Stop digging.
It is time, high time, to put Greek art in its place. Greek art is overrated. This might've been said before, by someone, or other -but I am not aware it. And, if it has, not in so many words. It's done (Greek art). Stick a fork in it.
It is not necessarily Greek art itself that I find overrated, but rather the adulation, the critical meltdown, that I consider overheated. I merely find it ludicrous that the marble sculpture of a man's genitals is upheld as the epitome of Western Civilization.
Granted we are dealing with ancient Greece. Exposure was, then, a protest of sorts, a crude assertion of individual liberty. It was an assertion of innate freedoms by freeborn men to do as they pleased. Freedom was, in ancient Greece, a competition, which leads me to compare it to the contemporary modern cult of bodybuilding.
I find the critical bowing and scraping before the statuary of the Greeks unseemly. The deification of man was satirized in antiquity. Just an educated guess, but naked statues were not exhibited in public, not , at least, in the Athenian agora. They were for private viewing, very private, behind a veil of secrecy, and by invitation.
Viewed to best advantage as the centerpiece at one of the (in)famous symposiums of Athens, I would surmise. I surmise because I wouldn't know. As rhetorical question; would you accept an invitation to Plato's Symposium? With the treacherous Alcibiades? After the Mutilation of the Hermes scandal?
Greek statuary establishes an original formal precedent in the history of art. Around the Age of Pericles, statuary figures become free-standing, detached from the wall as, for example, to the facade of a temple, that is, as a decorative element, as more than a detail of architecture. This free-standing effect of Greek statuary is affectionately denoted, "in the round," by savants.
Statue-in-the-round corresponds to the new-found freedom of the Athenian freeborn citizen. It is one of many landmarks in the history of Western Civilization. So was satire. As a feeble attempt at humor, I would, accordingly, characterize The Symposium, of Plato, as analogous to "theater in the round," or, “dinner theater,” as it is known today. By analogy, both instances are mediated by a formal criterion.
To be candid, I find “dinner theater,” and all such theater-in-the-round to be unserious theater -certainly not "Greek," and yet the Greeks certainly enjoyed dinner theater as much as we moderns -if the perennial popularity of The Symposium of Plato is any indication.
To be perfectly honest, the Greek art of antiquity exudes the musty staleness of kitsch, like the bones of a dead body exhumed from the ashes. Greek statuary is kitsch, an imposture, a macabre joke. The jumble of bric-a-brac handed down from ancient Greece looks like nothing so much as a rummage sale, resale shop, yard sale/garage sale, flea market, etc., the relic of deceased family.
The supervening criterion of kitsch being affection, "I like it," -as if it were a question of favorite flavor in ice creams, reduces it to any object of sentimental value. It is thereby made iconic, in reference to something (or someone), not present. It becomes a fetish outside its original context.
I have for very long pondered the meaning of kitsch, a term which is at once derogatory, as it is a term of endearment. I do not take the matter lightly. Unable to define it to my satisfaction, one containing exclusionary language in the definition, it got to a point at which I looked around and had to admit that anything could be kitsch. Anything, including Greek sculpture.
The argument over kitsch turns on proving that anything is not kitsch, categorically, that it is art. The minor premise of the argument is praising art for reasons other than artistic. The renowned Professor of Antiquities, at Heidelberg, shall we say, praises it for its cultural importance, because it is authoritative. I think Greek statuary looks like a rubber balloon -make that a latex, rubber balloon.
It is one thing to cherish a family portrait or any heirloom belonging to one's family. It is another matter to cherish a hand-me-down, a false heirloom, a token not belonging to oneself or one's family, kept not for artistic merit, not even because it is simply beautiful, but for sentimental reasons. We're not Greeks. That's why it's kitsch to us.
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403