Nude painting row at French school sparks teacher walkout

[ZenDruid]

That professor from england sounds dumb, everyone heard about slavery and 9/11

He was dumb, he should have known that it was the British who first brought slaves to the Jamestown Colony in 1619; Jamestown being a British colony with a British governor appointed by the Crown. About 150 years before the United States came along.

 

[stlukesguild]

I had a professor from England say to us in class "Americans have no culture."

I need to agree that your professor was quite likely cognitively lacking. Of course, it is possible that he or she was simply frustrated over the influx of crass American mass-media culture: TV, advertising, pop music, comic books, and Hollywood films (but a good deal withing that realm is quite good). If he were a professor worthy of his degree he should have been more than aware of the wealth of "high culture" contributed by Americans: Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Cormac McCarthy, James Whistler, Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Willem DeKooning, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Joseph Cornell, George Tooker, Jacob Lawrence, Phillip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Imogen Cunningham... to say nothing of American contributions to film, television, and music... including some of those working within the realm of pop music.

 

[brianvds]

I had a professor from England say to us in class "Americans have no culture."

I need to agree that your professor was quite likely cognitively lacking. Of course, it is possible that he or she was simply frustrated over the influx of crass American mass-media culture: TV, advertising, pop music, comic books, and Hollywood films (but a good deal withing that realm is quite good). If he were a professor worthy of his degree he should have been more than aware of the wealth of "high culture" contributed by Americans: Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Cormac McCarthy, James Whistler, Edward Hopper, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Willem DeKooning, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Joseph Cornell, George Tooker, Jacob Lawrence, Phillip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Imogen Cunningham... to say nothing of American contributions to film, television, and music... including some of those working within the realm of pop music.

What they usually mean is that they don't like American culture, but of course, then it would sound too much like personal taste and too little like fact.

For the past century, America has been by far and away the most creative nation on the planet, in pretty much all fields, from the arts to the sciences to technology.

 

[stlukesguild]

Brian... we can't underestimate the British. A small country (in comparison to the US in both scale and population) turned out an impressive array of creative artists.

Among the notable artists since mid-century we have: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Howard Hodgkin, and David Hockney. We also would do well to remember that Pop Art... one of the most influential movements of the 20th century... was begun by British artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton... and later Hockney, and Peter Blake (among others).

The US certainly dominated the realm of Jazz Music, Blues, and early Rock... but by the 1960s, the British certainly led the field in Rock/Pop with the contributions of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, The Police, The Animals, Cream, Eric Clapton, John Mayall, Queen, etc... They also had more than a few great classical composers: Edward Elgar, Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, etc...

British contributions to literature are unequaled across the centuries... and they produced more than a few literary "lions" into the 20th century (and beyond): Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, G.K. Chesterton, A.E. Housman, John Berger, Wilfred Owen, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence Durrell, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, William Golding, Aldous Huxley, Henry James, Graham Greene, J.R.R. Tolkein, Kazuo Ishiguro, Neil Gaiman, Peter Ackroyd, etc...

Even in the field of film, we have Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Ridley Scott, David Attenborough, etc...

For better or worse, the Arts have always flourished in the wealthiest nations... and those nations with an influx of ideas and individuals from other countries through trade, immigration... or even warfare.

 

[brianvds]

Brian... we can't underestimate the British. A small country (in comparison to the US in both scale and population) turned out an impressive array of creative artists.

The British certainly punch above their weight. Or at least, they used to. In more recent times they have produced the likes of Boris Johnson.

 

[stlukesguild]

It's hard to laugh at Johnson considering some of our recent/current political crop.

 

[brianvds]

It's hard to laugh at Johnson considering some of our recent/current political crop.

And you can all relax: when it comes to corrupt and incompetent leadership, none of you will beat South Africa.