the art institute yesterday was wonderful as always! i had a really good time. every time i look at a work, i notice something new. i wish i was able to absorb the plethora of information marked on all the little plates, each piece with a note on how to tie them into their corresponding historical and cultural contexts. my friend is a history buff, he has an incredible long-term memory and just seems to pick up on this stuff easily. so it was fun to go with him and D.
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some of the first sculptures of buddha emerged from hellenization, so the romans i guess were crazy about the greeks and when they expanded trade into the middle east and india, which supposedly at the time had a greater population of buddhists, they were like "oh wow marble gods so cool" and were inspired. and hellenization has had this trickle-down effect into other cultures, seen through the use of visual schemes like contrapposto.
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my friend pointed out that the way that the greeks/romans of the occident interpreted dieties contrasted with the orient in the general sense that, they percieved their gods more "human", verses in the orient where gods are often superhuman in conciousness, ethics, piety etc. the pre-socratics were remarkedly atheist, and the greeks generally viewed (if you were a citizen and not a slave) all opinions worthy of consideration regardless of your background or class distiniction. 
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they were a comparatively atheist society and were (according to him) the first to ask "what is this" (acknowledging a natrual phenomoenon as something that could be grasped in their level of conciousness) versus "who did this" (ascribing the source of a phenomenon as from a diety or being supernatural and imperciable to human understanding)
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so this is sort of reflected in their art as well. *generally* works you see belonging to the occident have a tendency to be "literal" and "optical" versus works you see from the orient that have a tendency to be more abstracted or idealized (sometimes to extremes, like in islamic geometric patterns used in mosques). 
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although, i think all artists shared an appreciation of patterns in nature to pull from that could be used to inspire a sense of the divine (greek columns being modeled after proportions of the human body) i point this out to be careful in generalizing too much or insinuating that one method of representation is better than the other, or be misinterpreted as having "le epic atheism" beliefs blah blah (i enjoy spinoza's conception of god but, unless i read something that changes my mind, in practice i'm an atheist)
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he had a lot to say, a lot of it fell through my sleepy post-work haze, but i think that conversation stuck with me the most because it provided the a very general historical overview of what we were looking at. i wish the more specific things he had to say stuck with me, but history is my weakest subject and something i'm a bit insecure about. only way to defeat that is to learn though. i think artists should seek as much understanding of art history as they can, and by extension, world history.
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tomorrow i'm driving out of the city to a car museum with d, him, and another friend. it'll be nice to be out of the sphere of where only public transit can take me, heh. theres also an antique mall in that area which will be fun, and maybe we'll have a chance to hike.