Little Boxes

experience art

I never worried so much about permanence because I make things that you experience, and then it's in your mind. Most of my stuff is site specific or site-related, but I feel that's what we do in life. We have first-hand experiences, and those are the ones we don't forget. They stay with us and hopefully they're meaningful enough that they're with you the rest of your life. That's pretty much what I've always been after. I've always tried to do stuff that has an effect on you that you never forget the first time.

- Doug Wheeler

Doug Wheeler - RM 669 (1969)

Empire

Egypt's might is tumbled down

Down a-down the deeps of though;

Greece is fallen and Troy town,

Glorious Rome hath lost her crown,

Venice' pride is nought.

But the dreams their children dreamed

Fleeting, unsubstantial, vain,

Shadowy as the shadows seemed,

Airy nothing, as they deemed,

These remain.

- Mary Coleridge

Regression

What is characteristic of many twentieth-century movements is the almost frantic search for contact with the primitive. Whatever you think of French Fauvism or German Expressionism, of Dada or Surrealism, or Abstract Expressionism-not to mention more recent movements and fads- they all have this in common: that they value regression. This valuation, as we have seen, reflects the distaste for the skills developed by the Western tradition, while I do not share this distaste I can appreciate the causes of this revulsion: the achievement of naturalistic representation as such has become trivialized. It has, anyhow, become somewhat redundant through the invention of photography. The resulting attitudes confront art with urgent problems.

An experience which I had when writing Art and Illusion may illustrate what I mean. Interested as I was in the integrative skill which is required in composing a naturalistic landscape, I asked a child of 11 to copy a reproduction of one of the masterpieces of John Constable. It was the picture, Wivenhoe Park, which now hangs in the National Gallery in Washington. As I had expected, the child disregarded the interaction of elements, and so the copy, which I also included in my book, considerably reduced the complexity of the painting. The main elements of the scene are all recorded, the house in the distance behind the lake, the swans on the water and the cows in the fields, but all these items are arranged on a flat surface, lacking in depth and atmosphere, but compensating for this lack by a greater intensity of colours and a greater simplicity of the component shapes.

You will not be surprised to hear that when I showed the result to an art student of my acquaintance he expressed a strong preference for the child’s drawing over Constable’s masterpiece. You will admit that there is a problem here, because, if there is anything I know about values in art, it is that Constable was the better artist. This experiment took place many years ago, and the child in question has meanwhile grown into a splendid young woman, yet she never wanted to add art to her many accomplishments, let alone to surpass Constable.

On the other hand, it is easy enough to read the mind of the art student. You may remember that, at the very beginning of these talks, I contrasted the cover of a chocolate-box with a child-like scrawl by the French painter, Dubuffet. I ventured to say that, without the chocolate-box, we would not have Dubuffet. The sweet picture of smiling goldilocks or the bowl of appetizing cherries mobilizes the dread of kitsch because it is found to be cloying. Cloying at least to those among us whose taste has undergone that process of sophistication of which, two thousand years ago, Cicero gave such a masterly description, which I have quoted in my first talk. To be found actually liking such a piece would be a social embarrassment, the admission of an undeveloped, that is, a primitive taste, a taste for the primitive scrawl of a Dubuffet, on the other hand, is safe from this suspicion.

Now this, to be frank, is the danger I see in the cult of the primitive. It is the cult of an extraneous negative virtue, the preference for the absence of certain qualities which we have been taught to reject. But negation can never be enough. Nor can regression be. If I may return to Freud’s example, it is not the childish babble which makes the joke, but the skillful use of verbal confusion in the witty ban mat. True, sheer nonsense can also be delightful, as in the rhymes of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, but who can miss the mastery with which this nonsense is presented?

I believe the great artists of the twentieth century who admired the primitive and appeared to reject the skills of tradition, knew equally well how to use regression in play or in earnest without surrendering to its pull. Take Picasso, whom I quoted for his alleged desire to draw like children. He never did. But in one instance, at least, where we find him deliberately regressing to the methods of child art, we can guess his purpose. I am thinking of one of his preparatory drawings for Guernica, the mural he did to commemorate the destruction of the small Basque town in the Spanish Civil War.

