Did their Catullus walk this way?

More or less reproducing an e-mail I sent derspatchel this morning, after we'd both seen "Classical sculptures dressed as hipsters look contemporary and totally badass."

I agree it's an interesting project. It's more of a Rorschach of the viewer's perceptions than any kind of statement about the objective relatability of classical art. It wins points with me for not being an exercise in irony—hey, look, it's the Mona Lisa in skinny jeans, isn't that just too postmodern for words—but I object to the implicit claim that the sculpture is remote and boring and inacessible otherwise, the same point you identify: that we should only be expected to relate to people like us.

(For the sake of the argument, let's ignore that most of these examples are not portrait sculpture, but idealized representations of gods, heroes, nymphs, etc.—that's Aristaios with the mirrorshades in the first picture, a Maenad with the kid and the tambourine farther down—that we are looking mostly at Renaissance versions rather than marbles from classical Greece or Rome, and that if they were the latter, in their original contexts they'd have been brightly painted and a contemporary viewer wouldn't suffer from the stylizing effect of blank white stone that the modern clothes are partly intended to combat; the author of this post would probably find them distractingly gaudy instead.)

I personally find the hipster drag a lot weirder to relate to than nude or ivy-dressed marble, but it's not my subculture anyway. It is possible that if this project had been undertaken with punk fashion, I'd be like HELL YES THAT IS TOTALLY DIONYSOS WITH THE EYESHADOW AND THE RIPPED BLACK LEATHER WHERE CAN I COMMISSION THIS OBJECT I WANT ONE IN MY LIVING ROOM STAT, OH ORPHEUS ARE YOU EVER TOO EMO FOR WORDS. But I also wonder whether the blogger is getting the same questions out of this series the photographers put into it, or whether I am, or whether I would feel less prickly about this concept if it had been executed with Olympian victors or funeral stelae rather than mythological figures. I am all for seeing the past as though it were alive and confusing as the next person, not safely tidied into interchangeable Roman and Greek names and something about hetairas. But there is also the danger of thinking just like us. I love Sappho, but we wouldn't even use the same words for it.

(Even a copy of the Barberini Faun isn't supposed to have pants on.)