**Summary Nuggets from Provided Text:**

1.

**Prevalence of Iconoclasm:**
   - Acts of vandalism toward landmarks such as the Little Mermaid are often positioned within broader debates on iconoclasm, which is not only an expression of anger but also an attempt to challenge authority and make space for new societal values or narratives.

- Iconoclasm can be both didactic and symbolic, aiming to "teach" by removal or destruction as much as by preservation.

**Cultural Reclamation and Representation:**
   - Discussions about the Little Mermaid, and similar icons, highlight issues of cultural representation, especially regarding the domination of Western-centric narratives.

- There is a push for decolonizing perspectives, reclaiming stories and symbols that have pre-existed colonial or Western framings.

**Motivations Behind Acts:**
   - Media and academic discourse suggest vandalism of monuments like the Little Mermaid often carries a message, whether political, social, or cultural—critiquing tradition, expressing resistance, or highlighting marginalized voices.

- Specific references in the text allude to different forms of protest, such as environmental activism, anti-racism, or political statements (e.g., the Russian flag instance).

**Controversy of Artistic and Historical Value:**
   - Debates continue on how society should approach controversial monuments, considering both their artistic/historical value and the problematic aspects of the figures or stories they represent.

- The decision of who is celebrated or memorialized in public spaces is increasingly scrutinized, with calls for greater transparency and, possibly, "cooling-off periods" before reintroducing such works with adequate context.

**Public Discourse and Diverse Remembrance:**
   - There is a noted lack of public discourse around the handling of vandalized or controversial monuments and a growing call for a more diverse and inclusive culture of public memory.

**Vandalism as Events of Faith or Protest:**
   - In some contexts, vandalism is seen as an "event of faith" or a deeply personal act with symbolic meaning, as illustrated by references to religious statues and the devotion they inspire, even after being desecrated.

**Photographic and Digital Documentation:**
   - The obsession with imaging and documentation raises questions about the preservation and impact of visual records of these monuments and their transformations, including damage and repair.

**Implications for the Little Mermaid Statue:**
These extracted points should be understood as the socio-cultural and psychological backdrop for the recurring vandalism of the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen.

Each act of vandalism—whether for political, ideological, or personal reasons—contributes to an ongoing discourse about authority, memory, representation, and the function of public art.

The media accounts often frame these acts not simply as crimes, but as complex interventions in the ongoing negotiation of meaning, history, and identity in public space.

Certainly!

Focusing exclusively on the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, here is a synthesized summary that matches your request for key individual incidents of vandalism, with contextual and narrative elements illuminated where possible—drawn from historical records (since your supplied text does not directly cover the Little Mermaid’s vandalism cases):

**Report on Repeated Intentional Damages to the Statue of the Little Mermaid, Copenhagen**

**History and Overview:**
Since its unveiling in 1913, Edvard Eriksen’s Little Mermaid statue, situated in the Copenhagen harbor, has become an iconic symbol of Denmark.

However, its prominent public placement and symbolic stature have made it a frequent target for acts of vandalism, protest, and political demonstration.

---

**1.

1964 – Decapitation (First Major Attack)**
- **Incident:** On April 24, 1964, the statue was found decapitated; the head was sawn off and stolen.

- **Details:** Despite a police investigation, the head was not immediately retrieved.

Artist Jørgen Nash, associated with the Situationist movement, later claimed responsibility as a political and artistic statement.

- **Restoration:** A new head, crafted from the original mold by the Eriksen family, was installed.

1984 – Arm Removed**
- **Incident:** On July 22, 1984, vandals sawed off and stole the statue’s right arm.

- **Details:** The arm was returned by two young men days later.

- **Motivation:** No clear political or social motive was established, though it was widely considered an act of youthful mischief or protest.

1990 – Failed Decapitation Attempt**
- **Incident:** In 1990, there was an attempt to decapitate the statue again, leaving noticeable damage to the neck area.

- **Details:** The attempt was unsuccessful, but repair work was required.

1998 – Second Decapitation**
- **Incident:** The statue was again decapitated in January 1998.

- **Details:** The head was later returned anonymously.

- **Motivation:** Again, this was attributed to vandalism rather than a distinct political agenda.

2003 – Blown Off Pedestal**
- **Incident:** On September 11, 2003, vandals used explosives to blast the statue off its stone base.

- **Damage:** The statue was knocked into the harbor but was not seriously damaged; it was retrieved and restored.

- **Motivation:** The nature of the attack suggested significant planning, but no individual or group claimed responsibility or provided an explicit reason.

2004 – Painted with Graffiti**
- **Incident:** The statue was repeatedly doused with paint (red, green, and more), and graffiti was scrawled on the base.

- **Details:** These acts were typically timed with political protests or global events, with slogans advocating for various causes.

Ongoing Minor Vandalism**
- The statue is frequently subject to less severe vandalism, such as being dressed in clothing, draped in banners, or decorated with various items.

These acts are often connected to celebrations, protests, or local events.

---

**Discussion and Context:**
- Many acts against the statue, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, were emblematic of broader currents in avant-garde art and anti-establishment protest.

Particularly, the Situationists used public art vandalism as a critique of bourgeois values and a call for reimagining the use of public spaces.

- Later attacks and acts of graffiti generally align with global protest movements or serve as a platform for expressive dissent (e.g., coloring the mermaid to protest whaling or wars).

- The statue’s repeated targeting could be read both as a signifier of its power as a symbol, and as demonstrating the vulnerability of public art in contested urban space.

---

**Conclusion:**
The Little Mermaid has become a recurrent site for the expression of social, political, and artistic grievances, as well as acts of random vandalism.

Each instance reflects not just individual motives but also broader social dynamics—how cultural symbols are appropriated, contested, and negotiated in public discourse.

Let me know if you need more detailed discourse analysis or references to specific media coverage for some of these episodes!

Certainly!

Based on the provided text, here is a summary in the form of key nuggets of information, in about 2500 characters:

---
**Key Nuggets from the Text:**

- The text discusses the act of "sweeping" away the legacies of previous political powers, likening it to practices of new regimes which may choose to retain or discard elements of past systems at their discretion.

This is compared to the actions of political parties in Sudan and the difficulties of truly erasing institutional legacies.

- There are references to how leaders in power recycle former adversaries, incorporating them into new administrations despite earlier opposition, indicating the complex and often cyclical nature of political change.

- The concept of a "deep state" is introduced, characterized as self-interested groups indifferent to broader societal suffering, suggesting a cynicism about genuine reform.

- The narrative shifts to protest and civil resistance, describing disruptive street actions and comparing them to vandalism in a museum setting, e.g., people destroying or defacing artworks as a form of environmental protest.

The hypothetical example given is of damaging museum art to make a political point about the environment.

- The analogy to criticizing a needle for its hole is used to question the logic or effectiveness of certain kinds of protest or vandalism.

- The text explores the process by which objects, tools, or artworks gain collective social significance over time, becoming part of a society’s cultural and symbolic heritage, suggesting the emotional weight carried by monuments and public statues.

- There is reflection on alienation and cultural guilt in societies influenced by Western modernity, as people grapple with loyalty to traditional versus imported cultural forms.

- Artworks and statues, once created, become "instruments" that accumulate shared memory and meaning, representing more than their material existence; when these are attacked, it threatens collective identity and history.

- The text highlights contemporary debates about the value and role of art, especially in times of social and ecological crisis, referencing protests like those by environmental activists targeting cultural institutions (“Just stop the oil”).

- There is a mention of ancient sculptures and their lasting importance in shaping human identity and memory, paralleling contemporary disputes over the preservation or destruction of cultural heritage sites.

- The closing sections urge for educational and critical appreciation of art, media, and history to prevent hasty or destructive reactions toward cultural artifacts.

- **The Little Mermaid and Other Statues**: The narrative discusses the repeated damages and challenges faced by popular statues, including—but not limited to—The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen.

**Summary Nuggets from Provided Text:**

1.

Title:

Content: Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette uses a fake heist film to address real issues in the art world | Pittsburgh City Paper

Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette uses a fake heist film to address real issues in the art world

click to enlarge
Photo: Sean Eaton
Lyndon Barrois Jr.
There’s an elephant in the room at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum Gallery – one you see, and one you feel.

An Art Nouveau-inspired painting titled “Kaleidoscope” comes with gold-lined ears and bold primary colors in an abstraction of shapes that resembles an elephant. There’s a leopard, borrowed from the adjoining Carnegie Museum of Natural History, perched on stacked crates. There’s a bookcase filled with real and fake crystals, artifacts, and other objects. In the center of the room is the empty working station of a questionable presence – a possible art forger.

With Rosette, on view at CMOA through Aug. 27, Pittsburgh-based artist Lyndon Barrois Jr. places museum-goers into the center of a space that nearly resembles a movie set, complete with a never-to-be-realized short script for a heist movie about museum conservators-turned-forgers. Barrois uses his solo show, featuring a whole new body of work, to consider an art movement influenced by stolen artifacts and defined by exploited labor. Even when silent, there’s another elephant presence with you in the room: the legacy of colonialism.

Pittsburgh City Paper spoke with Barrois about the origins of Rosette, the ways art is influenced by colonialism, and the complex idea of ownership in museums.

When did you start conceptualizing the show?

The story of the conservative-forger narrative is something that has been on my mind for almost 20 years. And originally, it was going to be just a full screenplay. It was after my own experience of taking a class on painting conservation. I was also really interested in crime fiction novels. At first, it was like, maybe it’s a novel or novella, and then I was like, no, I kind of see it, so maybe it should be a film. I've been thinking about it in the context of a film for a while, but the structure of that story and the character makeup has changed over time.

Originally, the motivation to forge something was to protect it from a greedy inheritor, or someone who was going to inherit it and do something that the original owner didn't want to be done with it. So it was a sort of, like, protective strategy, to keep the real thing safe. And to allow a fake thing to travel in the world or through a market.

Later, I was reading more about the history between Belgium and the Congo, and things just kind of snapped into place, where I was like, this history feels like a good motivator. I'm interested in this history, I want to do something to speak to it.

The use of cinema in your art is recurring. Where does it originate, and why use cinema as a conduit for your message?

It lends itself to the production of physical things because there's already this way that stories allow objects to carry meaning. And also, I think, as a culture, the way that we consume film and television, you know, cinematic media, we're already accustomed to the language of marketing, and how these things are advertised to us and how we have a sense or a perception of a story before we actually we see the actual film. ... I've always kind of been interested in advertising and marketing strategies.

And so, it was just sort of convenient that film production or the history of Hollywood marketing strategy has existing forms that I can play with or alter or rescale, and kind of translate into paintings or sculptures that also fit within or mimic the aesthetics of posters, lobby cards, film stills, physical props, you know, set environments. Playing with that, like the museum is a prop house. The museum has a collection. It’s a way of thinking of a museum collection as a sort of prop house. What can I borrow to assist the narrative I'm trying to tell? To that point, many of these objects are borrowed. It’s a very meta and also somewhat sustainable choice.
click to enlarge
Photo: Sean Eaton
"Masters of Fine Arts," part of Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette at CMOA

Can you talk about the process of choosing pieces to borrow and your goal in using borrowed pieces?

I feel like every visit we made a different, slight alteration or clarifying decision about what we wanted to do, which is really fun. And then once I got a sense of what objects I was using from the museum, then I could decide, okay, what do I need to make, to play off those things? Some things I already knew. I think I knew I wanted to make lobby card portraits. I knew I wanted to recreate at least two objects that I found buried in a Belgian institutional collection, which are the King Leopold II [work] and sculpture of two children playing. Both of these are definitely meant to reference rubber extraction and labor exploitation. This fragmented sculpture of children playing with their missing limbs was obviously a reference to punishment that people who were put to work in the Belgian Congo and who were amputated as a form of punishment, so I wanted to allude to those things without literally showing them.

There’s a lot of allusion here, and I really want to talk about the literal and figurative elephants in the room. Can you talk about the elephant, and unpack the symbolism?

This [elephant piece] was inspired by a series of essays by Debora Silverman called Art Nouveau: Art of Darkness. She is kind of making a case about these kinds of colonial roots within Belgian Art Nouveau, because a few of the more notable designers of this movement in that part of the world were affiliated with King Leopold, or commissioned by people within Leopold’s circle. So it's a combination of design works or elements from [Belgian painter Henry van de Velde] and [Belgian architect Victor Horta]. And there are other visual examples from different designs of theirs, either referencing something that she described as elephantine, or whip-like or vine-like to reference the rubber vines.

It's also a different visual identity that they take on as distinct from different parts of the world. So yeah, just kind of trying to locate that visual lineage, and these designers, and how their relationship to these resources that were extracted by exploitational means were kind of embedded in their design sensibility.

There’s a tension here, between the desire to appreciate art through conservation and the potential harm done, that comes with keeping art in a way different than what the artist intended. Can you unpack that?

I was told by a conservator that there's an interesting shift between generations of artists, where, I would say, historically, in terms of hundreds of years ago, there was a sense of archival practice. And then we move into modern, post-modern [eras] to where people are making all these material experiments, and however the work is, whatever happens to it, they're okay with it degrading to a certain degree.

But now, with contemporary art, I think we're interested in this weird thing of allowing something to decay or change up to a point, and then we want to freeze it there. And that's much harder to do. I think there's one part of a conversation in which value by colonial entities has been achieved by taking things, like resources, raw, natural resources, to fuel a particular economy.
click to enlarge
Photo: Sean Eaton
"Guardians Gate (Farfanicchio)," part of Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette at CMOA
There's also the case in which objects, like cultural artifacts, fetish objects, are taken from a place for their sort of exotic properties, and then, based on the new ownership, get assigned a particular value. Or even the way that something just simply being in a museum collection changes its value or changes its perceived value, which I guess I could say was also something that I've always been interested in, of using cheap materials presented well, or presented carefully, to hopefully change the perception of how it’s valued. I used a lot of cardboard in my work when I was an artist no one cared about. That was a highly critical aspect of my work. While at the same time, I could go to a museum and see a cardboard sculpture that is being so cared for.

So there are these kind of discrepancies as well. I'm also asking the question about aesthetic value. There's a bit of that in the script text as well. Like, if an object fulfills the same aesthetic experience as an original, does it matter whether or not it's fake? That’s just a question that I've always had ... at what point do I need the actual object? If I have a really satisfying image of it, at what point does an image satisfy the use of an object? At what point does an object simply reduce itself to being an image? These kinds of things, I think, are still at play.

What should museum-goers be considering about the art they’re viewing and the conservation that keeps it viewable, that they may not already be considering when in a museum?

Acknowledging the relationship between things that are seemingly separate. Like, what does an elephant molar have to do with [Patrice Lumumba, former Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo]? Actually, one of the people involved in his assassination took one of his teeth. This is where the name “precious gums” comes from. Little things like that. There are just some things, like, when objects are illuminated by historical anecdotes or historical realities or a particular narrative, that there’s a connection that’s formed between them. … How the past impacts the present and the future always. These kinds of relationships are not just cyclical but seemingly unending.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Lyndon Barrois Jr.: Rosette. Continues through Aug. 27. Carnegie Museum of Art. 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. Included with regular admission. carnegieart.org

**Prevalence of Iconoclasm:**
   - Acts of vandalism toward landmarks such as the Little Mermaid are often positioned within broader debates on iconoclasm, which is not only an expression of anger but also an attempt to challenge authority and make space for new societal values or narratives.

Title:

Content: Smashing statues

Iconoclasm isn’t just an expression of anger. It’s how we try to make new worlds.
February 17, 2023
(Source image from Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Sometimes, bored indifference can sting worse than outright hostility. I was telling a friend about my present book project, The Storm of Images, which concerns the iconoclasm struggle in the Byzantine Empire during the eighth and ninth centuries. In my view, it’s a pivotal moment in the definition of Eastern and Western Christian traditions, so I was somewhat deflated when my friend asked, in effect, Why on earth would you want to do that? It’s so long ago, and the whole story is, well, Byzantine, a word that through the centuries has acquired plenty of negative baggage.

Fortunately, I was able to articulate a response that went beyond the simply defensive. In fact, I would argue, the whole story of iconoclasm is of perennial significance, a fact that should be as obvious today as in any previous era. Not only is smashing images an absolutely standard and recurring part of what societies do, but it is a fundamental part of religious sensibility, and by no means only for Christians. Simply put, it’s the way that we try to make new worlds.

Image smashing arises from two distinct impulses. Some iconoclasm grows out of hatred of a particular individual or the beliefs and causes that they represent. Here the smashers are striking at the figures represented, seeking to purge their memories as evil and unwanted. Such were the attacks on Soviet and communist images following the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989. More recently, in the United States, we see assaults on statues of Confederate heroes such as Nathan Bedford Forrest or Robert E. Lee. Through attacks on objects, activists are attacking the larger causes represented by those images. The United States has, since 2020, experienced a historically very sizable and socially transformative outbreak of iconoclasm, which has been echoed around the world.

Other smashers may truly venerate or love the individuals depicted, but they reject the depiction itself. In this category, far from condemning the figure represented, activists are driven by the exalted view that they have of that person, and they are rather agitated by the very notion of representing them in material or visual form. Such representation is thought impossible, the attempt evil or blasphemous. Any form of worship or prayer directed at objects is unacceptable, and it is futile to draw distinctions between worship and veneration, of praying to a material thing as opposed to praying through it. This attitude, this rejection of material images as such, was a fundamental driving force in the European Reformation—one at least as important as any particular theological doctrine of any given thinker.

The smashing of images is commonly one sensational aspect of a larger package of religious innovations, often of a quite revolutionary character. These tenets might include an assertion of inner spirituality over external or material symbols, along with perhaps a stern rejection of institutional religion or professional clergy.

Iconoclasm coexists intimately with anticlericalism. It is a rejection of existing notions of authority and a quest for whole new groundings, free of the claims of tradition. Depending on the context, the destruction of religious images can be an assertion of the supremacy of secular authority, of kings and governors over bishops and priests. The fact of destroying supposedly sacred objects—and remaining unharmed—sends a powerful message about the futility of those objects. If they are so potent, why can they not even protect themselves?

For both categories of iconoclast, their achievement lies not in destroying a given statue or altarpiece but in asserting the power to do so, against the power of the old order that hitherto had been its shield and defender. To strike at a statue or image—to bring down a Confederate general—is also to attack the institutions or individuals that erected those figures in the first place and who support their maintenance. It is a symbolic statement of who controls the visual landscape.

Moreover, the mass public violation of older taboos and restraints proclaims the impotence of that old guard. The fact that authorities no longer have the will or ability to prevent the removal of such once-cherished things in itself proclaims the end of an old world and the creation of a whole new order of society or politics. It is zero hour.

Even when the matters at issue are ostensibly secular, such acts of protest often acquire a ritualized format, which has echoes of enthusiastic or revivalist religion. Scenes of the removal of statues or images unforgettably proclaim these moments of revolutionary transformation. They are deliberately theatrical. In a modern context, visual representations of such acts of destruction become iconic in their own right. In their power to teach values, the acts of removal or destruction are as didactic as the images they are combating.

Making images is a perennial and fundamental component of the human religious experience, and so is crediting them with supernatural powers. But no less common is the practice of critiquing or destroying them. Sometimes we commemorate people’s faces; at other times we deface, and with equal passion. In order to be balanced and objective, a hypothetical museum of global religions should properly include its share of hacked and defaced icons, of fragments of toppled and shattered statues. The never-ending dialogue between the two competing approaches, the smashers and the devotees, has often driven religious thought and artistic expression.

John Calvin famously declared that “the human mind is a perpetual factory of idols.” I would adapt that to say that, time and again, history proves that the human mind is a powerful factory of image breaking, of iconoclasm.

- Iconoclasm can be both didactic and symbolic, aiming to "teach" by removal or destruction as much as by preservation.

Title:

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How do we deal with controversial monuments that are also part of Vancouver's history?

While there were a variety of views, the consensus is a cooling-off period might be the best solution before reintroducing controversial works and explaining the context in which the art was created.

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Statues have been in the news a lot lately, not because they’re shining examples of public art displaying the best of humankind, but for the racist and colonial concepts they’ve come to symbolize.

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What to do with them, though: Should they be destroyed? Hidden from view in a dusty backroom of a museum somewhere?

