Other People’s Thoughts is a section in the Journal of the China Heritage site. It is inspired by a compilation of quotations put together by Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), one of our Ancestors, during his reading life.
Pierre remarked that the resulting modest volume of quotations was ‘idiosyncratically compiled for the amusement of idle readers’ (see Simon Leys, Other People’s Thoughts, 2007). Our aim is similar: to amuse our readers (idle or otherwise); as is our modus operandi: to build up an idiosyncratic compilation, one that reflects the interests of The Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology and its coterie.
In collecting this material, and by adding to it over time, we accord also with a Chinese literary practice in which quotations — sometimes called yǔlù 語錄, literally ‘recorded sayings’ — have a particular history, and a powerful resonance.
The most famous collection of recorded sayings is The Analects 論語, compiled by disciples of Confucius. Then there is the timeless 5000-words of Laozi’s The Tao and the Power 道德經, as well as the Chan/Zen 禪宗 tradition of what in English are known by the Japanese term kōan 公案, dating from the Tang dynasty. Modern imitations range from the political bon mots of Mao Zedong to excerpts from the prolix prose of Xi Jinping’s tireless speech writers, and published snippets from arm-chair philosophers and motivational speakers.
Other People’s Thoughts also finds inspiration in the ‘poetry talks’ 詩話, ‘casual jottings’ 筆記 and ‘marginalia’ 眉批 of China’s literary tradition.
We start the Lunar Year of the Dragon with this, the forty-second chapter in Other People’s Thoughts.
— Geremie R. Barmé,
Editor, China Heritage
26 April 2024
***
Other People’s Thoughts I-XLIII:
- Other People’s Thoughts, China Heritage
Other People’s Thoughts, XLIV
… the moment when a historian says that something had to happen is the moment when he stops writing history and starts predicting the past.
— Clive James, Hitler’s Unwitting Exculpator, Cultural Cohesion, p.488
The Fog
Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.
— from Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, 1993
The Wasted Lessons of History
It is undoubtedly true that some people who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But some people who can’t remember the past aren’t. More disturbingly, many of those who can remember the past are condemned to repeat it anyway. Plenty of people who remembered the past were sent to die in the extermination camps. Their knowedge availed them nothing, because events were out of their control. One of the unfortunate side effects of studying German culture up to 1933, and the even richer Austrian culture up to 1938, is the depression induced by the gradual discovery of just how cultivated the two main German-speaking countries were. It didn’t help a bit. The idea that the widespread study of history among its intellectual elite will make a nationstate behave better is a pious wish. Whether in the household or in the school playground, ethics are transmitted at a far more basic level than that of learning, which must be pursued for its own sake: learning is not utilitarian, even when — especially when — we most fervently want it to be.
— Clive James, Primo Levi’s Last Will and Testament, The New Yorker, 23 May 1988, p.268
Liz Truss on Sue Gray
To my surprise, she took it upon herself to commiserate with me by giving me a hug, before telling me that as a result of my demotion, my salary was being cut. I didn’t welcome her unsolicited embrace — I am not a hugger — but given how delicate I was feeling, she got off lightly.
— from Ten Years to Save the West
Time’s Up
Covering British politics during this period has been like trying to remember, and explain, a very convoluted and ultimately boring dream. If you really concentrate, you can recall a lot of the details, but that doesn’t lead you closer to any meaning.
— What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain, The New Yorker, 1 April 2024
The Scottish Hate Crime Bill
‘The wording of the law itself is committing its own crime.’
— Jonathan Pie, 2 April 2024
A couplet from the Ming dynasty
仗義每多屠狗輩，負心多是讀書人。
The most righteous people are often bottom-feeding butchers,
the well-educated are often backstabbers.
— 曹學佺
Old Soviet Joke
Who is a communist? — The one who has read the works of Marx and Lenin.
Who is an anticommunist? — The one who has read the works of Marx and Lenin and actually understood them.