When Picasso received the commission to paint a work for the Spanish Government Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937 he first thought of symbolizing the civil war through the fairly obvious analogy of a bullfight. As a passionate aficionado, he had often painted and drawn bullfights before, and the theme of the gored and dying horse came to him almost unbidden. Some of these earlier compositions reach an intensity and poignancy in the image of the rearing creature in its death agony that illustrates how much the motif must have meant to him. It is precisely this formula which he first tried out and yet discarded in favour of what looks like a childish scrawl. He drew a horse which really recalls a child’s drawing, with four straight legs sticking out of an oval body and a crude head attached to a clumsy neck. Other sketches show even wilder distortions.

Pablo Picasso - sketch for Guernica 1 (1937)

I do not think I am over-interpreting if I say that Picasso tried to revert to elementals precisely because he found his skill obtrusive. He wanted to get away from what threatened to become a facile stereotype; he wanted to learn to draw like children. His fury and grief at the violation of his country may have demanded from him something more genuine, more intense than a repetition of a symbol, however moving. But for Picasso this extreme regression was a passing phase, a fresh charging of the mind with artistic energies. It is not the least instructive aspect of his search for an expressive symbol that, in the end, Picasso reverted to his earlier invention, the rearing horse in the agony of death. He must have felt that he could not do better and that the painting as such had meanwhile become so charged with emotion that he could afford this self-quotation. Even with this amendment Picasso’s Guernica, in its final form, remains one of the most impressive instances of the power of regression, casting aside the niceties of style in the heat of emotion. But just as the great actor can scream or roar without losing control of his faculties, so Picasso gave vent to his fury without becoming inarticulate.

Pablo Picasso - Guernica (1937)

This seems to me the decisive point in the use and abuse of regression as cultivated in our century. The disregard of the rules of grammar that occurred in poetry or of that of plot in the novel or drama, the casting aside of dexterity and even of the brush itself, must be compensated for by a heightened awareness of the means at the artist’s disposal. If I were asked to name one artist who exemplifies in his work just the right balance between regression and control, the exact dosage of the primitive handled with mastery, it would be Paul Klee. Studying his oeuvre and that of his peers in the employment of primitive modes, one arrives at a conclusion which is only an apparent paradox: the more the ‘Western artist courts the primitive, the more must his art differ from his admired models. African or Polynesian art — the styles we used to call primitive — have many resources, but, for good or ill, they must lack the one so dear to the sophisticated. I mean, of course, primitivism. The tribal artist cannot regress to an earlier phase for the sake of effect. The technical developments of the Western tradition have thus given to art an unexpected dimension. Hence one of the values of the primitive in art, its otherness, turns out to be a by-product of the striving for progress which the ancients and Vasari celebrated in chronicling the evolution of Greek and Renaissance art. It is a progress achieved by the systematic correction and adjustment of the conceptual schema, ‘Without this effort and the artistic perils it disclosed, we could not appreciate that distance between the elemental and the slick which plays such a decisive role in our taste today. We cannot opt out of this development which has carried us so far away from the genuine primitive. Nor can the self-conscious artist escape from the hail of mirrors which gives an added significance to whatever he does or leaves undone.

Paul Klee - The Goldfish (1925)

I was confirmed in my diagnosis of the situation in which the artist and the public find themselves in reading some of the utterances made by Roy Lichtenstein, whose rejection of artistic sophistication drove him to seek inspiration in the popular art of the comic strip. Asked by a reporter of Art News, “Are you anti-experimental?” he replied, “I think so, and anti-contemplative, anti-nuance, anti-getting-away-from-the-tyranny-of-the-rectangle, anti-movement and light, anti-mystery, anti-paint-quality, anti-Zen and anti-all of these brilliant ideas of preceding movements which everyone understands so thoroughly.’ Apparently, Lichtenstein found himself trapped in a field of force in which he could see no move but that of turning to the imagery beloved of the unsophisticated masses. And yet he, too, realized in his heart of hearts that art cannot come of rejection alone. Three years later, he put this insight into the following words:

I’m interested in portraying a sort of anti-sensibility that pervades the society, and a kind of gross over-simplification. I use that more as style than as actuality. I really don’t think that art can be gross and over-simplified and remain art. I mean it must have subtleties and it must yield to aesthetic unity; otherwise it’s not art. But using it as a style, I think that it’s really a kind of conceptual rather than a visual style which maybe permeates most art being done today, whether it is geometric or whatever.’