A panel of local art experts tackled that question on Feb. 10 and, while there were a variety of views, the consensus was a cooling-off period might be the best solution before reintroducing controversial works and explaining the context in which the art was created.

“A Columbus statue, for example, needs to be put away for awhile,” said Angela Clarke, director and museum curator at the Italian Culture Centre Gallery and moderator of the public-art panel. “We need to acknowledge he was not a good person.

“I think there’s a lot of negotiation with that and we need to reflect on how we present these things thoughtfully.”

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It may surprise a lot of people that for years the PNE was home to a statue of a young Columbus, a gift from the Italian sailor’s hometown of Genoa called The Dreamer, until it was removed to storage early last year after several acts of vandalism and a threat to decapitate it.

Or how to explain to tourists milling around the statue of Gassy Jack at Maple Tree Square that the saloon keeper who gave his name to Gastown that, at age 40, he married a 12-year-old Indigenous girl who, after giving birth to a son, ran away at 15?

Or a bust of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator who was Adolf Hitler’s ally in the Second World War, that was once displayed at the Italian Cultural Centre.

It was that Mussolini bust by Charles Marega, an immigrant sculptor from Italy who anyone crossing the Lions Gate Bridge heading north will know of from the lions adorning the Stanley Park side of the bridge, that eventually wound-up leading to last week’s panel discussion.

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“It started as a celebration (of Marega), then became more of a roast, and then at the end it was a bit of an excoriation in a way because you’re starting with this figure who really brought a lot of dignity to the Italian community at a time when there was a lot of racism toward that community,” Clarke said. “Marega was this elegant, artistic figure who was commissioned to do all these amazing things and he was popular because he was bringing all these European ideas like Beaux-Arts here.

“As time has gone on, as much as we are staggered at how wide-ranging his influence was in public sculpture here in Vancouver, at the same time there’s so much that’s questionable about the things he did.”

For one, his very notion of what public art was for was diametrically opposed to what we consider its purpose is today, Clarke said. Marega’s idea was public art should represent the corporate culture of the city and that that is what people in the community not only expected, but also wanted public sculptures to reflect.

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“There was no sense of questioning the status quo and of course the lions on the bridge, as beautiful and majestic as they are, for an Indigenous person … ”

The bridge lions aren’t mountain lions, after all, they’re symbols of Britain and its aristocracy, and the peaks they’re named after had a name — Ch’ich’iyúy Elxwikn, the Twin Sisters — long, long before contact with Europeans.

But do we destroy the statues? Take them down and store them?

Panel members had several thoughts:

“There really shouldn’t be a blanket statement across the country, or across the province,” Ammar Mahimwalla said.

Mahimwalla now lives in Victoria but for five years until 2018 he was the special projects adviser with Vancouver Biennale.

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“My sense personally, using artwork for cultural monuments as learning tools is definitely important,” he said.

Growing up in India, a lot of colonial history was officially erased, practically overnight: Cities were renamed, statues were taken down and placed in “museum graveyards where nobody would really go visit them.”

“Which is worse in some cases,” he said, than keeping the art front-and-centre to remind people of what not to repeat.

gordmcintyre@postmedia.com

twitter.com/gordmcintyre

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**Cultural Reclamation and Representation:**
   - Discussions about the Little Mermaid, and similar icons, highlight issues of cultural representation, especially regarding the domination of Western-centric narratives.

Title:

Content: Actually, Black Mermaid Folklore Has Been Around Long Before Disney’s The Little Mermaid

The moment I feel even remotely vulnerable —be that the fragile morning after an inhibition-free night, the familiar shiver of cold and flu symptoms or the helpless pit of despair that engulfs me when my mental health begins to plummet —you’ll find me curled up on the settee, under a protective layer of blankets, shamelessly watching movies filled with childhood nostalgia. Movies like Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) have sat firmly in this arsenal of self-care classics ever since I can remember, enveloping me in a carefree hug at a moment's notice.
But movies that transported me to a place of innocence and ignited my imagination without having to strain to envision myself within these fantasy worlds, however, are in short supply. As a dual heritage Black kid growing up in the 90s, opportunities to feel represented in my escapism were limited. Slightly too old to be impacted by Disney’s Princess and the Frog, I found meaning, and myself, in classics such as Roger and Hammerstein's Cinderella (starring Brandy, Whitney Houston and Whoopi  Goldberg) and Motown’s The Wiz (an adaption of the Wizard of Oz starring Diana Ross and Micheal Jackson). It’s for these reasons that I am unashamedly excited for Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, in which Ariel is played by Halle Bailey.
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There’s no shortage of discourse on representation politics, the ongoing need for fairer representation in the media we consume and the ways the lack of it impacts people of colour of all ages. This importance can be felt most viscerally via a quick TikTok search of The Little Mermaid where endless streams of reaction videos showcase the unadulterated joy of Black children when seeing the latest trailer.
Move over to Twitter, however, and you’ll likely be bombarded by bigotry and bias. The hashtag #NotMyAriel is trending amongst outrage and disgust at a Black actor being cast to play a fictional character. To quote writer and academic Saidiya Hartman, “So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination”, and whilst simultaneously comical, embarrassing and triggering to witness, this backlash served as a reminder that no matter how frivolous our sources of joy may be, whiteness will attempt to steal every ounce of it.

The fantasy of merpeople lived in the cosmologies of our Black and indigenous ancestors long before Hans Christian Anderson coined his fable in the 19th century

In decolonizing our imagination —  by challenging the Eurocentric erasure of Black and Indigenous wisdoms, creativities and experiences —we’re able to recognise that whilst the remake of The Little Mermaid is important to many (myself included), we can also find ourselves represented in our own cultural storytelling, folktales and mythologies. We don’t need to rely on the white gaze of Western capitalism to feel seen and heard. In letting go of that gaze, we are reminded that the fantasy of merpeople lived in the cosmologies of our Black and indigenous ancestors long before Hans Christian Anderson coined his fable in the 19th century, and certainly before Disney offered our generation a capitalist mascot in their 1989 animated adaptation.
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“All children, irrespective of race, creed, religion, deserve to see themselves reflected in books and films. We owe it to their self-esteem, to their creativity, to their imaginations. The imagination of a child is boundless, and it is the imaginations of this current generation of children that will ultimately provide solutions to some of the most pressing crises faced by the world today,” writer and doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, Mary Ononokpono tells Unbothered.
A final year doctoral candidate, Mary’s ongoing research into the lives of coastal Biafran women during the Atlantic Age and Age of Abolition has sparked an informal interest in the ways that pre-colonial African communities were informed by a belief in and fear of water spirits. Known colloquially as ‘Orishas’ or ‘Ndem’ these deities were thought to have been sent by a supreme or higher god to populate, protect and service the earth, and continue to be worshipped today.
“Racial injustice is ultimately rooted in historical illiteracy. If people don’t understand how we got to this point as a society, injustice will persist. In that respect, the decolonization of the cosmologies, mythologies and folklore of Black Atlantic societies has a really important part to play” she continues.
Some pre-colonial water spirits include Yemaya — a goddess of the ocean, who, legend has it, created the seven seas. Believed to be a fierce protector of women, this water spirit is still worshipped across the world,such as by those of Santería faith in Cuba who were transported across waters during the transatlantic slave trade. It is said that to connect with Yemaya, holding a shell to our ears will carry her messages in the sound of waves.
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Another pre-colonial deity is Oshun, the goddess of divinity, femininity, fertility, beauty and love. Considered to be one of the most powerful orishas, she’s both heralded as the nurturer of humanity and feared as a benevolent being, whose earthly punishments come in the forms of floods and droughts. In Nigeria, annual celebrations continue to take place along its Oshun river, where pilgrims pay homage, make sacrifices, and ask the deity to grant wealth, health and happiness. Often depicted in yellow robes, Oshun is rumoured to be the ethereal muse behind Beyonce’s numerous works, referenced in both the lyrics and symbolisms of her visual album Lemonade and her ode to the African diaspora, Black is King
Photo by YAMIL LAGE/AFP/Getty Images.
A follower of the Orisha sea goddess Yemaya, of the Yoruba religion, gives offerings at Havana's harbour during the Yemaya Day celebrations in Cuba
Elsewhere in Brazil, the Tupi people celebrate Iara, commonly referred to as “the Lady of the Lake”. A great warrior who was betrayed by her brothers, Iara is a water spirit with a princess-like origin story — minus the damsel in distress trope. Often likened to other South American tales of sea witches and goddesses, over time Iara manifests in recent imaginations as a merging of the two, feared and revered for her power to lure men to the bottom of the ocean.
Perhaps one of the more infamously depicted deities however is Mami Wata.  Also known as  Watramama or ‘Mother of the Water’, this water spirit is part human, part fish, and is often depicted as interchangeable genders. Considered to hold the important role of blessing the souls who died at sea, Mami Wata has held cultural and religious significance to the African diaspora for centuries. Mami Wata is celebrated in festivals such as the Epe-Ekpe festival in Togo for example, and is commemorated across multiple artforms; from exhibitions in the Smithsonian and Knockout Centre to featuring as the protagonist in Natasha Bowen’s young adult fiction, Skin of the Sea.
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Another work of fiction which draws sources from Indigenous histories is Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch, a book I have read and reread numerous times. Here, Aycayia, a mermaid of Taíno legend, who has the lower torso of a fish and a human upper torso adorned in tribal tattoos, is reimagined. Drawing inspiration from the Taíno population who inhabited Hispaniola (now the Republic of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and were made extinct after being ‘discovered’ by Christopher Columbus in the 15th Century, Aycayia’s tale is one of colonialism, displacement, belonging, love and violence.
Photo by Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.
Entrance to the Shrine of Oshun, the water dwelling fertility goddess of the Yoruba religion in southwestern Nigeria
It’s through the honest and respectful retellings and reinterpretations of pre-colonial imaginations that diasporas of colour of all ages can truly see ourselves represented. As an avid wild swimmer who has always felt an affinity and attraction to merpeople despite being relatively disinterested in fantasy and sci-fi genres, I feel more at home in these nature-adoring narratives that offer an insight into my heritage than I ever have in any Disney movie.

Chantay is a London-based tattoo artist who specialises in Black depictions of ethereal deities. Her merpeople, fairies, cupids and nymphs sit amongst rockpools, toadstools and flowerbeds, sporting voluminous afros, cascading dreadlocks and woven cornrows.

It's for these reasons that I’d always craved a mermaid tattoo, but after one wildly uncomfortable experience involving a white tattooist and a failed attempt at depicting afro hair, I’ve been cautious of finding an artist who could dream up a mermaid that actually looks like me. So, when I stumbled across Chantay Blue’s Instagram I was overjoyed! Chantay is a London-based tattoo artist who specialises in Black depictions of ethereal deities. Her merpeople, fairies, cupids and nymphs sit amongst rockpools, toadstools and flowerbeds, sporting voluminous afros, cascading dreadlocks and woven cornrows. Earlier this year, I had the honour of getting one of Chantay’s merpeople inked on my forearm. There she sits, glistening as bubbles rise around her, her billowing curls trailing to the part of her waist where scales meet skin.
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Catching up over Zoom, Chantay and I discuss her approach to tattooing — itself a form of expression rooted in Indigenous practices that predates colonialism — and its revolutionary potential to reclaim a sense of identity and belonging.  “When you get artwork tattooed on your skin you want something beautiful, something that reflects what beauty is to you, but most of the time we’re only offered images of white faces and features,” she says.
“All this does is reinforce the same beauty stereotypes that were forced on us in stories about merpeople and fairies when we were growing up. It doesn’t sit right with me, that you go for a beautiful tattoo and a white artist inks another white person on your arm or leg,”  she continues, “I want people to be able to see their own beauty in my tattoos — it helps me feel beautiful when I’m drawing these stunning creatures that look like me too. I think it speaks to my inner child who was always into mermaids, but never saw myself in them.”

Through a decolonizing lens we can reclaim our voices, stories, perspectives and imaginations and enjoy a blockbuster movie for what it is...

Whether through feature-length movies, fictional novels, tattoos, exhibitions, music or oral histories, when we are able to access ourselves in our own cultural storytelling, we’re reminded that we never needed the approval of whiteness to do so. With the racist rantings of grown adults on social media reframed as inconsequential white noise, we can also relinquish ourselves from the politics of representation, and no longer rely on white-dominated industries to dictate when and how our valid need to feel seen is met. Much like the ways that Ursula steals the voice of Ariel in the classic story, the commercialised capitalist legacies of colonialism silence the narratives of our ancestors. Through a decolonizing lens, we can reclaim our voices, stories, perspectives and imaginations and enjoy a blockbuster movie for what it is, without feeling uncomfortably reliant on it to speak to our sense of self. So, whilst you’ll most certainly find me tucked up on the sofa, my cat secured in the little spoon position, embracing the 2023 remake with childlike wonderment, I can’t help but wonder: wouldn’t it have been nice if we could’ve seen the tales of our own water spirits — Aycayia’s, Mama Wata’s or Oshun’s perhaps — depicted on the big screen too?
This article was originally published to Unbothered UK

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- There is a push for decolonizing perspectives, reclaiming stories and symbols that have pre-existed colonial or Western framings.

**Motivations Behind Acts:**
   - Media and academic discourse suggest vandalism of monuments like the Little Mermaid often carries a message, whether political, social, or cultural—critiquing tradition, expressing resistance, or highlighting marginalized voices.

- Specific references in the text allude to different forms of protest, such as environmental activism, anti-racism, or political statements (e.g., the Russian flag instance).

**Controversy of Artistic and Historical Value:**
   - Debates continue on how society should approach controversial monuments, considering both their artistic/historical value and the problematic aspects of the figures or stories they represent.

- The decision of who is celebrated or memorialized in public spaces is increasingly scrutinized, with calls for greater transparency and, possibly, "cooling-off periods" before reintroducing such works with adequate context.

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Content: Navigation

Who decides who is put on a pedestal?

Monuments in public spaces are a politically charged issue, with closed circles of experts often making decisions about who or what gets memorialised in Switzerland. In an opinion piece, a group of academics and curators argues that the time has come for greater transparency and new types of commemoration.

This content was published on February 27, 2022 - 10:00
Philine Erni, Sarah Grossenbacher, Rachel Huber and Vera Ryser

The Swiss women’s strike in 2019 and the Black Lives Matter movement that began in the United States in 2020 have helped to raise questions about the politics of memory in Switzerland. In the country’s public spaces, there is an absence of memorials to women, people with migration experience and people of colour.

The authors

Philine Erni is an art and literary academic and will be part of the management team of Theater Winkelwiese in Zurich from the 2022/23 season.

Sarah Grossenbacher studied history, sociology and spatial planning and is co-head of urban planning at the City of Lucerne.

Rachel Huber has a doctorate in history. She researches and teaches at the Department of Modernism at the University of Lucerne and is co-founder of the Historians' Network Switzerland.

Vera Ryser is a freelance curator, exhibition organiser and literary academic. Among other things, she co-initiated the project Das Wandbild muss weg!External link (The mural must go!).

End of insertion

Instead, it is mostly white male figures standing on pedestals of bronze or stone. For decades – centuries, even – they have represented Swiss progress, innovation and success. What’s often overlooked is that their success and wealth are built on, among other things, the exploitation of indigenous peoples, the keeping of slaves or their support for the slave trade.

Various voices have demanded that statues of such figures be transferred to museums or re-interpreted and their hidden stories be revealed and displayed.

The year 2021 marked 50 years since Swiss women obtained the right to vote. Many academic conferences and media reports, such as one in the German-language NZZ am SonntagExternal link newspaper, took stock of progress made in that time: roughly 70% of artworks shown in Swiss museums are by men; nine out of ten streets named after a prominent figure are named after a man; and women go largely unmentioned in history books.

The need for a diverse culture of remembrance is clear. But how can such a polyphony be taken into account when dealing with the existing monuments in public spaces?

Who decides? And why is there no public discourse?

Depending on their significance, existing monuments in public spaces fall under the responsibility of either city or cantonal heritage authorities. But deciding which structures can receive heritage status – and therefore become officially part of public remembrance – is the responsibility of heritage conservatorsExternal link. Normally these decisions come without public consultation, even in the case of public monuments that hold great symbolic and political significance.

Thanks to political pressure, in the city of Zurich a working group (Kunst im öffentlichen Raum or Art in the Public Space) is examining 26 statues, while the historian Georg Kreis is looking at “just under 40 monuments”External link. These studies are generally welcome, but they still raise questions: Who are the experts in this case and who is being brought on to offer advice? And why is there no public discussion, despite there being a highly political question at the core: how do we as a society want to remember the past?

Regulations exist primarily on the protection and preservation of monuments. Even artworks commissioned for public spaces are created for eternity, barring damage. Can activism alone prompt a swift removal? Vandalism can touch a nerve, but it only solves the problem of unbalanced representation in public spaces in a selective way. As seen with demands since the 1970s from feminists that public squares and streets be renamed, little has changed structurally: the demands are far too seldom complied with to this day.

Yet involving locals in a discussion is both possible and sensible. In recent years, many municipalities have gathered experience with participative processes. These have taken many forms: surveys, roundtables and workshops, even games and guided tours, both digital and in person. Why aren’t these forums being used to talk about public monuments?

What must we rethink or unlearn?

At this point, it is worth taking a look at the current restitution debate, where the art historian Bénédicte Savoy and the economist Felwine Sarr have called for a “gesture of restitution” with considerable success. “Gestures of removal” or “completion” could serve as a good starting point for a new approach to memory culture. They could also contribute to a new type of relationship between segments of society that are over-represented and those that are under-represented – one that gives a sense of community and belonging.

This approach would be based on the view that history, too, is “in constant flux,” as the historian Achim Landwehr puts it: the past, present and future are all related and historical narratives are constructs of the present-day perspective. This concept of history inevitably calls into question today’s assumption that monuments are valid for eternity.

To forge a new culture of remembrance that’s fit for our times, cities and towns need to actively promote a new type of relationship in public spaces, not just to protect their monuments, but also to renew them. The recent call to supplement the statue of David de Pury in Neuchâtel with works that will initiate a critical dialogue about the original statue of the Swiss banker and slave trader, and the Zurich project group to combat racism in public spaces show that Swiss cities are beginning – albeit slowly and within the constraints of existing structures – to take an interest in a new remembrance culture.

This new culture requires existing specialist juries to relinquish their power and make way for more participative strategies and greater transparency. This way it would be possible, at last, to anchor our towns’ public spaces in the present and distance ourselves from the misunderstanding that “heritage” should serve as a lasting commemoration of a system bequeathed to us by the past.

Existing statues would be complemented by achievements and realities that are part of our society but are not memorialised in public spaces – and therefore remain invisible. They include women, the LGBTQ community and people of colour as well as subjects that remain socially taboo: forced labour and Switzerland’s policy on foreign seasonal workers, for example. One pre-requisite for a diverse, intersectional culture of commemoration and remembrance would be that these “others” can participate in political, legal, institutional and cultural life.

Anyone who wants to contribute to this must work on visibility. It starts with basic research. And we have to establish different and more current forms of remembrance: “edit-a-thons” (where authors create articles collectively on neglected historical women for the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia) or hashtags such as #metoo and #blacklivesmatter. Perhaps these are examples of a future memory culture: they are participative and digital, ephemeral and volatile.

(Translated from German by Catherine Hickley/gw)

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of SWI swissinfo.ch.

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More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative

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**Public Discourse and Diverse Remembrance:**
   - There is a noted lack of public discourse around the handling of vandalized or controversial monuments and a growing call for a more diverse and inclusive culture of public memory.

**Vandalism as Events of Faith or Protest:**
   - In some contexts, vandalism is seen as an "event of faith" or a deeply personal act with symbolic meaning, as illustrated by references to religious statues and the devotion they inspire, even after being desecrated.

Title:

Content: X

Indonesia

Indonesian fishermen save Virgin Mary from the sea

Act of vandalism is being seen as an 'event of faith' by Catholics

Catholics pray in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary saved from the sea. (Photo: Handrianus Atagoran)

A statue of the Virgin Mary that was reportedly dumped in the sea by a mentally ill man in Indonesia was rescued from the sea by fishermen in an incident that has moved Catholics to look at it through the lens of faith.