— September 1987
Tom of Finland
After the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939, the nineteen-year-old Laaksonen was called to basic training and eventually put in charge of an antiaircraft crew. He remembered being disappointed by the loose-fitting Finnish uniforms, especially when contrasted with those of the Nazi soldiers, who arrived during Finland’s military alignment with Germany against the Soviets. Laaksonen began having anonymous public sex with Wehrmacht soldiers. “The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course I drew them anyway,” he later said. “They had the sexiest uniforms!” Hooven gingerly notes, “Many years later, Tom’s honesty in portraying his response to the powerful imagery of Nazism got him into trouble.” What his engagement with Nazi aesthetics means for our understanding of his art and its influence on contemporary queer identity remains a tangled question.
— Jarrett Earnest, Tom’s Men, The New York Review of Books, 9 May 2024 issue
我一生善良，从没做过坏事，但人间疾苦，没有一件放过我
最近网络上有一段话：“我一生善良，从没做过坏事，但人间疾苦，没有一件放过我！”
有个网友评论说：你善良个毛！！！
什么叫一生善良？
你，为他人的苦难发过声吗？
你，为弱势群体呐喊过吗？
你，为社会上的不公不义抗争过吗？
你，为压在头上的三座大山教育医疗养老呼吁过
吗？
你生而为人，拥有作为人的基本权利，是谁几乎剥夺了你所有的权利，你思考过吗？
如果你什么都没有做，甚至你的亲人孩子受到欺凌都不敢发声，那么，你的沉默便是罪恶的帮凶。那你说说你善良在哪里？？？
一杞人婉君
Curb
I went back and watched the whole series and would like to report that television has never had anything like this show, nothing as uncouth and contradictory and unhinged and yet somehow under a tremendous amount of thematic control, nothing whose calamity doubles as a design for living. It presents the American id at war with its puritanical superego. Sometimes Larry is the one. Sometimes he’s the other. The best episodes dare him to inhabit the two at once, heretic and Talmudist. …
… “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is about more than Larry’s probable narcissism. It’s a supreme comedy of manners. How, it asks, do we share a meal, a drive, a party, a meeting, a bathroom, an office pantry, a city — how do we courteously enforce norms and, with modesty, uphold standards? Are courtesy and modesty necessary? It’s the only show we have left that’s been this curious about, this keen on the fine print of living an ethical, civic life, about interpersonal candor and the maintenance of a kind of civility while also allowing for the liberty of letting you do you.
— Wesley Morris, Larry David’s Rule Book for How (Not) to Live in Society, 5 April 2024
Revolution
There is a sour tendency in cultural politics today — a growing gap between speaking about the world and acting in it.
In the domain of rhetoric, everyone has grown gifted at pulling back the curtain. An elegant museum gallery is actually a record of imperial violence; a symphony orchestra is a site of elitism and exploitation: these critiques we can now deliver without trying. But when it comes to making anything new, we are gripped by near-total inertia. We are losing faith with so many institutions of culture and society — the museum, the market, and, especially this week, the university — but cannot imagine an exit from them. We throw bricks with abandon, we lay them with difficulty, if at all. We engage in perpetual protest, but seem unable to channel it into anything concrete.
So we spin around. We circle. And, maybe, we start going backward.
— Jason Farago, The Venice Biennale and the Art of Turning Backward, The New York Times, 24 April 2024
Prisoner of Chillon
… It might be months, or years, or days—
I kept no count, I took no note—
I had no hope my eyes to raise,
And clear them of their dreary mote;
At last men came to set me free;
I ask’d not why, and reck’d not where;
It was at length the same to me,
Fetter’d or fetterless to be,
I learn’d to love despair.
And thus when they appear’d at last,
And all my bonds aside were cast,
These heavy walls to me had grown
A hermitage—and all my own!
And half I felt as they were come
To tear me from a second home:
With spiders I had friendship made
And watch’d them in their sullen trade,
Had seen the mice by moonlight play,
And why should I feel less than they?
We were all inmates of one place,
And I, the monarch of each race,
Had power to kill—yet, strange to tell!
In quiet we had learn’d to dwell;
My very chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends
To make us what we are:—even I
Regain’d my freedom with a sigh.
