How Climate Changes Art

This week we tackle the intersection of art and our changing climate. Throughout history, art has helped reveal the climate around us and highlight our fragile relationship to it. We look at navigational charts from the Marshall Islands, Katsushika Hokusai’s "Under the Wave off Kanagawa", Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s "Hunters in the Snow", Mali's Great Mosque of Djenné, the Ise Shrine in Japan, steadily sinking Venice, the cave paintings of Lascaux, and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, among others.

[lorenabpv]

It wasn't an art museum, but the fire that destroyed the National Museum in Rio made me think of how much we could destroy (in this case, literally fossils and unbelievably important natural history artifacts) by ignoring the preservation aspect and how public policies rarely account for both climate change and the challenges that our urban climates affect the things we want to preserve. That goes for art, history, architecture and so much more that could last longer than it probably will thanks to how most places are currently ignoring climate change and resource shortages.

On a brighter note to an otherwise depressing comment: I love Hot Mess so much, it's probably my second favorite PBS channel, after this one. I learn so much from there.

[disharibose]

The Art Assignment is showering us with videos and I! Am! Ready!

[abelrrant]

in my town there is a water front. theres a little bridge. under it is a little waterway. i took nearby rocks and made a wall out of them. i thought for a while they will stay up, months later i revisted them to see the rocks dispersed everywhere leaving a few lines of straight fashion. i realized no matter how we try to make our mark time and nature fades us away.

[Zany_Phil]

Your channel is a delight for amateurs as much as it is for seasonal art enthusiasts. Thanks for engulfing us in this world of arts!

[disharibose]

The beauty of The Art Assignmemt is that it makes me come back again and again and look for details that I missed. Not to forget the fact that the videos present the art in such a manner that it compels me to go and search and learn more about them. This I think is a way of preserving art; by informing more people about it, the artworks are preserved in our memories. We remember the ones that are lost, and strive to preserve the ones that aren't, even if all that I can personally do is preserve them in my memory.
Thank you to the entire team of Art Assignment! I am sending you big hugs ❤

[pollie]

Great video! You always succeed in covering art from a lot of different cultures all over the world, wich is something my traditional art history courses fail me. I always love reading the comments on these videos aswell. Art is made to start conversation and debate, something I think this channel does really well.

[SamOshins]

I think of the book New York 2170, a piece of art in its own right, that envisions the city in the year 2170. Kim Stanley Robbins so effectively shows the experience of living in a city that will be mostly underwater that I was forced to confront my own experience of the city, and how I plan to live in it. Art that conveys emotions, experience, or wonder for the earth is art that is showing the constant change of the earth. I struggle sometimes with the "caught-in-time"ness of art, and how it can compare to the ever-changing-ness of life on earth, but it is, as you say, just a snapshot of how we are living. Let us all constantly interrogate how we're living individually, and hopefully (and maybe with some help from truly incredibly art) we can find a way to live better and do less harm to our home.

[madetocommentt]

Beautiful video and very informative. A small correction though: the Naiku shrine is dedicated to the goddess Amaterasu. Naiku is simply an independent name for the shrine.

[TheR]

I think this is my favorite episode so far!

[KannikCat]

What a tour de force episode! So much I want to say… I’ll limit my comments to the Rebbelibs of which I am in awe, such amazing works they are, absolute beauty born in function. And to note I’m delighted with all the architecture, especially the community aspect of the Bjenné mosque as another form/function beauty expressed through those wood beams.



To dive into the conversation you posed at the end, for me drives home the most our impact on the planet is the accidental (yet often feeling artistic) contrasts between our built megastructures and their ‘apocalyptic’ surroundings. Dams with no water, rivers that no longer flow to the sea, bridges and earthworks broken by nature, and cities inundated, wrecked, or ablaze. The original inhabitants of Venice understood, to an extent, the shifting environment around them -- there is evidence of floors being built atop of floors to account for their sinking structures. But all too often we think we’re so smart and can best this massive (and lovely) planet and hold its ‘forces’ at bay, all while at the same time, paradoxically, thinking there’s no way we could possibly effect something like the climate because the world is so big. Double hubris at its finest. :P Seeing images of our ‘glory’ wrecked always works to help keep my hubris at bay, and I hope it helps do the same for others. (Though unfortunately it often has us double down in a “need a bigger hammer” kind of way to do something even more mega next time…)

[scurrmurr]

Love your channel.! I think it would be very interesting to see a Video about modern contemporary art which challenges the subject of climate change and the factor we as humans play in it :)

[Rozenkratz]

Great series and specially great episode, maybe it's because of the episode John made on the Anthropocene Reviewed but I almost cried when I saw the Lascaux paintings

[polymainsheizou]

I'm doing an essay for uni on nature in art, and this was so helpful. Thank you so much!

[cjthibeau]

Amazingly in depth, informative, and interesting video as always! i've recently rediscovered my love of all forms of art so I am so glad I subscribed! Can't wait for the next video!

[lilik]

This is one of my favourite episodes!!! You have such a talent of explaining complex topics really clearly and interestingly

[hisuiseto]

I know that art is hard to preserve, but if you really think about it. It really is hard to preserve art that is millions and millions of years old. Just looking at the navigation charts made back then with twine, shells, and sticks. To be able to chart not only sea currents, but also track islands as well. I’m at a lost for words, but I’m sure the charts are hard to preserve. Climate being shown through art is beautiful and it teaches us a lot about our world. Even climate itself shapes the way our art looks like as we finish it. I never thought about art in that way, how climate could affect it. Not just the way climate can affect the artwork itself, but how the climate can affect us, and the way our artwork looks as a final result. Plus art shows how we face the weather of our world. It may be sunny, snowing or even a hurricane, but art shows us we can push through Mother Nature. No matter what she may throw at us, she knows we can bounce back.

[va]

The clear voices with which environmental artists dare to address ecological ignorance win my respect and fortify despise towards the elitist obscurantism and introspection of "significant" artists 'sucking up to academic elite' and oligarchs' pockets.

[ciroferreira]

I was watching your "
Trending artists of the 17th century" video where you use the google trends feature in a very cool manner.
I wonder if you ever heard of "Google Art and Culture Experiment", where you choose 5 different colors and google select a ton of works that use those colors. There are so much possibilities of videos that I think you could do using that which I would love to see!

PS: sorry if that has non connection with this particular video, I just thought that the probability of you seeing a comment on a more recent video was higher. Love the channel!

[davescave]

Art is amazing. I love historical pieces.

[mschrisfrank]

I have a strange relationship to art (and most of the world) in that while I love it and I think it’s wonderful to have connections to the past, I also think part of the beauty of things is that everything passes into dust.