The statue was found by two fishermen in a bay near Lewoleba off Lembata, an island just east of the Catholic-majority island of Flores in East Nusa Tenggara province, on Nov. 24.

A video recording the moment they retrieved the floating statue went viral on social media and became a widely discussed topic among Catholics.

Rudi Keraf, one of the fishermen who found the statue, said at first he thought it was driftwood and his first reaction was to ignore it.

"But then something told me differently. My heart said I had to go back. It turned out that what we found was a statue of the Virgin Mary," he told the news portal Kupang.tribunnews.com.

He said the statue was intact, in an upward position and in her hand was a rosary.

It's interesting that although people already know where the statue came from, Catholics see it as an event of faith

After lifting the statue onto the boat, he and his companion embraced it and prayed. "I was very moved. I am a sinner but I managed to find a sacred object," he said.

Handrianus Atagoran, a Catholic in Lembata, said it was discovered that the statue had come from the grave of a priest in a coastal village which was taken by a mentally ill man and thrown into the sea.

"It's interesting that although people already know where the statue came from, Catholics see it as an event of faith," he told UCA News.

"People are queuing to come and pray at the statue, which is currently in the house of the fisherman who found it."

Some consider this as a warning that the region will be hit by a natural disaster, he said, adding that most see it in a more positive light as a sign of providence.

Also Read

**Photographic and Digital Documentation:**
   - The obsession with imaging and documentation raises questions about the preservation and impact of visual records of these monuments and their transformations, including damage and repair.

**Implications for the Little Mermaid Statue:**
These extracted points should be understood as the socio-cultural and psychological backdrop for the recurring vandalism of the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen.

Title:

Content: Russian Flag Painted on Copenhagen's Most Famous Landmark

It's the latest in a long line of attacks on Little Mermaid statue
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 2, 2023 10:15 AM CST

The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, one of Denmark's most famous landmarks, has been vandalized yet again, this time with the Russian flag. Authorities said Thursday that the white, blue, and red stripes of the Russian flag were painted on the stone the statue sits on, Reuters reports. Police said the vandalism was discovered early Thursday. "We are of course launching an investigation to find out who did it and when and how it happened," a police spokesman said, per Jyllands-Posten.

Denmark, like other European nations, has strongly criticized Russia's war against Ukraine. The small statue, a tribute to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, sits off a waterfront promenade in the Danish capital. It has been vandalized many times since it was installed 110 years ago, AFP reports. It has been decapitated twice and was knocked off its base with explosives in 2003. In 2017, it was doused in red paint in a protest against whale hunting. In 2020, during worldwide protests after the death of George Floyd, the words "racist fish" were painted on the base, though Andersen scholars said they weren't aware of any racist elements in the fairy tale. (Read more The Little Mermaid stories.)

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Each act of vandalism—whether for political, ideological, or personal reasons—contributes to an ongoing discourse about authority, memory, representation, and the function of public art.

Title:

Content: X

Indonesia

Indonesian fishermen save Virgin Mary from the sea

Act of vandalism is being seen as an 'event of faith' by Catholics

Catholics pray in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary saved from the sea. (Photo: Handrianus Atagoran)

A statue of the Virgin Mary that was reportedly dumped in the sea by a mentally ill man in Indonesia was rescued from the sea by fishermen in an incident that has moved Catholics to look at it through the lens of faith.

The statue was found by two fishermen in a bay near Lewoleba off Lembata, an island just east of the Catholic-majority island of Flores in East Nusa Tenggara province, on Nov. 24.

A video recording the moment they retrieved the floating statue went viral on social media and became a widely discussed topic among Catholics.

Rudi Keraf, one of the fishermen who found the statue, said at first he thought it was driftwood and his first reaction was to ignore it.

"But then something told me differently. My heart said I had to go back. It turned out that what we found was a statue of the Virgin Mary," he told the news portal Kupang.tribunnews.com.

He said the statue was intact, in an upward position and in her hand was a rosary.

It's interesting that although people already know where the statue came from, Catholics see it as an event of faith

After lifting the statue onto the boat, he and his companion embraced it and prayed. "I was very moved. I am a sinner but I managed to find a sacred object," he said.

Handrianus Atagoran, a Catholic in Lembata, said it was discovered that the statue had come from the grave of a priest in a coastal village which was taken by a mentally ill man and thrown into the sea.

"It's interesting that although people already know where the statue came from, Catholics see it as an event of faith," he told UCA News.

"People are queuing to come and pray at the statue, which is currently in the house of the fisherman who found it."

Some consider this as a warning that the region will be hit by a natural disaster, he said, adding that most see it in a more positive light as a sign of providence.

Also Read

The media accounts often frame these acts not simply as crimes, but as complex interventions in the ongoing negotiation of meaning, history, and identity in public space.

Certainly!

Title:

Content: news _ header _ top _ 970 _ 100
Bulat Gilvanov: “Our elite buys paintings somewhere in Monaco ”
“I am disappointed in the idea that culture can be promoted in contact with the national elite.
In order for this trend to change, some tectonic changes must occur, ” says artist Bulat Gilvanov.
He spoke about the lack of Tatar visualization in Kazan, feminism, the Tatar imperial concept and many other things in an interview with Tatar-Inform.
Bulat Gilvanov: “We have a creative potential and a powerful legacy.
But the elites don ’ t know what to do about it. ”
Photo: © Ramil Gali / Tatar-inform
“Even Namdakov quite superficially revealed the topic ”
- Bulat, we would like to talk to you about the Tatar culture through the eyes of a representative of the urban Tatar intelligentsia.
So let ’ s start with specific city stories.
Many Kazan residents and tourists have an opinion that Kazan lacks a Tatar visual.
Do you agree?
And how can this be corrected taking into account, perhaps, the Soviet experience, when various paintings, smalt panels on national themes were popular?
- I agree, such a visualization in Kazan is not enough.
I would like to have a feeling that this is the capital of Tatarstan.
We ourselves declare this, we want to broadcast our national culture as widely as possible both in space and in time, that is, in the future.
In the guise of the Kazan Kremlin, this task was solved, otherwise we see the standard style of modern architecture for many cities.
I don't even know what to call it... post-industrial, I guess.
This, of course, is beautiful and spectacular, I myself like this constructive beginning - glass, graphic lines.
On the facades of sports facilities, shopping malls there is often some interesting decorative solution.
- Do you mean this literalism, when, for example, a tennis racket sticks out from the facade of the Tennis Center?
- Yeah, including that.
That is, there are such things, but I do not remember that there was a national moment in them.
Apparently, there is no understanding that the architectural solution of facades and silhouettes can be revealed with a national bias.
Well, such a task for architects, most likely, is not set.
I do not know who is doing all this, probably Moscow, and until recently European architects.
Perhaps, and therefore, national in these projects is not enough.
- As, say, in the projects of the same Dashi Namdakov.
"Natsmena", but also not a Tatar.
- It's the same story.
Dashi Namdakov is an absolutely wonderful artist, I like him very much, but it can be seen that he did not immerse himself in the topic.
I mean, he does what he does, that's all.
Are you talking about “The Cup ” and the sculptures around it?
- And about the sculpture "Karakuz", installed in Almetyevsk.
It's the theme of the warrior girl that I've been promoting all my life.
This image eventually took a strong place in the national consciousness.
Indeed, there is in the legends such a character - Karakuz, this is an associate of Altynchech.
The sculpture is also beautiful, but again it can be seen that there was no study of the Bulgarian costume - military, national.
Still, I ’ m all for it, she ’ s, again, beautiful, and the topic is right.
However, as you can see, even Namdakov quite superficially revealed the topic.
The cup is the same.
The same dragons and leopards originate from the ancient Turkic animal style, but even this style here, on the Volga, differed from, for example, Siberian.
Was it less aggressive?
- Yes.
Remember the story of Namdakov ’ s “Guardian ”.
Why did it happen?
The sculpture itself is simply gorgeous, but there was an instruction to increase it.
The author increased it, and it became creepy.
Size does matter, though.
The artistic image in a monumental form and in the form of a small statuette is perceived differently.
“I do not see a gap between the Volga Bulgars and modern Tatars ”
- You mentioned the female warriors, and indeed, the appeal to the female image for some reason in the form of valkyrie seemed to have become a common place in the Tatar fine arts.
What does this have to do with it
I often think about it myself.
Is it necessary to promote it, is it not something...
- Artificially?
Not artificial, but harmful.
Just now feminism, which we all once welcomed, is taking on extreme forms, and it can turn into something bad.
Do you want a connotation with feminism?
- No, I wouldn't.
Of course, it is impossible to be against the movement for equality and social equality of the sexes.
But there are physical differences, there are traditions, and they arose for a reason.
They make sense just for the survival of the human race.
- So your warriors - what are they?
Feminine?
- Oh, yeah.
Some even reproach me - she can not, they say, the girl to hold such a weapon, it is unbearable for her.
I just had that task.
At least, I saw these legends through a certain contrast, dissonance: here are warm, fragile girls who are completely unaccustomed to war, and now they are forced to take up cold weapons and stand up for the defense of the Motherland.
The image of sacrifice intensifies, and the feat becomes doubly special.
That is, there is an additional tragedy, an additional conflict.
Let us now turn to your obvious sympathy for the Bulgarian subject.
I noticed that the interest in it, as well as the tendency to identify with the Bulgars, is common among the creative intelligentsia.
Historians have a different opinion.
What do you conditionally answer to a historian who tells you that the Tatars are the heirs not so much of Volga Bulgaria as of other historical periods?
- I have studied this issue and do not see a gap between the Volga Bulgars and modern Tatars.
We speak the same language, we live on the same land, we celebrate the same holidays.
Nardugan, Karga Botkasy, Kaz Omase and Sabantuy are all pre-Islamic Bulgarian holidays, there is no Mongolian component.
In Kul Gali ’ s poem “The Tale of Yusuf ” the same language, some parts of it in the original are even more natural and understandable than the modern literary translation.
Kul Gali wrote before the Mongol conquest in his native language.
Are you sure it ’ s a Bulgarian language?
- Of course.
I don't think the scribes wrote anything in another language.
Some manuscripts indicate that there are two editions of the poem - 1212 and 1233.
Perhaps in 1233, Kul Gali supplemented and processed it.
In any case, he was an eyewitness to six campaigns of the Mongols on Volga Bulgaria until 1236, when it fell.
By the way, I have such an illustration in one of the books.
Here (shows): the author writes that this was composed by the weak servant of God Ghali in such and such a year, in each line he put 22 syllables.
Here is the Bulgarian city, here is Idel, here are the Mongol warriors who are already knocking at the gate.
There is an assumption that Kul Gali died during the Mongol pogrom in Bilar.
Our language has not changed.
As well as our self-consciousness, way of life, basic activities.
The famous historian and archaeologist Alfred Khalikov in private conversations was unequivocally for the Bulgarian version.
“The Russians have a strong association of the Horde with evil, existential threat ”
But these conclusions he voiced in that period, which can be called Tatar historical romanticism and which is long over.
- Yeah, but it's not just Khalikov.
Even at the beginning of the 20th century, when our people were still self-determining, Bulgarism was considered as the main version.
In addition, there is no such potential for confrontation in Bulgarism as in Tatarism.
The Bulgars have been living together with the Russians since the time of Kievan Rus, this state was built and defended by the Slavic and Turkic peoples together.
Berendeys, Kovuys, Torks are all Bulgarian subethnic groups.
Khan Kubrat founded ancient Russian cities, including, according to some sources, and Kiev.
And especially Poltava, where his bet was.
That is, we have coexisted with the Russians throughout their history.
At the same time, the Russians have a strong association of the Horde with evil, an existential threat.
So the Tatar imperial concept is ultimately destructive.
The Russians and I will continue to live together.
The ideologists of Tatarism present bulgarism as an idea that aims at stripping the Tatar people, at its division, but in fact it, if you look at it, has a collective beginning.
I think that the surviving Volga peoples would well accept the Bulgarian idea of   joint existence.
Because, apparently, there was something in the Bulgarian tradition and in the Bulgarian state, which allowed these peoples to survive and live to this day.
– Do you think the Tatars will return to the Bulgarian project?
- I hope so.
It seems to me that our people have yet to make a choice in the future.
– Do you feel that the number of supporters of your concept has increased or decreased over time?
- I think they're getting smaller.
At least in the 1990s, the Bulgarian movement was much more powerful.
All the movements were more powerful.
- Oh, yeah.
If then a referendum on renaming was announced and there was some discussion in the media, thanks to which ordinary citizens would simply think - usually they still live their lives, I do not exclude that they would vote for renaming the TASSR in the Bulgarian Republic.
– When you are called a Tatar artist, it does not cause internal protest?
- No, I am calm about it, maybe even ironic.
I do not lead such a confrontational line as some people in the Bulgarian movement, who rigidly separate themselves from the Tatars and conflict.
“They buy a painting in Monaco for a lot of money to show off at their party ”
A few years ago you said that the art market in Tatarstan is undeveloped.
Has anything changed during this time?
- There are positive aspects, but in general, the trend continues.
There is no stable community in which, say, collectors who know artists work.
Everything happens quite casually.
Paintings are usually bought either on occasion - as a gift, or spontaneously, simply because the thing liked.
There is no such thing as a buyer to study which artists we have and what is worth buying and what is not.
Although it is not difficult to find information now, everything is on the Internet.
It is not necessary to communicate directly with artists, experts or read reference books.
However, this is not the case.
Maybe the Tatarstan elite is interested in our art, understands it?
For the vast majority, probably not.
I am deeply disappointed about this.
Maybe that ’ s why I moved away from exhibitions and projects, from all this movement.
What exactly is the disappointment?
- The idea that culture can be promoted in contact with the national elite.
If something happens to her, it happens as a result.
Roughly speaking, he went somewhere in Monaco, saw something there, he liked it, and he wants the same.
“Do me the same. ”
Or he ’ s lucky right there to show off in his party: here, he took a picture in Monaco, paid a lot of money.
How to change this trend, I don ’ t know.
Apparently, there must be some tectonic changes, something must move in the heads, in public relations.
Because we have creative potential and a powerful legacy, but there is no understanding among the elites of what to do about it and whether there is any benefit in it.
Maybe it just needs to change a generation?
Their children are different, it's a story about a 300-year-old lawn.
- I am not sure, by the way, that if their children studied conditionally in England, they will come with something else in their head.
Well, maybe on rare occasions.
I don't think that's the solution.
I don't know what the solution is.
They should have the understanding that they draw their wealth and power from a national source and that it is a guarantee of the preservation of all this.
But there is no such understanding yet.
So I just stick around and do what I have to do, and whatever happens (laughs).
Let it be unprofitable.
Have businessmen or officials ever bought your paintings?
- Officials do not, and businessmen, although very rarely, bought.
Tatars are a rare case.
Although, in theory, the paintings of our artists can be approached purely utilitarian, decorating their premises and offices.
This is good for business, for the future, and artists will be able to survive and do something else.
There will be a rich field of national culture, it will become denser, better.
At the very top of this understanding, perhaps, there is.
Mintimer Sharipovich is noticeable, if not admiration, then at least respect for art.
Apparently, he somehow sees and feels this beauty, understands its value.
It was the same namdakova he took.
This is either an innate understanding, or it comes from the fact that in Soviet times, art was presented as a really valuable and sublime thing.
“I don ’ t think that the Tatar culture is hermetic ”
Let ’ s move on to the Tatar culture as a whole.
There is an opinion that it is quite hermetic.
- You mean self-obsessed?
Ah, yes.
And that it has no connection with the world cultural context.
Can you say that about painting?
- No.
In general, I do not believe that the Tatar culture is hermetic.
We had a very powerful Jadidic movement that kind of released our culture into the world.
Many even criticize him for this, because such a step, in their opinion, pushed the Tatars to assimilate.
No, our culture, including the visual arts, reacts quickly enough to the global context.
Is there contemporary art in Tatar painting?
Is there any activism there?
- I won ’ t say about actionism, but there is modern art.
There is, for example, Tatar ethno-futurism.
His study, as well as the study of the Tatar avant-garde, was carried out by Yulduz Galimzyanovna Nigmatullina.
She published the book “Late Modernism in Tatar Literature and Fine Arts ”.
This phenomenon is explained there, modern Tatar artists are considered in the context of world art.
But modernism is still late.
What artists are we talking about?
- About modern us, about my acquaintances.
Basically, there is about the Tamga group, which was engaged in the development of the national language.
It consisted of Magyar Khaziyev, Khamza Sharipov, Riyat Mukhametdinov, me.
Kostyak Chelninsky, although there were Ufa artists.
Recently, we do not exhibit, but at one time we actively exhibited and participated in various projects.
All these artists are now alive and well, working outside the group, independently.
In general, we had quite a strong movement at the time.
And there are good, original artists now, including in Kazan.
A bright representative is Ilgizar Khasanov.
A beautiful modern artist, a modernist with a national foundation.
You're friends with Alfrid Shaimardanov, aren't you?
- Yes, at one time and worked in the same workshop, and lived together.
Is it true that artists don ’ t consider him an artist?
That ’ s what he says (laughs).
He is an artist, of course.
When considering his candidacy for the Union of Artists, voted in favor, although there were those who spoke of his "amateur".
Well, he's a real nugget.
It is believed that Bucky Urmanche was very strong as a sculptor, but as a painter he is overrated.
What do you think of that?
- Yes, no, he is a really gorgeous, very versatile artist.
He is recognized both as a classic of the realistic school, and as the creator of an original national language.
And his painting is the most beautiful.
It is painting as such, that is, the interaction of warm and cold colors.
This interaction is like music, it is very difficult to achieve it in painting.
Here is the actual music gets directly into the heart, a person immediately understands it and perceives it, but with painting it is not so.
To achieve music, an artist needs to develop this skill.
“In my youth I thought: I have everything accurately conveyed in the picture, why is there no musicality and beauty? ”
How did it go to you?
- It's very hard.
I finally understood this music quite late.
Even in school I felt that I had a misunderstanding of painting.
I perceived color only as a certain characteristic of the object, as something that needs to be conveyed accurately and realistically.
And the understanding that this is the same “wavelength ” that beats directly into the heart came much later, with practice.
Some people, especially women, get it right away.
We had girls in school who felt painting.
I ’ ve seen them do things differently.
Seems crooked, but beautiful.
And I thought: I have everything accurately conveyed in the picture, why is there no musicality and beauty?
On the subject of female artists.
My daughter entered an art school this year, and as a father, I would like to understand where a young artist can go to work today to feel normal.
I will offer you options, and you will evaluate them.
All right?
The first, the most obvious: to paint paintings and sell them yourself at online auctions.
- Yes, an option.
The second is to offer your services in the cinema as a production designer.
- In principle, the cinema is now being filmed in Tatarstan.
I myself recently called from Tatarkino, offered to participate in their project this autumn.
But I apologized and refused – I did not have time.
I was involved in several film projects and it was interesting.
So that ’ s also an option.
The only thing is, we don ’ t have a lot of movies.
But it is a specific thing.
But you can go to Moscow and get involved in the work, for example, as a decorator, learn all this cuisine and only then pretend to be a production designer.
Or start as a costume designer.
- Yeah, that's it.
There are a lot of theatres in Kazan.
Another option is to draw manga.
Can we monetize it somehow?
- I think so.
Publish in the form of books or monetize via the Internet.
I guess it's possible.
And the last option is to paint urban objects, including private ones.
- Of course.
Listen to you, it turns out like a chocolate story.
I mean, the young artist is all right with perspective, right?
- Yes.
There are other options.
You can do animation.
Maybe there will be something related to the Internet.
However, there is a question with artificial intelligence, those who are engaged in it can take out design orders.
But, I think, only purely utilitarian.
No artificial intelligence can illustrate a book as thoughtfully, artistically, and beautifully as a human being.
To do this, you need to live your human life, use the human experience, your sense of the culture to which the writer belongs.
A relative of mine recently told me about artificial intelligence and said that soon I will be out of work.
I was scared at first, and then I thought and realized that he should think about it.
Because writing programs and applications to artificial intelligence is much easier.
Gilvanov Bulat Alfirovich is an artist, a member of the Union of Artists of Russia.
Born in 1972 in Elabuga.
He graduated from the art department of the Naberezhnye Chelny School of Arts, the graphic faculty of the St. Petersburg State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after I.E.Repin.
Laureate of the State Prize of the Republic of Tatarstan named after M. Jalil.
In 1999 – 2001 – teacher of the Department of Fine Arts of Naberezhnye Chelny State Pedagogical Institute, in 2001 – 2005 – artist-trainee of the creative workshop of the Russian Academy of Arts in Kazan.
In 2011 – 2014 – lecturer at the Kazan branch of the Moscow State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after V.I. Surikov, in 2012 – 2018 – assistant at the creative workshop of painting of the Russian Academy of Arts in Kazan.
Since 2018, he has been a freelance artist.
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Focusing exclusively on the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, here is a synthesized summary that matches your request for key individual incidents of vandalism, with contextual and narrative elements illuminated where possible—drawn from historical records (since your supplied text does not directly cover the Little Mermaid’s vandalism cases):

**Report on Repeated Intentional Damages to the Statue of the Little Mermaid, Copenhagen**

**History and Overview:**
Since its unveiling in 1913, Edvard Eriksen’s Little Mermaid statue, situated in the Copenhagen harbor, has become an iconic symbol of Denmark.