Mahun (6300 ft), 25 March 1934
While the cadent sun throws lurid copper streaks across the sand-blown sky, all the birds in Persia have gathered for a last chorus. Slowly, the darkness brings silence, and they settle themselves to sleep with diminishing futterings, as of a child arranging its bedclothes. And then another note begins, a hot metallic blue note, timidly at first, gaining courage, throbbing without cease, until, as if the second violins had crept into action, it becomes two notes, now this, now that, and is answered from the other side of the pool by a third. Mahun is famous for its nightingales. But for my part I celebrate the frogs. I am out in the court by now, in the blackness beneath the trees. Suddenly the sky clears, and the moon is reflected three times, once on the dome and twice on the minarets. In sympathy, a circle of amber light breaks from the balcony over the entrance, and a pilgrim begins to chant. The noise of water trickling into the new-dug flower-beds succeeds him. I am in bed at last. The room has ten doors and eleven windows, through which a hurricane of wind and cats in search of chicken bones whistles and scutters. Still the frogs call each other; that vibrant iridescent note makes its way into my sleep; I wake to find a cat opening my food-box with such fury that were I a safe-breaker I should engage it for an assistant. The draught shakes the bed. I hope Ali Asgar is warmer with the dervishes, but dare not grumble to him in the morning, as General Sykes told him Mahun was paradise fifteen years ago. Morning impends, lifts its grey veils, arrives — and as though at the beat of a martinet conductor, the birds strike up again, a deafening, shrieking hymn to the sun, while a flock of crows on the other side of my room, not to be forgotten, set up a rasping competition. Now, and as suddenly, silence has fallen again, while the first rays of sunlight steal on to the stage. Outside the door, Ali Asgar and the dervish are fanning a tray of charcoal and coaxing the samovar. Footsteps pass: ‘Ya Allah!’ The dervish answers ‘Ya Allah!’ The pilgrim chants his morning prayers from the balcony, using long-drawn nasal semitones that remind me of Mount Athos. An arc of gold lights the blue dome and the sky is fleeced with pink. Here comes Ali Asgar with a tray of tea.
— Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana
Swearing on a Stack of Bibles
What could be more absurd and hypocritical than the putative Republican nominee selling Bibles and promoting an America with draconian abortion laws during his trial over a $130,000 payment to keep a porn star from telling voters about their dalliance?
— The New York Times, 20 April 2024
Red Shred
A severed hose dribbling water as it twitches to and fro is our first clue as to the effect the fibers are going to have when they make contact with human bodies. Even so, the resulting image of person after person coming apart and falling to bloody rectangular pieces is one of the most admirably disgusting things ever filmed for the small screen.
— 3 Body Problem, episode 5 recap, New York Times, 22 March 2024
Jubao 舉報 — China’s heritage cancel culture
Of a dozen comedians I spoke to in recent months, most told me that their fear was not of the censor but of the spectator. As standup broke out of its in-crowd—for the most part, young urbanites familiar with the Western variety—it began to reach a diverse audience that included nationalists, Internet trolls, and those who struggled to separate a joke from a sincere opinion. Alex recalled that, one night, after a show, an audience member reported him for touching on gender-related issues. “They claimed I had violated the rights of women,” he told me. The police arrived and left only after the staff showed the officer that the joke had been approved by the culture bureau. “It’s not authorities doing it. It’s people doing it,” Jake, a comic in Shanghai who also asked to go by a pseudonym, told me.
When a spectator reports a comic for political misconduct—what Chinese call jubao, “to inform against”—it sets into motion a machine with a long, tragic past. During the Cultural Revolution, children reported on parents, and students reported on teachers. And, during China’s economic rise, the system was inundated with complaints from consumers about unscrupulous businesses, and unscrupulous businesses about their competitors. These days, the machine lies at the heart of the country’s variant of cancel culture, one animated not by feminism and anti-racism but by hypernationalism and an allergy to insult. “You can’t offend people in China,” Jake told me. “In American comedy, if someone’s offended, ‘Free speech, bitch’ ”—there is at least some recourse to First Amendment principles. “The stuff we have to work around is, ‘Oh, I didn’t like the fact that someone asked me what university I went to,’ ” he said.
— Che Chang, The Aftermath of China’s Comedy Crackdown, The New Yorker, 26 March 2024
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Chris Wallace: “So how has the 2020 election — everything that has flowed from it — pissed you off?”
