Some cultural news from the BBC

Some East End gallery specializes in up and coming artists (buy it for a penny, sell it for a pound); some of these artists are then interviewed: one makes large installations of planes locked up in ice which then slowly melts (yeah, duude, cool, pass the sheesha); the interviewer asks her: you wear a chador (‘conservative’) but you make such modern works! She doesn’t have a damn clue, does she?

Meanwhile at the White House the What's-their-names are assembling a collection of borrowed art; it’s all modern (i.e. post-1950) of course, and American (probably has to be), including someone’s mediation on the square (!); except a DAY-ga (American enough when you pronounce it that way); except this last is judged risque (shhh… legs); but the former first lady was also cultured, we are told: she owned a de Koenig (along with hyper-realist representations of West Texas landscape). Ah, the uncultured me: who de hoeck was de Koenig?

Ah... upon consideration, don't tell me, I don't want to know.

An Algerian band in France plays, lousily, electric oud. You play such a mix of traditional and modern! gushes the interviewer. Huh?

Sorry, I don’t understand this language, though everyone around me seems to speak it.

Here, for instance, is Florian Zeller (who?) invited to speak at a kind of book fair in Egypt (probably because no one better would go), offering his cultural gems:

if the Islamic world generally had difficulties with the novel, it was because it was living to a large extent in an era that belonged to the period before modern times, bogged down in archaisms that were by their essence incompatible with the foundations of the novel: freedom, fantasy, complexity, the ambiguity of all truths and the suspension of moral judgement. In this respect, the novel could easily become the battle ground between two civilisations.

Freedom, fantasy, complexity, the ambiguity of all truths and the suspension of moral judgement? Has Zeller ever read any archaic poetry, either Islamic or -- European? And if so, which part of his anatomy does he use to think (and speak) about it?

The terrible thing: he thinks this drivel actually means something; and – oh, emperor’s new clothes! -- his Egyptian colleagues believe him! How's that for conversation: you pretend you say something meaningful, they pretend they make a meaningful response.

How do you explain to these grunts that the language they speak –which happily interchanges modern, western, good, inevitable, free, and sexually liberated is incoherent, that it is broken, that it means nothing, that it is impossible to say or think in it anything that makes any sense at all and that by speaking it they just bury themselves in some horrendous dark hole of the mind?

But then -- why would anyone even try to explain?