Silly Little Country

World Cultural Masterpieces

Restless after my operation yesterday, I slept fitfully, and so had the radio on all night long tuned to CBC's 'Overnight', one show I truly missed during the recent lockout. During part of what I was awake for, I heard from Czech public radio about the exciting triumph of the Czech Republic at the designation of one of its art forms as a World Cultural Masterpiece. I groggily realized it was not their superb dramatic movie-making (in the last few years on cable TV I have seen utterly amazing films from the Czechs on the WWII and post-WWII experience of their society and recommend them to everyone), or the amazing industry they have built around animation.

In fact my half-awake brain found it hard to credit what I was hearing, either what the masterpiece was, or how it was so declared. Some music I had not wish to hear again was played. It seems a lot of the money our government contributes to the UN goes into a program to support a committee of bureaucrats to designate every couple of years what are the cultural masterpieces of the world. I could barely credit my memory of all this when I woke but a little research has brought me to this.

You can go read the description there but hte last paragraph of the description is particularly ominous:

The migration of young and middle-aged people to the country’s urban centres is considered the greatest threat for the viability of the different regional types of Slovácko Verbuňk. This tradition also relies on financial support since the traditional costumes and musical instruments are made by hand and need regular maintenance.

This sounds depressingly like something a large bureaucratic organization wants to find a way to spend money (whose?) on. The people considered to be its supporters are losing any interest in it. It costs something to do it. I suspect this designation is unfortunate for the overall welfare of Czechs, who will now find themselves pressured to maintain this (unlikely, in my view) masterpiece (curiously named 'Slovacko' something).

Even more symptomatic of a bureaucratic (and political) process, we discover that in this cycle there is also a Slovakian masterpiece! And note how its characteristics dovetail with those I mention above.

During recent decades the role of the Fujara has changed from an everyday context to the performance at exceptional events, such as at festivals or in a private environment. The communist era and the political developments in the 1990s have caused significant social, cultural and economic changes. Young people especially have become increasingly estranged from traditional folk art. Despite a lack of support, individual initiatives have been trying to safeguard the Fujara instrument and its music.

Nobody is interested anymore and somebody needs a way to get other people to pay for this.

No doubt I'll go read and discover that the whole purpose of this effort is to save things the market is killing off (I have not bothered at this point). But I am pretty sure that will be it - I have scanned the list and there is nothing that is actually clearly a masterpiece so recognized - i.e. something like the complete works of Beethoven or of Abba or of Neil Young. In fact there is nothing from Canada or the US.

This is the kind of thing I really did not want to learn about the UN. Not that I have not learned a lot I did not want to learn.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:01 PM