[HN Gopher] As Nepali villages modernize, mokha art is on the ve...
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As Nepali villages modernize, mokha art is on the verge of
disappearing
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-12-04 05:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (globalvoices.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (globalvoices.org)
| bhu1st wrote:
| I am from Kathmandu, Nepal but never heard of this art style
| before. Looks like its popular on eastern Terai region.
| eyeundersand wrote:
| Same, I grew up in Chitwan- home of the Tharus. It's sad how
| little we know about the indigenous cultures around us.
| Homogeneity accelerated by modernity is oftentimes lamentable.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| I lived in the eastern Terai area for a couple of weeks and
| didn't see any of this.
| autoexec wrote:
| It seems like this is the fate for everyone. Sometimes when I see
| pictures of old buildings I can't help but notice that it seems
| like everything used to be so much fancier than it is now. Even
| though the builders didn't have the advantage of modern tools and
| science they sculpted statues and gargoyles and domes and columns
| and flying buttresses and trusses and everything inside and out
| was covered in intricate carvings and gilding and mosaic and
| fresco and ornament.
|
| Somehow all of our education and technology has resulted in
| everything being as basic and cheap as possible. We're lucky if
| builders bother to do even a half-assed job slapping together
| thin sheets of drywall and formaldehyde-soaked plywood. All the
| effortful artistry has been replaced by whatever is simple and
| cheap. Given enough time Nepali villages will be filled with
| nothing but tract housing and big box stores.
| powerapple wrote:
| if there are slaves, they can spend their life building your
| fancy house. Yes, we are going to have houses which are ugly
| maybe, but more people are going to have houses. It is a win
| for humanity.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| But we still watch things like the Qatar World Cup which was
| largely understood to have been constructive by modern day
| slaves. Was the quality of architecture more aesthetic there
| than in other competitions?
| someotherperson wrote:
| Things have always been cheap. The difference is that in
| exchange for quality and intricacy we're giving the craftsman
| and contractors a liveable wage and allowing 12 year olds to go
| to school.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The wheel has turned - now we are keeping 20-year olds in
| school who should instead be earning money and are saddling
| them with impossible student loans.
|
| And half of the building contractors are Mexicans with even
| less rights than your worker with US passport.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Even though the builders didn't have the advantage of modern
| tools and science they sculpted statues and gargoyles and domes
| and columns and flying buttresses and trusses and everything
| inside and out was covered in intricate carvings and gilding
| and mosaic and fresco and ornament.
|
| > We're lucky if builders bother to do even a half-assed job
| slapping together thin sheets of drywall and formaldehyde-
| soaked plywood.
|
| You are comparing cathedrals with regular living/working
| places. Cathedrals concentrated a huge amount of resources in
| them for ideological reasons. Regular living/working places are
| produced as cheaply as possible to meet the requirements. Both
| then and now. Prestige buildings get lavished with
| ornamentation and pomp. Both then and now.
|
| The article talks about something different. It is comparing
| regular folks homes then and now, and describes how a
| particular art form is disappearing.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Just a note that this is true for "cathedrals" in the
| figurative sense as well as the literal sense that you seem
| to mean it - there are plenty of attractive historical
| buildings that weren't religious but still represented
| displays of prestige and power by governments or just
| individuals.
|
| There's also heavy survivorship bias going on here. The
| Dickensian slums of London weren't worth preserving so were
| wiped away, whereas more impressive buildings were much more
| likely to be preserved. A naive assessment of historical
| buildings in London might be that the whole place was much
| more impressive than today, whereas it may be that, on
| average, the reverse is true.
| Retric wrote:
| Europe is filled with old buildings with decorative
| elements. Some of this is survivorship bias, but fire and
| bombs destroyed buildings fairly indiscriminately. Instead
| the cost of labor was relatively low so adding these
| elements was simply more affordable and therefore they
| ended up on more buildings.
|
| This shows up for even iconic modern buildings. The Sidney
| Opera house is a perfect example, from a mile away it looks
| interesting but get close and there's few small scale
| details that look interesting. By small scale I mean fit
| within a 3 foot by 3 foot cube the way a gargoyle head
| might.