We must hand it to Lichtenstein that he has seen the dilemma in which his negation of negations has landed him and so many of his fellow artists. He realized the resulting plight, and tried to extricate himself by claiming that his art is really very different from the style he imitates, and therefore very subtle. But, whether true or false, this claim only brings us back to that sophisticated elitism from which he, like so many other primitivists, wanted to escape. But, on his own showing, the dilemma in which he finds himself enmeshed is the result of intellectual rather than purely artistic ambitions. If I am right that this applies to much of the art of our time, then intellectual arguments may also offer a remedy. I have always seen myself as a historian rather than a critic, and I would never want to tell artists what to do as long as they, and their public, are happy. But I think that, in the present malaise, even the historian of art can make a contribution because it was he, as I tried to show in these talks, who first appeared in the guise of the serpent, tempting the artist to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.

- E.H. Gombrich

kitsch meets art

Roy Lichtenstein - Girl with Ball (1961)

a postmodern awareness of the rules of art being broken is itself a form of hyper-elitism

Photography

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug a camera.

- Lewis Hine

I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph.

- Man Ray

Picasso > Le Corbusier

It is a curious paradox that even the most materialist of us tend to value what might be called the useless above the useful. Useless not in the sense of being without purpose, but without utility, or at least with not much of it. Manolo Blahnik makes shoes that are harder to walk in and a lot more expensive than a pair of plimsolls, though they might be rather more helpful as part of a courtship display. A Ferrari attracts more attention than a Volkswagen, but is hardly a practical means of urban transport. And, at a more fundamental level, while art is useless, design is useful. So Picasso is a far more central figure to the culture of the twentieth century than Le Corbusier, and Guernica, if it were ever to be sold, would command a far higher price than the Unite d’Habitation.

- Deyan Sudjic

Invictus

monument

Dan Flavin - "monument" for V. Tatlin 1/5 (1970)

Money

I was led into captivity by the bitch business

Not in love but in what seemed a physical necessity

And now I cannot even watch the spring

The itch for subsistence and having become responsibility.

Money the she-devil comes to us under many veils

Tactful at first, calling herself beauty

Tear away this disguise, she proposes paternal solitude

Assuming the dishonest face of duty.

Suddenly you are in bed with a screeching tear-sheet

This is money at last without her night-dress

Clutching you against her fallen udders and sharp bones

In an unscrupulous and deserved embrace.

- C.H Sisson

authentic copy

I reproduce the work of important artists not as best as I could because that implies something different, as close as I could without copying it. When you copy something it becomes something else.

- Elaine Sturtevant

Elaine Sturtevant - Warhol diptych (1973)

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees

- Those dying generations - at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

Form and content work productively against each other in the first stanza of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, one of the great Irish emigration poems. Yeats is telling us that he must abandon the perishable domain of human love, sexuality; death and reproduction for some more enduring kingdom, one less carnal and fugitive. Yet even though the opening demonstrative already places this perishable domain at arm’s length (‘That’ rather than ‘This’), the imagery which portrays it is tender and mutedily sensuous. And this grants the natural, human world of the dying generations a grace and preciousness which makes it hard to abandon. Yeats is refusing to make things easy for himself by setting up a convenient straw target of the fleshly world he is leaving behind. Instead, he pays homage to what he is repudiating. He does this, too, by rather courteously suggesting that the fault is his own and not that of the dying generations — that the place is unfit for ‘old men’ like himself, a self-deprecatory phrase which one can imagine costing this youth-obsessed poet a fair amount of amour propre. We suspect that he believes that the profane realm of the dying generations is pretty degenerate anyway, but he is in elegiac mood, and thus tactful enough not to say so outright.