However, its prominent public placement and symbolic stature have made it a frequent target for acts of vandalism, protest, and political demonstration.

Title:

Content: Right now
+ 20 ˚ C
Now in St. Petersburg
+ 20 ˚ C
Cloudy, No precipitation
Feels like 18.
4 m / s, zap
751mm
57%
Read more
Traffic jams
5 / 10
Rituals on graves and lost gilding.
St. Petersburg museum workers about the growth of vandalism
1274
Valentin Egorshin / Fontanka.ru
The Museum of Urban Sculpture is sounding the alarm: in St. Petersburg, the level of vandalism is growing.
Experts ask citizens and tourists to save the budget money and stop picking priests sphinxes.
And yet not to remove the gilding from the monuments, because to sell it still will not work.
The sphinxes from the Egyptian bridge were returned from restoration only in December 2022.
The restoration work lasted more than three months.
The sculptures were cleaned, treated from corrosion, gilded parts and painted in the color of oxidized bronze.
All the splendor cost almost 5 million rubles.
For restoration, by the way, the price is not surprising.
As Nadezhda Efremova, a senior researcher at the Museum of Urban Sculpture and curator of the collection of monuments, explained to Fontanka, in such matters, in any case, we are talking about millions.
Repeat the whole process was planned no earlier than ten years later, but in June, damage was noticed on one of the sphinxes.
The cover moved away from the sculpture exactly near the fifth point.
The Museum of Urban Sculpture concluded that the character of the chip is mechanical: “We will not take it to say what exactly they (damage. – Approx. ed.) were inflicted.
A shoe, a hand, anything.
Unfortunately, the pedestals are low, there is a lot of transport and people there.
These sphinxes are among the most “affected. ”
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The victim was promised to patch up before the end of the summer - this is the deadline for the end of the restoration season.
For this, you will most likely have to request additional funding.
As it usually happens in state organizations, the budget in the Museum of Urban Sculpture is drawn up immediately for a year in advance.
The hole on the cover of the monument, as the photographer of “Fontanka ” was convinced, meanwhile, is expanding.
By August, it will certainly increase in size.
By the way, the neighbor of the sphinx on the other bank of the Fontanka also had time to suffer: he had chips closer to his back.
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“By the middle of this year, we are almost at the point of just 2022 in terms of the number of acts of vandalism.
Last year there were 32 of them, this year there are already 22, ” the press service of the museum says.
The statistics included cases with graffiti, traces of paint, scratches and other damage to the paint layer.
The curator of the collection Nadezhda Efremova laments that in St. Petersburg there is no longer that reverent attitude to the monuments, which helped to preserve them to the present day: “The war began on June 22 [1941], and on June 25 the museum has already received a directive on the urgent shelter of monuments in the city.
All employees of the museum received instructions where to go to get the necessary building materials.
And the Bronze Horseman?
Since the time of Alexander I, the legend has been preserved that as long as he stands in his place, no enemy soldiers will enter the city.
During the historical excursion, the employee recalls Klodt ’ s horses on the Anichkov Bridge: “For many citizens, the end of the war was marked by the fact that on June 2, 1945, the horses returned to the Anichkov Bridge.
Then people finally realized that the war was over. ”
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In December 2022, not only the sphinxes from the Egyptian bridge were returned from the restoration, but also the lions that stand on the Admiralty Embankment.
From the side of this can not be seen, but the back of one of them after six months has already been pierced.
“They give the impression of such powerful lions, but in fact they are very fragile.
Inside the lions are hollow and have no supports.
Pushed copper, from which they are made, in thickness from 3 to 5 millimeters.
Almost like a piece of paper, ” explains Nadezhda Efremova.
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The damage was discovered after the "Scarlet Sails".
Experts believe that the lion could have been pierced by accident.
For example, a bottle or some other object.
But graffiti, for example, can not be written off on the will of chance.
Most often, inscriptions appear on pedestals that are easy to reach.
Special anti-vandal coatings do not always save: the matter is in the characteristics of the material.
The pedestal of the same Klodt horses is made of forged granite, which is distinguished by small notches.
As a result, the paint is clogged in the pores of the stone and can be removed only with a special compressor and after many hours of work.
It is no coincidence that the disappearance of gold.
According to experts, it is cleaned in the hope of reselling.
Disappointment awaits the vandals immediately: “Gold leaf is thinner than a human hair.
It turns into chips, rubbish.
For what?
Completely senseless act.
The naked surface is not protected, so the monument is again waiting for restoration.
We don't have much choice.
We have to do something — or watch the monuments being destroyed before our eyes. ”
A separate pain of museum workers is rubbing the protruding parts of the sculptures “for luck ”.
Rubbed to shine noses and shoes are both thinning of the metal, and the loss of author ’ s study.
The curator of the collection explains that such a sign eventually leads to the destruction of monuments: “The most reliable protection of metal is natural patina (a coating that is formed under the influence of the natural environment and is able to protect the author ’ s metal. – Approx. ed.).
When it is removed, acid rain, guano, and other contaminants fall on this bright area.
And the metal itself can not protect itself, the surface begins to corrode, corrosion processes develop. ”
Such monuments are also restored, but on the sculptures especially beloved by tourists, the artificial patina can disappear in a few hours.
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Rubbed for luck sculptures are found even in protected areas.
For example, in the Necropolis of Masters of Arts, which is also part of the Museum of Urban Sculpture.
Especially visitors love the leg of an angel at the burial of Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
Head of the department of memorial sculpture Daria Zaleshina says that rubbing the leg began only in 2019.
This is probably due to a new urban legend.
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Fans of mysticism here in general and pulls: the jewelry on some tombstone thrown, the photo with burned eyes will leave.
As the guardian of the necropolis suggests, all these artifacts are associated with certain rituals.
The trend for magic emerged after the series “Battle of psychics ”, filmed in the museum secretly.
However, the findings, although terrible, do not harm the exhibits.
At least nothing needs to be restored.
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How and for what the goddess Athena punished the mythical weaver Arachna
“The spider, hated by Minerva, hangs her loose nets at the door, ” Virgil wrote in Georgica.
And it is not surprising that one of the most fascinating stories in Roman mythology is the myth of Arachne.
First mentioned by Ovid, the myth follows the fate of Arahna, a weaver so adept that she was able to summon Athena / Minerva to compete.
Eventually, Arachna turns into a spider to do what she knows best - weave.
Terracotta lequitos with women making woolen cloth, attributed to the artist Amasis, circa 550-530 BC.
Spinning and weaving were the main social activities intended for women in both ancient Greece and Rome.
In a world where the vast majority of women were excluded from public life, weaving was a creative activity that allowed them to gather and communicate.
It is noteworthy that textile production was an exclusively female and important activity.
Good weaving skills were considered an advantage for women of both the lower and upper classes.
As for the slaves, they had to weave and spin.
In many cases, male slaves were also involved.
The Spinners, or the Fable of Arahna, by Diego Velázquez, 1657.
Photo by revistagq.com.
The ideal of a good weaver wife has existed for centuries.
In Homer ’ s Odyssey, many probably remember Penelope, Odyssey ’ s wife, who was praised for her weaving skills.
For Penelope, this artistic experience was not only proof of her noble origins, but also a trait closely related to her femininity and fidelity.
Through weaving, she managed to remain faithful to Odysseus for ten years and protect herself from a group of fans.
In the Iliad, Homer praised Helen of Troy for her weaving talents.
Among other famous mythical weavers were the Moirs, three women who weaved the fates of both mortals and gods.
However, the most famous weaver in Greek mythology and the patron deity of this activity was Athena.
Arachne, Phillips Halle, 1574.
Photo by britishmuseum.org.
The first literary mention of the myth of Arachne is found in the epic Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid.
This story was written somewhere between the first century BC and the first century AD.
It is unclear whether this story was a fictional fairy tale created by Ovid or a popular myth recorded by a Roman author.
The name Arachna in Greek literally translates as "spider".
The taxonomic name Arachnida describes all spiders, scorpions and other octopus insects.
According to Ovid, Arachna was first a girl from Hypaepa in the ancient kingdom of Lydia.
Pliny the Elder in Natural History (7.196) ascribes to Arachne the invention of linen cloth and nets, and to her son Kloster the invention of the spindle.
Minerva, Gustav Klimt, 1898.
Photo by pinterest.ca.
The family of Arahna was not royal.
Ovid notes that she was of modest origin.
Her father was Idmon of Colophon, a purple dye maker.
Her mother came from a simple family, in which there was nothing special.
Despite such a modest beginning, Arakhna managed to become famous throughout Lydia for her weaving skills.
It was so good that local nymphs often left their homes to see the work of the young weaver.
Arachna was obviously so good at weaving that the nymphs not only wanted to study her fabrics, but also to watch her create them.
The beauty of Arachna ’ s art was so great that it was obvious to everyone that Athena (Minerva) herself had taught it.
However, Arachna denied that she had learned this art from anyone else.
In fact, she was offended and even provoked the goddess: “Argue with me, I will not object, even if I get beaten. ”
(Ovid, VI.1-25)
Athena, of course, did not take long to notice Arachna ’ s disrespectful behavior.
But she did not punish the proud and impudent girl at once, but only took the form of a weak old woman and went to meet Arachne, to give her one last chance: “Not everything that old age has should be avoided: knowledge comes with age.
Do not reject my advice: seek great glory among mortals for your weaving skills, but yield to the goddess and ask her forgiveness in a humble voice, reckless girl.
She'll forgive you if you ask. "
(Ovid, VI, 26-69).
Arachna immediately rejected the idea of apologizing to Athena.
Instead, she said she had done nothing wrong.
Her art belonged to her and only to her.
No one else should have taken credit for it, even if it was Athena.
Angry Athena and Arahna.
\ Photo: storonaslov.ru.
And not restrained, Arachna challenged the goddess, looking at the old woman and wondering why Athena did not come to fight her.
Confident that Arahna did not want to ask for forgiveness, Athena opened up.
At the sight of her nymphs and Phrygian women in the workshop of Arahna began to worship the goddess.
Only Arahna remained motionless.
Despite her fear, she was stubborn enough to stay true to her word.
After a few moments, she was ready for a weaver competition, although she knew that nothing good would come of it for her.
Arachna and Pallada, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1636-1637.
Athena began to weave her tapestry.
In the center, she weaved the story of her rivalry with Poseidon (Neptune) for Athens.
A contest she won by naming the city in her honor.
On the tapestry, Athena presented a powerful image of herself in armor with a helmet holding a spear and a shield.
She also depicted the twelve Olympian gods with Zeus (Jupiter) in the center, admiring her victory over Poseidon.
The tapestry ’ s message to Arachna was clear: “How dare you, mere mortal, defy me, a powerful goddess whom even the gods respect and admire? ”
Then Athena began to weave scenes of four myths: Rhodope and Hemus, Pygmy, Antigone and Cynirus.
Triumph of Minerva, Francesco del Cossa, 1467-70.\ Photo:
Common to all these myths was that they told the story of mortals who disrespected the gods and were eventually punished by being turned into something by the gods.
Rhodopa and Gemus were turned into mountains, Pygma into a crane and forced to fight against her people, Antigonus into a stork, and the daughters of Cynus were turned into steps of the temple after he declared that they were more beautiful than the gods.
With these four myths, Athena clearly warned Arachne of what awaited her.
Arachna learned this and realized that her life depended on it.
Her work represented a completely opposite image of Athena.
While the goddesses appeared virtuous and omnipotent on the tapestry of the goddess, they were presented as childish, abusive, unjust and unethical on the tapestry of the Arahna.
Statue of Emperor Augustus of Prima Port, 1st century AD.
Photo by google.com.
Arachna has woven eighteen examples showing how the gods are transformed to deceive mortals and take advantage of their advantages.
These were mostly stories of mortal women raped by the gods, mostly Zeus and Poseidon.
The most notable examples include the rape of Europa, Proserpine, Leda, Antiope, Danai, Medusa, and Mnemosyne.
Arachna's work was a direct challenge to Athena.
It represented a completely different reality than that depicted on the tapestry of Athena, where the gods deceive and insult mortals for no reason.
Minerva and Arahna, René-Antoine Ouass, 1706.
\ Photo: tech.everyeyee.it.
After Arachna finished weaving, Athena carefully examined her work in search of flaws.
However, the tapestry was so perfect that there was nothing to indicate.
In fact, it seemed that Arachna had indeed surpassed Athena.
The goddess could not accept it.
In anger, she destroyed the tapestry of Arahna, tearing it with her own hands.
She then struck Arahna with a loom shuttle on the forehead.
Arachna could not stand it, so she ran and hanged herself.
But for the angry goddess, this was not enough.
Before leaving, Athena sprinkled Arahna with the poisonous herbs of Hecate, turning her into a spider.
Athena saved the life of her opponent, but at the cost of her humanity.
Ironically, Arachna was sentenced to life in weaving.
A painting by Hermann Postumius depicting Athena revealing herself to Arachne and the crowd.
Photo by owlcation.com.
Athena was a patron of arts and crafts, mainly spinning and weaving, and was often depicted with a spinning wheel in her hand.
Her cult was also closely related to weaving, and, according to Greek and Roman mythology, she was the source of artistic skill associated with this art.
In addition, in ancient times, there was a widespread belief that artistic talents are gifts of the gods.
As a result, it becomes clear why Athena was upset after Arahna rejected the goddess as a source of her weaving skills.
At first glance, the myth of Arahna is a classic story about a mortal who crossed the boundaries of divine law and received punishment.
However, towards the end, the same uncertainty remains.
Painting by Francesco del Cossa: The crowd gathers around the loom of Arachna.
\ Photo by zenysro.cz.
Yes, Arachne offended Athena, but did she really offend the gods?
Her tapestry was so perfect that even Athena could not find the slightest mistake on it.
Athena, who destroyed him and then punished Arachna in such a cruel way, eventually begins to doubt her action.
What began as the usual story of a mortal insulting the gods ends as the story of the arrogance of the gods, unjustified rage, and lack of mercy.
It seems that only Athena can cross the boundaries of what is allowed.
By the end, it becomes clear that this story is about the irrationality of divine punishment.
The Triumph of Virtues by Andrea Mantegna, 1502.
Photo by el.m.wikipedia.org.
One can interpret the myth of Arahna as a history of censorship.
In this case, Ovid draws a parallel between the censorship of art under the emperor Augustus.
In fact, it can be argued that Ovid draws a parallel between himself and Arahna.
This idea is reinforced by the fact that weaving was a common metaphor for poetry in Rome.
Ovid, expelled from Rome in 8 AD, is very similar to Arachne.
He saw his work destroyed by his superiors and his talent suppressed.
His fair criticism of power has been unjustly punished, and he has been denied access to the world.
In this case, Arahna is the symbol of the creator who creates beautiful art only to be seen by the censored authorities (Athena).
Ovid describes the tapestry of Arachne in detail because he wants readers to be shocked when Athena destroys it.
Apparently, this is how the poet himself feels when his work is not allowed to reach the audience.
The myth of Arahna and Athena.
Photo by twitter.com.
Although this was not Ovid ’ s original intention, it is not difficult to read Arachna ’ s myth from a feminist point of view.
One look at Ovid's description of her tapestry is enough.
Her work, centered around rape stories, is a fiery criticism of the established order and a powerful voice against the injustice of power.
In addition, it is a real challenge to Athena, the patroness of virginity.
Tournament between Athens and Arahna.
Photo by google.com.
In this reading, Arachna represents a talented, skillful woman who is ready to judge and finally overcome the tradition to discover what lies beyond.
Athena is the exact opposite.
It represents an oppressive patriarchal tradition.
She is a woman who embodies masculine traits (warrior maiden) and, at the same time, an ideal virtuous woman (patron of weaving) and the triumph of public morality over nature (revered for being forever a virgin).
Athena is a desexualized woman who idolizes the established hierarchy represented in her tapestry, and does not tolerate any other opinions and contradictions in her address...
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1964 – Decapitation (First Major Attack)**
- **Incident:** On April 24, 1964, the statue was found decapitated; the head was sawn off and stolen.

Title:

Content: In Russia, Marmorica Luca was stolen
From the mountain park "Ruskeala" in Karelia stole his symbol, the statue of Marmoric Luke
In the famous Russian mountain park “Ruskeala ” in Karelia, the statue of Marmoric Luke, a man who is the main symbol of the tourist complex, has disappeared.
This is reported on the page of the park in “Vkontakte ”.
Employees of the complex said that the main Marmoric, the “owner ” of the mountain park, who“ always received guests with great love, respect and warmth ”, was stolen.
The incident was called an act of vandalism and theft of someone else ’ s property.
"We would like to remind you that the consequences of vandalism can be very serious, because it is a crime that causes material and moral damage," the statement said.
Staff warned that the culprits would be brought to justice.
At the end of May, in another Russian city, Ufa, the famous monument to Mite Valera was stolen - the culprits were two graduates of a local school.
The object was considered the smallest monument in Russia.
It was a silver-molded figure of a tick, mounted on a pedestal with the inscription “I just, like you, want to live! ”.
It was not possible to return the monument, but less than a month later a new monument appeared on the site of the Valera Mite.
It was decided to call him Valery II Valerievich.
The good tape is deactivated.
Welcome to the real world.

- **Details:** Despite a police investigation, the head was not immediately retrieved.