Larry David: “You can’t go a day without thinking about what [Trump] has done to this country, because he’s such a little baby, that he’s thrown 250 years of democracy out of window by not accepting the results of the… I mean it’s so crazy. He’s such a sociopath. He’s so insane. He just couldn’t admit to losing. And we know he lost. He knows he lost, and look how he’s fooled everybody. He’s convinced all of these people that he didn’t lose. He’s such a sick man. He’s so sick.”
— ‘Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?’, Max, 29 March 2024
A Cemetery of Children’s Complexes
I knew [Putin], and I saw him as a very special mixture of children’s complexes, a cemetery of children’s complexes. In this cemetery there are so many dead bodies but he was able to use them as his inspiration….
There are several Russias and it depends which Russia you choose to fish out of the river. A lot of people fish out Russian culture, you know, from Pushkin to Chekhov, all this stuff, and you could fall in love with it, and after that you believe that Putin is just like a person passing by.
— Viktor Erofeyev, I didn’t leave Russia — it left me, The Times, 29 march 2024
Knock Knock
Humourist Max Beerbohm’s 1909 sketch “A Club in Ruins” tells the story of the demolition of a club on the corner of Hanover Square. A tanned young man stands on the corner looking slack-jawed. He had, he tells the author, gained membership on the very day his father sent him to Australia for a decade. He paid his subscription annually with pride and “endured his exile”, knowing he was a member of a London club. Seeing it in ruins, he declares that he “might as well go back to Australia”.
— Joy Lo Dico, What’s the point of private members’ clubs?, Financial Times, 30 March 2024
To Dwight Macdonald
cc, 1 p.
Goldwin Smith Hall
Ithaca, NY.
October 3, 1958
Dear Mr. Macdonald,*
This is just a short note between lecture and library to thank you for your delightful and stimulating letter.
My wife and I remember with pleasure your brief—too brief—visit.
Had not Zhivago and I been on the same ladder* (I feel his grip on my ankles), I would have been glad to demolish that trashy, melodramatic, false and inept book, which neither landscaping nor politics can save from my waste paper basket.
I hope to visit the New Yorker offices on the 2oth or the 27th of October and hope to see you there. Thanks for your nice invitation.
Sincerely,
Vladimir NabokovIt was good of you to put in a kind word for Lolita in Hollywood. Hedda Hopper is waging a spirited anti-Lolita campaign—on moral grounds, I understand.
* Literary critic.
** The best-sellers.
八化: 今日酷评
【体制内单位的一个现象】
领导皇帝化，办公室东厂化，副职中层太监化，同事妃子争宠化，领导讲话圣旨化，工作汇报奏折化，办公晨会早朝化，绩效考核主观化！
— reposted on X by Zhang Lifan
Xictionary
David Axelrod on Trump
This is a guy who has violated 11 of the Ten Commandments.
Putting words in Voltaire’s mouth
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
— Eavelyn Beatrice Hall in The Friends of Voltaire, 1906
Founding an Empire
Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions will die for Him. I think I understand something of human nature; and I tell you, all these were men, and I am a man: none else is like Him; Jesus Christ was more than a man. I have inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devotion that they would have died for me but to do this it was necessary that I should be visibly present with the electric influence of my looks, my words, of my voice. When I saw men and spoke to them, I lighted up the flame of self-devotion in their hearts. Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of man toward the unseen, that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred years, Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others difficult to satisfy; He asks for that which a philosopher may often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his children, or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks for the human heart; He will have it entirely to Himself. He demands it unconditionally; and forthwith His demand is granted. Wonderful! In defiance of time and space, the soul of man, with all its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to the empire of Christ. All who sincerely believe in Him, experience that remarkable, supernatural love toward Him. This phenomenon is unaccountable; it is altogether beyond the scope of man’s creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless to extinguish this sacred flame; time can neither exhaust its strength nor put a limit to its range. This is it, which strikes me most; I have often thought of it. This it is which proves to me quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus Christ.
— a quotation attributed to Napoleon, from the time of his exile on St. Helena
One is more certain to influence men, to produce more effect on them, by absurdities than by sensible ideas.