Instead, in a charmingly diplomatic gesture, he discreetly tucks the phrase ‘Those dying generations’ as a kind of warning aside into his otherwise alluring portrait of the young, the birds and the fish. The punctuation of the first five lines of the stanza has the effect of placing all these items on the same level. This suggests an equation between the erotic young and the birds and mackerel, which is scarcely much of a compliment to the former. Once again, then, there is a delicately muted criticism: human beings are really just as helplessly caught up in an endless biological cycle as salmon, which may be one good reason to sail off to Byzantium. Even so, Byzantium does not sound all that appealing an alternative, at least at this point in the poem. That rather too contrivedly imposing line ‘Monuments of unageing intellect’, with its plodding stresses and surplus of solemnity; is perhaps intended to sound faintly rebarbative, in order to throw a final flattering light on the sensuality being left behind. There is also, perhaps, a slightly schoolmasterish feel to the admonition ‘all neglect’, as though a spot of finger-wagging is going on here. But the poem gets away with it.

Yeats is not the kind of writer who explores nature in Keatsian or Hopkinsian detail. There is nothing lavish, profuse or sensuously detailed about the birds in the trees, the salmon-falls and the mackerel-crowded seas. ‘Fish, flesh, or fowl’ sounds more like a grocer’s terminology than a poet’s. ‘Mackerel-crowded’ is a fine stroke, and ‘mackerel’ (if the pun may be forgiven) a splendidly mouth-filling word; but ‘the young in one another’s arms’ and ‘birds in the trees’ are deliberately bare and notational. It is as though Yeats is just touching them in on his poetic canvas, without the least intent to lend them complex, convincing life. They are little more than emblems, like (for the most part) the swan in ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’.

Yet the poem’s achievement is to create the effect of lavishness and profuseness from these few meagre, economical items, an effect which would have taken Gerard Manley Hopkins at least another dozen lines. The stanza generates a cornucopian sense of abundance out of the sparsest of materials. And whereas one feels that Hopkins might have been carried away by this potentially inexhaustible fertility, Yeats remains rigorously in control, as the orderly syntax suggests. By about line 4, we are growing a little anxious: what are all these bits and pieces adding up to? Then, suddenly, a main verb (‘commend’) locks authoritatively into place in the next line, to bind these various elements together and lend them some overall thrust and coherence.

It is as though the chain of brief phrases, with its rapid, cumulative buildup, generates a sense of mounting excitement, one those young lovers might find familiar. Its grammatical open-endedness suggests that this copious piling of life-form upon life-form could in principle go on forever, creating just the sense of exuberance and prodigality that the verse is after. But that clinching main verb, not to speak of the beautifully intricate rhyme scheme, is on hand to assure us that everything is under control. It is as though Yeats’s breathing-in, in preparation for the delayed arrival of the main verb, has been deep enough to allow him to voice one brief phrase after another (‘the salmon- falls, the mackerel-crowded seas. . .‘) without things getting out of hand. So the intellect is not just in Byzantium, to be encountered on disembarking, but is already unobtrusively at work in the present. The exclamatory excitement of the lines, with their staccato rhythms, hint at the possibility of an ecstatic loss of control in the face of these fleshly delights, without ever corning remotely close to it.

- Terry Eagleton

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

- William Yeats

'the problem that has no name'

As a magazine writer in 1950s America, Betty Friedan interviewed many women who were living the classic American dream: they were young and healthy, they lived in fine suburban homes, their husbands had well-paid jobs, their children went to school, their housework was made easier by many labour-saving appliances and (we can add with the benefit of hindsight) no one worried about drugs or AIDS. This was the Good Life, in the most prosperous country in the world, and these women should surely have been the envy of anyone who has ever lacked comfort, leisure and financial security. Yet when Friedan talked to them, she found that they had a problem. They didn’t have a name for it, and nor did Friedan, so she called it ‘the problem that has no name’. The problem formed the core of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the book that more than any other single work triggered the modem feminist movement. In it women describe the problem in their own words. Here is a 23-year-old mother:

I ask myself why I am so dissatisfied. I’ve got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money... It’s as if ever since you were a little girl, there’s always been somebody or something that will take care of your life: your parents, or college, or falling in love, or having a child, or moving to a new house. Then you wake up one morning and there’s nothing to look forward to.