Title:

Content: Arguments of the Week Society 13 +
The Most Bold Attempts on Great Works of Art
, 19: 21
“Art is born only from grief, ” said Chuck Palahniuk, showed Van Gogh and now agrees everyone who considers himself a connoisseur of art.
You don ’ t have to cut off your ear to be heard.
Practice shows that, perhaps, art is born in suffering, but it often becomes popular with the help of an unconscious PR campaign of wretched vandals.
In this article, about why Leonardo da Vinci ’ s Mona Lisa became so popular, Munch ’ s Scream was no more important than the Olympics, and the Yeltsin Center guard became both the creator and the defendant.
Ivan Vasilyevich changes the profession, or the author's view of art.
If from the very foundation of the Yekaterinburg Yeltsin Center, the museum was attacked by criticism of Russians who noticed the distortion of history in the project, now the sower of “intrigue, scandal and investigation ” was the guard of the cultural center.
The first working day of the employee decided to celebrate, leaving a mark in the history of the branded ballpoint pen Yeltsin Center.
This day was the last on the post of the guard of the gallery.
The incident occurred at the exhibition "The world as objectivity.
The Birth of New Art ” in the Art Gallery of the Museum.
Assessing the symbolism of the name of the exhibition, the employee of the private security company painted the eyes of two silhouettes in the painting “Three Figures ” by Anna Leporskaya – a student of Malevich – worth 75 million rubles.
The motive for his action is unknown.
After the damage to the picture, the man went home and for several days did not get in touch - "very worried" because of what happened.
His former colleagues suggested that this was nothing more than a “clouding of the mind. ”
The final touches to the picture were put by the guard on December 7, 2021.
At first, the Ministry of Internal Affairs refused to initiate a criminal case, calling the damage caused insignificant.
Today, a criminal case was opened against the guard under the article “Vandalism ”.
A creative employee faces a fine of up to 40 thousand rubles, corrective labor or arrest for up to three months.
So, a 60-year-old employee of the private security company can become an involuntary PR-agent, because the picture of a student of Malevich today appears in all media, and the case of an artistic experiment with a ballpoint pen will remain in history.
"...
A Gioconda to be stolen.
and stolen. ”
In the distant 16th century, the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo ordered a portrait of his wife Lisa Gerardini from the famous Leonardo da Vinci at that time.
Today, she looks at visitors to the Louvre through thick glass, mesmerizing with a barely noticeable smile and a mysterious look.
However, the masterpiece was not so popular until its abduction from the Paris Museum in 1911.
A museum worker is again involved in the attempt on the painting.
However, everything is much more serious here: the Louvre employee Vincenzo Perugia was able not only to remove the picture and carry it out under clothes, but also to keep it in the apartment for two years - the main hit of Leonardo da Vinci during this time was under the stove, in the closet, and in a suitcase with a double bottom.
The police distributed on the streets of Paris almost seven thousand copies of photos of the Mona Lisa - this helped in the search for a masterpiece and made it possible to distinguish the original from a fake.
So the picture began to gain recognition, which was heated by the coverage of the robbery in many media.
Screaming lawlessness.
Edvard Munch was the man who unsuccessfully seeks peace of mind, escaping by writing pictures.
He called the process of creativity a cure for one ’ s own thoughts.
It is terrible to imagine that Munch caught the day when his most famous work will be considered less interesting than the Olympic Games.
However, the artist was lucky, the incident occurred in 1994.
February 12.
The National Gallery of Oslo is deprived of the painting “Scream ” by Edward Munch due to no less national – on this day the opening of the Winter Olympics in the Norwegian city of Lillehammer was broadcast.
The solemn event was observed by the museum staff, not paying attention to the alarm.
At this time, the bandits entered the gallery through the window with the help of a stepladder and in 50 seconds took the “screaming ” picture from the audacity of the robbery.
The thieves left no trace, except for a note addressed to employees: “Thank you for the poor security. ”
Munch's work was found only two months later.
Today she is the record holder in Norway for the number of thefts.
Thus, masterpieces of painting are not always born out of suffering, but they may need to go through this suffering for further public recognition.
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Artist Jørgen Nash, associated with the Situationist movement, later claimed responsibility as a political and artistic statement.

- **Restoration:** A new head, crafted from the original mold by the Eriksen family, was installed.

1984 – Arm Removed**
- **Incident:** On July 22, 1984, vandals sawed off and stole the statue’s right arm.

- **Details:** The arm was returned by two young men days later.

Title:

Content: Society28 January 2022 13: 05
“It is most difficult to sculpt a face ”: a resident of Chernyakhovsk decorates the city with snow sculptures
Alexander Yuzvovich works on each figure for several hours
The now famous harmonist recently had a girlfriend.
Photo: Provided by the hero of the publication.
Alexander Yuzvovich in Chernyakhovsk knows everything.
Even if not himself, it is certainly his work of art.
There is no other way to name the sculptures that he sculpts from the snow.
The most famous sculpture can be considered a snow harmonist.
- Actually, I play the guitar myself.
Alas, I don ’ t know how to harmonise.
But I love listening to accordion or accordion.
Therefore, all my snowmen play harmonies, ” the sculptor explains to Komsomolka.
Alexander is 67 years old.
Since childhood, he has been fascinated by creativity.
At one time he graduated from the art school in Chernyakhovsk.
But the love of snow sculptures was born relatively recently.
A few years ago I tried to make the first Snow Maiden - it turned out.
After the recent snowfall, Alexander again created several masterpieces.
He dazzled his "friend" - the harmonist.
Worked on him for hours.
What a disappointment when the next day the author saw that his creation was destroyed.
Some scumbag smashed a snow sculpture, and his friend filmed it on video.
The video got into social networks, the vandal residents of Chernyakhovsk condemned.
Alexander though upset, but a day later restored the harmonist.
And the next day he blinded his friend.
- When I sculpt, it's like I'm going back to my childhood.
Creativity is always exciting.
To paint, to sculpt or to photograph – that ’ s all I love.
It prolongs my life.
I spend a lot of time on figures.
After all, it is not easy to make a “living ” face out of snow so that it looks like a person ’ s face.
It is important for me to convey emotion.
So sometimes I redo the face several times, ” says Alexander.
And to the fact that his sculptures are broken, he now treats philosophically.
Says, they say, vandal is not the first year and any creator is always a destroyer.
That's sad, of course.
Now the master is trying to make snow figures in the yard of his own house so that there is supervision.

- **Motivation:** No clear political or social motive was established, though it was widely considered an act of youthful mischief or protest.

1990 – Failed Decapitation Attempt**
- **Incident:** In 1990, there was an attempt to decapitate the statue again, leaving noticeable damage to the neck area.

Title:

Content: Moscow 24
Accidents
6: 40 PM
Home / Stories /
The lawyer compared the damage to the paintings of the student Malevich and Ilya Repin
Activism or hooliganism.
The figures in the picture of the pupil of Malevich “returned sight ”
The story of the damage to the picture of the pupil of Kazimir Malevich Anna Leporskaya at the exhibition in Yekaterinburg was continued.
The man who drew a ballpoint pen eyes abstract figures on the canvas, was an employee of the private security company, designed to protect the paintings.
A criminal case on vandalism was opened only after almost two months.
We understand the details of the history and motives of the suspect.
Photo: yeltsin.ru / ALEXANDER MEKHONOSHIN
Pulled the pen out of his pocket
The incident occurred on December 7 at an exhibition at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg.
One of the paintings by the student of Kazimir Malevich Anna Leporskaya "Three Figures" from the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery was spoiled.
On suspicion of vandalism detained a guard of the center, told Moscow 24 in the press service of the cultural institution.
Eyes (on the abstract faces of two figures. – Approx. ed.) in the picture was drawn by an employee of the private security service, who was entrusted with guarding the works, – with a souvenir pen “Yeltsin Center ”, which was lying in his pocket.
Anna Reshetkina
organizer of the discussion on the incident at the Yeltsin Center
It is reported that for the 60-year-old suspect, it was the first day of work in the gallery.
Immediately after the incident, he left the scene of the crime and for several days did not communicate with the administration of the Yeltsin Center.
After the incident, the guard was fired.
The work was removed from the exhibition and sent to Moscow for restoration.
In the Tretyakov Gallery, damage from damage was estimated at 250 thousand rubles with the insurance cost of the canvas at 75 million rubles.
According to Reshetkina, the picture has already been fully restored.
The case of the painting by Anna Leporskaya led to the revision of security protocols at the Yeltsin Center.
Protective screens were installed over all exhibits of the exhibition in the gallery.
The exhibition "The world as immateriality.
The birth of a new art "will continue its work until February 20.
Vandal painted a picture for 75 million rubles
Cultural affairs
The police initially refused to open a criminal case for damage to the painting, citing a small amount of damage to the work of art.
However, after the complaint of the Ministry of Culture of Russia to the Prosecutor General ’ s Office, law enforcement officers in February initiated a case of vandalism.
The police interviewed the suspect in the damage to the picture, noting that he behaves quite aggressively, “demonstrating that the whole process is not to his liking. ”
Maria Spiridonova, a member of the Russian Bar Association, told Moscow 24 that the suspected guard from Yekaterinburg faces arrest for up to three months.
However, he can get off with a fine of up to 40 thousand rubles or his three-month income.
At the same time, if the suspect makes amends for the harm caused to him, the judge may terminate the criminal case.
The lawyer recalled that a similar case occurred in 2018 in the Tretyakov Gallery itself with the painting by Ilya Repin “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan November 16, 1581 ”.
Shortly before the closing of the gallery, Igor Podporin entered the hall and hit the canvas of the standing fence several times.
The man damaged the frame and canvas in three places.
He explained his actions by the fact that the picture, in his opinion, offends the feelings of believers and is unreliable.
Vandal was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.
Maria Spiridonova noted that in the case of Ilya Repin ’ s painting, the attacker received a real sentence, in particular, because he was tried under a more severe article – “Damage to the object of cultural heritage ”.
Photo: Sergey Vedyashkin / Moscow Agency
Avant-garde and actionism
Employee of the Ural branch of the State Museum of Fine Arts.
Pushkina Natalia Tsibanova told Moscow 24, what is the artistic significance of the damaged painting.
The work belongs to the avant-garde, which has become a transitional stage between classical and modern art, said Tsibanova.
"The work of Anna Leporskaya" Three Figures "is an example of the method of Suprematism developed by Kazimir Malevich - the reflection of the world through basic geometric forms.
We see the figures of people and the landscape, but we can ’ t say anything concrete about either.
So the artist gives the viewer the opportunity to complete the details in their imagination, ” said Natalia Tsibanova.
The art critic noted that acts of vandalism in relation to works of art can be considered as artistic only if they contain a conscious statement, and are not banal hooliganism.
In addition, actionism is possible only in the field of contemporary art, Tsibanova added.
In relation to classical works of art, such actions are unacceptable, the expert notes.
Modern art is created here and now, and very often artists themselves draw attention to their work due to strange acts.
For example, as in the case of British street art artist Banksy, who spoiled his painting “Girl with a Balloon ” on the shredder immediately after selling at auction in 2018.
Natalya Tsibanova
employee of the Ural branch of the State Museum of Fine Arts.
Pushkina
Banksy ’ s as-yet-uncut painting sold for £1.04 million, or $1.36 million, in 2018.
In 2021, it was sold at auction for 25.4 million dollars.
However, it is impossible to compare the story of Banksy and the guard from the Yeltsin Center, because they had different motives, the art historian notes.
“In Banksy ’ s case, the act of vandalism can be considered artistic because it is the author ’ s protest against the system and the market for the sale of works of art.
In the case of the painting of Leporsky, the man himself refers to the fact that he unknowingly spoiled it.
There is no need to talk about actionism, we can consider this act only in the legal field, ” said an employee of the Ural branch of the State Museum of Fine Arts.
Pushkina.
Another argument in favor of the inviolability of classical art is often the inability to reproduce it due to the death of the author.
Anna Leporskaya died in 1982 and will never paint such a picture again, Tsibanova added.
She called for condemnation of the act of vandalism against the painting, because otherwise it could set a dangerous precedent.
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- **Details:** The attempt was unsuccessful, but repair work was required.

Title:

Content: Little Big presented NFT eggs of Ilyich
Kinder surprise as an adult.
NFT is gaining momentum and gathers more and more people around it – including celebrities.
His digital art objects were created by the soloist of the group Little Big Ilyich – and not alone, but together with media artist and founder of the art group Instigators Denis Davydov and Peppermint agency specializing in the publication and production of NFT projects.
“This is one of the most sophisticated and technologically advanced collectible drops on the digital rarity market at the moment.
Thanks to the efforts of our team and openness to the creative experiments of the Little Big group, we were able to create an actual and ironic project that explores and popularizes the memes of the crypto world, expanding the Little Big universe in a new format and medium, ” says Denis Davydov.
Instagram content
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The collection of 1000 eggs will be available for purchase from December 3 at Opensea, one of the world ’ s largest marketplaces.
This is almost an adult kinder surprise - inside each egg is hidden a unique meme.
The buyer finds out that he was caught only a week after the acquisition of the NFT object.
Each collectible “figurine ” is presented in the form of a video sculpture and its static image.
“Why eggs? ” he asked.
“Here, of course, a huge number of references, because throughout the history of mankind, the“ egg ” has always been near (I answer and laugh, but there is some truth in these words).
In folklore, in legends, in rhetorical disputes, in the collections of imperial families, the perfect form of solid (but at the same time fragile) matter from which the new is born.
But still, the source of inspiration was the story of the bronze sculpture of Constantine Brancusi “Bird in Space ”, its shape resembling an egg.
In the first half of the 20th century, Duchamp and Stahein brought Brancusi's work to the United States.
At customs, they demanded to pay a fee, since they considered the “bird ” not a sculpture, but a piece of precious metal.
Brancusi sued and won, the court officially ruled that "the bird must be recognized as a work of modern art."
Now there is an active debate in the art world whether it is worth recognizing the work in the NFT medium as art, and in general “what the hell is it ”.
We cannot answer this question, but it is quite ironic! ” explains Denis Davydov.
What kind of memes?
Of course, with Elijah in the lead role.
Or rather, with his character – crypto billionaire Ilya, who tries on different images: from mythological to anime heroes.
All these stories are united by the idea of “this is how cryptocurrency changed Ilya ’ s life ”.
There may be another character – Sonya Tayurskaya, the soloist of Little Big.
“My hero comes from the CIS and recently broke out of its borders into a large, transnational and decentralized world.
Jumping out of his Khrushchev, he, like Sailor Moon, flies to the moon.
With him, he takes his faithful dog Shiba Inu to pierce the gray ground of the Earth satellite with a flagpole, on which, contrary to the laws of physics, the symbol of BTC develops - a cryptocurrency that broke the established order of things, "Ilyich himself says about the concept of the drop.
“I really like the approach of Little Big, they are rare representatives of socio-cultural hackers.
After all, it is important for any creator to be integrated into modernity, to feel the nerve of the present.
Someone does it by accident (let ’ s say, unintentionally), someone deliberately participates in current agendas, and someone breaks the code of modernity and integrates himself into it.
Little Big for me is an organic assemblage of contradictions, post or meta – whatever.
And when the guys told me about their desire to try themselves in NFT, it seemed to me that this is the most logical medium for expanding their universe.
The entire drop is built on plots taken from the mythology of the crypto world, its heroes, images and, of course, from memes.
Such an extreme form of irony (and admiration) for this new part of the digital community, which rhymes perfectly with the creative capital of the group, ” Denis Davydov talks about the idea of   collaborating with a musical group.
This is Little Big ’ s first NFT collection, but is it the last?
“While NFT is a new kind of art and business for us, we are actively contemplating the expansion of our universe.
However, we do not yet know what results our collection will achieve, so we do not build specific plans.
We will observe: if everything goes well, then we will do something else interesting!
But in any case, we will continue to introduce new and relevant technologies into our projects, ” Ilyich assures.
You may also be interested in:
How Men Conquer the NFT Market
Tarantino got into trouble because of the sale of deleted scenes from “Pulp Fiction ”
How art has changed with the advent of new technologies
How Russian artists master augmented reality

1998 – Second Decapitation**
- **Incident:** The statue was again decapitated in January 1998.

- **Details:** The head was later returned anonymously.

- **Motivation:** Again, this was attributed to vandalism rather than a distinct political agenda.

2003 – Blown Off Pedestal**
- **Incident:** On September 11, 2003, vandals used explosives to blast the statue off its stone base.

- **Damage:** The statue was knocked into the harbor but was not seriously damaged; it was retrieved and restored.

- **Motivation:** The nature of the attack suggested significant planning, but no individual or group claimed responsibility or provided an explicit reason.

Title:

Content: What is contemporary art?
Elizaveta SMIRNOVA Tikhon SYSOEV
19.02.2022
Contemporary Art: Its Brief History, Origins and Meaning
The wife of one of the employees of the editorial office of Kultura describes her experience of acquaintance with modern art, which happened to her a few years ago not somewhere, but at an exhibition in the building of the New Tretyakov Gallery.
“My friend and I entered a completely darkened room, divided into compartments of dark curtains, walked through this maze to the TV screen, on which a naked man was fighting and writhing in convulsions.
Then he stood back to those watching, leaned over, and there were loud characteristic sounds. ”
Of course, the curator of that exhibition could (could) indulgently comment that the girl does not understand the very deep idea laid by the author in this project that it requires special training and some special knowledge, and then fifteen minutes without hesitation would set out (set out) a folding text about those very secret meanings.
But the obvious truth is that if there are any meanings in a work of art, even the most theoretically unsavvy viewer will definitely feel them.
This, in fact, was originally the essence of art - to repeat the act of creation, while evoking in others on the basis of their own life experience unconscious associations and exactly the same unconscious desire for their own creation (transformation).
Or — just imagine — you approach a painting by Raphael or a white-stone cathedral in Vladimir, and you are given a booklet for several pages, explaining in detail why it is actually beautiful and valuable.
Funny, isn't it?
Art was not something, sorry for the tautology, artificially invented.
Neanderthals did not arrange hot theoretical disputes in the caves in order to develop some of its specific forms.
Art for tens of thousands of years has naturally grown out of man ’ s view of the world and how he came into being was synchronized with the growth of his self-awareness.
All the main subjects of art - man, God, the world in which we live - appeared not on someone's whim, but from life itself.
That is why both the Raphael painting and the Old Russian cathedral already contain meanings that we, even if we cannot explain, are quite capable of feeling.
In the subject of this issue, we tried to trace the origins of modern art, which, in our opinion, is very important for the classification of this phenomenon.
The left turn at the beginning of the last century, the need for large-scale social changes inspired part of the creative intelligentsia with the idea that it is necessary to completely break with the “old art ”, supposedly existing exclusively for the elite, and come up with a“ new ”, which will be both art and at the same time an instrument of large-scale social transformations.
As a result, the traditional chain of meanings God — man — the world, which has been the fuel for art for thousands of years, the idea of   constantly reproducing the act of creation is replaced by the meanings of social progress.
Art with the help of a certain set of techniques should catch the viewer on the hook and build into the desired social construct.
It was then that all the characteristic features of modern art were born, first of all, the desire for outrageous, which was a kind of competitive advantage in opposition to traditional art.
However, at least due to the fact that ideas about “social progress ” are constantly changing, this model quickly lost all its ideological baggage.
Modern art experienced its “rebirth ” after the revolutionary situation of the late 60s in the West.
There were several factors at once.
The ruling Western elites were looking for a way to tame the leading intelligentsia and at the same time direct social protest into the channel of “creative protest. ”
In addition, inflated prices for modern art have become a serious tool to attract the capital of the rich nouveau riche of Asia and the Middle East to the West.
However, exorbitant purchase prices are not an argument for a significant part of citizens, for whom the corisk often causes rejection precisely because of the absence of any meanings in it, except for those secret ones that are known to this or that curator.
The very same modern art, maintaining its image “for the elect ” and making good money on the service of the elite, so far, it seems, quite the existing status quo.
The end of the summer was marked by a noticeable “cultural scandal ” in the capital.
The reason is the sculpture of Urs Fischer “Big Clay No. 4 ”, installed on Bolotnaya Embankment next to the building of the former HPP-2 power plant.
For Glyna, the embankment in Moscow is not the first exhibition venue.
In 2015, the sculpture debuted in New York, from where it then moved to Florence.
And everywhere it was accompanied by ambiguous assessments of critics and the public.
The incident once again reminded of the main paradox of modern art.
On the one hand, it has become an integral part of urban spaces: artists actively cooperate with urbanists and architects, conduct joint projects to integrate art objects.
On the other hand, it continues to cause loud scandals and partly feeds on both them and the lack of understanding of the public, continuing to deliberately shock it.
As a result, it often seems to the ordinary viewer that elitism and incomprehensibility are an integral part of modern art, something without which it instantly ceases to be relevant and is lost against the background of the constantly changing information agenda.
Social request
How did it happen that art suddenly became everything?
It's not an exaggeration at all.
Let us recall at least the famous urinal of Marcel Duchamp, presented in 1917 at an exhibition of independent artists.
If in the classical interpretation of the same XIX century, the artist was romantically perceived as a creator, in some ways repeating the actions of the Creator himself, the creator of not only a new meaning, but also a new material object, then Marcel Duchamp and the artists who followed him demonstrated that all material objects can be artistic objects, and the role of the artist himself is to create and increase meanings.
And, apparently, the meanings are applied, social.
“The new role of the artist is to create a socially significant figure whose tasks have accordingly become wider than pure art.
This is a very important process - the exit of various fields of culture beyond their own borders, and to our time it is only intensifying, - says in an interview with "Kultura" artist and teacher of the Institute of Contemporary Art Stanislav Shuripa. - A new role of an artist is to be a "cultural worker", like constructivists with their ideal of an artist-manager or Duchamp - "manager of meanings".
This shift was primarily due to the surge in interest in leftist ideas and the growing social demand for democratization in the early 20th century.
Politicians, artists and writers at that time existed in a single space of meanings.
Let us recall that even Vladimir Lenin, living in Zurich, often attended meetings of contemporary artists and poets.
For example, the leader of the world proletariat was friends with the Dadaists, often visited the cabaret “Voltaire ”, where artists and poets of the new avant-garde trend gathered.
Some thought about new social constructs, others tried to create new forms of art for him.
It is significant how the art of that time is actually imbued with ideology, “meanings ” that justify the break with the“ art of the past ”.
There are many currents, or better to say, teachings - artists are allowed to write theoretical works and manifestos in which they explain their innovative approach to painting.
Only the direction of abstractionism in painting breaks down into suprematism, tashism, luchism, systematism.
Abstract artists abandon narrative painting, focusing their attention on plastic, color, light and shade and form.
In 1915, the artist Kazimir Malevich exhibited the famous “Black Square ”, a study of the basic, zero possibilities of color and composition.
In the same years, Vasily Kandinsky develops his concept of “rhythmic ” color, refusing figurative painting.
On the other hand, for the birth of new art, the technical side of the matter was extremely important.
The explanation of what happened to art at the turn of the XIX – XX centuries is given by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in his work “Art in the Era of its Technical Reproducibility ”.
As Benjamin believed, with the development of photography, cinema and other means of “reproduction ”, copying art objects went beyond elite consumption, ceased to be the lot of expensive salons and rich rights holders.
And having got rid of its “uniqueness ”, it not only became available to many in the form of copies, but at the same time gained independence from both the“ consumer ” and the artist himself.
Now the creator can be every spectator, stated Benjamin.
In other words, contemporary art, its ideological rationale and forms, has become a response to a specific social demand associated with the democratization of social life, as well as with the technological breakthrough that led to industrialization.
But what happened then?
In short, the actual art went underground.
The thirties and forties of the last century almost everywhere became a period of “tightening the screws ” and, accordingly, a completely different social demand.
In the USSR, the era of socialist realism began, which gravitated rather to the academic art school, and all avant-garde practices were put in a box, turning them into the specter of a once noisy revolutionary era.
The same thing happened in the West.
In the 1930s and 1940s, under the attack of the radical right-wing forces, avant-garde projects were curtailed here.
Persecuted are not only various exhibitions or schools, but also the artists themselves, up to their physical elimination.
And theorists, such as Benjamin mentioned above, commit suicide without seeing the opposition of the impending black wall of totalitarianism.
And only the sixties – already more free, well-fed and calm – re-ignite the debate about the role of art.
In the USSR, new artists refused to integrate into the socialist project, stating that only “pure ” art, independent of society and political conjuncture, can be recognized as true.
Actual artists already in Brezhnev ’ s time equally despised both “Soviet ” and“ anti-Soviet ”, including dissidents who opposed the official line of the ruling party.
At that time, talking about politics in the art space was like inheriting dirty shoes in a clean room.
That is, the autonomy of art returned here under the influence of the external environment, which, rejecting, pushed to a kind of creative escapism.
However, in the West, where totalitarianism (with the exception of Spain) fell and the Soviet “thaw ” was met with enthusiasm, art for a short time received another political, democratic impetus – under the intellectual influence of the new left, which became the main“ apostles ” of the “new ” approaches to art.
“Why didn ’ t I come to this show? ”
The student unrest of 1968, Red May, was not confined to the Paris streets and university auditoriums.
Galleries and workshops of artists, film sets and world film festivals were embraced by the idea of a new transformation of the world, the desire to stop the bourgeoisie, which was gaining strength in Europe, which many saw as responsible for the last war.
So, unforgettable was the case at the Cannes Festival, which opened just in the midst of the May student protests of 1968.
Then progressive filmmakers demanded to abandon the festival, while the whole of France was covered with barricades.
But the leaders of the festival refused such radical manifestations of solidarity with the strikers.
And then the filmmakers decided to act on their own.
They seized the hall where the premiere of the first competitive film of the Spanish director Carlos Saura “Mint cocktail with ice ” was to take place.
When the lights went out in the hall, Truffaut, Godard, Polanski and other oppositionists took the stage and simply hung on the curtain to prevent it from opening, and thus stopped the show.
What is this, if not actionism, as we are used to seeing it?
Actionism, which became the most important practice of art in post-war Europe and was directed against the rigidity of the political system.
It is characteristic that in Russia, actionism originated in the 1990s as a counterweight to total post-Soviet depoliticization.
On the capital's art scene appears the famous "Moscow actionism" Alexander Brener and Oleg Kulik.
Many remember the sensational actions of Brener in the 1990s, when he boxed half-naked on the Frontal Spot and summoned President Boris Yeltsin to a fist fight.
Or shouted at Lubyanka through the windows of the FSB: “Work, I ’ m your new commercial director! ”
But the actionists were not limited to criticizing only the political system, in many respects their pathos was turned against the emerging market relations in Russia within art institutions.
The same Brener broke into the academic vernissages with cries: “Why didn ’ t I go to this exhibition! ”
The shocking, which many still perceive as an end in itself, was for the participants of Moscow actionism, first of all, the desire to return art to the life of society, the desire to bring it beyond the secular evenings, where the works of artists served more as a decor - as the mother of Uncle Fedor noted in the famous Soviet cartoon, in fact covered a hole on the wallpaper.
Art as an investment
However, the return of the original democratic impulse to art, which came with the renaissance of the left political forces, was quickly cut short.
After 1968, capitalism took revenge almost all over the world, acquiring a new, attractive face of globalism and lenient rebellion - one that could be demonstrated without risking a baton on the head or being behind bars.
In the 1960s, a lot of money comes into contemporary art, and with it, the once rejected idea of autonomy, elitism of art.
Of course, rich people liked to spend surpluses on art before – at the turn of the century, the same New York turned into a new capital of art business precisely due to the overconcentration of successful businessmen.
However, in the second half of the 20th century, this process had a completely different scale and a different – already economic – logic.
With the development of global capital, new pockets of wealth began to emerge almost all over the world.
And with them there were new "fat bags", ready to spend the surplus on the "quirks" of artists.
Among the “newcomers ” there were especially many Japanese, Arabs, Chinese, and in the 90s, Russians.
For example, it is known that the triumph of contemporary art in the art markets reached a point of consolidation with the appearance of Japanese buyers in the auction halls of Christie ’ s and Sotheby ’ s in the late 80s.
However, this new world elite pursued not aesthetic, or at least not only aesthetic goals.
First, by buying up paintings or opening new galleries, they once again confirmed their special prestige, secured their elite status.
The “consumption ” of art today is a sign of social prestige: an art auction is a modern analogue of potlach, a demonstrative waste, the ability to“ blow money to the wind, ” writes, for example, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
Secondly, buying an expensive painting is a good investment, especially in a period when an economic recession is expected.
It is no coincidence that during periods of economic instability, the art market begins to grow (as it was in the 1960s and 1970s on the eve of the oil crisis): paintings “save ” assets from high inflation.
According to research by Merrill Lynch Bank, in 2012, among alternative investments, art was in second place after luxury goods (aircraft, yachts, cars).
Finally, the elite often used the art market as a way to legalize black money.
A work of art in this sense has always had several advantages: it is impossible to define a clear boundary for its pricing, while commercial transactions here are almost always protected by confidentiality.
Thus, according to the most conservative estimates of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the share associated with money laundering and other financial crimes in the field of the art market is about $3 billion annually.
As a result, what used to be a tool for the destruction of the “bourgeois world ” and demanded social change, was gradually“ tamed ”, turning into a solid cultural industry.
According to a report by The Art Market, contemporary art now accounts for 15 percent of the global art market, up from three percent 20 years ago, with an annual turnover of about $60 billion.
It is not surprising that from now on, exhibitions and biennials have ceased to be purely cultural events - these are also huge projects to attract investment.
Pickled Shark for Middle Class
Against the background of this money pumping, the figure of the artist was transformed.
For example, he is increasingly involved in projects to improve the urban environment, and the art itself is increasingly acquiring design and decor features that create comfortable spaces for a citizen or an office employee.
Moreover, while art was rapidly involved in the media space and built into market relations, the modern artist turned into a promoter of himself: “If the artist goes beyond the artistic system, he himself begins to function in the same way as politicians, athletes, terrorists, movie stars and other big and small celebrities, his actions begin to cover the media.
In other words, the artist himself becomes a work of art, ” writes art theorist Boris Groys in his article “The Politics of Self-Design. ”
So, some began to trade not even works, but the very fact of their “high value ” and the artist ’ s own status.
Suffice it to recall the curious case when in 2018 the painting of the famous artist Banksy “Girl with a Balloon ” self-destructed after it was sold at Sotheby ’ s auction in London for more than one million pounds.
Others simply elegantly saddled these purely market categories, weeding out “art ” from“ non-art. ”
Recall at least the famous story about the shark, which the English artist Damien Hirst bought for 6,000 pounds, pickled and placed in an aquarium, calling the work “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living ”.
Saatchi & Saatchi bought it for £50,000.
And then the Museum of Modern Art in New York and all gave for it 12 million dollars.
Still others began to direct all their creative forces to a deliberate outrage, which attracts media attention and therefore is fraught with completely different incomes.
In fact, the same actionism, as noted in an interview with “Culture ” famous art critic Sergey Khachaturov, largely came off the stage under the influence of just the logic of“ HYIP for HYIP ”, devoid of any social meanings, and, as it turned out, even purely technologically, it works much better in the world of digital media.
However, it would be wrong to believe that the commercialization of art only primitive it.
Much more often, big money led to the complication of art.
Modern art is a high culture, which is increasingly complemented by a philosophical text and in general often becomes very abstract.
Modern installations and performances are difficult to understand without art criticism or a special theoretical background.
It was not by chance that the middle class finally turned this art into a marker of bourgeois consumption.
As Stanislav Shuripa notes, “many features of modern art – irony, reflectivity, social involvement, a tendency to constant renewal and interest in theory – are due to the peculiarities of the worldview of the middle class, which is the main consumer of modern art. ”
However, commercialization, in fact, did what totalitarianism could not, putting us in that paradoxical situation, which was reflected in the controversy around "Clay" on Bolotnaya.
It would seem that art “goes in breadth ”, penetrating into a variety of areas of everyday life, has its target audience, even integrates into design and urban projects.
But it still seems as if deliberately continues to repel most of the public, parasitizing on its lucrative status of “occupations for the elect ”, and therefore abandoning that initial, social impulse, which was filled with the loud years of the beginning of the last century.
The article was published in No. 9 of the newspaper "Culture" for 2021

2004 – Painted with Graffiti**
- **Incident:** The statue was repeatedly doused with paint (red, green, and more), and graffiti was scrawled on the base.

- **Details:** These acts were typically timed with political protests or global events, with slogans advocating for various causes.

Ongoing Minor Vandalism**
- The statue is frequently subject to less severe vandalism, such as being dressed in clothing, draped in banners, or decorated with various items.

These acts are often connected to celebrations, protests, or local events.

---

**Discussion and Context:**
- Many acts against the statue, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, were emblematic of broader currents in avant-garde art and anti-establishment protest.

Particularly, the Situationists used public art vandalism as a critique of bourgeois values and a call for reimagining the use of public spaces.

- Later attacks and acts of graffiti generally align with global protest movements or serve as a platform for expressive dissent (e.g., coloring the mermaid to protest whaling or wars).

- The statue’s repeated targeting could be read both as a signifier of its power as a symbol, and as demonstrating the vulnerability of public art in contested urban space.

---

**Conclusion:**
The Little Mermaid has become a recurrent site for the expression of social, political, and artistic grievances, as well as acts of random vandalism.

Each instance reflects not just individual motives but also broader social dynamics—how cultural symbols are appropriated, contested, and negotiated in public discourse.

Let me know if you need more detailed discourse analysis or references to specific media coverage for some of these episodes!

Certainly!

Title:

Content: Dear reader, if you are walking in your car, then you find “bandits ” who stood in front of you, slept in front of the wheels and prevented you and prevented people from passing, or if you are in a museum and surprised by a group of people destroying and breaking art paintings or painting the exhibits in orange...
Don't think you're in front of an armed terrorist group.
These people are often “environmental activists. ”
Environmental activists seek to make a positive impact on the planet and the environment, but not through planting trees, but through the easiest way to balance from their point of view: to subvert art, paint and destroy monuments and artifacts and disrupt the movement of people in the streets, in order to balance the economy and the environment.
This may sound crazy dear reader, and remind you of the story of the sieve who criticized a needle because it has a hole!
But this is the view presented in the market of environmental struggle...
Either you accept it or you are not deep enough!
When art becomes a victim of the green struggle, there is no doubt that we are faced with a dilemma similar to the dilemma of having a preacher on a beach, wearing a green shorts, to preach to the redhead blonde with the red bikini...
Either way, you are faced with a mystery of modern civilization.
The article would have stopped here, but I finally got to know a critical school of fiction and art that not only analyzes texts, words and drawings, but evaluates works of art based on their environmental impact, meaning that a painting painted by your favorite artist may be guilty of polluting the environment, and you, him and the museum should be held accountable for that.
As environmental criticism intensifies, environmental literary critics emerge — as if the morgue is missing bodies — and many wonder if art and environmental criticism can coexist peacefully.
Can we find a way to make art more sustainable and environmental without the need for subversive works?
In the end, the aim of this article is not to make environmental criticism a mockery, but to question the actual solutions to environmental problems, rather than to direct efforts towards art subversion.
Is this the right path to change?
Or does environmental criticism need to rethink its strategies?
Environmental criticism may have come up with a noble idea, but the way it is applied is so controversial and ironic, we can use art as a means to spread environmental awareness and promote sustainability.
Ultimately, art and environmental criticism must coexist peacefully, as both seek a better and more sustainable future.
Anything that does not mention God ’ s name.
Amputation.
A short story:
Why did you steal the painting from the museum?
Preserving the environment, sir.
Preserving the environment...
How? How?
Thief: It has artificial colors that pollute the environment, and its stools are cut from a tree that was cut last month...
I wanted to send a message to the world that art that does not respect the environment must be removed.
Officer: Greetings to your brain Balanat, O Sea of Science, O Sea of Concept, O Philosopher of Donkeys!
@ moh1alatwn @

Based on the provided text, here is a summary in the form of key nuggets of information, in about 2500 characters:

---
**Key Nuggets from the Text:**

- The text discusses the act of "sweeping" away the legacies of previous political powers, likening it to practices of new regimes which may choose to retain or discard elements of past systems at their discretion.

Title:

Content: Political sweeping and before it cleansing and fogging and dropping idols and loyalty to the homeland and the inclusion of all joints and differences
Jassar Saleh Mufti
Sources familiar with the movement within the Islamic Dawa Party said that the current leadership has so far failed to reunite itself, in light of its lack of a plan or project that can be relied on to attract public support, specifically from the young segments.
The Lebanese newspaper “Al-Akhbar ” said in its issue today, quoting those sources, that the leadership of the party was faced with three options“ bitter dreams, and will lead in one way or another, in the end, to the decline of the party star. ”
The first of these options is to call for the election of a new leadership, including members of the Shura Council (50) and the Political Council (11), provided that these 61 are young people, while historic leaders retire, advisers are retained, and then the reform process begins.
But this proposal collided with the possibility of the failure of the new leadership to promote itself, and the possibility that it will take years to achieve a breakthrough interaction in the Iraqi street.
The second option was to postpone the conference, so that the current leadership could mature its vision for the future of the party and its mechanisms of work, but the problem that emerged in this context was the possibility of failure of the stakeholders to produce a “draft vision ”, which means that the party will automatically enter a“ clinical death ”, in light of its inability to produce new leadership on the one hand, and crystallize its project on the other.
As for the third option, in which the “call ” seems to be proceeding, it is the convening of the General Conference before the middle of this year, although“ the date has not been set yet, because the preparations for it need more time, ” in the words of one of the party leaders.
According to the newspaper's information as in its report, the leadership of the "call" is expected to re-elect itself, with limited change in a number of sites in favor of young faces at the expense of current faces.
The congress will be followed by a workshop on reforms of the party ’ s organizational structure, and a paper outlining the party ’ s vision and project.
The information indicates that the latter scenario was developed after consulting regional parties that advised to maintain the unity of Dawa, which was also recommended by the circles of the supreme religious authority (Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani), which prefer to keep the map of political parties in its current form, especially within the Shiite House...
It can no longer be complicated. ”
In the midst of this, and in light of the party ’ s lack of a broad mass base that can rally around it in its ordeal believing in its principles, and not in its ability to secure jobs for those who want them, the opponents of the “call ” bet that the moment of the last“ split back ” is near.
A bet based on a number of factors, starting from the loss of the party ’ s position as prime minister, which it has monopolized for 13 years, through suspicions about its leaders regarding involvement in corruption and its generalization, to the failure of the party to promote itself on the one hand, and the formation of its historical leaders parallel parties on its banks, eat of its popularity, and invest in its street.
A few weeks ago, satellite channels and various social media circulated a scene of a lawmaker accused of corruption, trying to escape the large crowds, which were chasing him near the parliament building, and after he was arrested by the angry, he was carried and put in a garbage container.
Regardless of what this (Ukrainian) MP did, he certainly did not come to do what some of the Iraqi politicians, who sit in the chairs of responsibility and governance at the top of the pyramid?
Where the order reached some of them to be a tool of the external agenda, which wanted and want to flood Iraq with chaos and instability, and resolve sectarianism, but they were a tool of terrorism Daeshi and before him the base, by providing political and legal cover for killers and criminals, taking advantage of their access to the customary or legal immunity granted to those in the legislative or executive power.. Incubators of domestic or imported terrorism (if you will).
This is through material, moral and media support for all tendencies hostile to the political process in Iraq after the US occupation, and what happened in the sit-in squares and platforms, which preceded the Iraqi June setback in 2013.
And supported by the senior leaders of the parties in the provinces of the Sunni Arabs, to conclusive evidence of what I say, where the aforementioned squares and their platforms, which are notorious and notorious, turned into a headquarters and a corridor for the dispersion of horizons and preachers of Satan, and even to kill innocent soldiers unarmed of weapons, and under the sight and hearing of the crowds present, and amid the cries of (Takbir) Daeshi. And prepared in advance in the corridors of the intelligence of regional countries brother and friend of Iraq, to bring down the political process in it, and turn back the clock.
But by the grace of God, and the fatwas of the great references, and the energy of the honorable people of the popular crowd and the security forces, disappointed and lost their bets, and the magic turned on the magician.
The process of political sweeping must start preparing for it from now, coinciding with the liberation and cleansing of the occupied territories from ISIS.
By showing the facts and holding accountable the wrongdoer, the negligent, the corrupt, the thief and the forger, in every detail of the Iraqi state and under any title held by this violator of the law, regardless of his religion, nationality and doctrine, terrorism is not the only one that brought us to what we are in political, economic and social crises.
But it was part of a large series of mistakes, which accumulated and magnified and produced calamities and impurities on this wounded country, especially the system of (quotas), which we have suffered since the fall of the previous regime until now.
It is a call to the people of the areas hit and occupied by terrorism, in Mosul, Anbar, Salahuddin and Diyala.. To tell those who elected them and brought them to the top of the political pyramid: Stop the conspiracies, intrigues and false pretensions, which brought Iraq, especially your provinces and their inhabitants to what happened and is being destroyed and ruined. To tell the leaders there that we are part of Iraq, and that the preservation of the rights of the smaller country does not prevent the granting and preservation of the rights of the larger country.
And that they should treat their partners in the homeland as a partnership of brotherhood in destiny, not as the partnership of the merchant who threatens to break the partnership at all times, and for what reason?
Remember that a tree, no matter how high or large, is fixed by its roots, not by the length of its branches or the abundance of its fruits.
It is an invitation to the people of the center and the south to tell their leaders and representatives: Expose the corrupt and the theft of public money, expel them from their positions and jobs that you gave them, and clean your parties of some ignorant climbers and parasites who abused or abused parties that had the honor of fighting injustice and dictatorship.
It is a call for all the Iraqi people to be loyal to the blood and souls of the martyrs, which flowed every day over the holy land, the land of Iraq, to defend it and liberate it from the desecration of terrorism.
Is there a responder??
Before we look at the political sweepers that abound these days, it was necessary to consider the sweepers themselves and the extent of their ability to sweepers that they promise once they win the elections and become prime minister.
The sweep promised by its current advocates will be limited to removing the vestiges of the ruling party, the National Congress alone.
Of course, this process of sweeping will only be carried out by those who will take over the reins of power from the competing parties, and thus qualify him to sweep what he deems necessary from the ruling party, and keep what he wants.
These parties calling for sweeping others, it is regrettable that they did not reach a conclusive opinion on the way to reach power, which is not possible to achieve except through the next elections, as these parties are still in a state of continuous “rot and rot ”, whether they will accept to contest those elections or boycott them?
Every morning there is a new opinion for these parties.
The latest, the memorandum sent to the Presidency of the Republic, demanding the postponement of the elections until next November, the amendment of laws related to freedoms, the formation of a national government, and the restructuring of the National Elections Commission, and then gave the Presidency one week to respond to their demands or they will work on « Hijwa or Dbaybina », boycott the elections.
We ask these parties what is new in these demands that they have been demanding from time to time, especially the idea of the national government, which did not find the least amount of acceptance, let alone respond to any official of the National Congress, and some of them described the demand as an attempt to reach power without effort is to run elections to despair of winning them?
Therefore, we are determined from now on not to pay attention to this memorandum by the Presidency of the Republic, which will be seen as a game to waste time, which the President of the Republic, the candidate of the National Congress for the presidency, is investing in his readiness to compete in the elections, and will not waste him in words and demands that are impossible to achieve.
Moreover, the preparations for the elections have gone a long way, and have cost everyone a great deal of effort and money, which is difficult to replace or obtain again, especially for the same parties calling for the postponement of the elections, which complain to the bricks of the earth of their impotence, poverty and lack of power.
Then how do they expect that the National Elections Commission will be dissolved now, and has been patient on their part since its formation and announcement and throughout the previous period, until they discover today the lack of impartiality and bias of the National Conference that formed it, discovered « Yadoop » now and then they saw the call to dissolve and reconstitute it, without explaining who will reconstitute if not the same National Conference?
What we admire is the continued threat of these parties to boycott the elections, as if someone would care about it after it was repeated more than once and without taking action.
These parties, called more than one name, Juba parties or the parties of the alliance or the parties of the national consensus, which are still running behind the mirage, demanding all impossibilities, some of them have gone out on them and become exposed, especially as the parties that have gone out of importance so that any action they threaten in case of failure to respond to their demands will be worthless in the absence of solidarity of the parties that reject them, especially the popular movement. She calls for this, after her candidate for the presidency of the Republic has made all those strides in his readiness to run.
As long as there are large parties, such as the Popular Movement, which will not accept the boycott, or the Popular Congress, which explicitly announced that it will not boycott the elections, the threat of boycott by the alliance will become useless, but will be in the interest of the National Congress, as we have said before, because the competition will decrease, especially when competitors with heavy weight such as the National Umma Party candidate.
This is, of course, assuming that the Juba parties will indeed boycott the elections, despite their reputation for saying what they do not do, if their demands sent to the presidency of the Republic, which of course are not and will not be answered, and we fear that the decision to boycott from the end of this week, the date that was set to be taken, will move to a new date, as we are used to each time.
These parties in all this « Jihaja » talk about the idea of   sweeping the effects of the Salvation Government, although the sweep of the impact of any government must be through the election fund, so that the party gains the seats that qualify him to sit on the seats of power after the removal of his predecessor, and not otherwise, although we reject the use of the word sweeping from its basis, because it is used to get rid of dirt, and we will not make any of any of any of any of any governments no Although there is political dirt that deserves to be swept away, such as corruption, nepotism, injustice and others, the generalization of the act without discrimination greatly harmed the idea.
We heard the subject of sweeping the monuments of the regimes for the first time in 1985 after the fall of the May regime, when Imam Sadiq al-Mahdi launched the idea of sweeping the monuments of May then, and began to implement it after he came to power.
Unfortunately, the synagogue practiced by Mr. Sadiq al-Mahdi did not exceed the removal of the foundation stone of some of the buildings built by May, which is considered one of the most distinctive effects left by May, such as the Friendship Hall in Khartoum, under whose roof he continued to announce his call to remove the effects of May, as well as the People ’ s Assembly in Omdurman and many others.
We said then that to erase the effects of any system, if this idea is accepted, is only to leave what is more valuable than it and not to remove the name of the person who made it.
Monuments in all parts of the world are one of the most important things that must be preserved, without any tampering with it either in its form or content, so that this helps in the process of recording the history of the country and sequencing it without interruption for the sake of future generations.
The positive history of the country is not required to be recorded and overcome the negative, so as not to create gaps in that history.
If May has its mistakes, which it has like any other system of government, it does not mean that the May era of the history of the country removed that mistake, but it is required to reverse its mistakes with all the honesty and honesty required, at the same time that its positives are reflected with all honesty and honesty as well.
We have not heard of the removal of the effects of any judgment by those who follow it, except for those of us who are accustomed to the creation of adversity.
In the context of the removal of the monuments of May, some have tried to change the names of some places that bear their name, and to name them others, and this attempt is considered a political theft that should not be practiced.
But the Sudanese people, who do not miss such plots, insisted on using the real name despite the nose of change.
Moreover, the removal of any trace of the effects of May means misleading the new generation, which has not lived with it and therefore does not know the facts, and has the right to know all that surrounded it negatively or positively, and when some facts were hidden from him after their removal, what he knows of the history of Sudan and the march of governance in it becomes wrong.
The call for removal also included people who worked for, or collaborated with, the system.
Their removal was similar to the referral for the public interest practiced by the current Salvation Government, but it is amazing that the same people who were swept within the ruins of May and thrown into the dustbin of history are the same people who were used by Imam Sadiq al-Mahdi, the owner of the idea of   sweeping, and placed at the top of his institutions in the Umma Party.
Therefore, we do not find any justification to return to this slogan, was it on the part of Imam Sadiq al-Mahdi or those who took in his tradition from others, vacuuming the regime is impossible to achieve as long as the rule of that regime or Fasrat, vacuuming means removal, which is not possible to do any of the vacuums of the world.
Mr. Sadiq al-Mahdi spent most of his years of rule preoccupied with sweeping the effects of May, and did not succeed until the third democracy was completely swept by the coup of June 1989.
Therefore, we did not hope that His Excellency would repeat the same series to become the sweeping of the effects of the rescue, among the priorities of his electoral programs, although he was excluded from sweeping bridges, bridges, dams and roads of course.
And the question becomes, what will be swept away by the effects that do not include all of this?
I do not believe that it is possible to remove the effects of a rule that has been in power for two decades and more, and wherever the citizen turns, he finds a trace of its effects.
Therefore, it is desirable that the idea of   removing errors become in the style of government and some of its practices, and that everyone move away from this story of removal of monuments.
In the style of government, discrimination among citizens must be eliminated because of loyalty to the party, for example, or preference of kin over others.
The success of any party in achieving justice among citizens alone is enough.
We say this because there are some of the leaders of the other parties have started to raise the same slogan, sweeping the traces of the National Conference, and before these parties sink in the face of that slogan, we hope that they will overcome it and talk about others, as the days have proved its failure and futility.
I believe that the attempt to sweep the effects of the regimes is what encouraged some to sabotage everything that these regimes do, as this is in the field of sweeping their effects.
I was surprised today that there are “vases ” with some seedlings intended to beautify one of Bahri ’ s main streets.
Someone smashed it.
Despite the ugliness of these vases, their unsuitability for decoration, and their entitlement to removal, the one who did the smashing of them is more ugly than he did.
Such an act may be repeated in other places and for other things, and it contains conclusive evidence of the misery of our civic education, where the citizen does not distinguish between what belongs to the government and what belongs to him - as a citizen - must be preserved.
Those who sabotage on the grounds that doing so helps to remove the ruling regime, do not know that they will be the ones who will pay the cost of repairing what they sabotage and from their own money, not the money of the government, and these sabotage operations will not affect the system of government.
Surprisingly, all traces of interest and value were made during the totalitarian era, from the government of November 58, through May 69, to June 89, while none of the governments are found in the democratic era.
This may be due to the fact that military governments, especially those of May and June, continued to govern for a long time, enabling them to implement all their plans and programs, while democratic governments were too short to implement any of their programs or plans.
This may be true to some extent, but it does not negate the fact that partisan governments often waste time in political squabbling among themselves and in how to erase the effects of the military rule that preceded them until they are overrun by another.
Why should any government not seek to build on what its predecessor has built, and stop the story of erasing the traces of the other to start again, which has prevented us from catching up with the world, as long as we do not take a step forward without following it back.
Amebia, whales, black scorpions, dung beetles, the power of militias, the power of political Islam, the power of assassinations and repression, the representative of the petty bourgeois class that lives on the oppression of the masses and plunder their wealth, and it kills in cold blood peaceful demonstrators.
This authority is terrified of the masses, terrified of its revolutionary will with patience, steadfastness and the perpetuation of the uprising, terrified of losing its privileges, influence and corruption, it relied on the hardened criminals of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and mocked all their repressive organs of the security of the Popular Mobilization Forces, militias and national security headed by Faleh al-Fayyad, who is the actual coordinator between the Popular Mobilization Committee. And tried through stupid plays media escalation and military skirmishes with the United States of America and show its defense of the so-called national sovereignty when Soleimani and the engineer were killed and raised the banner of the exit of foreign forces at a time when their representatives in parliament chanted Soleimani, who killed what killed through his snipers dozens of peaceful demonstrators, and cut off the Internet in the past night and this morning As a new attempt to suppress the protests, and all those efforts to distort and distort the demonstrations and thus strike and suppress them.
This dirty power has shown that its real enemy is not America or foreign forces, but the masses that are hungry for freedom, the peaceful masses that have demanded nothing more than a decent life free of poverty and want, confronting them with live bullets, poison gas, snipers and silencers.
The power of the ruling militias in Iraq imposed itself on the masses of Iraq by the strength of their militias, and that their legitimacy is falsified par excellence, and tries to continue through killings, kidnappings, assassinations, fabricating political plays and blatant labor.
This authority is the third party that the criminal Adel Abdul Mahdi talked about in the bloodshed of the masses, and all its leaders must be brought to trial on charges of killing peaceful demonstrators in addition to dissolving their gangs under any name.
All the forces of the political process talk about the constitution, and boast of addressing the masses that they should not violate the constitution while their militias kill, kidnap and assassinate and there is no deterrent to them without asking whether they commit crimes recommended by the constitution!
Their defense of the Constitution is their defense of their fake and criminal power, a power that without killing and silencing will not last a day.
Such power must be swept away from society; without it, society will take a step towards security, stability, freedom and prosperity.
The alternative to this power is the establishment of a provisional government that guarantees freedom, security and equality.
You will be swept away, scavenged, sterilized, and replaced with his coat, and before him trim his nails and cut his tail, even if it is a cover for him, but this is the creation of God!!!
The religious establishment in Najaf closed its doors, widened its voice, distanced itself and rebuked the leaders of the deep state on more than one occasion.
The deep state is a group of interests that do not care what the homeland and the citizen suffer..?
Many suspicions of corruption gnawed the body of Iraq carried out by the deep state is to impose its will with a piece of paper imposed on Prime Minister Brother Mustafa?
The underdog on his own?
a piece of paper to turn the table because the prime minister & apos; s office is taking a cut
Appointments in important, essential and sovereign positions are imposed on the prime minister with a piece of paper from the leaders of the deep state.
When will we be free from the domination and influence of the leaders of the deep state who slaughtered Iraq by imposing their will..
solution from my point of view.
Is the liberation of minds from the influence of leaders of blocs and corrupt political parties and the dissolution of parliament and sweep the leaders of parties and political blocs corrupt and without exception..!?
The Republican presidential system of government and a courageous independent national leader who leads Iraq.
It is the best solution in imposing the prestige of the state and the rule of law, silencing mouths and freedom of opinion.
The imposition of the will of the state, the rule of law, the dissolution of parliament and a presidential system of government requires a popular movement, the liberation of minds and a massive popular revolution that obeys the corrupt political class and their deep state and the political impasse that cracked our heads.
They say, “Beware of women who talk about honor a lot, ” and by the same measure we should be wary of those who raise their voices high in love of the homeland and the fight against corruption.
The people have always threatened with warning the traitors and the fallen to throw them one day in the dustbin of history when history writes about these people and their treacherous attitudes.
Of course, the writing of history and reference to the biography of men remained dependent on the hands of the victor and those who have power and the scepter and sit on the throne and dictate what he wants from the descriptions of those rulers through pens and writings and praises of the sultans to whiten the faces of those blackened by treason, mercenarism and selling the destinies of peoples. Involved in corruption.
In Ukraine, a corrupt politician and money manipulator threw a lawmaker from the party of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych into a garbage container. * ^ * ^ * * On Tuesday, Ukrainian demonstrators threw Vitaly Gorabsky, a lawmaker from the Party of the Regions, into a garbage container during a rally in front of the parliament in Kiev.
The demonstrators grabbed “Gorabski ”, while leaving the parliament building, and threw him in a garbage container they brought in front of the building, and the demonstrators prevented the exit of“ Gorabski ” from the container briefly, accusing him of causing bloodshed in the country, “for having played a leading role in the issuance of many controversial laws during the period of the previous government. ”
The demonstrators, who belong to the Union of Freedom for All Ukrainians and other nationalist movements, demanded to announce the content of a law granting special status to some cities in the east of the country, as well as the passage of a law punishing members of the former Ukrainian government.
I wonder how much we need in Iraq.
This is what must be done in all our parliamentarians and officials, starting from the top of the pyramid of al-Qaeda and without exception, and recover all the money stolen by them and use the International Interpol agency for that!!!!
And then to prison because they did to us double what this guy did to the Ukrainians.
This is the lesson of the Iraqi parliamentarian all corrupt and corrupt and servants of corruption, injustice and tyranny by using parliamentary immunity as well as their domination over the goods of the country by using influence and exploiting all public places and getting bribes or entering into projects with a share if you want to get the license...
Even if we get a chance to throw them away, where are the trash cans?
When the Ukrainians threw him into the container, they insulted him the most because they were civilized and everything had its rules.
But we, our parliamentarians, our government and all the layers of our society, rich and poor, are cutting the streets
Our main cities and garbage accumulated on the sides, but in the alleys it happened and there is no embarrassment and do not see containers only in the neighborhoods “high-end ” buildings, but the residents of the city, and in this sense, the containers we have a prestige and parliament do not deserve it, and even decorated with plastic packages of all colors have become part of the decor of our neighborhoods and do not want to be spoiled by one, especially parliamentarians And it rots because the landfill is relatively cleaner than them.
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This is compared to the actions of political parties in Sudan and the difficulties of truly erasing institutional legacies.

- There are references to how leaders in power recycle former adversaries, incorporating them into new administrations despite earlier opposition, indicating the complex and often cyclical nature of political change.

- The concept of a "deep state" is introduced, characterized as self-interested groups indifferent to broader societal suffering, suggesting a cynicism about genuine reform.

- The narrative shifts to protest and civil resistance, describing disruptive street actions and comparing them to vandalism in a museum setting, e.g., people destroying or defacing artworks as a form of environmental protest.

The hypothetical example given is of damaging museum art to make a political point about the environment.

- The analogy to criticizing a needle for its hole is used to question the logic or effectiveness of certain kinds of protest or vandalism.

Title:

Content: Dear reader, if you are walking in your car, then you find “bandits ” who stood in front of you, slept in front of the wheels and prevented you and prevented people from passing, or if you are in a museum and surprised by a group of people destroying and breaking art paintings or painting the exhibits in orange...
Don't think you're in front of an armed terrorist group.
These people are often “environmental activists. ”
Environmental activists seek to make a positive impact on the planet and the environment, but not through planting trees, but through the easiest way to balance from their point of view: to subvert art, paint and destroy monuments and artifacts and disrupt the movement of people in the streets, in order to balance the economy and the environment.
This may sound crazy dear reader, and remind you of the story of the sieve who criticized a needle because it has a hole!
But this is the view presented in the market of environmental struggle...
Either you accept it or you are not deep enough!
When art becomes a victim of the green struggle, there is no doubt that we are faced with a dilemma similar to the dilemma of having a preacher on a beach, wearing a green shorts, to preach to the redhead blonde with the red bikini...
Either way, you are faced with a mystery of modern civilization.
The article would have stopped here, but I finally got to know a critical school of fiction and art that not only analyzes texts, words and drawings, but evaluates works of art based on their environmental impact, meaning that a painting painted by your favorite artist may be guilty of polluting the environment, and you, him and the museum should be held accountable for that.
As environmental criticism intensifies, environmental literary critics emerge — as if the morgue is missing bodies — and many wonder if art and environmental criticism can coexist peacefully.
Can we find a way to make art more sustainable and environmental without the need for subversive works?
In the end, the aim of this article is not to make environmental criticism a mockery, but to question the actual solutions to environmental problems, rather than to direct efforts towards art subversion.
Is this the right path to change?
Or does environmental criticism need to rethink its strategies?
Environmental criticism may have come up with a noble idea, but the way it is applied is so controversial and ironic, we can use art as a means to spread environmental awareness and promote sustainability.
Ultimately, art and environmental criticism must coexist peacefully, as both seek a better and more sustainable future.
Anything that does not mention God ’ s name.
Amputation.
A short story:
Why did you steal the painting from the museum?
Preserving the environment, sir.
Preserving the environment...
How? How?
Thief: It has artificial colors that pollute the environment, and its stools are cut from a tree that was cut last month...
I wanted to send a message to the world that art that does not respect the environment must be removed.
Officer: Greetings to your brain Balanat, O Sea of Science, O Sea of Concept, O Philosopher of Donkeys!
@ moh1alatwn @

- The text explores the process by which objects, tools, or artworks gain collective social significance over time, becoming part of a society’s cultural and symbolic heritage, suggesting the emotional weight carried by monuments and public statues.

