Ignoramus XVII

Łysiak tells us that Chinese and Japanese painting does not count because it's mere calligraphy.

I wonder what he means by "does not count". If "does not count" = "Łysiak does not like", then, I think, he is right, though I suspect one should really parse Lysiak's "X does not count" as "Łysiak does not know first thing about X". Thus "Japanese painting does not count" becomes "Łysiak does not have a clue about Japanese painting".

All's in order, then.

In order, but still an embarrassment: the dismissal of Oriental painting as calligraphy isn't novel: various Europeans have been pronouncing it since the 17th century. One must wonder at the point of writing -- and publishing a book of plagiarized nonsense. I mean, novel nonsense -- e.g. "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" -- is just nonsense, why not publish it; but plagiarized nonsense is simply shameful.

Of course, the first European to dismiss Chinese painting as mere calligraphy was not expressing an original thought, either: the idea is Chinese and goes back to Yuan dynasty, when total disappearance of official sponsorship for painting starved the profession to death and left the art in the hands of scholar-poets, who recognizing how weak they were at what they were doing, called it, self-deprecatingly, "my graceless doodles".

European painting is certainly great, but European thinking about it isn't terribly original.

I am curious what Łysiak means by The White Man, by the way. He wouldn't mean The Great Pinko-Grey Race, by any chance, would he?