| anthk wrote:
| In Spain you can even spot an astronaut on an really old
| building in Salamanca, older than the US itself. But
| that's made as a hint/norm/law? among
| Historicians/Restorers in order to say 'hey, this chunk
| is not the original, it had been restored recently
| because of maintenance'.
| thorin wrote:
| This is not really true, my 100 year old house in the UK is
| one of hundreds in my suburb/village. Each house is slightly
| different though, in terms of the layout. The fireplace is
| hardwood and has some columns on it that are handmade on a
| lathe, each side is slightly different. The doors are clearly
| handmade as they have slightly different features on each.
| This obviously doesn't happen anymore unless you are paying a
| massive premium. This required a much higher element of skill
| obviously, analogous to the difference between writing low
| level code and wiring library code together with a modern web
| framework, or even a low code saas product.
| 0wis wrote:
| At the time, it already costed a huge premium. If you get
| to the basic cost in terms of ressources, it is probably
| less expensive to do elaborate work like this today due to
| better knowledge and tools. But maybe today, most of (new)
| homebuyers prefer allocating more resources to less durable
| goods like tech or entertainment. Edit : Plus, cheap 100
| year old homes do not exist anymore.
| thorin wrote:
| At that time labour was cheap, now labour is a major part
| of the build. Housing was also cheap due to land being
| more plentiful.
|
| 100 year homes are pretty common in older cities of the
| UK and in the countryside. New homes are similar in price
| in a lot of cases. They have advantages such as better
| insulation, less to go wrong (in theory) but also
| disadvantages such as lack of parking, garden and
| "character".
| petesergeant wrote:
| > At that time labour was cheap
|
| I was curious about this, but also a bit lazy, and the
| easiest figures to find were for the US. A carpenter in
| 1921 in Boston MA (which is upper-end of the range given,
| but not outlandish) earned $1/hour or $40/week. According
| to this[1], that's $17/hour or $680 a week. That's just
| over half of what they get paid now, at ~$30/hour.
|
| As to:
|
| > At that time labour was cheap
|
| For the random example I picked, in the US, labour was
| about 50% the cost it is now.
|
| 0: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/union-scale-wages-
| hours-...
|
| 1: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
|
| 2:
| https://www.indeed.com/career/carpenter/salaries/Boston--
| MA
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Regular living /working places are produced as cheaply as
| possible to meet the requirements. Both then and now._
|
| Yeah, a trip to an open-air museum (we call such a place a
| "skansen" in Poland) will show you that for most of history,
| people lived in places that even homeless of today would
| scoff at. Right angles are a luxury.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Cathedrals? Bah, nonsense. Go into google street view and
| slap down a marker in any random town with buildings built a
| few decades ago on in the American east coast. Downtown in a
| random town, not in a modern suburb or commercial park.
| You'll see humble regular buildings, built for regular people
| to live or work in, with decorative trims and fancy
| brickwork.
|
| Here's one I found in seconds: https://www.google.com/maps/@4
| 2.2537582,-73.7922474,3a,30.7y...
|
| Look at the brickwork around the windows on the house with
| the blue door. It's no cathedral, just some random building
| in a random small town nobody has ever heard of. The builders
| obviously cared to make it look nice anyway. If you go down
| the street you'll see many other buildings like that. Not all
| of them by any means, many of the others are plainer, more
| utilitarian, and many of those are obviously newer. But to
| say that _" Regular living/working places are produced as
| cheaply as possible to meet the requirements. Both then and
| now."_ obviously isn't true. Some were built as cheap as
| possible then. Many are now. But many then _were_
| deliberately built to be nicer than was required.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Cathedrals? Bah, nonsense.
|
| The comment I responded to said this: "sculpted statues and
| gargoyles and domes and columns and flying buttresses and
| trusses and everything inside and out was covered in
| intricate carvings and gilding and mosaic and fresco and
| ornament."
|
| That's a cathedral. You won't find that in a "humble
| regular building". It does not fit the image you linked.
