Re: The Importance of - when I watched the National Theatre production on the first day of its youtube run I was occasionally paying attention to the live chat. Don't know how many of these people came from tumblr, but, oh, the enthusiasm! The joy! "Severe chill" becoming a meme right in front of me!

When I was a very small child, my mom used to bury coins in my sandbox, leave huge boot prints in the sand, and tell me pirates had come in the night and buried treasure. I would be out there happily for hours, with my little sieve, and my mom got a quiet morning to herself for the price of a handful of pennies.

It is important to remember that as far as art history goes, that it is patently untrue that realism only became humanly possible with the development of linear perspective in Europe thanks to Brunelleschi (a commonly repeated myth in lower division art education), and that examples of artistic realism as we know it today has long existed in many, much older art traditions. West African arts cultures are a great example to work off of. (i.e. Yoruba)