LOUVRE DE PARIS - BOHEMIAN CAPITAL

 

 

                                                     Louvre de Museum, Paris, France

  

  

LOUVRE DE PARIS -  BOHEMIAN  CAPITAL

The Louvre or the Louvre Museum is the world's most-visited museum, and a historic landmark in Paris, France.  It is the home of some of the best-known works of art, including the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo.

 

Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people and with few permanent ties. It involves musical, artistic, literary, or spiritual pursuits.  One of the meeting place of Bohemians or  headquarters (Bohemian Capital) used to be Paris in France.

 

Bohemian is a group of artists, writers, actors, lawyers, and journalists, all of means and interested in arts and culture.   Bohemians from all over the world meet regularly in a place like Bohemia  (Czech Republic), Paris (France), San Fransisco and  California (United States of America), etc.

 

 

 

Louvre, in full Louvre Museum or French Musée du Louvre, official name Great Louvre or French Grand Louvre, national museum and art gallery of France, housed in part of a large palace in Paris that was built on the right-bank site of the 12th-century fortress of Philip Augustus. It is the world’s most-visited art museum, with a collection that spans work from ancient civilizations to the mid-19th century.

The Louvre is known to be the largest art museum in the world and is looked up to for its incredible collection of artworks by great artists. The museum is also the home of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (1503), also a prominent painting for being the world's most expensive artwork.

 

The Louvre palace is huge, with over 400 rooms and 35,000 artworks! It's impossible to see everything in one day. If you only have an hour or two, it is recommended visiting the Denon wing, which houses some of the most famous masterpieces (Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, The Raft of the Medusa, and more).

 

 

                            Venus  by Sandro Botticelli

                                    Venus de Milo statue  in  Louvre de  Museum

In Roman mythology, Venus was the goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility. She was the Roman counterpart to the Greek goddess Aphrodite.  However, Roman Venus had many abilities beyond the Greek Aphrodite; she was a goddess of victory, fertility, and even prostitution.

 

 

                                         Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci

The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait painting by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, it has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world.

 

 

The Bohemian Club

American social club

 

 

The Bohemian Club, an elite invitation-only social club founded in San Francisco in 1872 by a group of male artists, writers, actors, lawyers, and journalists, all of means and interested in arts and culture. Since its founding, the club has expanded to include politicians and affluent businessmen. The club is known especially for its annual summer retreat at what is known as Bohemian Grove in the redwood forest of California’s Sonoma county, an event that continued into the 21st century. Notable members over the years have included Clint Eastwood, Henry Kissinger, Walter Cronkite, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Charles Schwab, Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Jack London.

 

The Bohemian Club was founded by a group that included journalists who wrote for the San Francisco Examiner. The term bohemian was meant to conjure the cultured intellectual urban bohemian, as opposed to the impoverished type. They chose an owl as the club’s totem and gathered regularly to socialize, drink, and put on and enjoy theatrical and musical performances. The club inhabited temporary locations until it established its permanent headquarters in the early 1930s on Taylor Street in downtown San Francisco.

 

The annual trip to Sonoma began in the summer of 1878.  In the 20th century the members’ retreat garnered a reputation for involving highly secretive and cultish rituals, the most well-known of which was the “Cremation of Care,” instituted in 1881—an opening ceremony whose purpose was to make the club members “carefree” from the outset of the retreat.  That performance took place in front of the large concrete owl (built 1929) in the center of the camp at Bohemian Grove.

 

 

 Bohemian Rhapsody :

 

An important reason that "Bohemian Rhapsody" resonates and has resonated for over 40 years is that it embodied something very intense, which is Freddie Mercury's personality and life. That record is an oral extension of Freddie Mercury's self-consciousness without shame.  

 

Bohemian Rhapsody was the trendsetter of musical videos.  The song writer and front man for Queen,  Freddie Mercury made it a classic song.   Even after 40 years it still resonates and ear pleasing.

 

                                                   Queen (British rock band)

Queen are a British rock band formed in London in 1970. The band comprised Freddie Mercury (lead vocals, piano), Brian May (guitar, vocals), Roger Taylor (drums, vocals) and John Deacon (bass).

 

 

 

 Clockwise  from top left: Brian May,  Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor, John Deacon

In 1975 the stir created by Queen’s clip for “Bohemian Rhapsody” showed how video could augment if not outright define a song’s qualities (whether they were virtues or vices was up to the listener-viewer).  In the late 1970s key videos by Devo and other new wave artists crystallized the nature of the form.

 

Why is Bohemian Rhapsody considered a masterpiece?

And perhaps beyond all the notes, lyrics and performances, what truly makes "Bohemian Rhapsody" great is that it embodies what every musical piece should be: the talent and the drive to push boundaries and create something that brings us together, even 40 years later.

 

 

Music video, promotional film for popular music, especially a rock song.  Music videos began to be widely broadcast on television in the early 1980s.   Like the commercials they essentially are, music videos may qualify as the quintessential postmodern art form: hybrid, parasitic, appropriate, often compromised by commerce or undermined by aesthetic pretension, ideally compact, and assimilable.

Bands with the clout to swing it—the Beatles, first and foremost—had begun substituting filmed clips for in-person TV appearances in the late 1960s, and bands marginalized by conventional commercial outlets—punks, first and foremost—were among the first to recognize the form’s usefulness as both sales pitch and agitprop a decade later.  But music videos did not become ubiquitous until the advent of MTV (Music Television) in 1981 made them an all but indispensable adjunct to marketing a song.

 

In the late 1970s key videos by Devo and other new wave artists crystallized the nature of the form—including an inherent irony that only the most earnest artists in their wake even tried to overcome, usually with hapless attempts to ignore it.  By the MTV era, performance clips had been all but superseded by a conceptual approach whose characteristic surrealism was often more stipulated than invented and whose glib stylistic hallmarks quickly became clichés: associative editing, multiple dramatized situations chosen more for their visual impact than their appropriateness, an air of significance undeterred by lack of actual meaning, and a breathtaking readiness to refer to, pilfer, and rework the 20th century’s vast trove of talismanic imagery—drawn from movies, TV, painting, news photography, and so on.

 

 The writer is a great enthusiast of art and culture.