent condition of artifacts are par for the course.

The Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago has a really great exhibit[0] on this topic right now, comparing Roman marbles archeologically excavated by the university with similar items obtained from the art market. The exhibit opening lecture on YouTube is worth watching if you're interested in this kind of thing.

[0] https://oi.uchicago.edu/marbles

[1] https://youtu.be/DnMO5nYP-eo

What a marvelous story. Daly's project was also thoughtful (as presented here, anyway) rather than a 1960s "shock" piece.

I was a little disappointed that the historical section was not more detailed, especially as the beginning of the article talks about today being a tie of misinformation. All cultures invent historical precedent, of course. But this work brought to mind a series of Nazi "documentaries" produced in the 1930s and 1940s trying to justify the bogus "Aryan origin" narrative and in particular to claim that the so-called "Aryan" German culture they were asserting was in fact indigenous to German territory. (Of course, like all cultures, it both is and is not).

I find this kind of thing particularly interesting and, separately, hilarious, as I personally couldn't care less about the idea that one's ancestry justifies one's own self. Thus its importance to others makes it worth learning about.

(On the amusing side, I was particularly struck by a supposed artifact, a sculpted head, that looked remarkably like Dilbert. I told Scott Adams about it and he was suitably amused. But looking now at his writing over the last six years or so one has to wonder...:-).

In case anyone is wondering: this wasn't a scam, but an art exhibit in an art museum about an openly fake civilization, done by an artist with mostly repurposed "found" objects.

The "convincingly exhibited" of the title is misleading. It wasn't about deceiving people, it was about world-building. It wasn't shown at a history museum.

It wasn't a hoax, but more of an artistic "mockumentary" for a made up civilization. Almost borgean...

Agree

Borges and his men in that strange city...

That makes more sense as the detail and volume of information indicated in the article seems like more than I would expect.

F for Fake by Orson Welles is in the same vein. Still don't know if it's a fiction or non-fiction.

Perhaps not an outright scam, but the tax-free structure of Cornell and much of the art world is certainly a benefit that most normal people and businesses don't enjoy.

Ok, we've made the title not say convincingly and replaced 'fake' with 'invented'. Thanks!

Why do humans so often exaggerate their perception of credibility?

Falling in love is often or even usually an example of that, and has the result of increasing fertility, giving the credulous a fitness advantage. A tribe with more credulous warriors may have a military advantage by being more cohesive and easier to lead.

The willing suspension of disbelief has been a successful genetic mutation. Genes learned to meme.

Because the emotion comes first, reason second. The primary purpose of reason is to rationalize emotion.

In fact, I suspect that the entire sensorium (sight, sound, etc) is an abstraction of emotion.

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