Life time project - art

[C Elegans]

Please list works you think should be included in a "must see during your lifetime" project. Spam associated with the works is allowed (Perhaps it's not defined as spam them, hm...)

A start from me:

Literature:
The bible, the koran and the rigveda.
Homer: The Illiad & The Odyssey
Aeschylus: Agamemnon
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex
Euripides: Media
Virgil: The Aenied
Ovid: Metamorphoses
Arabian Nights (NOT the European version, find a translation of an Arabic version)
Dante: Divina commedia
Chaucer: Canterbury tales
Sidney: The countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
Marlowe: Tamburlaine
Shakespeare: King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, The tempest, Richard III
Milton: Paradise lost
Goethe: Faust
Keats: Ode to a Grecian urn
Shelley: Ode to the western wind
Bronte: Wuthering heights
Wilde: Salome
Zola: Nana
Dostoyevsky: Notes from the underground
Gorky: The trilogy about his life. (The English titles should translate to something like "My childhood", "My universities" and "Out in the world")
Solochov: Quiet Don
Baudelaire: Les fleurs du mal (Should translate to "The evil flowers")
Eliot: The waste land
Joyce: Ulysses (If you can't stand it, try Portrait of the artist as a young man.)
Borges: The library of Babel
Mishima: The sea of fertility tetralogy (Spring snow, Runaway horses, The temple of dawn, The decay of the angel)
Eco: Faucault's pendulum

Architecture:
The great pyramids & the valley of kings
The Chinese wall
The city of Samarkand in Uzbekistan
Parthenon at Acropolis in Athens (most of the statues are at British Museum though, called "the Elgin marbles)
Colosseum & Sixtine chapel in Rome
The temple mosque in Jerusalem
The city of Petra in Jordania
Th castle/mosque in Alhambra in Spain
Taj Mahal
The Mediveal castles in Central Europe and UK
The Mediveal towns in Morocco and Syria
Notre Dame & Chatelet les Halles in Paris
The Kremlin & Vassilev cathedral in Moscow
The Winter palace in St Petersburg
La sagra familia in Barcelona
The Macintosh house in Scotland
The city of Prague, in Czech Republic
The city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Sydney Opera house

More suggestions? Rejections? Please also post paintings, sculptures, music, film and other works of art.

[frogus]

nice thread CE!

umm..literature-wise you're pretty good...but I have to say, for architecture, the sistine chapel is not that impressive...(although I've never seen it in real life, I know what it looks like) and if we're going to have a fresco section as well then The School of Athens and The Last Supper need to go in too

and you forgot Saint Peters! The basilica is a must see, and add the Palazzo Senatorio to the Rome section as well...ummm... that's all I can think of now, but I'll post later on

[CM]

Barabodor - Indonesia, it is a buddhist shrine or temple.
It is amazing.
Damascus as a city is beautiful with all the old stuff mixed in with the new.
There is Mohenjadaro in Pakistan:

http://www.harappa.com/har/moen0.html

Just some pictures of the place and other stuff.

The Sitting Buddha in Bangkok or Cambodia, don't remember which one.
All for now.

[Jace]

Literature
Moby **** - It is not about whales!
e e cummings - any
Cerabus the Aardvark
The Art of War - a cliche, but worth a read

Places/Architecture
Stonehenge
Newgrange
Maiden Castle
The Uffington White Horse
Skara Brae
Any number of crudader castles in Turkey and the Mid East
Empire State Building
A genuine Japanise Meditation garden (Kyoto)
The palace of Catherine the Great (Moscow?)
The city of Venice (before it sinks)
Inca/Aztec ruins
Ancor Whatt (spelling?)

[Geckopat]

Barabodor - Indonesia, it is a buddhist shrine or temple.

i been there 6 yrs ago.
tried reaching for the statue's ring finger but didn't manage.
the whole temple was magnificent.

at that time we were told that the steps leading up towards the highest pagonda were sliding oredi.
so we could oni take pictures 1 level below the pagonda.

but it was still a worth it trip.

[EMINEM]

Literature:

Plato & Aristotle - the Republic, Dialogues, Ethics (boring stuff, but important nonetheless)

Beowulf (though be sure to get a good translation)

Spenser - Faerie Queen - to get acquainted with the original Forgotten Realms setting

Gibbon - Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire - forget the history, just read it for his writing style.

Dostoyevsky - Crime & Punishment, Brothers Karamazov.

Tolstoy - War & Peace - well worth the effort

Grey - Elegy written in a Country Churchyard - resonates with something inside each of us.

Wordsworth & Coleridge - The Lyrical Ballads

Tolkien - Lord of the Rings (lest we forget!)

[frogus]

Plato & Aristotle - the Republic, Dialogues, Ethics (boring stuff, but important nonetheless)

I wouldn't call Plato boring...but I sure as hell wouldn't call his books 'literature' either...

Gibbon - Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire - forget the history, just read it for his writing style.

likewise.

[Dottie]

I feel i have to ask a small question to the board. Is a Book/Movie/Whatever reqiured reading if it is popular enough, or must it also have other qualities? The starwars triology is a good example, noone can seriously argue that it is great movies, still it is extremly popular. Should one be obliged to see them then?

[frogus]

one should not be obliged to do anything at all relating to art or literature, but if one is going to read books and see films, I'm pretty sure that seeing and reading good ones will be better than seeing or reading popular ones. Well who's to say something isn't good, if it's popular, you say?

the literature-fan (for want of a better term*) is more expert than the movie fan. This is just a coincedence: People who like literature like it a great deal and are more inclined to spend effort and time and money on it, so they know what is good and what is bad. So people either like good literature or don't like literature at all.
The same is not true for movies; by another coincedence, the type of person who likes movies is almost everyone, and whether one likes movies or not is not related at all (even coincedentally) to how expert one is. So everyone likes movies, some good. some bad, while bad literature unfortuately doesn't get liked by anyone...

