Thread by @sentantiq

I just can't.

1, You only think it is beautiful because you have been conditioned to idolize neoclassicism

2. Neoclassicism is a willful and ignorant reinterpretation of classicism

3. Neoclassicism literally erases color and contour, rips things and ideas out of context

https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1225246907301277696

4. Neoclassicism is fascist with a small f in that it imposes a rigid, leveling structure on everything, choking out other perspectives and representations

5. Neoclassicism is FASCIST because literal Fascists in Germany and Italy and elsewhere loved it

6. As many friends and scholars have already written, neoclassicism is eurocentric and colonial and racist

7. In the US it is deeply connected with slavery and white supremacy

8. And the whole aesthetics thing is a problem

9. People who use the Greco-Roman (or any other) past as an aesthetic marker privilege elitist versions of cultures which already silenced the voices of women, marginalized peoples, and the poor

10. Cleaving to it is either ignorant of its origins and effects or longing for them

11. And valuing the past only for its aesthetic content constitutes a practice which conditions us to treat people as objects and to reduce our valuation of them to the same way we look at stupid neoclassical buildings

sententiaeantiquae.com/2019/11/21/lat…

.@DouthatNYT I just don't think you understand much. If you do, you are selling something pretty vile

@DouthatNYT Here's more about the romanticization of the Classics and the danger of pure aesthetics

bostonreview.net/politics/joel-…