|
| > But many then were deliberately built to be nicer than
| was required.
|
| Sure. Same as many are deliberately built nicer today. In
| the city centre where I live they built a new hotel, and
| they have amazing Ionic order columns on the facade. And
| they look freshly carved and beautiful.
|
| There is just little point in comparing prestige
| architecture (the one with the gargoyles, and domes and
| flying buttresses and carvings and mosaic and fresco and
| ornament) with regular buildings. Instead we should do
| exactly what you did in your comment. Compare a regular
| building from then, with a regular building now.
| century19 wrote:
| Checkout this map of outdoor art in Amsterdam.
|
| https://amsterdam.kunstwacht.nl/plattegrond
|
| A lot of them are small adornments to housing, one large
| area of which (Apollobuurt) was built as social housing
| 100 years ago.
| wharvle wrote:
| I remember one small town post office we frequented wasn't
| much to look at outside--brick, but not fancy--but was
| gorgeous inside. Marble everywhere, including floors, brass
| everything including solid wood brass-clad exterior doors and
| fine, ornate brass PO Box doors, et c. Probably built at the
| tail end of the 19th century.
|
| Just a sleepy little town post office, but they built it like
| it'd be there 300 years. I can't imagine what those nice,
| serious-feeling doors alone would cost to get today. I know
| no small town post office would ever get them, that's for
| sure.
|
| All the ones near me now are much newer and are the same sort
| of disposable stripmall-type construction as everything else.
| They don't feel nice to be in. They don't feel serious. They
| will not be here in 100 years, probably not even 50.
| modo_mario wrote:
| >You are comparing cathedrals with regular living/working
| places.
|
| The house i'm renovating was built by lower class people now
| dead. The fireplace has some marvelous emaile work. My
| grandparents on one side were factory workers (glass cutter
| and cigar roller specifically) and are still ridiculously
| frugal beyond belief due to their experiences in the world
| wars. Their living room has lovely cornishes, etc. Their fire
| places have art of goats and nature on em. The modern
| equivalent of that fireplace is a comparatively ridiculously
| expensive box with 0 ornamentation.
|
| On the other hand the expensive new builts now go 2 ways with
| some harking back to old pastoral styles but with less detail
| and the other ones are cubic featureless boxes inspired by
| american flat roofed villas but without the wealth to take it
| much further.
|
| I could go on and on about the death of detail in design and
| elsewhere and i know it's just annecdotes but it's to be
| found absolutely everywhere. Not just the cathedrals and
| major buildings of the state and the rich.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Pictures of old buildings = pictures of old rich people's
| buildings
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Not necessarily. Impressive stone buildings in the Western
| Balkans were often built by people who were quite poor,
| except for what livestock they held. It helped that society
| was clan-based, so resources were pooled, and when these
| families had to build a house in a region of vendetta and
| invasion, for protection they chose stone that has held up
| well over time.
|
| An interesting parallel might be those old Amish houses in
| the US built well through communal effort, even though the
| families might have been cash-poor.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| In this particular case, article describes a style passed down
| through the women in the family. If you spend all day at home,
| you have time for things like that, and the Indian Subcontinent
| continues to have a substantial percentage of women who remain
| in the home. However, as women eventually join the workforce it
| might be inevitable that this and other such traditions fade.
| blueridge wrote:
| https://mcmansionhell.com/
| ctom96 wrote:
| Love that site, so good and really captures what I don't like
| about modern housing
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's a vernacular architectural art style that is disappearing,
| but it is actively being recorded by the Tharu Cultural Museum &
| Research Center in Ratnanagar and the Tharu Janjati Museum
| outside Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh.
| loceng wrote:
| Not to be confused with mocha art..
| atmosx wrote:
| Related (and one of the most interesting articles I've read the
| last few years): https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-
| of-average
| froh wrote:
| amazing, thanks! this has been discussed extensively on HN,
| too:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| Are their living standards being increased? If so I'd say that's
| fine. They can decide how those art go, maybe preserve them in a
| different place.
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