2rafa
5hr ago
Indians are MDMs in Africa just like Lebanese and Palestinians are MDMs in Central America (and parts of West Africa, too). But that doesn’t say much about overall performance, just about potential differences with majority populations in those lands. ‘In the land of the blind’…, as that line goes.
2rafa
17hr ago
The German system is a hybrid of the Anglo and French systems. The husband cannot unilaterally perform a legally valid paternity test, but he can challenge his wife’s (or the child’s mother’s) refusal of one in court. The court can then order a test, and if he isn’t the father, if he wasn’t married he’s largely off the hook and if he was he has a strong legal case.
This is in contrast to the French system which makes it difficult if not impossible at every point without maternal consent. France is actually quite unique in this regard, a product of a long culture of acceptance of affairs by both sexes.
Essentially some point in the last 500 years, but probably 200-350 years ago (being deliberately broad) classical art was “solved”. Developments in perspective, the teaching of art, color, etc etc meant that certainly by the early 19th century you couldn’t really, as an artist, make a more beautiful painting of a subject in a naturalistic (ie beautiful, realistic, aesthetically congruent style) in an innovative way. There are still many classically trained artists and for a couple of hundred dollars you can buy a beautiful painting from a really good Chinese artist in a naturalistic style of whatever you want.
At that point, what does the artist do? The field has been solved, so once you spend a few years developing the fine motor skills, technique and so on in a classroom you just spend another 50 years doing the artistic version of churning out the same table 10,000 times. Many, probably most working artists did this and still do this. There are still portrait artists and video game concept artists and classical landscape artists and so on who follow these rules to the letter and just paint ‘thing, following rules’ with some technical skill.
But for the artist who wants to be innovative in terms of technique, what is there to paint or draw? You can draw something new, be the guy who does portraits of SpaceX rockets or NVIDIA GPUs or something and maybe solves some minor challenge of framing or perspective involved. Kind of a niche, and limited demand. Or you can experiment with technique in a way that violates the classical laws of beauty, perspective, framing, etc that are ‘solved’. That largely describes the last 150 years of modern and then contemporary art. It isn’t a grand conspiracy but it’s not necessarily the most flattering way of viewing the profession either.
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