The magazines and television soaps of the time tried to tell women that the role of wife and mother was the most fulfilling there can be. After all, compared to women in earlier periods, or in other countries today the American housewife of the fifties had it easy. ‘Having it easy’, however, was little consolation; in reality it was precisely the problem. This kind of life was supposed to be all that a woman needed for fulfillment, but when she had achieved everything she was supposed to want, her life plan came to a dead stop. The suburban housewife lives an isolated existence in her comfortable home, equipped with labour-saving devices that allow her to complete her daily chores in an hour or two. In another hour at the supermarket she can gather the week’s food supply for the entire family. Her only role is to bring up a family, and her children soon spend all day at school, and much of the rest of their time watching television. Nothing else seems worth achieving.

Consider a quite different way of living. Over the past forty years, several groups of Australian Aboriginals who subsisted by hunting and gathering in remote desert areas have come into contact with Western civilization. Through this contact they have access to reliable supplies of food, steel axes, clothes, and many other goods. If quality of life depended on quantity of material possessions, this contact would be bound to improve the quality of life of the Aboriginal groups. Yet observers are agreed that it has had exactly the opposite effect. We do not have to idealize the nomadic Aboriginal life in order to recognize that it provides many opportunities for finding satisfaction in the tasks of obtaining the necessities of life. Richard Gould, an American anthropologist who lived with an Australian Aboriginal hunter-gatherer group, found that:

the daily lives of the nomadic Aborigines are essentially harmonious and rewarding. An individual grows up realizing what is expected of him. By acquiring and developing practical knowledge and skill he learns to fulfill these expectations and is rewarded immediately by his own satisfaction in achievement and in the long run by the esteem of his kin. When food comes from a shop, bought with a government welfare check provided by a well-meaning social worker eager to see that all Australians get what they are legally entitled to receive, the skills and knowledge acquired over a lifetime are immediately devalued. The result is deeply demoralizing. Almost everything that the members of the nomadic group used to spend their days doing has lost its point. It is no wonder that alcohol often becomes a major problem, and even when it does not, these formerly nomadic Aboriginals appear to be at a loss for anything to do.

The modern housewife in her tidy household and the Aboriginal Australian sitting on the dusty ground outside the store are suffering from the same malaise: the elimination of purpose from their lives. The need for purpose lies deep in our nature. We can observe it in other animals, especially those who, like us, are social mammals. The tiger, restlessly pacing back and forth behind the bars of a small concrete cell, is fortunately becoming a less common sight at the zoo. But the monkeys still kept in barren metal cages in laboratories, or the pigs confined for months on factory farms in stalls too small to allow them even to pace back and forth, are suffering from the same problem. When you provide a sow with food and a warm dry place to lie down, you have not provided her with everything she needs. Such animals exhibit what ethologists call ‘stereotypical behaviour’ — they restlessly gnaw at the bars of their pen, or stand rocking their heads back and forth. They are trying to make up for the absence of purposive activity in their lives. Even the caged factory farm hen devours her daily nutritional needs a few minutes pecking at the feed with which she is supplied and then is left with nothing at all to do. As a result she will restlessly peck at her companions and all factory farm hens are now ‘debeaked’ to stop them killing each other. Some relatively more enlightened keepers of animals now mix the day’s food with straw or other inedible material and scatter it across the floor of the cage, so that the animal must work to find it. Hens kept indoors can be given food that is very finely ground; then instead of getting their daily food intake in a few minutes, it may take them several hours.