*excuse cliches

[C Elegans]

Great suggestions, everyone

@Frogus: I included the Sistine (is it without the "x" in English?) Chapel mostly because of the art rather than the architecture, I should have put it under art instead since it's really Michelangelo's and Raphael's paintings I think is a must see. I've been to Rome, but at the time I was a rebellious teenager and refused to do anything touristy, so I haven't seen it (very stupid of me, but I'll go back to Rome sooner or later.)

posted by EMINEM
Plato & Aristotle - the Republic, Dialogues, Ethics (boring stuff, but important nonetheless)

Hey, you are getting ahead, I was planning to include those and other non-fiction works in a parallell thread about "life time projects - science/non-fiction". Like Frog, I don't find Plato and Aristotele boring, at least not Plato.

posted by Dottie

I feel i have to ask a small question to the board. Is a Book/Movie/Whatever reqiured reading if it is popular enough, or must it also have other qualities?

This is a topic worthy of an own thread - I have no definite answer. I agree with Umberto Eco that what is great art and great science can only be decided over time. Time adds a metaperspective where you can see the broader meaning of a work and the influence it had in it's genre and in society in general. Popularity is IMO not equal to quality - but how do we define quality and who is to set the criteria? Personally, I'm traditional inasmuch as I think works that have induced new principles and represents change in a genre are important for everyone to read/see/hear/ Also, I would include works that have had influenced other artists a lot, and that many later works refer to. Sometimes, popularity coincides with above parameters, as in the case with Shakespeare, Tchaikowsky or Michelangelo. However, popularity can be brief - a work can be immensly popular without leaving a trace in history, and the opposite can also happen, just think of artists like Goya.

When popularity don't coincide with other qualities, I think one must consider what to get out the work. Learning about a culture and the mindset of people in general should be done much better by understanding works that are popular. However, then it's perhaps not the art per se we are after. If we are interested in experiencing art in itself, then I think other qualities than mere popularity are more important. A lot of people watch crappy Hollywoos movies made out of a "13-a-dozen" mold, and soaps, especially "docu-soaps" are highly popular. Should we be obliged to watch them because of this? No, not as art IMO. If I was a sociologist however, then I'd watch it for a deeper understanding of people in our soceity, because media influence people a lot more than they often realise.

[Delacroix]

Interesting list mentiond above.

I will just type some in adition to this list above:

Shakespeare- The Merchant of Venice; Romeo and Juliet.
Plato- "Apologia de Sócrates", "Banquete"(Sorry for the Portuguese
Maquiavelli- "The Prince"
Kafka- Metamorphosis;
Nietzche- "Assim falou Zaratustra"(Sorry for the portuguese again).
Defoe- Robinson Crusoé.
Camões- Lusiadas
Shelley- Frankenstein
Sófocles- Antígona.
Alvares de Azevedo- Uma Noite na Teverna.
D!ckens(this automatic censor is a little dumb)- A Christmas Carol
Hobbes- Leviathan(More sociology than art I know)
Russeau- "Do Contrato Social"(Still more sociology than art; Forgive my portuguese)
Neruda- Confieso que he vivido; Para nacer he nacido.
Sartre- * I cannot point a piece *
Bronte- O Morro dos Ventos Uivantes(This I also don't know in English, especially because the tranlaction is not literal)
Cervantes- Don Quixote


Of course I don't have read all these books metioned in the literature lists, some I type for criteria of importance, and mentions; . But they are waiting for me.

[C Elegans]

@Delacroix: Good additions I have actually included some of the works on you list on my non-fiction list.

Machiavelli's The prince is a must read IMO, as is Rousseau's The social contract ( I think this is the English title). By Nietzsche I would chose Ecce Homo or Human all too human instead of Thus spoke Zarathustra, since Zarathustra is so symbolic and difficult to interpret without being well read in Nietzsche's theorietical works.

[Tamerlane]

Places/Architecture

The very few places Tammy would like to visit...

Sistine Chapel
Winter Palace
Forbidden City
Irkutsk (sp?)- Just curious to see how people can live in those climates.
The Valley Of Kings
And that big rock thats in the middle of Oz...

[fable]

Malraux: The Voices of Silence

Braudel: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th - 18th Centuries

Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Koestler: The Sleepwalkers

Herodotus: Histories

Schama: Rembrandt's Eyes

Apuleius: The Golden Ass

Jung: Psychology and Alchemy

Barnstone: The Other Bible

[C Elegans]

Great suggestions Fable, I only know half of them

Some art, hopefully Frogus and VooDoo will add more:

Of course I agree with Frog on The last supper and The school of Athens When I was in art school long ago, I wrote an essay about Raphael, with special focus on the School of Athens.

- The statues from Parthenon, Acropolis
- Botticelli: La primavera
- Michelangelo: David
- Rembrandt: The night watch
- Picasso: The girls of Avignon
- Marcel Duchamp: The birde stripped bare by her bachelors, etc

Music:

- Gregorian church song
- Bach's Brandenburg concertos
- Mozart's Requiem
- Beethoven (can't suggest a work, I still hate him because I used to play a lot of his works)
- Chopin's Nocturnes (I have overcome my hate for Chopin )
- Mussorgsky's Boris Gudonov
- Rachmaninov's 2nd piano concerto
- Sibelius' Finnlandia
- Tchaikowsky's Manfred symphony
- Puccini's La Traviata
- Shostakovitch' 10th symphony
- Tibetan traditional singing (sounds like contemporary Western classical music - imagine a crossing between Lygety and Schnittke!)