— a verified quotation from Napoleon
Arak
A pustule had developed on my thigh, which was now of such a size that the whole leg was swollen from the ankle to the groin; I could hardly walk. To drown the pain, I ordered some arak, at which the seyid protested a theatrical horror. Pussyfooting in Persia was no business of his, I thought. Whisking out the cork, I thrust the mouth of the bottle into his beard. He fled like a raped nun; but in the lorry there was no escape. Whenever the bottle appeared, he swooned on to the steering-wheel as though overcome by the fumes, calling on God and the driver to avenge the impiety. The driver laughed. God took no action till Turbat-i-Sheikh Jam, where we arrived at midnight.
Here, as I was unloading my luggage in the caravanserais, some soldiers stole my saddle-bags. Thinking their door was locked, I launched myself against it with all the strength of my sound leg. But it wasn’t, and the vigour of my entry sent four of them sprawling, including one whose behind, as he bent over the loot, unexpectedly met my knee. The rest were furious, and chased me, still hopping like a locust, to the kitchen, where the crowd laughed them to shame. I then asked where I could sleep, and was shown ceremoniously to the edge of a mat near the stove already occupied by five others. Taking a teapot of hot water, I sought a ruin across the court, where I poulticed my leg in peace; three separate draughts froze the bandage to my flesh. “Is it comfortable here?” asked the seyid, creeping up behind me with a white bundle in his arms. I exorcised him with the arak bottle.
No pilgrim was ever so glad as I to see the domes of Meshed. Mrs Hamber, at the Consulate, had asked me to stay if I came back; I had no strength to pretend hesitation. My leg was cupped at the American hospital. Next morning, waking up to find clean sheets against my chin and breakfast on a tray, I wondered at a forgotten world.
— Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana, Meshed, Persia, 17 December 1933
The Convert
There is a lot of missionary effort here, of the muscular, wicked-to-smoke-or-drink type. Men in spectacles, tweed coats, and flannel trousers go striding down the Char Bagh accompanied by small boys and bearing the unmistakable imprint of the British schoolmaster; their behinds stick out as if their spines were too righteous to bend. Behind it all lurks an Anglican bishop, who has lately become an apostle of the Oxford Group Movement. Buchmanism in Isfahan! This is a cruel revenge for the Bahais in Chicago.
A more humane exponent of English ethics was Archdeacon Garland, who lived here thirty years. During that time, he used to say, he made one convert. She was an old woman, who was ostracized for her apostasy, so that on her deathbed the Archdeacon was the only friend she could send for. She had one last request, she told him.
“What is it?” asked the Archdeacon, anxious to ease his protégée’s last moments.
“Please summon a mullah.”
He did so, and repeated the story afterwards.
— Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana, Isfahan, Persia, 13 February 1934
Sic Tempus
Alas, alas! Only when a scholar is in great hardship are his integrity and rightness revealed. But nowadays, people profess their admiration for one another as they meet on the streets; they run around with each other, dining and drinking and reveling, confidently faking smiles and laughter to win one another over, clasping their hands to their chests to show one another, pointing to the sun above and weeping, swearing never to turn their backs on one another in life or death—it all seems so trustworthy. But if one day the slightest hint of advantage might appear, be it as small as a hair, they avert their eyes as if they don’t know one another. If one man were to fall into a pit, the other would not extend a hand to help him, but would push him farther in, and would even throw stones down on him—it’s like this everywhere. This is something that even beasts or barbarians would not bear to do, and yet such people view themselves as having planned well. When they hear of Zihou’s [Liu Zongyuan’s] conduct, may they indeed be somewhat ashamed!
嗚呼。士窮乃見節義, 今夫平居里巷相慕悅, 酒食遊戲相徵逐, 詡詡強笑 語以相取下, 握手出肺肝相示, 指天日涕泣, 誓生死不相背負, 真若可信。一旦臨小利害, 僅如毛髮比, 反眼若不相識, 落陷穽不一引手救, 反擠之, 又下石焉者, 皆是也。 此宜禽獸夷狄所不忍為, 而其人自視以為得計。 聞 子厚之風, 亦可以少愧矣。
— 韓愈，《柳子厚墓誌銘》, from Anna M. Shields, One Who Knows Me, Harvard University Asia Center, 2015
Positano
It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.