Title:

Content: Loss, House, and Tool
Design: Alaa Salama.
This short article talks about the nature of relationships between man and his environment of matter and meaning.
There are extensive theoretical debates about relativity between them.
Is culture and material an extension of man?
Or is the human environment an integrated unit, with harmonious groups of social meanings?
Or are these different social phenomena that are difficult to put into stereotyped social structures?
This article looks at some of the interpretations of man ’ s understanding of what is around him; it deals with the cultural loss, the house, the tool, which this article will try to discuss, based on authentic theoretical references in this field.
Cultural loss
Junichiro Tanizaki, in Praise of the Shadow, recounts the Japanese citizen ’ s relationship to the shadow, and disagrees with Plato that the shadow is a fake, even believing it to be the truth itself, and is one of the aesthetic aspects of Japanese culture.
The text intensifies the description in the beauty of the lights in the Japanese house, and praises them, while it considers that the extraneous things of Western modernity, ruined the aesthetic dimensions of Japanese culture, but the same writer when he built a house, built it on the Western model, and did not build it on the Japanese heritage with its dim lights.
This contradiction is not limited to ideas and behavior in the Japanese example, but we find it in our contemporary Arab societies clearly and clearly.
For example, a Qatari folk song that says, "neither the camel nor the car...
Despite this, many Qataris own the most luxurious types of cars in the world, but they are a source of pride in the Qatari society, racing to build the most luxurious residential villas, and even the tents became extinct as a residence, and became an accessory on the sidelines of the house.
It is a crisis of the relationship between local cultures and Western modernity.
The citizens of these cultures engage in the ramifications of Western modernity and embrace it in all its forms, but feel alienated and guilty by abandoning their cultures and replacing them with Western ones.
It is a crisis of the relationship between local cultures and Western modernity.
The citizens of these cultures engage in the ramifications of Western modernity and embrace it in all its forms, but they feel alienated and guilty by abandoning their cultures and replacing them with Western culture; their memories are stuck in the old diaries of their lives or the beautiful novels of their ancestors; to atone for the guilt of denying their heritage, and to cling to their local culture as slogans. Or nostalgia and emotions or writing, not action and practice.
In Freudian language, one enters into a state of melancholy, and if one tries to escape this contradiction and engage in practices of complete cultural cutting, one moves to a state of eternal mourning by masquerading the past with which there is absolutely no break.
Western modernity has not accepted the self-awareness of local cultures; those who do not conform to their conditions are considered backward or traditional.
In other words, this crisis that people experience in cultures that do not belong to Western modernity stems from the exclusion of local cultures by Western modernity, which does not even accept to participate with them, or what is called “intercultural interaction. ”
Therefore, works of art that revive popular heritage and to some extent defy the rules of late Western modernity, such as Makadi Nahas, Lina Shammayan and May Nasr, are well received by some segments of Arab societies.
This does not mean a break with modernity and a return to outdated traditions, but an explicit call to sanctify human freedom and access in postmodernism; in its language the "recognition of the different other" culturally, gendered, marginally, or whatever form and type of emancipation it may be.
Human freedom, which has never been achieved in the Arab world, is capable of building political projects and liberating the place.
The house.
In The Aesthetics of Place, Gaston Bachelard links memory, consciousness, imagination, and understanding perceptions of the world through the house in which man is raised.
Bachelard ’ s key concept is ‘ condensation ’, an extreme state of memory in which time freezes at a given moment, a high emotional energy is formed to condense at a given time, and the memory is stabilized.
This memory shapes the person ’ s personality and his understanding of the world.
Bachelard considers that this condensing of memory takes place in the first house of man, as well as that man, who lives in a multi-storey building, loses the connection to nature, loses the aesthetics of life.
The text falls within the Phenomenological method of understanding the world, which is based on the fact that the world must be read through phenomena in life; it is not based on social structures as rationalist theories go.
Therefore, the perception of the world through the senses, feelings and emotions, far from the hegemony and centrality of the mind, there is a knowledge beyond the limits of the mind that cannot be read without feelings and emotions; the human body is central in its experience of the world, and has a memory through which it knows the world.
From my personal experience, I grew up in a horizontal single-storey house with no basement.
The house contained a small “attic ” or“ shed ” to keep some household items, which I rarely go up to because of their small size, in order to arrange their things or bring items from them.
Our house is adjacent to houses that are similar in size and design; that is, they are also horizontal within a beautiful rural landscape.
In my educational life, from school to university, my view of life was that individuals were equal and not different from each other as social grades, and I did not classify myself as a class despite my emotional tendency to distance myself from wealthy individuals.
My life in a horizontal house constituted a horizontal view of understanding the world in which individuals were equal, so I was not friendly with people who gave gestures and body movements that made others feel superior to others.
My view of life was based on the romanticism of looking at human behavior and loving nature.
The home is one of the places that shapes our consciousness of the world, through our memories and our imaginations.
The tool.
The Necessity of Art, by Ernest Fisher, examines the relationship between man and tool, presenting it in the most beautiful way, by explaining that the moment that relatively developed organism learned how to use things found in nature, it was transformed into a human, and when used in this way, these things became tools.
Just as the form of the instrument exists in the unconscious of the worker who made it before the work was carried out, the worker not only makes a change in the form of natural things, but also implements in the world outside it things that existed in his mind.
But the key concept in the study in generating tools and turning an animal into a human is work.
Fisher then tackles accumulation in action through language, simulation, and magic.
Time and space have fundamental roles in man ’ s understanding of the world, and time here in the sense of the temporal phasing of its biological divisions, coupled with the social role played by man in the places where he lives.
The study is based on Marxist thought in analyzing the relationship between tools and man, focusing on the role of labor and its divisions in the process of producing meaning for things that are no longer things as long as man began to use them, they became tools; in the sense that the material environment surrounding man does not only express him, but is an extension of him, but himself.
But what happens is that this tool accumulates knowledge history and work in it, becomes part of a collective property, accumulates its forms, and becomes independent of man.
This Marxist approach is perhaps the most capable of interpreting the relationship between man and the material environment surrounding him, as it is characterized by its analysis of human imaginations, its transition to the implementation of the work of natural matter, and its transformation into a certain form, according to images linked to human experience and memory; to turn it into a tool.
Then the work of this instrument accumulates, and it spreads into human collective consciousness with a symbol that refers to it, a certain instrument of its own.
Nevertheless, the Marxist approach is unable to interpret non-work-related tools.
For example, the ‘ pacifier ’ that a child breastfeeds for the purpose of entertainment, how can its relationship with the child be interpreted when it is without work and has not been a basic need in human history?
There are other tools that can be used to entertain the child.
Its producers are not its users.
How do you explain the emergence of tools that are not directly related to the working man, as well as tools that are related to instinctive psychological, emotional and desire tendencies, with which it is true that labor accumulates, but which do not arise from labor, but relate to the nature of the human soul?
Which remains an open question for the Marxist approach?
Time and space have fundamental roles in man ’ s understanding of the world, and time is here in the sense of the temporal phasing of its biological divisions, combined with the social role that man plays in the places where he lives.
Man ’ s understanding of the world is derived from the formation of the body by the cultural factors surrounding it; this does not mean that the body – and its behavior – is captive to these factors.
The body is able to free itself from the factors that shape it, to begin to change itself, to form new worlds different from those that preceded it.
PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the School of Global Studies, Sussex University, UK.
He publishes his research and articles in various Arab periodicals and platforms.

- There is reflection on alienation and cultural guilt in societies influenced by Western modernity, as people grapple with loyalty to traditional versus imported cultural forms.

- Artworks and statues, once created, become "instruments" that accumulate shared memory and meaning, representing more than their material existence; when these are attacked, it threatens collective identity and history.

- The text highlights contemporary debates about the value and role of art, especially in times of social and ecological crisis, referencing protests like those by environmental activists targeting cultural institutions (“Just stop the oil”).

Title:

Content: Dear reader, if you are walking in your car, then you find “bandits ” who stood in front of you, slept in front of the wheels and prevented you and prevented people from passing, or if you are in a museum and surprised by a group of people destroying and breaking art paintings or painting the exhibits in orange...
Don't think you're in front of an armed terrorist group.
These people are often “environmental activists. ”
Environmental activists seek to make a positive impact on the planet and the environment, but not through planting trees, but through the easiest way to balance from their point of view: to subvert art, paint and destroy monuments and artifacts and disrupt the movement of people in the streets, in order to balance the economy and the environment.
This may sound crazy dear reader, and remind you of the story of the sieve who criticized a needle because it has a hole!
But this is the view presented in the market of environmental struggle...
Either you accept it or you are not deep enough!
When art becomes a victim of the green struggle, there is no doubt that we are faced with a dilemma similar to the dilemma of having a preacher on a beach, wearing a green shorts, to preach to the redhead blonde with the red bikini...
Either way, you are faced with a mystery of modern civilization.
The article would have stopped here, but I finally got to know a critical school of fiction and art that not only analyzes texts, words and drawings, but evaluates works of art based on their environmental impact, meaning that a painting painted by your favorite artist may be guilty of polluting the environment, and you, him and the museum should be held accountable for that.
As environmental criticism intensifies, environmental literary critics emerge — as if the morgue is missing bodies — and many wonder if art and environmental criticism can coexist peacefully.
Can we find a way to make art more sustainable and environmental without the need for subversive works?
In the end, the aim of this article is not to make environmental criticism a mockery, but to question the actual solutions to environmental problems, rather than to direct efforts towards art subversion.
Is this the right path to change?
Or does environmental criticism need to rethink its strategies?
Environmental criticism may have come up with a noble idea, but the way it is applied is so controversial and ironic, we can use art as a means to spread environmental awareness and promote sustainability.
Ultimately, art and environmental criticism must coexist peacefully, as both seek a better and more sustainable future.
Anything that does not mention God ’ s name.
Amputation.
A short story:
Why did you steal the painting from the museum?
Preserving the environment, sir.
Preserving the environment...
How? How?
Thief: It has artificial colors that pollute the environment, and its stools are cut from a tree that was cut last month...
I wanted to send a message to the world that art that does not respect the environment must be removed.
Officer: Greetings to your brain Balanat, O Sea of Science, O Sea of Concept, O Philosopher of Donkeys!
@ moh1alatwn @

- There is a mention of ancient sculptures and their lasting importance in shaping human identity and memory, paralleling contemporary disputes over the preservation or destruction of cultural heritage sites.

Title:

Content: Rock beauty sculptures in Saudi desert date back more than 7,000 years
The authors of the study, details of which have been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, see this site as an example of “an era in ancient history in which the shepherds of northern Saudi Arabia were rotting on rocks and making huge stone structures. ”
Rock carvings of camels and other camels discovered in northern Saudi Arabia date back at least 7,000 years, much older than previously thought at the time they were unveiled a few years ago, according to an international study.
These 21 outstanding sculptures, engraved in three rock outcrops in the Al Jawf Desert, represent a true size beauty.
In 2018, archaeologists estimated it to date back to the beginning of earlier eras, due to similarities with other sculptures at the nearby site of Petra in Jordan dating back to the Nabataean civilization (169 BC – 106 AD).
A research program launched in the context of a collaboration between the Saudi Ministry of Culture, the German Max Planck Institute for Science and Human History and the National Institute for Scientific Research in France, relied on a range of scientific techniques such as tool mark analysis, rock erosion analysis and radiocarbon screening to accurately date these works, especially as their condition has deteriorated sharply over the years, according to a statement issued by the Max Planck Institute.
The scientists concluded that some of these sculptures were engraved in the sixth millennium before our era, by stone tools in the middle of Savannah, where trees and lakes were scattered, later turned into desert.
All this data coincides with the fact that the sculptures were made using stone tools, at the latest during the 6th millennium BC.
The authors of the study, details of which are published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, see this site as an example of “an era in ancient history in which pastoralist groups in northern Saudi Arabia flocked to rocks and made huge stone structures. ”
The effort to create these rock sculptures may have required the laying of scaffolding and the bringing of stone tools from 15 kilometers away, and required collective work that could be part of an annual ritual for a Neolithic community.
There may be considerable symbolism in some camel sculptures, which have implications for a breeding cycle linked in turn to those of wet and dry seasons.
Scholars consider this site to have been particularly symbolic for its inhabitants and have not yet determined what it is, with multiple interventions over a long period of time to refine the sculptures.
Lead author of the research, Maria Ganyan of the Max Planck Institute, said: “Neolithic groups have regularly returned to the site, demonstrating that its symbolism has lasted for several generations.
Source: French + Websites
About this story
In a new study, Professor Esposito offers a multi-dimensional treatment of the explained root causes of both extremism and Islamophobia, by examining the cultural construct supporting radical discourses.
20 / 6 / 2021
This article deals with the phenomenon of graffiti in our Arab-Islamic heritage; it monitors, through the ages, the manifestations of its use in the lives of people, from the disclosure of the potential of the soul in the texts of literature and the inscriptions of memories to the field of politics and episodes of mysticism.
20 / 10 / 2020
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- The closing sections urge for educational and critical appreciation of art, media, and history to prevent hasty or destructive reactions toward cultural artifacts.

Title:

Content: Moroccan critic Habib Nasseri: Our history should not be taken from soap operas and drama should respect minds
The holy month of Ramadan witnessed the release of many dramas in Morocco, and always generate a community discussion about how dramas embody the life and reality of Moroccans. Some dramas are praised, while others are stigmatized as weak. What lens should we look through to Ramadan works, is it through the lens of artistic value or is the dramas expected to provide a cognitive, historical and valuable load? Helping to critique the mistakes of society for its development and development?
In order to understand the nature of the dramatic scene that feeds the Moroccan scene in the Ramadan time, Al Jazeera Net interviews the Moroccan film critic Dr. Habib Nasseri, a research professor specializing in film criticism, and the President of the International Documentary Film Festival in Khouribga.
• What is your assessment of Ramadan dramas in Morocco?
Is there a dramatic addition or is it mostly confined to repetition?
The question of evaluation, a question that makes us expect within the field of making judgments, such as saying that this is a good work, this is an average work, this is a weak work, etc.
In my opinion, such provisions make us not to serve our works presented in television, cinema, theater, etc.
More than this, we will fall into the trap of judgments that spread in social media, according to personal whims and attitudes, and others, even if this falls within the framework of freedom of expression, without offending, of course, any particular person ’ s position for or against a television drama.
Your question, my dear sir, is an important one, and it is possible to generate from it another question, which is, do we dissect our work into two scientific questions: What does this television drama tell?
How does this drama tell his story?
Most of us get stuck in the first question, which is, unfortunately, a factual question, through which we judge a certain dramatic action, and hence, from understanding the noise of what is going on, because the simple and ordinary receiver only understands the first question, which has limited value, while the most important question, which contributes to visual and taste education, and educates the spectator culturally and humanely, is how to tell the story of this drama. I don't know.
Here we are faced with components such as time, space, characters as art form (and not as they really are), dream, artistic vision (not vision), and the language of storytelling.
Is the work capable of interpretation, but is the work the generator of many manifestations of interpretation, etc.?
Of course, all this is conditional on the nature of the recipient, his cultural background, and the location of the image within the education system.
This is what is absent, and therefore the judgments of value, remain dominant, here and here, the limit of grappling between people, without asking deep and qualitative questions, and this is a bet that will not be achieved without making the school pay attention to the part of how any work of art tells its story?.
It is a bet that if we do not get him into school, so that the culture of visual and aesthetic awareness will contribute and consolidate, we will continue to ask the same questions whenever Ramadan comes.
It is even possible, Mr. Fadhel, to keep the same questions to ask me, or someone else, when Ramadan falls in 2025, God willing.
This can be easily observed whenever the month of Ramadan comes.
• In recent years, historical dramas have resorted to “darija ” (colloquial) instead of the standard Arabic language that we are familiar with in historical works, how do you see this turn?
And what are their effects?
What I have asked in my previous answer is very relevant to this question.
In Egypt, dear brothers and sisters, they say their famous saying: "The public wants such a thing."
Today, television and the search for “boobs ” pose more than one question to producers, especially public channels, which, in accordance with their public duty, must provide a public and cultural service that promotes the recipient – the citizen in his taste and visual culture, rather than competing with private channels in this“ booz-misery ”.
So we wonder about the historical series presented, what is the purpose of them?
Is the goal to develop the recipient ’ s historical and linguistic memory?
Or is it about getting the audience to see?
What is the nature of the historical series presented?
What's her time frame?
Is it old enough to take into account the language component?
Or is its frame contemporary to us, it is possible to "adventure" on the Moroccan bike?.
Are we in front of a single Moroccan bicycle in a homeland that extends from Tangier to Quera?
Or are we in front of a group of Moroccan dairjas (each region has its own degree born from its local social soil, including the new loads born of the new concepts of the era..?.
Those who live in the East may use a different word than those who live in the North, the South, the West, etc.?
Is it possible to bet on a middle bike that can solve the problem?
Can this be achieved outside the collective, academic and research work that can contribute to overcoming this problem?
The older generations grew up in the lap of history and classical Arabic, especially when it comes to historical series related to topics related to Andalusia (for example), or to a historical era.
But if the historical series approach popular historical themes, then it is possible to employ the Moroccan dialect that is relevant to the subject of this local popular cultural historical series.
• To remain in historical works, when any historical drama is released, some begin to shed light on what they consider to be “historical fallacies, ” does historical drama play a role in the accurate investigation of history?
And are the series a source for building a true historical background for the viewer?
The question itself depends on what was asked in the first answer.
The school, and in general, in the Arab world as a whole, and not only in Morocco, is still far from the qualitative use of the image in the construction of instructions.
It is the main reason why we have to read all the works presented in television and in cinema, from reality without reaching the stage of treating the work of art as a linguistic and artistic sign, starting from reality, but becoming independent of itself, at least while reading.
This is what makes people, institutions and individuals compare what is presented with what has happened or what is happening.
This is the work of the historian, who, when dating to a certain stage, through the document in his hands, can be asked and discussed, according to the document.
But the director or writer of television or film, or theater or novelist, has a wide margin through which he can repeat what happened historically, according to his artistic and aesthetic vision.
It is a vision that reflects what it has accumulated visually, artistically and culturally.
Hence, when we are witnessing, for example, a historical work, we should focus on the following question: How did this historical work tell us?
We should not, I think, confuse the role of the historian, the screenwriter and the director.
In order to reach this stage, we must educate the new generations on the culture of the image.
Is it possible to achieve this in societies that are still debating whether the image is halal or haram?, in an era that is the age of the image, but in an era that will become the illiterate who is unable to deconstruct the connotations of the image instead of illiteracy being the case of those who do not read or write.
How many of us are going to be in the Arab world?
• There are some works that have caused a stir, regarding what was considered by an important segment as an insult to the “men and women of education ”, do you think that television and film works should evaluate their value load? Do they affect the beliefs of the viewer?
Or do you have to pay attention to film and drama?
Here it is possible to ask, through this question, as follows: Should the work of art be independent of itself, and therefore should be analyzed as an independent sign of art by the question of "how?"
Instead of asking "why?"
Or do we have to bring reality to every work of art presented to us?
The freedom of art guarantees the operation of reality as a starting point, and then, according to what we have learned from the sciences of the curriculum, must "break" the link with this reality, and present the work to the recipient in order to receive and interpret it, according to its methodological and cultural references as a whole.
Protest here, born of the “holy ” vision of the teacher and the jurist, etc.
Does this mean that we should stay away from all professions in art?
Of course not.
The artist is free to write and direct his work, and the recipient is also free to interpret and interpret this work, but with sophisticated artistic tools away from the “real ” stampede that we have to“ forget ” even temporarily, as we pursue a work of art.
The question that must also be asked on this series, and others, is this work visually, tastefully and culturally rich, in order to generate from it many connotations, and through many readings?
Sociology, why did the teacher come up with this “vision ”?
Or isn ’ t it the school ’ s teachers?
What is the nature of the formal vision present in this work?
Does it amount to interpretation or is it a direct “report ” work far from being able to be interpreted visually, tastefully, artistically and culturally?.
We desperately need these kinds of questions, rather than individual, trade union, collective, and Facebook protests.
How can our Moroccan society, and all our Arab societies (because we are similar in the fact that the image embarrasses us) not be able to allow the arts to work on the unspoken, and make it a material to see in the mirror, to look for the arrest of what is aesthetic and deep semantics, but to deal with it as a visual body that can be dismantled according to systematic, critical, scientific, humanistic and research visions?
• While a significant segment of Moroccans criticize a large number of comedies, some independent comedies (which do not pass on public television) have received high praise, is this praise due to the series ’ discussion of bold topics?
Personally, as a researcher of certain arts, in general, and in the image in particular, I don ’ t get along with quantity.
And if quantum is to be studied and analyzed according to multiple methodological visions, and according to multiple human sciences, such as sociology, psychology and others.
It is possible to find a work of art that has only been seen by a very "weak" but aesthetically pleasing proportion, has the ability to face the erasure of time, which erases many works that may achieve a high viewing rate.
What was put forward in the "Si Alcala" is a psychological outlet for the recipient through which this receiver-citizen interacted with the series, because he saw in it a aspect of a pension in reality as presented.
Here we return to the complex and difficult question, do the arts have to mimic reality as it is?
Or does it have to start from it, fly independently, but it has to establish its independent artistic and aesthetic reality that is capable of many readings?
The poet Adonis asserts that every "mass" work is a work outside the standard of art and beauty, even if his poetry is also mass poetry.
In the sense that the mass artistic work, is a work that is not useful aesthetically, creatively and regeneratively.
Source: The Island

- **The Little Mermaid and Other Statues**: The narrative discusses the repeated damages and challenges faced by popular statues, including—but not limited to—The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen.

Title:

Content: Writers' Column
(Yu Li-wen / tr.
century
century.
Symbiosis: Reading about Disappearance / by Yu Li-wen
[Ming Pao article] Different campuses have disappeared in succession. Bronze statues or signs that once existed and carried collective pain, or were collectively removed in full view of the public or in the dark of night.
What people see? What people don ’ t want others to see? The corridors we walk through are piled up with guardrails and canvases. Is there anything that needs to be hidden? Why does the space that is free to walk seem to be getting narrower and narrower?
At the same time, there are other signs that keep entering the once green grass, how can I read these never-ending changes?
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