Our progressive leader and his achingly hip party have some very unprogressive best friends
Published:
October 17, 2014 at 9:33am
The BBC reports today on a Chinese clampdown on ‘immoral art’
The BBC reports today:
Chinese President Xi Jinping has told artists, authors and actors that their work should present socialist values and not carry the “stench of money”.
Mr Xi delivered a speech to some of China’s leading creative figures, according to state news agency Xinhua.
He told them not to pursue commercial gain at the expense of artistic and moral value, Xinhua said.
Artists should not be “slaves” to the market or “lose themselves in the tide of market economy”, Mr Xi told them.
Nor should they “go astray while answering the question of whom to serve, otherwise their works will lack vitality”, he warned.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-29645574?OCID=twitterasia
Surely, Kitten of Malta and Mr. Apap Bologna will be delighted to read this.
Mr. Xi should be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Hypocrisy.
Spoken like the true son of the Communist Party’s propaganda chief, which is exactly what he is
He’s a fine one to talk, having amassed enough private assets to pay for his daughter to attend Harvard university under an assumed name.
Send Banksy over there. They have a large wall that needs painting apparently.
Nothing an oppressive regime shouldn’t be doing.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/13/degenerate-art-attack-modern-art-nazi-germany-review-neue-galerie
The first to go was the Bauhaus design school.
How dare Germans learn to recognize the values of beauty and function through the machine aesthetic instead of sickly sweet nostalgia and prejudice via abused classical stylemes?
‘…..However central aesthetics were to Nazism, Peters takes pains to clarify that the party’s views of art did not come out of nowhere. The concept of degeneracy – the idea that artists could have pathological disorders, that their art could be not just bad but sick, even contagious – was widely debated during the era of Bismarck, most prominently by the Austro-Hungarian physician and critic Max Nordau, whose 1892-93 book Entartung (“Degeneration”) warned that any society could be corrupted by decayed ideas of beauty and virtue. “Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists,” Nordau argued. His theories on art and illness ripple through the writings of Nazi race ideology, including Mein Kampf – even though, in one of the most brutal ironies of modern art history, Nordau was not just Jewish but a committed Zionist, and he’s buried in Tel Aviv.
For the Nazis, modernism was not just an inferior or distasteful style. It wasn’t even just non-Aryan. Modernism was a swindle – a dangerous lie perpetuated by Jews, communists, and even the insane to contaminate the body of German society (they were fond of medical and corporeal metaphors, the Nazis). The stakes are clear in the largest gallery of this show, which features two triptychs side by side. On the right is Beckmann’s Departure, a grand and enigmatic allegory of hope in the face of persecution. On the left is Ziegler’s The Four Elements, a kitsch, insensate, classicised-to-death depiction of four nude, racially idealised women, their breasts round as grapefruits…..’
That the crusade to censor Piano’s philology serve as warning.
Vatican is resigning en bloc upon request of the Maltese Archbishop according to Malta Today
Maybe he should deliver the same speech to his politician colleagues at all levels.
Chinese politicians are by and large the most corrupt on earth.
Could he have been referring perhaps to Joe Chetcuti’s famous violin pics?
I wonder will the whether Chinese cultural activities will be forced upon us all during the next couple of years culminating in V18?
Thousands of Chinese paper lanterns will light up the Grand Harbour during the V18 climax.
But, who knows, by then the Malta – China relations could very well have hit the rocks. With Joey, one never can tell.
I wonder what he’d make of the zobb-like monument that sits near the airport.
Find artists and replace with politicians!
How come there’s no mention of the pledge of Joseph to resign if not ready in time? Afraid, are we?
http://www.parlament.mt/file.aspx?f=48461
What strikes me most is the line reading ” … that their work should present socialist values and not carry the “stench of money”.
Does this apply only to artists, authors and actors? Shouldn’t it apply to special envoys too ?
And eventually the artist himself will lose vitality…
http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/news/national/44682/bus_driver_behaviour_tops_complaint_list#.VEErNmeSxmM
So we cannot insult our Great Leaders in Beijing and in Malta and cannot call them “bulls”.
I long for the days when Muscat called Gonzi a “liar” during a televised debate without anyone having to call in the police. How much freer we were two years ago.
It seems that our freedom is now being bartered for the tyranny of Chinese patronage.
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-10-17/local-news/Government-will-give-more-details-on-new-power-station-when-talks-with-China-are-concluded-6736123940
After the election, they claimed that they were ready to kick off the project within weeks . Today, 18 months later, they are still claiming that they are close to the kick off.
Chinese tax return sheets must be works of immoral art.
There are two types of countries:
>One where governing powers are afraid of the press and the people
>And One where the press and the people are afraid of the governing powers.
So if I am an artist I should not become a slave but a mule.