— John Steinbeck, May 1953
Rupert Murdoch owns a vineyard?
Yes, it’s called Moraga and is Murdoch’s home on the West Coast. It’s also the only vineyard within the L.A. city limits. He bought the estate, which features an 11-bedroom 1920s Mediterranean-style home, in 2013 for a reported $29.5 million after seeing an ad in the Mansion section of The Wall Street Journal (which he owns). The property used to be owned by Victor Fleming, the director of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind. The vineyard is reportedly Murdoch’s passion project, and it’s where he and Hall isolated during the pandemic lockdown. Hall studied viticulture, and the Daily Mail says she was hoping to inherit it. Instead, Murdoch’s going to marry his next wife there.
How long did Jerry Hall have to study viticulture?
Five hundred hours! Per Vanity Fair, she studied online through UC Davis and told friends Murdoch asked her to do it so he could write off $3 million in expenses as long as she worked 500 hours per year on winemaking.
Can you buy the wine?
Per the Moraga website, they have 6.9 planted acres of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petite Verdot, Cabernet Franc, and Sauvignon Blanc. A bottle of 1998 red — said to feature notes of blueberry, blackcurrant, and cocoa — sells for $390.
But some bad news: Climate change, which Murdoch has called “alarmist nonsense,” is affecting production, according to a former Moraga winemaker.
— The Rupert Murdoch-Elena Zhukova Wedding: Everything We Know, The Cut
Adam’s Curse
… A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.
— W.B. Yeats
Carl Hiaasen: ‘They don’t need much of an excuse these days.’
You’ve been on a book tour for “Wrecker,” and some of your events with kids were canceled. Why?
I did several group student visits, and a couple were canceled. None in Florida yet. One was a school board district in Georgia, one in Virginia and one in North Carolina.
For one of them, they were afraid the pro-vaccine message in the book would offend children. Really.
Then one was because I wrote a book called “Strip Tease” about 30 years ago, and somebody thought anyone who would write a book called “Strip Tease” shouldn’t be allowed to talk to children, even though I’ve been writing these books for younger readers for over 20 years.
The third one I didn’t get a reason on. Really, it could have been anything. They don’t need much of an excuse these days. Now you just have this aura of fear and anxiety by the board members, so I can’t even say if it was a specific complaint.
Now I’m hearing that when you do these events for kids, they want to see the book way in advance. It used to be if the American Library Association approved a book, everybody thought it was OK, but that’s not true anymore.
A lot of the people standing up at these (school board) meetings aren’t even parents. They’re self-deputized vigilantes who are on a crusade to purify.
— Colette Bankroft, Carl Hiaasen got canceled at schools over new book, ‘Wrecker.’ Here’s why., Tampa Bay Times, 5 October 2023
Global South Wallpaper at Biennale Arte, Venice, 2024
… in Venice, Pedrosa treats paintings from all over as just so many postage stamps, pasted down with little visual acuity, celebrated merely for their rarity to an implied “Western” viewer.
You thought we were all equals? Here you have the logic of the old-style ethnological museum, transposed from the colonial exposition to the Google Images results page. S.H. Raza of India, Saloua Raouda Choucair of Lebanon, the Cuban American Carmen Herrera, and also painters who were new to me, got reduced to so much Global South wallpaper, and were photographed by visitors accordingly. All of which shows that it’s far too easy to speak art’s exculpatory language, to invoke “opacity” or “fugitivity” or whatever today’s decolonial shibboleth may be. But by othering some 95 percent of humanity — by designating just about everyone on earth as “foreigners,” and affixing categories onto them with sticky-backed labels — what you really do is exactly what those dreadful Europeans did before you: you exoticize.
— Jason Farago, The Venice Biennale and the Art of Turning Backward, New York Times, 24 April 2024
Adios Larry
“I’m 76 years old and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life.”
— Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Finale
Adios Susie
Getdafuckouttamyhouse!
— Susie Greene, Curb Your Enthusiasm