On the modern view of work and leisure, as we apply it to humans, these devices make the animals work harder, reduce their leisure time, and so should make them worse off; but observation shows that the animals’ welfare is improved. Of course, such strategems are at best a poor imitation of the wide variety of activities that animals have available to them in their natural conditions. They do not make it acceptable to keep animals in barren cages; but their relative success should make us re-examine our attitude to work and leisure. It is clear that our quest for a purpose to our lives has its roots a long way back in our evolutionary history, and will not easily be eliminated.

There is one short cut to overcoming the need for purpose. For the pharmaceutical industry, an existential void is a marketing opportunity. In the sixties, suburban doctors started prescribing tranquillizers in increasing quantities to housewives who came to them feeling depressed. As the Rolling Stones sang in ‘Mother’s Little Helper’:

Kids are different today, I hear every mother say

Mother needs something today to calm her down

And though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill

She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper

And it helps her on her way

Gets her through her busy day

Doctor please, some more of these

Outside the door she took four more

What a drag it is getting old.

That is one way of ‘solving’ the dissatisfaction caused by a loss of purpose: turn the dissatisfied housewife into a contented zombie. It solves the problem only in the sense that alcohol solves the problems Australian Aboriginals have in adjusting to Western civilization, and crack and other drugs that solve the problems of unemployed Americans living in urban slums.

Not quite as addictive as heroin, less harmful than alcohol, but still problematic from an environmental perspective, is that other great modern tranquillizer, going shopping. Many people readily admit that shopping is not so much a means to obtain goods that they need, but rather their major recreational activity. A large dose of it seems to help overcome depression. Shopping is a modem substitute for more traditional hunter-gatherer activities. The shopping mall has replaced the old hunting grounds. Like gathering roots, seeds and berries in an arid environment, shopping can take a large portion of the day. It allows for the development of specialized forms of knowledge and skill. (How do you select the right items to gather? Where and when are the genuine bargains to be found?) Shopping can even pass as purposeful activity; its leisure component can be disguised or denied, in a way that it cannot if one spends the day playing golf.

Why was it mostly women who experienced such a loss of purpose in the fifties? At that time most men, but relatively few women, worked in jobs that held out the prospect of a promotion, an increase in responsibility and power. This is still often the case, if not quite to the same extent. So when one morning a man wakes up and asks himself, ‘Is this all there is to my life?’ he can quieten the doubts by thinking about that coming glorious day when he gets to move up to a more important position, with higher pay and more responsibility. That is why, as both employers and unions have found, a career structure, a ladder leading upwards, is often more crucial for job satisfaction than actual rates of pay. In contrast, for a housewife there is no promotion. Romance will fade, and the children will need their mother less and less. No wonder that many American housewives, once they had everything they were supposed to want, felt the meaningless of their existence more acutely than their husbands did.

- Peter Singer

Philanthropy for the Arts

In 2004, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a sum of said to be in excess of $45 million for a small Madonna and Child painted by the medieval Italian master Duccio.

Duccio di Buoninsegna - Madonna and Child (1300)

A dollar a day would feed this mother and child.

Unknown - Mother and Child (now)

click here to save a life

to grasp is to lose

Plucking chrysanthemums along the East fence;

Gazing in silence at the southern hills;

The birds flying home in pairs

Through the soft mountain air of dusk—

In these things there is a deep meaning,

But when we are about to express it,

We suddenly forget the words.

- T'ao Ch'ien

The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.

- Goethe

Waste

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

- Thomas Gray

The lines illustrate the pathos that some bright people are held back by their obscure origins from attaining worldly fame. But the elegance of the verse dignifies this dire situation in a way which makes us feel reluctant to see it altered. By comparing it to a natural condition, it also makes it seem as though it could not in fact be altered. Intellectually ambitious farm laborers presumably object to the poverty which holds them back; but gems do not mind being in caves, and flowers prefer not to be plucked. The imagery is askew to the argument it is meant to underpin. 'Blush,' carries a resonance of virginity, and so a suggestion that renunciation is desirable, including perhaps the kind of sacrifice force upon talented people from modest social backgrounds.

- Terry Eagleton

appropriation art