Title : "Museums are indeed the churches of progressive-minded people, since they celebrate just the qualities that fanatics and dogmatists want to quelch..."
link : "Museums are indeed the churches of progressive-minded people, since they celebrate just the qualities that fanatics and dogmatists want to quelch..."
"Museums are indeed the churches of progressive-minded people, since they celebrate just the qualities that fanatics and dogmatists want to quelch..."
"... the vigorous acceptance of uncertainty that lets us ask new questions and leaves us unsure about which way is up. Not knowing which way is up is indeed part of the point. 'If I turn the work around, I risk destroying it,' the curator in charge of the exhibition where the Mondrian was to be shown said... adding that 'maybe there is no right or wrong orientation at all?'... Abstract art was meant to interrogate premises... The reason that pictures of Mondrian’s kind are inestimably precious to the human spirit... is that they are the last place where individual purpose and human pluralism are so ferociously honored. The values that are most important—and ones which progressives are most inclined to honor—are those which empower the greatest range of people to self-expression with the greatest possible individuality."Writes Adam Gopnik in "The Case of the Upside-Down Mondrian/A great work of art always produces a vital disorientation" (The New Yorker).
Why does Gopnik keep saying "progressive"? It doesn't sound like the so-called "progressives" in American politics today.
To view the "vigorous acceptance of uncertainty" as the central quality of progressivism runs directly counter to the idea Biden proclaimed in his speech last night. Am I progressive if I vigorously accept that we can never really know who won the 2020 election or am I a dark demon of chaos? Is Biden a fanatic or dogmatist for wanting to quelch those who won't embrace the "right" answer?
I had to stop and say out loud: "Do you 'quelch' a person or thing?" (I wanted to write "quelch those [people]" but Gopnik said "quelch the vigorous acceptance.")
Meade questioned whether "quelch" is a word at all. Shouldn't it be "squelch"? Did Gopnik mix up "squelch" and "quench"? There's also "squash" and "quash."
The OED calls it a "rare" word, "An imitative or expressive formation" influenced by "quell" and "squelch." There's an example from the 17th century that seems to presage Mondrian:
1659 A. Wood Life & Times (1891) I. 280 Some hang swinging on the gallery..and then come quelshing downe on people's heads.
But let's get back to Gopnik and the Mondrian picture — don't say "painting" (it's colored adhesive tape). Some expert recently decided it has been hanging upside down. And look, Trump rears his head:
Uncertainty about an artist’s intentions—including, but not limited to, which way she intended the picture to be top and which bottom—is not a sign of what a certain man would call a “hoax”; it is a sign of originality of purpose and a tolerance for open-ended inquiry....
So... your "vigorous acceptance of uncertainty" displays originality and tolerance, but the Trumpists who say those legal procedures —that said Biden's belonged on top — well, they hung the picture of the 2020 election upside down... those people... they're not like the fine people who tolerate uncertainty about the orientation of the Mondrian.
The entire controversy puts one in mind of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s wondering why people said that it was natural for humans to think that the Sun went round the Earth—what would they have thought it looked like if it were the other way round?
Thus articles "Museums are indeed the churches of progressive-minded people, since they celebrate just the qualities that fanatics and dogmatists want to quelch..."
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