--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, bob_brigante <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Next time you're in Vegas, check out the shrine to Brahma in > front of Caesars Palace, put there so Thai gamblers could > appeal for luck: > > http://tinyurl.com/yunvqd
I'm not sure how I feel about this trend. (And it *is* a trend...over half of the furnished or partially furn- ished apartments I saw in Sitges had Buddhas or Krishnas or some icon of Eastern spirituality on display.) On a practical level, designer-wise, these things are CHEAP. You can get a statue or a modern thangka for a fraction of what you'd pay for real art. And it looks "hip," especially if you're designing an apartment and you've browsed through the pages of Architectural Digest or the other "home fashion" magazines and seen all the real Asian art on display in their showcase houses. So people snap these things up like they were hotcakes and them with a carton of maple syrup they need to use up. But on another level (just rappin' over coffee this morning), does this trend indicate anything else? Well, one of the things it indicates to me is a certain fas- cination that human beings have for the symbols of ideas, as opposed to the ideas themselves. How many people do we see on the streets every day wearing crosses around their necks, as if that makes them Christian, while living livestyles and doing things each day that *scream* of never having under- stood Christ's ideas? How many Buddha statues are seated beside the cash register in shops whose mer- chants are trying their best to squeeze out every penny they possibly can from the customers who enter their shops? All I'm trippin' on this morning is the human fas- cination with the *icons* of spirituality, as opposed to the *ideas* of spirituality. The late, unlamented Jerry Falwell probably had a house *full* of images of Christ, and used those images to promote his own image, and his own ideas, for decades. Some might suggest that *his* ideas had very little to do with the ideas of the fellow from Nazareth whose iconic image he was using as a sales tool. Same, in my opinion, with the "fashionization of spiritual icons" trend one tends to see around us in the world of interior design and fashion itself. Walking around a tiny beach town in Spain, I saw *hundreds* of T-shirts that contained Hindu images, Christian images, Buddhist images, and even Islamic images. They're all the rage, it would seem. And yet, if you stopped and asked the wearers of these icons to explain the *ideas* that form the basis of these spiritual movements whose visual icons they have appropriated as fashion items, how many would be able to do so? I'm just thinkin' as I'm writin' here; I haven't formed any real theories about all of this. But my first "take" on it is that the phenomenon is more related to the statue that Bob posted a link to above than it is to any real interest in or resur- gence of spiritual belief. In Vegas, some rich gamblers contributed a statue because they're superstitious, and believe it'll bring them luck at the crap tables. It's just about the desire to make more money. On the Big Island of Hawaii, there is a lovely hotel there filled with real Asian art that they bought cheap twenty years ago, and that recently was valued at five times the cost of the hotel itself when it was sold to the Japanese. Again, the display of religious art was about making more money. The Crusaders had a big cross painted on their shields and on their breast- plates as they murdered the "infidel" Arabs and the fellow Christains they deemed heretics. The suicide bombers who blow themselves and other hapless victims up on buses and in public squares probably have little medallions around their necks that contain an image of Mohammed, or some other symbol of Islam. I guess my over-coffee reaction to this religious- iconography-as-fashion-statement stuff is to wish that as many people had studied the IDEAS of the great spiritual teachers of the past as have used their images to decorate their houses and their bodies.
